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Comment by leeoniya | Hacker News Reader

not really.

my family moved to the states from moscow when i was 7. we spent all our money that we got from selling a crappy apt on the move itself. we lived on food stamps, had to learn english, my parents (both with technical university degrees) went to community college and worked low wage jobs to pay the rent, bills and tuition. we had a super old used ford that was rusting everywhere a vehicle can rust and the dollar store was where we went shopping. today, i'm somewhere between employee and executive [limited only by personal preference of work/life balance] thanks to my parents; my children will certainly have it easier than my folks or i ever did. but to say that it was because of some innate wealth misses the mark.

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> but to say that it was because of some innate wealth misses the mark

I'm not sure it misses the mark. All data show that wealth carries over multiple generations. That doesn't mean that non wealthy can't make it, just that wealthiest will, on average or even probably some p95 and up metric.

And wealth should be put into perspective, its often more to do with the surrounding education of the wealthy. If your surrounding growing up ran businesses of their own, knew how to manage people, understood finance, investments, calculating risks, knew about markets and business, had connections, that's a great environment to learn the same from. You mentioned both your parents had technical university degrees, so you had some advantage there.

Everyone can give it a shot, we have equal opportunity, but not equal challenges to face. You making it out of less is double awesome to you, even if maybe you felt it was easy, dunno, its still a hard thing you did, harder then if you had come from a more supportive environment.

certainly i'm not saying that prior wealth does not play a major factor or isn't strongly correlated, but it is not a prerequisite by any stretch, which was my interpretation of the comment.

I have the same background as you. Crimea, not Moscow.

Americans will never understand. Our parents stood in breadlines. We are making six figures in America.

It's not about wealth. It's about a culture that respects hard work, education, and opportunity.

> It's about a culture that respects hard work, education, and opportunity.

100%

i was maybe 5 and remember very vividly standing in those same breadlines with them. about once a year we got to eat bananas, it was amazing. in america there's a walmart next door to a target next door to a whole foods or trader joes, and across the street there's a meijer next to jewel and a macys plus 3 footwear stores - all filled with stuff that never leaves the shelves. and that's just within this 3 mile radius! i don't want to describe it as amazing because it is incredibly wasteful, but holy hell!

meanwhile, a large portion of the US population [that struggles to come to grips with basic economic principles] is paralyzed with fear of immigrants "stealing" jobs - usually jobs that don't even require a GED. a minimum-wage job is not a career and not meant to support a family; you're meant to grow out of it.

Same background here. China, not Moscow or Crimea

I worry about the next generation. They say that wealth skips every other generation, because if a child grows up in a well-to-do family, they will not value hard work as much.

> They say that wealth skips every other generation

Strangely, in all the empirical studies of socioeconomic status and its relations to family and environment, I've ever seen one detect that effect.

I suspect that the popular saying really just reflects that parents and children have high contact and lots of friction, and grandparents and grandchildren less so, and nothing about the reality of wealth or hard work.

my wife and i have the same concern. we fully intend to make them work as hard as we did. though theory is often more difficult to translate into actual practice. it's not feasible to move out of a good community that you spent your life working towards just so your kids can understand the meaning of what it's like to live poor, like your parents did.

> my family moved to the states from moscow ...

Right there, there was enough wealth that you ultimately transferred for what was far better prospects in the US than in Russia. This was probably a very smart move that others with much less means from Russia might have had a very difficult time even leaving their country for the US in the first place.

we were very typical or below in terms of income. the difference is that my parents chose to risk everything we had for a narrow window of opportunity that was nowhere near 100% guaranteed. our friends and neighbors were not prepared to do the same.

I'm afraid of survivorship bias. Just because you made it, it doesn't mean that others who fell in the same situation would. That's where statistics come handy.

Don't forget that you have lived through a period of growth in the US. It might not happen again for this generation.

What if the fundamentals changes, and the situations/opportunities you have been through are no longer there?

We like to think we make our choices and ourselves. But most of the time we are driven by whichever random events come in our way.

there are still incredible opportunities. you just have to be educated (STEM helps by an immeasurable factor), work hard and take risks to land them. luck helps. sometimes luck comes easy; sometimes you have to make your own luck. anyone who thinks there is less opportunity in the US today than 20 years ago is willfully ignorant and/or has never lived in countries that truly have no opportunity for upward mobility besides unicorn luck, marrying up or capitalizing on some level of corruption.

Sure. But see your phrase here: STEM helps by an immeasurable factor.

It is very easy to assume this if you are a software engineer living in the Internet Bubble. Many people suck at basic elementary math. Way too many people. Let alone they start programming in a professional level.

Was that the case in the last 50 years? Not really. I know rich people who thrived in the last 50 years just by being frugal, hard-working and persistent. Despite having no STEM/Math or modern economical knowledge they were able to create wealth.

In today competitive world where capital is competing endlessly for market-share, I can hardly seeing them surviving let alone thrive. And don't forget todays media and social apps. Too many distractions. People are too drunk to be able to focus on building real stuff.

In this context, wealth doesn’t necessarily have to start out as financial wealth. You came from an educated family, so even if your parents were materially poor, they created an environment that ensured you would be on an upward trajectory compared to them. This is a common story among educated immigrants from poor countries.

But then there are those who are both materially and educationally impoverished - those whose families struggled despite having been in the US for generations. Not sure it makes sense to conflate them with people like you.

> In this context, wealth doesn’t necessarily have to start out as financial wealth

i'm fairly certain the comment i was replying to was using 'wealth' in the literal, financial sense.

nevertheless, breaking the cycle of being disadvantaged by taking drastic measures and risks is something that's required in all cases. for us it was leaving everything behind and coming to the US with nothing. for someone who does not come from a background of education, delaying having children and spending more to go to school and establish a good base income would be a significant change from the norm perhaps.

different situations require different measures. as long as you have your health, there's little excuse to continually blame external factors, at least in the US.

Just as people who didn’t immigrate from a poor country might not completely understand your circumstances, I don’t think you fully grasp the circumstances of those who have failed to succeed despite being in the US for generations. If it were so simple for those people to just delay having children and invest more in education, they would have already done it.

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