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Comment by tengbretson | Hacker News Reader

It's not obvious to me that downward social mobility and upward social mobility are the same things. Lamenting the fact that Michael Dell's son "just hasn't become poor like me yet" sounds like sour grapes. This mindset that in order for people like me to make it people at the top have to fall only makes sense if you consider the economy a fixed-sized pie. It's obviously not.

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> Lamenting the fact that Michael Dell's son "just hasn't become poor like me yet"

My thoughts exactly. This isn't some generations-long dynasty, with a genius at the top and buffoons all the way down. This kid is literally one generation removed from the guy who made all the money. Even with an Elizabeth Warren-style wealth tax, there is no way that someone who grew up the son of a billionaire would not himself be very, very wealthy (unless his parents cut him off entirely).

It's more about questioning the system in which after certain point your bad decisions have no consequences like losing your wealth and becoming poor for instance. It's not about, and I don't see anyone arguing the point, me being unable to move up the chain without someone moving down.

> It's not about, and I don't see anyone arguing the point, me being unable to move up the chain without someone moving down.

It's right here in the article

> Rather than sending our most brilliant minds up the income ladder, America is ensuring that the wealthy, no matter their mediocrity, retain their grip on the highest rung

The assumption the author is making is that both things (sending our most brilliant minds up the income ladder AND the wealthy retaining their grip on the highest rung) cannot be true.

Except Harvard has limited slots and the failsons of the rich buying in takes away a spot from someone who is actually competent and driven.

In most of the same articles - American cannot be a meritocracy, social mobility isn't 100%! The assumption that a perfect meritocracy would be shown by your income having no correlation to your parents is about as opposite true as can get. If there is any heritability to ability/"merit", that will show up as correlation between parent and child incomes.

"Meritocracy" is a poor term regardless, because I have a different definition of "merit" than you do, and so do the authors. I've yet to see an article lamenting inequality that even attempts to define "merit"

the american dream is built on the ideal (myth?) of meritocracy, so it's not surprising that people want the world to adhere to that ideal: bright and hardworking people rise, dull and lazy people fall. we expect it to work both ways. it's not about the pie.

> bright and hardworking people rise, dull and lazy people fall

I'm with you on the first part where hardworking people rise, but I don't think the second part necessarily follows. Consider the actual reason at the heart of why we work to accrue wealth in the first place. We try to accrue wealth so that our failings and misfortunes don't set us back. If we accrue $300 dollars we don't lose our apartment when we have to pay for a flat tire. If we accrue $30,000 maybe we gain the confidence to tell our boss to get lost if they ask us for too much overtime. If we accrue $3 billion we can afford to take some risks and still land on our feet. That's the point of being wealthy!

so if you're dull and lazy, but have unearned wealth, you should never fail? why do you want to believe so hard that wealthy people should never lose their wealth in any circumstance?

it's a classic misallocation of resources, and how monarchies have time and again fallen into despotism, decay, and eventually overthrow. it's why democracy and capitalism came into being in the first place.

It's more about wealthy incompetent idiots running everything into the ground and destroying our institutions, governments, and economy for everyone except them.

Also, theoretically the economy is not a fixed pie, but for many years now it has been a fixed or shrinking pie for everyone not at the top of the income distribution.

maybe they wouldn't be idiots if the top schools took more rich kids!

(scarcasm... cue downvotes)

> This mindset that in order for people like me to make it people at the top have to fall only makes sense if you consider the economy a fixed-sized pie. It's obviously not.

It's not over the long timescale, but over the short-term it is. Rich kids frittering money away really is preventing others who may need that wealth more from having access to it.

I'm not sure what you mean by "having access" to it. What does it mean to "have access" to wealth? Do you mean offering them financing with favorable rates?

Nope, I mean owning or having control over money (which is effectively a share of societies productive output). The alternative to rich people (in this case kids) having control over this money, is to tax them. That money could then be redistributed to others. The Universal Basic Income is a concrete proposal based around this kind of insight.

What makes the economy obviously not a fixed sized pie? Every dollar that Michael Dell's son has came out of somebody else's pocket.

When that money came out of those people's pockets they went home with a computer that they obviously valued more than the money itself. By their own judgement they walked out of a store carrying more wealth than they walked in with. Michael Dell made himself wealthy but he made his customers even more wealthy.

Or they worked for 40 hours assembling computers for minimum wage while the company made billions and billions off that worker labour.

When someone takes silicon and produces a computer chip, it's pretty clear to me that value has been created that didn't exist before. Within my memory, we've gone from Z80s to 4GHz multi-core. How can you look at that and see a fixed sized pie? It's obviously growing.

Well, no. His father has honestly earned his fortune by creating a big business that employs thousands.

I suggest you stop preaching this Marxist crap. I was born in the Soviet Union and I tell you what: countries built with such "Rob the rich, give back to the poor" mindset are extremely bad to live in.

As opposed to the US where it's rob the poor give to the rich and it's so wonderful?

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and using HN for ideological battle, so we don't have to ban you again?

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post in the spirit of this site, we'd be grateful. It's not hard to use HN as intended if you want to.

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