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I'm sorry but you do live in a bubble. Here is a UN report on poverty and rising inequality in the USA: https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/1629536/files/A_HRC_38_....

Here are a few notes from the report:

* In September 2017, more than one in every eight Americans were living in poverty (40 million, equal to 12.7% of the population). And almost half of those (18.5 million) were living in deep poverty, with reported family income below one-half of the poverty threshold.

* In the OECD the US ranks 35th out of 37 in terms of poverty and inequality.

* The youth poverty rate in the United States is the highest across the OECD with one quarter of youth living in poverty compared to less than 14% across the OECD.

* US healthcare expenditures per capita are double the OECD average and much higher than in all other countries. But there are many fewer doctors and hospital beds per person than the OECD average.

* The Stanford Center on Inequality and Poverty ranks the most well-off countries in terms of labor markets, poverty, safety net, wealth inequality, and economic mobility. The US comes in last of the top 10 most well-off countries, and 18th amongst the top 21.

* According to the World Income Inequality Database, the US has the highest Gini rate (measuring inequality) of all Western Countries

The truth is poverty and inequality is uncomfortable and pushed to the edges of society.

I don't disagree with any of this being a reality, so thanks for the post. At the same time, I'm not sure it quite addresses what the New York Times piece was getting at, or what I was trying to get at. (Sorry if I was being unclear.)

Most of the UN stats are about poverty and inequality. But the NYT piece wasn't talking about poverty, and I don't deny that there's a small portion of the population stuck in a trap of cyclical poverty - I can see that every day. I also don't deny that inequality has been rising - every time I see a news update on Jeff Bezos' wealth, I'm reminded that his net worth is going up _way_ faster than mine is.

But what the NYT piece (slash the book it was summarizing) was _actually_ focused on was a changing experience for the American middle class - the Americans that aren't stuck in poverty, but also aren't the rich. The author was arguing that there's been a shift in the middle class experience... that you can now grow up in the middle class, do all the "right" things career-wise, and still find yourself struggling to make ends meet and keep up the standard of living associated with a middle class lifestyle.

All I'm saying is that, in the experience of me and my friends, that doesn't seem to be representative of middle class America over the last 10-20 years. Sure, I don't live in a McMansion and drive a nice new car, so maybe I don't define the middle class lifestyle as aspirationally as some people do. But the vast majority of middle class people I know seem to be finding it relatively straightforward to get an education, find a job that pays reasonably well, and start a family, without struggling to pay the bills.

Perhaps you’re simply in a generally more prosperous part of the country. It’s all anecdotes, I know, but I know a very many people who have gone down a similar path - graduating well from a state college/university - and struggle to find stable, family-supporting employment where I grew up in/near Madison, WI.

A lot of them are working in service jobs which are definitively low paying and often unstable. I also see a worrisome level of cynicism more generally: with the exception of entertainment, things are not getting better and the corruption of our business/political class will only continue to screw us.

I don't understand the inclusion of wealth inequality stats. How do rich people making more money affect the "average" American? The idea of forcing an upper limit on wealth is the exact opposite of the American system.

Exactly. If a person is making $50k in the US and the equivalent person $40K in another country, why would they want to live in the 2nd country just because inequality is lower?

"How do rich people making more money affect the "average" American" Because we live in a world where some things are effectively finite. So the relative wealth of other people does indeed have an affect on what you can afford. This is like an econ 101 idea.

Most of Jeff Bezos (and other rich people) money will be invested. These investments include government bonds, stocks, corporate debt etc. These investments will likely lower costs by providing liquidity to markets and funding for future innovations

That is effectively the growing pie argument which is great however if the inequality grows faster than the pie you are left with a smaller relative wealth which means you will be at a loss when it comes to any finite resource.

Inequality is not a measure of how much money rich people make.

Right, its a comparison of the income between the rich and the poor. I still don;t see how it is relevant. Who cares how much Elon Musk has vs the drug addict on the street? Neither of those are relevant for the average American

> the State of North Carolina actually gave me free tuition and paid me a stipend to get my Master's degree (free/cheap government education is a benefit which you don't have to be privileged to get, at least not as privileged).

If having your advanced education paid for doesn't make you "privileged" you might as well stop using the word since it no longer has any meaning. I mean, seriously.

Is a kid who studies and gets all A's in class privileged with getting the reward for all A's? Generally the idea of privilege is dealing with something you didn't work for. Having your parents pay for college? Privilege. Earning a scholarship anyone can earn? Not privilege.

The issue is with privilege that impacts what you can earn, but compared to someone born with a mental disability due to lack of nutrition while developing (or maternal drug abuse in pregnancy, etc.), everyone born healthy is privileged by a great deal.

I would say going to school at a time when free tuition was a thing is the privilege. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that still happens.

A kid getting good results can be a result of privilege. If their parents can afford to live in a good area with good schools then they're going to get a better education.

Additionally, I know this is UK and not US, but it does bring up other factors that economic factors can have on kid's performance: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/socio-economic-influences...

> Generally the idea of privilege is dealing with something you didn't work for.

I'd rather depend on the dictionary definition which is more subtle and less judgmental, but I'm aware that it's become a rather loaded term recently. (A special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.)

> Is a kid who studies and gets all A's in class privileged with getting the reward for all A's?

Overwhelmingly the answer is yes. Children who come from a privileged background tend to make better grades as a rule, and the privilege continues from there. There is no need to get defensive about it or guilt-ridden, either, if you're one of the people in that position. (what, I'm supposed to perform badly so others can catch up?) It is just useful to recognize what is happening.

If nothing else this kind of awareness prevents people from having to ask questions like "Do I just live in that much of a bubble?" Well, yes.

> Earning a scholarship anyone can earn? Not privilege.

It wouldn't be a scholarship if anyone could earn it. No organization that awards scholarships awards them to all applicants performing above a certain objective threshold, as far as I know. It's a contest with winners, and the winners enjoy a certain privilege. There's nothing inherently wrong with that.

(although it might be a big-picture problem if there aren't enough scholarships to go around, if increased credentialism requires too many people to win that particular lottery, etc. etc.)

So is everything everyone who's parents didn't act like complete deadbeats just the result of "privilege" and any effect of individual achievement, merit, hard work, etc. is marginal at best?

You can't hand wave and cite some difficult to quantify "privilege" in early childhood to explain all the differences in individual achievement among a group of people who share a common trait.

At what point does privilege stop and taking advantage of opportunity begin?

I'm not denying the role of luck in determining the course of one's life but to treat it as the global predictor of what one will achieve is basically denying the ability of people who do not have good luck in one way or another (e.g. who you were born to) to move up the ladder in spite of that.

Yes, it's better to be lucky than be good but being good can still get the job done.

Running a race is a good analogy here. Privilege is the equivalent of starting the 100 meter dash 20 meters past the starting line, while someone else starts at zero. You can both work equally hard and achieve vastly different results. If you make the advantage large enough, no "extra effort" can overcome that advantage.

Hard work and personal achievement is not all that matters. I believe I worked plenty hard to get where I am today but I had the fortune to be born to stable parents who could always put food on the table, took an interest in my education and could afford to send me to college without massive loans. Take away any of those things and my same effort would likely not have yielded the same results - I was set up for success.

I don't feel guilty about that, but I do try to recognize that people who are struggling can't just "work harder" to fix their problems.

I'm not sure what leads to defensive questions loaded down with so many false dichotomies and strawmen, but I would not ask anyone to feel bad about winning what Warren Buffett calls the "birth lottery." What I'm saying is that it's useful to recognize its existence.

The other thing that's useful to recognize is that while where we start is not destiny, you really can study what happens to entire populations of people. It is absolutely not difficult or "hand wavy" to quantify early childhood privilege to a meaningful extent. Nobody is saying the correlation between privilege, academic performance, economic performance, even crime and so on explain "all" of anything or treating them as "the global predictor of what one will achieve."

I assume people are defensive about this stuff because they're sick of feeling like they're being accused of having something they haven't virtuously earned, or perhaps more thoughtfully, because being studied sociologically as part of a population makes people feel like ants instead of beautiful, unique snowflakes. Well.

> (A special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.)

In which case doesn't the word become entirely pointless because everyone alive is privileged? The discussion then can only happen when comparing the amount of privilege between two people, which becomes almost entirely subjective since it involves comparing different privileges and deciding some sort order. The subjectivity is even worse when we look at the intersection of different privileges. And what of the privileges which we don't even consider to measure, or which the lack of such privilege is socially taboo to call out the lack of?

I feel like we need some formal calculus to discuss privilege, which to my knowledge doesn't exist.

I don't know why you see it as so complicated.

A sociologist might discuss factors in the home like household wealth, childhood exposure to crime or violence or disease, quality of education, parents' education level, and a whole bunch of other things and their effect on a child's future wealth and educational outcome and so on. (and yeah, something like IQ is a little more taboo, but you can always look at that) That's sociologists, but even among normal people that looks like a reasonable list of things that would constitute privileges, at least as a first approximation.

Oh yeah, I don't know where you live, but in a country like the one I live in, where money by design tends to trump just about everything in importance and effects the ability to obtain or maintain everything else, guess which factor tends to constitute the most important privilege?

None of this makes me want to wave my arms around and cry out "oh my, this privilege thing is so complicated we do not even have a vocabulary to talk about it!" but YMMV.

>in a country like the one I live in, where money by design tends to trump just about everything in importance

That 'just about' gets overlooked to an extreme degree. How much money makes up for being autistic? From having a learning a disability? From a history of abuse?

And even if the sociologist are looking at all the right factors, once we are a single level removed from them lots of those factors are dropped from the vocabulary and not picked back up. For example, sex is often brought up in regards to some issues, but completely dismissed from others. Other issues are considered to minor to be worth mentioning, and while that may be true for any single one, someone who suffers from multiple such small ones can end up being declared privileged despite the combined effect of multiple minor issues completely eliminating privilege granted by others.

How does a wage gap and expectations of putting children before career compare to having a law preventing genital mutilation? How much benefits stereotyped to men are to be canceled out by someone with a gender neutral name who sounds female over the phone? How does being white, tall, and handsome compare to auditory hallucinations?

The 'normal people' discussion of privilege is an abstraction of what privilege actually is, and it is a very leaky one. That some can choose to ignore those leaks and the impacts of those leaks on themselves does not validate the abstraction as a good one worth using.

Holy moly, we're not talking about an "abstraction." If you thought the definition of "privilege" was promising you a scorecard by which you could cleanly and easily judge where people fall on a line, that's about you and your expectations, not about reality.

I do recall reading that the bulk of scholarships end up going more to privileged, caucasian children than of minorities.

Anecdotally, my well off college friend still applied for many scholarships and got a decent 50% chunk of her education paid for via scholarships.

Privilege begets privilege. There are many students with the mental potential to get all A's in school that do not, often due largely to family discord and stress from poverty. Coming from a privileged background of a stable family with educated parents makes the achievement of straight A's mean much less than someone coming from a less privileged background. There are not objective measures of ability that you can cleanly separate out from their environmental dependencies. Being born poor is one of the worst things you can do to your health: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2016/01/401251/poor-health

> There are many students with the mental potential to get all A's in school that do not, often due largely to family discord and stress from poverty.

There are also many students that do not have the mental (either intellectual or psychological) potential to get all A's in school because of a history of family discord and stress and physical environmental effects associated with poverty. (That is, even if you took away any effects of current poverty holding them back from what they intellectually and psychologically could do under ideal circumstances, they still would not do well because of past circumstances.)

Yes, that's unfortunately true as well. Poor people tend to find housing in hazardous areas, and the developmental damage from some things, like lead poisoning, are permanent. Chronic stress also hampers physical development. To see how extreme just the psychosocial effects can be, I encourage everyone to read up on these two concepts:

http://www.driscollchildrens.org/patient-education/food-nutr... Children with severe enough emotional stressors can cease to grow despite adequate nutrition and no physical ailment.

https://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2013/winter/adverse-childhood-e... Adverse childhood experiences appear to set people up for increased likelihood of chronic illness for life.

The point is that anybody from any background could have gotten into the same advanced degree program and done the same work/study arrangement that I did. In fact, the program was super diverse in terms of race, gender, and socio-economic background... very intentionally so.

Many people give the label "privileged" in order to justify success. That way, they are not unsuccessful, other people were jut priveledged

> anybody from any background could have gotten into the same advanced degree program

Well, I assume there were some residency and academic requirements. (a taxpayer funded program that only benefits those of us smart enough to get into grad school constitutes a "privilege," but I digress)

> In fact, the program was super diverse in terms of race, gender, and socio-economic background... very intentionally so.

It sounds pretty great. I think, circling back to the "am I living in a bubble?" question, you need to realize how unusual that really is. It sounds like the kind of thing people who are concerned about this stuff would really like to expand and make available to more people.

personally i think the situation is fairly exaggerated. anyone who gets through an undergrad program in CS can probably live like you if they are smart about debt and adjust their expectations (ie, not living it up in NYC/SF).

that said, the main thing that gets people is educating their children. a lot of highly desirable places to live as a single person or young couple have pretty bad public school options. the places with good public schools are genuinely expensive in a lot of locales. take a look at home prices in areas around you with good schools and/or look at private school tuitions and you might see how professionals with kids can start to get squeezed.

> anyone who gets through an undergrad program in CS

Yeah.

not sure whether you are calling my original claim naive or that i imply getting an undergrad degree is an attainable goal.

LOL. Yes and yes, but mainly it's your privileged genetics.

Lo que hay que oír...

Which also seems to pretty much indicate where root of this issue lies ...