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Comment by Mikeb85 | Hacker News Reader

I just find it amusing that anyone ever thought otherwise. At the end of the day, having capital means you don't have to have a job while you're in school, you can do extracurriculars to gain a leg up, you can start a business, or you'll have friends in high places or who own business to network with and get jobs from.

Self-preservation is in everyone's nature. If you're rich, you're going to do the most for your family, your children and you're going to make sure it stays that way.

Education doesn't lead to social mobility, redistribution of wealth does. The countries with the most social mobility as well as the most equality have fairly 'socialist' political and economic systems. Of course, going full communist has been shown to have disastrous effects, so there's obviously a balance somewhere, but it seems that in the US and UK for sure the systems are still tipped a little too much towards the rich.

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>>Education doesn't lead to social mobility, redistribution of wealth does.

Two random thoughts:

Education is good for everybody - the poor may perhaps not gain on the rich, but their quality of life will be better than their similarly poor parents.

Severe redistribution of wealth can have second-order effects : people stop working and producing if too much of their labor is taken from them.

> Education is good for everybody - the poor may perhaps not gain on the rich, but their quality of life will be better than their similarly poor parents.

I'm not in the UK, Canada rather, but our generation is more educated than our parents' by a rather large margin, yet we're the first generation that's going to be poorer than the previous. Not sure this is progress.

While we have computers and cell phones nowadays, buying a house and raising children on a single income is a pipe dream for most. Wages have stagnated in a bunch of industries. Yet the rich get richer.

> Severe redistribution of wealth can have second-order effects : people stop working and producing if too much of their labor is taken from them.

I did mention that, and yes it does. Hence a middle ground.

People deciding to stop working is a good thing. It means they have market power and potential employers need to take that into account.

>Severe redistribution of wealth can have second-order effects : people stop working and producing if too much of their labor is taken from them.

I guess the key is to only take from people who do absolutely nothing.

Taking from people who have absolutely nothing might be a flawed plan...

>Education doesn't lead to social mobility, redistribution of wealth does.

I cannot name a single example that would prove this. Having little education and redistribution of wealth has led to whole nation simply getting poor in every example I can think of.

Social mobility != wealth and doesn't even necessarily correlate. Some countries have high mobility and are rich (Germany, Sweden, Canada). Some countries have low mobility and are still rich (US, UK, or maybe for a more extreme example, Saudi Arabia). Some relatively poor countries have low mobility (Brazil, Argentina). Some poor countries have high mobility where the topline is still poor.

Education does help the total wealth of a nation. But education doesn't necessarily help anyone change their social standing within a single country.

Doesn't high mobility actually mean that outcomes aren't correlated to inputs, which doesn't seem like an obviously good thing? Low mobility would also mean the same thing. Somewhere in between would be where the actual difference between generations equals the difference in outcomes.

My understanding is that you claimed that education does not help one bit to social mobility. On national level, to big groups of people. I still think that is false and I still have not seen any one example that would even rise a suspicion that your claim could be sometimes true.

> The countries with the most social mobility as well as the most equality have fairly 'socialist' political and economic systems.

Which countries are you talking about? There are almost no countries left that actually have socialist economic systems, because they just don't work. Countries like Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands or Norway that are often misleadingly described as "socialist" (positive or negative) all have free-market capitalist economic systems. In some cases more free than in the US. The difference is usually in that they have socialized both health care and pensions, as well as somewhat more comprehensive social security programs.

Furthermore, it is unsurprising that low inequality often leads to higher social mobility[1], because income strata are closer together. It tells you nothing about how much of an improvement moving upwards is in real terms, nor does it say anything about the real level of wealth.

Case in point, income in the US is more unequal, but income and purchasing power is generally higher[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...

[2] https://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2015/10/the-truth-poor...

Going to split hairs over the definition of socialism?

Also, the US is closest on the chart to Singapore and Argentina, two places with disparate purchasing power. Maybe that's not correlated? On the other hand, inequality and social mobility do seem somewhat more connected.

It's also obvious that all the countries with lower inequality and higher social mobility have higher living standards than the opposite, with a few potential outliers.

> Going to split hairs over the definition of socialism?

Absolutely. Socialism equals failure born out of ignorance. Bernie Sanders is a socialist. Ocasio-Cortez is a socialist. These people are clueless about the economy, as well as the countries that they themselves refer to as socialist[1].

[1] https://acton.org/publications/transatlantic/2019/01/17/denm...

Social democracy works. Obama is a social democrat. A welfare state can work, if there's an economy to support it. Socialism ends up destroying the economy, which ultimately destroys the welfare state as well.

The American socialists will not destroy the economy by turning the means of production over to the state, like the Soviets. They will destroy the economy with reckless spending programs that will create so much debt, it will either bankrupt the state or destroy the US dollar - the one major export good that the US has left.

> On the other hand, inequality and social mobility do seem somewhat more connected.

Yes, as I explained, if equality is low, it easier to move up or down an income strata, but it also means less in terms of wealth.

> It's also obvious that all the countries with lower inequality and higher social mobility have higher living standards than the opposite, with a few potential outliers.

Similar reason, if the standard of living is generally lower, it's relatively easier to rise up in absolute numbers. That is, if you want to go into the top percentile in Denmark, you'll need to earn maybe half a million euros (couldn't find a number), whereas in China you only need to earn less than 100,000$[2].

[2] https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/09/23/what-percent-...

Socialism seems to act like a societal micronutrient. A deficiency leads to the possibility of wide range of social sicknesses whereas overdosing on it (communism) is acutely (one generation) fatal.

Like everything else, moderation and balance.

Look at the parliaments of European countries, actual socialists are generally in the small minority.

People mistake socialism with social democracy, which is more or less the same as what moderate democrats in the US are espousing.

I would measure socialism not by the number of people who call themselves socialists. Europe is farther to the left on the spectrum, so today’s moderate are yesterday’s core socialists. Look at the tax burden, state role and involvement in business and personal lives.

As a software engineer who makes $150,000 per year, I'm wondering why you assume that inequality is bad? It's possible that we could improve the conditions of the poor while also increasing inequality, so that means that there's never any reason to discuss wealth redistribution as a possible solution to poverty. Also, it's human nature to want to help your offspring, so therefore it's immoral to ever even think of doing anything to reduce the advantages that rich kids get. After all, I'm for equality of opportunity, not outcome.

If you really want to help the poor, the priority should be growing the economy, which should be measured by how well my stocks are doing. This article should be flagged as a propaganda piece from the far-left publication Vice.

You’re assuming the natural order of society is to preserve the wealth of the wealthy. Which may not be true at all.

Look to countries like Brazil, Mexico, India, Russia to see why too much inequality is bad. Like I said, there's a balance.

https://www.justfacts.com/news_poorest_americans_richer_than...

The poorest 20% in the U.S. have it better than the middle class in most countries, despite the inequality.

The point is that inequality causes a bunch of societal ills (crime for example), nevermind what the actual living standards are.

Inequality is not the cause of crime. Poverty is the cause of crime. Just because there is inequality, doesn't mean certain people have to be poor. Wealth is not a pie with a limited number of pieces to go around. Wealth is created.

For example, you could fish all day and you've created wealth. This doesn't necessarily exclude the possibility of someone else fishing and creating wealth themselves.

Here you go: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/06/07/the-star...

This binary "inequality is bad/good" is a straw man. In the 1960s when the average CEO made 20 times the average worker, that's still inequality, but when it grows to over 300x as it is today, it doesn't seem inconsistent to me to argue that is a problem.

This all sounds rather tone deaf. What is the point, in your mind, of "equality of opportunity" if it doesn't result in any outcome? How exactly are people at the poverty level helped, this month, by the performance of the stock market?

When someone making more than triple the median salary in this country (who I'm guessing has never had to live on minimum wage) says we don't need to discuss wealth redistribution, but without offering any concrete suggestions about how to help the poor today, I find it hard to take that seriously.

Equality of opportunity means that if a homeless person and a rich kid work exactly as hard and get the same grades on the same tests and both perform the same at work they end up in the same place. That means if they both do great they could both end up well off, and if they both decide they don't need to work and skirt their responsibilities they can both end up out of a job and not in a good place, at least until they start doing better at their jobs again.

Equality of outcome means a lazy drunk who never cracked a book would get the same as an industrious person who makes great sacrifices for their career and education.

I assure you that you should take my opinion very seriously. After all, I'm smart enough to type JavaScript into a text editor, which makes me more qualified to make judgments about political/social issues than any journalist or politician.

Equality of opportunity means that no one is a serf or a slave, except people in the third world, who obviously don't count. It's important because it means no one can ever accuse me of having an unfair advantage over anyone else.

The stock market helps the poor by giving money to job creators, meaning that it might reach the poor eventually. Didn't you ever read Basic Economics?

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