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Comment by wishigotitfree | Hacker News Reader

Starting conditions (where one was born, levels of wealth and opportunity there, one's parents' education and jobs) are shockingly predictive about an individual's future. Hard work leading to social mobility has always been the exception, not the rule. Most will not beat the odds since if they did, those wouldn't BE the odds. A lot of us are just so deluded by survivorship bias borne of listening only to success stories, but it seems more and more people are seeing through the illusion. In my opinion, that's a good thing, as recognizing the true state of things is the first step to improving them, and this combination of consciousness and lived experience can prove to be potent immunization against bad faith actors who want to maintain the illusion of widespread social mobility.

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Starting conditions help tremendously, and I'm not doubting that in the least. One other thing which helps, significantly, is how much the parents value education. Most of the people I know who grew up very poor but now have money had parents that valued education, and pushed their kids to learn. They didn't have shelves of books at home, but they did visit the library weekly.

It has to be extremely difficult to focus on school and education when you don't know when your next meal is going to be. It's why I find news articles about lunch aids being fired for giving a kid lunch when they have no money so infuriating, and food insecurity is an enormous problem that is likely happening in your neighborhood today, and it's often overlooked. It's not easy to move upward especially when your choice is between "Do I improve myself by working hard or do I eat?"

I would think "starting conditions" includes the parents one has. Also what you say is not quite logic - you're saying that valuing education means people succeed. So why didn't the parents succeed then?

I think that's the question, and usually that's because they were born in the wrong place, at the wrong time or under the wrong regime. When their kids are born, it's a different perhaps better time, so better starting conditions, and they now have a chance to succeed. The anomaly is corrected.

But those are anomalies, it's exceptional. I think the issue is when you take two people born in the same town, at the same time, and both work equally hard, except one has the parents to give them a head start in everything and the other doesn't. Maybe one will eventually make an average salary in a local company, while the other will have his own company.

> valuing education means people succeed. So why didn't the parents succeed then?

Picture a first-generation immigrant family in America where the parents are older, don't speak English very well, and spend almost all their time working multiple jobs to pay bills and provide food and shelter for their kids. They then push their kids to do well in school because they know it's practically too late for themselves, but that their kids will be much better off than they were if they succeed in school.

Anecdotally, I knew several such families growing up.

I watched a video of Geoffrey Canada[1] explaining that when parents would ask them what they could do for themselves he would respond with something like "Unfortunately, there's not much you can do to change your situation. Which is why it's so important to place a high priority on your kids." I'm paraphrasing and don't remember the exact words but that really had an impact on me. The platitudes that Americans grow up - "Be who you want to be" and "You can do anything you want" - really start to fall away once you're older and have responsibilities and don't have the time anymore to take risks.

[1] https://hcz.org/about-us/leadership/geoffrey-canada/

Unfortunately public schools in poor neighborhoods are getting shittier and parents need to pay for private tutors and summer school. Guess who can afford that?

Education doesn't fall out of the sky.

Yes, money makes stuff easier. I don't think anybody is disputing that.

But you can be in a great school district with parents who think education is pointless, and in a shit school district with parents who think (know) it's one of the only ways out, and the former will underperform the latter all things being equal.

And this isn't as simple as "dump more money on shitty schools and they'll become great." There are plenty of examples of poor areas with higher per-capita student spending than more well-off areas, and the schools burning giant piles are money are still worse.

If parents value education they don't need to pay for tutors or summer school. I grew up in district with shitty schools, but I saw some kids succeed only because they learned stuff on their own.

Those schools aren't necessarily shittier...they are filled with kids that don't want to learn (and their parents increasingly blame the teachers for their failure).

So, it's just a statistical reality that kids in poor areas don't want to learn, and that's why the results show poorer people doing worse in education that rich people?

Interesting hill to die on, but you do you.

Any teacher in a school considered "inner city" (i.e., poor, relatively high crime) will tell you that there is often an anti-achievement culture present (and it's not correlated with race or ethnic background). My wife teaches in such a school. Many kids consciously try to avoid appearing smart or like they don't hold school in contempt because if they don't, their peers or their parents will shame them or abuse them. It's considered a very serious problem in the field of education.

At the same school, several of her students have received large scholarships, including full four year rides to university. This is rare, of course, but does correlate very clearly with parents being involved in their children's education, encouraging them, and not having an anti-achievement peer group.

It's a statistical reality that if your parents don't value education, and don't impress upon their children its importance, that those children are incredibly unlikely to decide completely on their own that education is the way out of their impoverished lives.

But that's a little too nuanced for your straw man.

A lot of parents of modest means, immigrant parents in particular, will move out to suburbs expressly because of the school quality relative to what's available in many city-centers. They're also willing to make much higher sacrifices for their kids' educations and enroll them in parochial or even private schools in spite of the cost. Sometimes, a good charter school or a magnet school is possible too.

That's very true. Widespread, high quality public education is a must.

It's not necessarily that the educators aren't high quality, but that the majority of students are there as a babysitting service and take up more time being disciplined than actually getting taught. We always say inner city schools have worse education...but I suspect it's more that the kids that attend those schools are disruptors and the system won't allow them to be disciplined in the way they should be (not that expelling them is the right thing either).

The quality of education is dictated innate ability, parents, and school system. I like to think of as a three leg stool. If one leg is missing, it's possible to balance. If two are missing, no amount of money will solve the problem.

The stool has a fourth leg: other students. It's tough to get a good education if many of the other students are violent or disruptive. Public schools can't easily expel problem students.

Hence why church and community structures are very important among immigrant communities.

I think there's also other cases where kids grew up without education (like myself) - but could have, but if i were to have kids now i'd value education immensely. Ie i'm not an immigrant, my lack of early education is a result of my family being poor and making poor decisions.

However now my values have shifted drastically. Ironically i would consider myself very lucky. Not wealthy by any means, but far better off than the average American household. Which then perhaps would put my children (which i'm not having, lol) in the position of being "children of well-off families".. maybe.

If you are far better off than the average American household you could definitely consider yourself wealthy.

I dunno.. these are loose definitions but i make enough that i'm confident i can pay off my mortgage, make meaningful contributions to my retirement and not be afraid of money (outside of job loss, at least). I also significantly budget for things like home repairs, car repairs, medical expenses, etc. I could lose my job tomorrow and be safe for 6 months, 12 if i needed to. I have no financial concerns outside of job loss right now.

My view however is that this isn't wealthy. Instead this is where the middleclass should be. I don't make enough to retire early (though i could probably extreme FIRE, but that doesn't sound enjoyable to me). I'm not by my definition wealthy, just safe, satisfied, happy. No fancy cars or homes, just a stable honest and predictable living. These are traits that, in my mind, America should strive to bring to all people.

Unfortunately i've not seen this spread. I've only seen it decrease. People far more and more on the edge of collapse, with no safety net in their bank, no budget for emergency expenses, no possibility of retirement.

Relative to the current state of America i am wealthy. To me that is very, very sad.

That's exactly how I would describe my own situation. From the outside looking in, people with less economic means think that my situation is "perfect", and that it equates to no worries(it does not).

Job loss is the only big worry, and even in that situation it wouldn't be difficult to find a similar job with similar pay. I know that is a comfort that not everyone(or most people) has. Knowing that this seems to be "as good as it gets" when compared to the majority of Americans is what makes me very, very sad.

My dad has a friend who owns a bus-sized camper/RV in addition to multiple cars and a beachfront home, but doesn't consider himself rich because he can't afford a large boat.

Point being, I think people are more aware of the unattained wealth above them than the levels they've already surpassed. (Myself included). The comment you replied to strikes me in the same way, though not nearly as blatant!

I replied https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27516973 - curious what your thoughts are on it. But no, i have literally zero fancy expenses. My car is 10 years old, my mortgage is not paid off, i don't have retirement, but all of those things are being worked on, and i am quite financially stable.

"Remember when you wanted what you currently have?"

> you're saying that valuing education means people succeed. So why didn't the parents succeed then?

Possibly because the parents parents didn't value education and by the time the parents came to value education they were already stuck in the cycle of poverty.

Why do you think the parents didn't succeed? Starting conditions matter, if you start from nothing and realize the right change it will still be a few generations before you can fully take advantage of it. However by making a small change now the future can be better for the future generations.

If you took the vast majority of babies and had be adopt them (this is of course kid napping which I wouldn't agree to) they would grow up to be more successful than if they remain with their parents. Of course successful is in the eye of the judge, some of their parents in 40 years would be glad for my help and some would think their baby would be better off with them.

The above applies to most of the people reading this as well. (a few of you have admitted you don't want kids because you would be a bad parent, and a few more could be good parents to your own kids but bad for adopted kids - but overall these groups are a minority)

Agreed, your parents mistakes are often a very strong source of motivation to act differently.

> I would think "starting conditions" includes the parents one has. Also what you say is not quite logic - you're saying that valuing education means people succeed. So why didn't the parents succeed then?

Some people value education independently of their parents.

You go on to make a point about a head start being beneficial, and I'm absolutely not disagreeing with that.

My parents valued education, their parents less so. So my parents education/training started much later in life, and even then the opportunities were not easily accessible. Both came from subsistence farming/ small holding families, with a large number of siblings, so just inheriting the land was not an outcome they could rely upon.

By becoming trained in their fields it meant they had a better opportunity to earn, but that was limited by the lateness to which they started their careers. When my siblings and I arrived we could be encouraged into education from the earliest possible opportunity.

The parents were immigrants. They were successful -- just not in the way its normally measured.

Don't immigrants show that not only hard work (which they usually did) but other factors (like emigrating from a bad environment, which can be pretty risky) are needed for a better life?

I don't think it's the emigration part that's needed.

People are usually forced to emigrate somewhere else because of the conditions or their home country. Those who are down to emigrate to a foreign country (especially if their original country is not a warzone or is not that bad - implying they're really trying hard to improve their life) probably have some other characteristics that can be useful for achieving success.

The debate then moves on how much of those characteristics are genetic and how much are due to the bad environment per se (or maybe the good environment their families where able to setup in a bad environment) - on which I think we don't yet have a scientific answer.

> So why didn't the parents succeed then?

Because they're busy trying to pay the bills? That hard work pays off in allowing their kids to focus on growing their brains.

> So why didn't the parents succeed then?

Investing your optimism in the next generation is just the immigrant way.

I think implicit in the post is that parents’ parents could have lived where education was too far away physically, took away from a pool of labor, etc.

Conversely, we have kids today, who for whatever reason have the opportunity to get an education but are sidetracked by entertainment and other things that can derail their long term prospects despite more being available to them. (Contrast with kids in third world counties who walk miles to the nearest school, pay for books from their meager earnings, take jobs to pay for their siblings’ education, etc) yet these privileged kids can’t be arsed.

Indeed. I have a friend whos whole extended family kept telling her that she should stop with this fancy expensive state college education and go to a trade school or something that would get her a job. Even when she was working at an engineering firm and starting to see the payoff, her family kept trying to drag her down.

Fortunately, she had a particularly strong will, so she spent just as much time telling them where they could stuff their trade school, and ended up doing quite well for herself.

I'm not sure I would have done so well had I come from a family that was that opposed to education on principal. I don't have any trouble believing this sort of thing keeps lots of people exactly where they started in life. (Lucky for me, my dad spent several years working at a paper mill out of highschool before going back to get his degree, so I got to hear first hand about what a good idea that was.)

On the flip side there are plenty of examples of kids being pushed into higher education who would have been much better off going to a trade school.

Working as a plumber, an electrician, or a carpenter can be quite lucrative, and they are certainly things that society needs.

Being pushed into higher ed is so much different than having an internal drive to do it. I'm glad that she's doing well and hopefully they can resolve their differences.

I have a number of friends who are teachers, and part of their job is to call the parents if the student is failing, falling behind, or not doing their work. The vast majority of the time the response on the other end of the line is "that's their problem, not mine." If the parents don't care, the students don't care, and life goes on as it always has for them.

> Working as a plumber, an electrician, or a carpenter can be quite lucrative

This narrative about wealthy trades people like plumbers and welders is not well supported by any data. The ones who do well are the ones who start businesses and hire people, so they become business owners, but most trades people don’t end up there and they obviously can’t all do it.

You should know that the U.S. Fed (St. Louis) published stats on higher education which shows that on average a 4 year degree doubles your income vs anything less. A graduate degree triples it. When I read that, I was blown away that the difference is that high on average. I would have thought maybe 10%, but double the earnings on average for all degree earners is so huge it’s something you can’t ignore.

https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/page1-econ/2018...

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/09/weldin...

> on average a 4 year degree doubles your income vs anything less

The data suggests that people who hold a 4-year degree have X ratio of income. That's two things: the people and the degree, not just the degree.

From a previous study, a related (but inexact) surprising outcome emerged: After adjusting for applicant scholastic aptitude, the additional benefit from attending an elite school is “generally indistinguishable from zero.” Excerpt from article*: In November 2002, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a landmark paper** by the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger that reached a startling conclusion. For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.

* - https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-ma...

** - https://www.nber.org/papers/w7322

> That's two things: the people and the degree, not just the degree.

Yes, true, it’s a valid point, but there’s really no debate over whether getting the degree is causal. And side note, the Fed’s data is for all Americans, not just a suggestive sample. The line between holding a degree and not is surprisingly clear. All the debate is over what the cause actually is. Specifically, to what degree the content of the education is responsible for better earnings vs whether simply holding a certificate, but not necessarily learning anything or gaining skills, is the reason for higher income. And I’m no expert here, I’ve only browsed a handful of them, but my understanding is that they more or less all conclude it’s a mixture.

And yes, selectivity of school has less effect than selective schools might have you believe, at the same time that just having a degree from a state university has more effect than some people suggest.

> there’s really no debate over whether getting the degree is causal

Is there no debate in the sense of "this is completely settled science that getting a degree causes a doubling of income on an aptitude-independent, statistically-sound, population-wide basis"? Or "it's not being debated because that debate is uncomfortable"? Or in some other sense of that phrase?

Have you seen any studies on it being a causal relationship between the education and the income doubling? Ie i'm curious if the people who complete a graduate are also inherently more likely to have higher earnings.

I'm in full support of education, so this isn't a backhanded reason to argue against education. The disclaimer seems necessary these days :(

Yes, there are such studies, quite a few IIRC (there have been some deep threads on this topic here on HN before, I’ll see if I can dig any up), and there definitely is some component of education providing higher earnings purely due to employer selection, and/or social selection & bias. So earnings are a mix of the education and skills learned, and of the social signaling that the certificate provides, plus other causes. I’m also in full support of education, but you’re right the disclaimer is absolutely necessary, and there are some components of misleading social narrative surrounding education, just like there are surrounding social mobility.

I think using the average wages is a bit unhelpful for an individual debating between going to college and going to a trade school. They should just compare the specific career paths they’re interested in. And not just wages, job availability is also crucially important. The earnings potential of a vocational school may not have a huge high end, but there are more than a couple college degrees programs with very little job prospects.

By all means, education is great, and people should seek knowledge even when it isn’t profitable. But let’s stop telling white lies to high school seniors about the disconnect between the goals of academics and the realities of the job market.

Working as a plumber, an electrician, or a carpenter can be quite lucrative, and they are certainly things that society needs.

I hear this kind of thing, but I have to say it is less than convincing when most of the people saying it don't seem to be sending their kids to trade school.

Based on my only social contact working in trades, the income follows a bathtub distribution - a lot of people taking below average, and a sizable minority getting upper middle class incomes, with almost nothing in between. This is the reason why we get the contradictory narratives of great fortunes in trades on one hand, and the statistics telling the opposite on the other hand.

Allegedly, the talent pool is really shallow - with a modicum of intelligence, passion and human skills, it's not that hard to make it. But most of the guys who end up studying trades are the bottom of the barrel who would do badly in any endeavor (or so I was told).

The caveat there is definitely whether the person then has the entrepreneurial drive to get the trade qualifications and start their own business with it. You're not going to be wealthy by any means of the definition by either becoming a plumber or an electrician working for another company. No way in hell, I know many of these people, as well as many carpenters both working their own business, or working for another company. I know one neighbor carpenter who owns his own carpentry/cabinetry business doing just well enough for himself, while another neighbor frames really nice houses and doesn't make nearly as much but does much harder work.

Then, I have a couple good examples of some guys with absolutely no education whatsoever who decided to start their own cleaning services by powerwashing restaurant kitchens, doing deep cleaning. These guys doing this cleaning gig the past few years are raking in $1k cash per night, 6-7 nights a week and making more cash hand over fist than a doctor makes. It's obvious to see what is the real underlying factor in all cases. Drive, motivation, and a go-getter attitude is what it takes. Plenty of people with degrees work at coffee shops and retail positions because after schooling, they expected a job to just drop in their laps but they have no go get it attitude from the start.

I have family in all of those professions. They're doing fine financially-- some of their kids went to college and some of them continued with the trade.

The biggest difference is the ebb and flow of available work. There were some months which were good, _really_ good, and others which were quite lean. Because of this, budgeting was an important skill to have.

Well, my logic is: if you go to university (ideally STEM) and have a modicum of practical skills, how hard really is it to become a plumber later in life? I'd imagine plumbing studies are shorter, some stuff you can probably transfer over from your university studies and you can probably apprentice reasonably easily somewhere.

> I'd imagine ...

Yes, and imagining is what is actually happening here, because you clearly do not understand plumbing (or any of the trades).

The studies aspect of it are the least part overall. Good plumbers (and electricians and builders) get good primarily through a delightful combination of attitude and experience. The experience comes from apprenticing early, and accumulating lots of "stories" along the way as a result of having to work in a large number of different contexts.

You will get none of this while working on your STEM career, and you will likely find that most plumbers (and electricians and builders) will be reluctant to take you on as an apprentice later in life without overwhelming evidence that you'd be remarkably good at it.

Yeah, this. The old guy on the job site knows more "tricks of the trade" than you will pick up in a trade school. Experience is paramount here.

It's easy to watch a youtube video on something and think that it looks easy -- until you try it. I can sweat pipes but I'd wager that 10% of them have a pinhole leak when pressurized for the first time. If it was something that I did on a daily basis, over years, I surely would get better at it. Now try doing one through a small opening in the sheetrock, and don't burn anything.

When I'm working on stuff in my house, that's when I call a professional because I recognize my limits.

Which you can side step by doing your own plumbing, helping friends out with that while talking to people, watching videos online, etc.

Good luck apprenticing as a doctor without 6 years of medical school. Or as an architect without architecture school.

Let's not overdo the "blue collar jobs are hard to get".

Working with your hands is a practical skill that takes significant time and effort to become good at. I, personally, am terrible at it. I am highly educated, though. There are what, maybe 2.5 school years of degree related work in a STEM degree? That’s pretty comparable to an apprenticeship.

Many trades and plumbing in particular have a large complement of contortionism. I do a small amount of home owner plumbing, but I wouldn't be likely to do it as a second career because pretzeling to get to the sink fasteners gives me aches for a week; and I'm not going to dig out underground pipes in easy soil, but around here it's all rocky stuff.

If I was apprenticing 20 years ago, the pretzel work would be fine, and I would probably be more willing to dig.

I want to second this. Ample kids go to college or uni just because that’s the normal thing to do even though they don’t have a good aptitude for studying and end up with two year liberal arts degrees which land them answering phones and lower tier office work.

They would have been better served by a trade which can pay way better than these office jobs.

> "that's their problem, not mine."

It’s worth noting that this attitude makes sense for someone who themselves found school to be a degrading and unsupportive experience, and dealing with a teacher complaining about their child is just more of the same dynamic.

> should stop with this fancy expensive state college education and go to a trade school

> Even when she was working at an engineering firm

Did she then get a STEM degree? Then, of course, it is better.

What is argued about I believe is the worthlessness of liberal arts degrees for a livelihood.

> It has to be extremely difficult to focus on school and education when you don't know when your next meal is going to be

This is true, but which is the bigger factor in America: parent(s) who are uneducated themselves and do not take an active role in their childrens' education OR food insecurity? I would argue the former. I remember a recent story about Baltimore single mom Tiffany France being shocked that her kid (a senior in high school) wasn't going to graduate because he had a 0.1 GPA (the story was that that was one of the top GPAs in the school). Like... how checked out do you have to be from your kid's education in order to not know that your kid is rampantly truant and has <1.0 GPA over the course of 4 years? Not to downplay her own struggles; part of the reason she's checked out from her kid's education is likely due to dealing with her own jobs/responsibilities/issues. So for that reason alone even having 2 parents is a massive educational advantage over their peers.

Food insecurity exists, but also there is an obesity epidemic and single parenthood epidemic in America among various lower classes and based on personal experience I tend to think parent mentorship (or lack thereof) plays a far bigger role in kids' education than food insecurity.

I would encourage you to look into food insecurity a little bit more. I live in a fairly nice area and there are kids in my school district who often don't eat when there are snow days and in the summer. It is significantly more prevalent than you think.

A lot of the food that lower class families have available, stuff which is non-perishable, tend to have empty calories and less fiber. Soft drinks are a problem, and they're cheap.

Having grown up around it, I can tell you that, if you had to pick one, a parents attitude has a much bigger impact on success in school than food insecurity.

That isnt to say that we cant or shouldnt do more about food insecurity, but wrt the GP post, it isnt the biggest factor.

Right, perhaps I wasn't 100% clear. My point was that obesity does not mean that a person is well fed, and that if a parent had to choose between eating and education, eating will win.

The parent's attitude is absolutely a factor which was what my original message (up a bit from here) was about, but I don't think that you can deny that food insecurity plays a part in their attitude toward education.

Honestly, I don't think that from what I have seen it is an either / or situation at all.

It is stressful, which doesn't help, bit there are many stressful situations across all walks of life which can be stressful for extended periods of time.

Basically, I think we are agreed it is a problem worth addressing. I don't think we agree that addressing food insecurity will necessarily translate into better attitudes towards doing well in school.

You do realize that obesity among the poor isn’t due to eating too much, as much as eating cheap high fat, low nutrition foods, right? In fact having only access to high processed, low nutrition foods is also considered food insecurity.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19320248.2010.5...

Yes, I acknowledge that food and nutrition insecurity exists and that it is a problem. However, my comment questions whether it plays as significant a role in child education as parental mentorship. I live next door to a very poor family that has a single mom and obesity. I interact with the boy almost daily. He is nutrition insecure, and I try to give him fruits and vegetables whenever he comes over.

However, my general impression is that the primary reason he is truant, has reading level of a 3rd grader (he is in 7th grade), doesn't do homework or make an effort in school, etc. isn't so much that he consumes a lot of empty calories. The primary reason IMO is that his single mom is 100% checked out of his education. And actually, more than just his education - practically his entire life. She has no idea who his teachers are, what his grades are, or even what his attendance is. He practically raises himself because his single mom is too burned out after working her jobs and other responsibilities. So... as a result, he drinks a lot of soda, eats a lot of fast food, plays a lot of video games, watches a lot of anime, doesn't go to school, doesn't read, sleeps on a very irregular schedule, etc.

What you’re not counting, and what most people miss, is that not only are you at a disadvantage due to lack of resources, but there are many people in positions of authority, power, or just plain tenure who believe that accumulated wealth is a reflection of the wealth of soul. If you are below them in birth, and didn’t chance yourself to some higher strata by the time they grace your presence, they tend to believe you belong there and treat you as such. Even in the great meritocracies of North America.

Show me the data that supports this claim. Big claim, zero citations. As an American I've never met anyone who thinks wealth reflects "wealth of the soul."

In my experience people here are Christian, in which case there's that verse about heaven and wealth and the eye of the needle (Google it) or they're atheist and don't believe in souls.

> I’ve never met anyone who things wealth reflects “wealth of the soul.”

I’ve never met anyone who would say exactly those words out loud either, and I don’t speak for the parent, but I feel like you might be taking what was an analogy extremely literally.

Have you ever met or seen someone sneer at a “hippie”? Have you ever heard someone argue that we should not increase the minimum wage? Have you ever heard someone suggest that homeless people are lazy or could get work if they wanted to? Have you ever witnessed anyone saying that the success they have is due primarily to their own hard work, and not for luck or advantages? I’ve seen all of those, often, and they all fit my interpretation of the parent’s comment.

Social Darwinism certainly is a thing and has been for a long time. A quick google about it brought up this article worrying that it’s a growing fad again: http://faculty.etsu.edu/odonnell/2011fall/engl3130/student_w...

Even just Survivor Bias in business - assertions that being better than the competition got them where they are - is relatively close to believing that having money proves you’re a better person. Certainly there’s no lack in the US of fascination with rich people nor of listening to our richest citizens. (How many famous rich people can you name? How many famous poor people?)

>In my experience people here are Christian

You need new experiences. Only ~70% of the US claims christianity (https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/) -- and that is "claims" because we all know there are people who do not practice what they preach.

If you have more than 10 friends and don't know a single non-christian, your anecdotal experience most certainly does not reflect the data.

Additionally, growing up in the bible belt, in my experience, the person you responded to is correct. "God will bless you" is a common refrain when talking about working hard, tithing, saving ones self for marriage, etc. And what is God's blessing in the arena of economics (hard work) except monetary reward? The prosperity gospel of mega churches is so popular for a reason, as disgusting as those of us on the outside may find it.

anecdotal experience needn't ever reflect data, since humans can cluster into similar groups.

Did you and I grow up in the same country? The entire puritan work effort is based on this premise in some way or another.

The more religious you are the more you appear to believe your wealth is a god-given right and that everyone else is a lazy no-gooder trying to steal the fruits of your hard work.

Puritanism typically holds that work is required, both historically and with the remnants we might see in more conservative protestants. Love of wealth - and particularly displays of wealth - would be failures of modesty and humility which are core values. Simply having wealth, especially wealth not shown but used for charity, would be considered a result of hard work.

The puritans didn't wear drab clothes because they lacked decent dyes, they wore them as an element of modesty.

Alms to the poor was not considered a bad thing, it was religiously required, especially when used to evangelize.

[1] - https://www.apuritansmind.com/stewardship/rykenlelandpuritan...

Prosperity Theology, also known as Prosperity Gospel.

Some of them say that the "eye of the needle" is actually a narrow gateway in Jerusalem - a physical gateway - which is a bit tight, but you can get a camel through it, so that's what Jesus was actually talking about, so actually it is fine to be rich; you might just have to unpack your camel a bit and carry your riches through.

"The prosperity gospel (also known as the “health and wealth gospel” or by its most popular brand, the “Word of Faith” movement) is a perversion of the gospel of Jesus that claims that God rewards increases in faith with increases in health and/or wealth." - https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/what-you-should-k...

And so on.

The myth of rugged individualism is embedded in Western society. Be thankful you live in a position of such privilege to be unaware. I highly recommend you find paths for empathy in your own life. If you're young, the hubris is unavoidable and disregard this comment.

There are many places you can start your research, but maybe looking into how we leverage shame and stigma is a good start: https://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/noncommunicable-di...

Have you started your research? Because you seem to pin ignorance on OP due to various failings (youth, privilege, lack of empathy) while assuming your own position is ultimately correct.

I would assume you (and anyone else) are better placed to describe your own virtues (to support your correctness), than some strangers vices (to support their incorrectness).

It's a somewhat clumsy restatement of the just world hypothesis, which seems like it's built into much of the discourse and attitudes of American society and has almost always been dominant.

You're asking for measurements to something not measurable.

I can't relate to you my experiences or the experiences of others I've known or just observed (I'm a keen observer) without just giving you anecdotes.

I could counter and ask you to measurably prove that people are not looked down upon for coming from a lower station, but I think we'd have some trouble with that as well. (Christians* are some of the worst for it—coming from one who grew up "in the church")

* Thought I should asterisk that so we don't go down a discussion about what makes a "true" christian. It's a broad scope and label of convenience. It's not meant to slander anyone practicing their religion. It's most certainly not isolated to Christians. Most of the encounters I've had are with people who tend to believe themselves somehow more... esoterically enlightened. It doesn't even make them bad people—just filled with hubris.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination_in_Calvinism

Reformed Christians believe that God predestined some people to be saved and others were predestined to eternal damnation

Regardless of what the bible says, American Christians do not believe "...it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

You might ask yourself what America would look like if american Christians believed this line. A billionaire like Donald Trump would be unelectable. The inheritance tax would be 90%. The social safety net would be larger than secular Europe. Health care would be free as a universal right.

The concept of a "wealth of the soul" is not related to the metaphysical concept of a "soul." It refers to the idea that you're born deserving the position you are given.

> I've never met anyone who thinks wealth reflects "wealth of the soul."

I've never met one either, but I've definitely met plenty of people who think the opposite: if you had any advantages of any kind over anybody else, your accomplishments don't "count". The only people who can actually be proud of what they've achieved and deserve what they have are people who were thrown away in a dumpster at birth, grew up in a run-down, inner-city, rat-infested orphanage being beaten every day but still managed to graduate with a perfect GPA even though they had to walk five miles each way to school in the snow with no shoes.

You're misinterpreting the discussion, I think. I can't tell if it's intentional or not.

Nobody was coming down on anyone for their accomplishments.

My intended contribution was that some (or in my experience, many) people in already achieved positions, regardless of how they arrived in their materially advanced station, might mistake the circumstances of another who is less materially fortunate as being so because it's a product of the less fortunate person's intrinsic inner worth.

And when someone, who is trying to breach those meritocratic strata for financial or other material rewards, encounters that kind of mindset in their superiors it can be terribly inhibiting—like trying to climb a hill of ice that refuses to believe it's slippery of its own accord and that the continual flailing of the climber is a failing of the climber alone. Or sometimes that would-be climber prefers to stick around the plains and enjoy the views. Neither of those situations makes the would-be climber a less-capable, less whole person—even if the would-be climber cannot see the icy hill for what it is.

("Why not pick a better hill" is about as controllable as "why not be born into a more materially advanced family")

Maybe those born into positions of wealth believe the former, and those not believe in the latter - Hence each believing whatever benefits their ego.

Maybe not hearing of the former opinion is due to its unpopularity - there are more people not born into wealth after all; This means you are less likely to meet a wealthy person (or be a wealthy person if this increases likelihood of meeting one), and if you did, they would be less likely to tell you of their perspective.

There's a good book called Moral Politics which covers this topic in depth.

Your last sentence confuses me. If someone believes in the great meritocracy then they must agree that wealthier people are better people, then it seems obvious that most people in the world feel this way, whether they admit it or not, and even whether they realize it themselves or not. The princess marrying the pauper is a nice fairy tale but how often does it actually happen in reality?

Fair point—that line was a bit tongue-in-cheek.

But I'm comfortable living with contradictions, so I do believe there is a meritocracy, but I don't believe it's total.

Only wading in the shallows because I actually have some work to get to today, but to clarify by example:

I'm sure most North Americans around this forum grew up hearing lines like "you don't want to end up a janitor". Personally, I've seen episodes like factory supervisors ignore physical health requests because their faithful hourly workers were "probably just trying to get off easy" (no, they ended up losing their job when their back gave out). Obviously they were only a line hand, so they're probably a dirtbag, as the line of reasoning followed in that situation.. and so on.

Definitely not touching the hot mess of "marrying upward" or other potential confidence games.

It doesn't make sense because there are jobs that only require one person but the impact scales with the environment.

For example, there only needs to be one president at any given time. The president didn't contribute the entire population to the country but he is compensated with power as if he did.

The idea that the person is the only deciding factor into the impact they have is absurd. Send a software developer back into medieval times and his programming skills will be worthless.

It’s not just education, but a specific type of education. The final path to a good career is pretty winding and complicated.

As someone who had to figure it out on their own, and is now a bit older, I can say I knew basically nothing when I started choosing my career path.

I used to think that the best route was the trade schools, because you can make a lot of money fast. But then I saw a lot of my friend’s salaries peak at ~$70000, and every year their jobs got harder and harder as they got older.

Then I used to think the most successful would be my friends in the hard sciences, like physics or chemistry, because they usually were extremely intelligent. But then after their PHDs, many just seemed lost and didn’t really know what kind of jobs to go to.

Of my cohort, it seems like the only successful people were:

1. The biology people who became doctors 2. The liberal arts people who became lawyers 3. Certain engineers (not civil) 4. Techies

That’s it. The 4 good career paths available to most of my high school/college cohort.

Everything else didn’t seem to matter. The business majors, and psych majors, and sociology majors who didn’t have parents to give them cushy jobs got stuck in entry-level hell.

This is pretty much what I came to say. Both of my parents came from very poor families, but they both valued education very highly. My brother and I may as well been born into a wealthy family since we both got every educational resource we needed, but up until I was 10 years old my parents had to make huge sacrifices to achieve that.

In these poor communities I'm seeing a tendency to stigmatize education... that's the biggest problem. The educational resources available to anyone today obliterates what we had in the 80's. You don't need to be an elite to have access to the critical material, you just need the desire to pursue it.

> You don't need to be an elite to have access to the critical material, you just need the desire to pursue it.

For most children and teenagers, this desire is at least partly a function of one’s peers. Hence the premium placed on houses in certain school districts or neighborhoods.

That's pretty much the point I was making. The whole community has to buy into the value of education. If you are getting harassed by your peers because you are reading a book for enjoyment, you are likely going to stop.

My intention was to point out that “you just need the desire to pursue it” is often not just a “you” problem, unfortunately, since people are heavily influenced by their environment.

> The educational resources available to anyone today obliterates what we had in the 80's.

Do you mean the materials available online? There's definitely lots of great material online, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence that schools and universities have gotten any better (despite becoming much more expensive).

I'm referring to things like "Nicole the Math Lady", "Kahn Academy" and other supplemental education resources. Even Wikipedia can get you on the right track with any topic. Since I homeschool my son I don't know if the schools have gotten better.

I took an accelerated Calculus class one summer. My parents spent hundreds of dollars on a VHS calculus set to supplement the class because it was moving too fast for me. That was the difference maker in me passing. Today, getting that info is trivial and available to everyone.

I was wondering if the effect of valuing education is subject to survivorship bias. Take China for example, on average 50% of the grade-9 students have to enter vocational training schools instead of high schools (grade-10 to grade 12). The odds of getting into the top 33 universities in China is less than 2%, and the odds of getting into the next best 100 universities is less than 4%. I'm sure more than 6% of parents value education to the extreme, yet large number of students may not get what they desire no matter how hard they try.

China might be a different sort of beast, though, given the sheer number of people and because of the level of control the government has on their citizens. I looked into how many Chinese students there are in America, and it (was) about 370,000 students in 2018, but surely that number has decreased because of COVID restrictions.

Keep in mind that valuing education does not mean having a college education, it means that you value education and are more likely to keep learning throughout your life.

First off so, your parents are part of the starting conditions obviously. But I think I read that from twin studies there are indications that parents does not help all that much.

In the U.S. just focusing on education can be bad, if you pick the wrong one you just get a giant student loan and not much else.

Finally, even though starting conditions and luck are extremely important, you can’t do much about them. So hard and smart work is still the best option to improve. Going back and giving itself better starting conditions is not an option.

I'll never forget something a grade school friend's parent told us once when I visited their tiny communist provided apartment. Total blue collar worker barely making ends meet. "The times are fucked up, boys, you need to study hard"

That for me pretty much sums up that mentality. I don't know where it comes from - maybe the delta from no education to education, no matter how basic, is enormous, whereas things like public school vs private school, or public school in town X vs. town Y don't have the same lift.

The wealthy are only wealthy in comparison to everyone else.

So if everyone else gets less poor say from free school lunches or free college, then it makes the wealthy relatively less rich even if their bank balance remains the same number.

It also means that the general population is harder to exploit.

So there are multiple motivations why some would like to perpetuate this myth and not fund social programs.

I think a big part of me starting PhD at 30 is that I wanted to get off my parent’s back as soon as possible. So I got my bachelor’s at 21 and started working. I enrolled in Master’s at 28, only when I could pay for it myself.

Other factors include the quality of my BS degree. I wish I was surrounded by professors who liked what they doing.

s/education/financial success - parents who support and motivate their kids in arts, sports and entertainment vs parents who support their kids in fields that don't pay well or which the child has little interest or skill.

> One other thing which helps, significantly, is how much the parents value education.

This is not a necessary condition, nor a sufficient one. There are plenty of examples where highly educated individuals didn't managed to become financially independent in spite of their education, which goes way beyond the old "literature/philosophy major" trope.

I'm saying that it's a contributing factor, not a steadfast rule.

How much social mobility we talking?

Statistically nobody goes from trailer park to billionare by working hard.

You have very, very, good odds of doing better than your parents if you manage to get to age 25 without incurring a felony record, addiction to something that will likely kill you or too many child support payments.

edit: I'm only talking about the US

I don't really know the stats, but I'm curious if this is true. Yes, GDP has been going up for a long time in many countries, and so the "average wealth" of each generation is going up.

However, is the same true for purchasing power?

Sometimes you hear about these mythical stories of janitors who could afford to actually buy a house, despite having two children and their partners being stay-at-home moms.

And yet today, I hear so many stories about 30 year olds with masters degrees who are still living with their parents because they can't afford to rent a studio.

Like I said, and I can't find good stats on this online. If you have any stats on which you based your comment, I'd love to see them!

The Wall Street Journal has a great infographic here comparing how many hours of worth it would take to pay median rent today versus in 1968: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-much-does-the-federal-minim...

Spoiler: it’s not pretty.

I just looked at graphics, but that's comparing minimum wage against various goods, isn't it? So it would be interesting to see the comparison between median wage and rent, etc. From the data, however, it looks like income inequality expanded quite a bit.

The second infographic compares rent.

But that's still comparing minimum wage rather than median wage, like the parent poster was talking about.

https://archive.is/vMKTY

worthless graph because it compares minimum wage to the price of goods, not median wage. The minimum wage today is $7.25 but essentially no one makes that. Target, Chipotle, Amazon, and other start out at $15, others aren't far behind.

You're wrong. Sorry, you don't get to handwave away the many places that are paying $9 an hour and were paying $7.25 last year. Some are still trying to around here.

You can look at the BLS stats. Less than 0.2% of the workforce is making minimum wage.

A better comparison would be the price per square foot. The median rent today buys a MUCH larger (and nicer) house than it did in 1968. The average house in the US has increased by 1,000 square feet in the last 50 years. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-s...

It's a comparison, but I wouldn't say a better one. You can't just rent a fraction of a property without sharing it with someone else, so the comparison is "What does it cost to get a place of your own in 1968 vs today?" and the answer is you either rent today's bigger but more expensive property, or don't - even if you could afford a 1968 property today.

As Adam Smith observed, when people get more income it almost always goes to better places to live. Better can be more space, better location, or more luxury in the space.

You can still find apartments built in the 1950s that are functional (places where the maintenance was done so they are essentially just as good as 70 years ago) and the rent is cheap. Most people want better.

The more interesting information on that page to me is that the living space per capita has increased. I was suspect that while square footage may be increasing, that could easily be offset by the number of people living in those houses but that doesn't seem to be the case.

The key information missing here though is a more generalized cost of living space per person, beyond housing. This data can still be biased, in general, because it may be the case that fewer people own homes, say more successful wealthy people, while the majority are renting these properties. I have a bucket of anecdotal examples of friends who still don't own homes in their 30s and are still renting.

This data would exclude all of those people painting a picture that people are doing well while some unknown population is renting, paying more per square foot than owning, and rates could be increasing per person per square foot over time. That population could be smaller or larger than those who own homes. I'd be interested to see those distributions of renting/owning and a similar cost comparison for renter square foot costs per capita.

Most renters are not renting "New US homes" and rent does not buy a house. It's a pretty poor comparison.

If a young millennial cannot afford a small apartment, it's a poor consolation that house sizes have grown.

>> And yet today, I hear so many stories about 30 year olds with masters degrees who are still living with their parents because they can't afford to rent a studio.

Part of the problem here is a different problem -- the concentration of jobs in super high cost metro areas, and often also, the NIMBYism that prevents such high cost metro areas from building more housing to address demand.

There are so many affordable studios to rent. And so many jobs, and sadly they aren't co-located...

> Yes, GDP has been going up for a long time in many countries, and so the "average wealth" of each generation is going up.

GDP does not correlate to "average wealth" and is itself a dubious measure for economic progress depending on what figures you pick to calculate it.

Also, no matter what metric you use, the "average wealth" of the younger generations, particularly millennials, is not in fact higher than their predecessors. The level of their productivity is a historical high point, but this is infamously contrasted by stagnating wages, assets, and by some metrics even overall quality of life.

>Also, no matter what metric you use, the "average wealth" of the younger generations, particularly millennials, is not in fact higher than their predecessors.

That's only if you look at developed nations. The average wealth in Asia has exploded. The market for labor is far more globalized now, so you have to compete with people used to lower standards of living.

>The level of their productivity is a historical high point

Who's deserves credit for the productivity? Warehouse workers didn't suddenly get twice as good as good as moving inventory by themselves, they did so because Amazon investors invested in automation

A lot of things that are social “musts” today were “wants” 30 years ago. Smart phones, unlimited data, eating out 3-4 times a week, Uber Eats delivery. None of this is necessary in order to survive, but not indulging is seen as odd or socially awkward.

Smartphones replace a lot of things though: * camera (including film & development costs) * camcorder * long-distance phone service * answering machine * portable music player (walkman, iPod, etc.) * GPS navigation devices

Depending on their use they can save a lot of money relative to the the products/services they replace

I'd disagree about "not necessary". Cellphones are a necessity now because payphones have gone the way of the dinosaur, there go 100 dollars for a family plan, internet is a necessity, there go 50 dollars more, and especially the expenses for the second car because no one can make do on one income, especially at the lower end of the income scale.

And childcare expenses, of course. Especially childcare.

But how is that any different than saying in 1918 a car was a want but in 1950 a car was a requirement for many people?

I suspect that the answer to these types of questions is that most people don't want to admit how mind-fucked we all are in to believing the bullshit that we are inundated with from the most powerful classes and how little freedom and financial mobility exists in the USA.

Also living space per person has nearly doubled since the 70s.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-s...

> eating out 3-4 times a week

What percentage of the western population eats out 3-4 times a week? I'd bet it isn't more than 10-20%, depending on the country.

> Uber Eats delivery

Not sure the people who do the delivering can afford having food delivered in turn (at least not 3-4 times a week).

Or even worse, poor. These are honestly very decadent habits and the majority of people can't afford them.

> And yet today, I hear so many stories about 30 year olds with masters degrees who are still living with their parents

Stands to reason. Dedicating five or more years away from the workforce at least partially, if not in full, is an enormous setback financially. As money compounds, your earnings when you are young are dramatically more important to your financial stability than those when you are older. It would be surprising to learn that such a person is on equal footing with a janitor of the same age who started working at the age of 14.

30 year olds with masters degrees who are still living with their parents? There must be additional information because this is just crazy. In 'flyover' country you don't see this. I'm assuming this is California or NY?

I think another component might be the major.

It's a mistake to think all masters degrees are equally 'bankable'

There might also be a skew due to COVID. Many single people moved back in with their parents because why not, no rent to pay and you can WFH anyways. And it’s not like the social life would go anywhere.

In this case I was referencing my own country, the Netherlands. We're heavily urbanized and no location in the country is ever more than 4 hours driving away.

> How much social mobility we talking? ([...] only talking about the US)

My college US history course ~20 years ago very much drove home the fact that (at least at the time) social mobility in the US was the same as in India. The surprise, of course, was that India has a caste system, while the US narrative is freedom; if you work hard, you’ll get ahead.

I don’t remember the sources, but the rate of social mobility (up and down) we learned in class was ~20%, as defined by ending up in a different quintile than one was born in, meaning put people into 5 categories according to socioeconomic status, and see whether they ever change categories, for example going from middle class to upper middle class.

Wikipedia says that overall average social mobility in the US hasn’t changed since then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...

Narrative is important because the language it provides frames a way of life for many who haven't framed their own perspective based on the information they have and haven't seen. It's easy to pickup a narrative, it's far more difficult to dig through and generate your own perspective. It's even more critical because childhood education relies on providing narrative frameworks because children often don't have enough information of processes yet to think critically.

The reason I say this is as you point out, in the US we frame everything as being highly mobile. The illusory framing of our society in "the American dream" in K-12 education and freedoms dangles this carrot of possibility of high social mobility to children. It's not completely invalid, it is possible to make massive transitions in socioeconomic brakets, but it's just a framing of the rare exceptions, not the norms.

Most of us are going to be the norms, so these narratives are a disservice to people about what their real socioeconomic mobility potential and probability is. It's fine to dream, aim high, and shoot for the moon as a society-- that promotes growth and avoids stagnation. At the same time, we should be very clear what is and isn't a moonshot that way many aren't so resentful when they later discover what they thought was reasonable was actually incredibly difficult bordering on impossible. What's possible and what's probable need to be distinguished and the American dream framing doesn't talk to probability.

There's this whole lie painted to children that the US is somehow a meritocracy when it's not. Merit can help, but it isn't everything and we need people to understand this.

I've seen those reports myself. However they don't note anything about the entire class changing. Today even the lowest cast things nothing about having an entire encyclopedia in their pocket (a smart phone), 40 years ago encyclopedias were something you needed to be middle class to have one in your house, and nobody could have them in a pocket (meaning you both could afford one, and the space to store it at home)

Going back farther, 120 years ago cars were the play thing of the super rich. Now the poor have much nicer cars (including options like electric start, not to mention the unheard of AC), that are fast and never break (by todays standard they break down all the time).

I can't help but read this as a kind of "let them eat cake" argument. Sure, some cars have electric starters now... how does that matter? Plenty of poor, working class people do not own cars. They're getting priced out of the cities they've lived in their whole lives. Working class wages have been stagnant for decades. Healthcare and education costs have risen much faster than inflation. A huge percentage of Americans are one medical emergency away from bankruptcy.

But yes, they do have access to cell phones and refrigerators, so good for them.

Look at the kinds of projects apartments and leaky rural shacks the poor of the 50s-70s lived in. You might have to combine five to get what we today consider one working set of appliances and utilities.

Section 8 apartments and double wides are such a massive step up from that. There will always be a bottom of the economic latter. But that bottom has moved up a lot over the past couple generations.

Mobility is a somewhat separate topic from what standard of living constitutes the bottom.

I'm not denying that. Of course average standards are better now than they were in the 1950's. But that argument is frequently used as a distraction to avoid talking about very achievable ways that we in America could improve living standards even further, or about very real ways in which lower class people are still suffering even though they might have an Xbox at home. All of the problems I mentioned in my above comment are still valid even though a section 8 apartment is better than a tin shed, yet you didn't address any of them. "There will always be a bottom of the economic ladder" is not an excuse for the wealthiest nation on earth to still allow people to be financially ruined for visiting the ER, for example.

Also, the myth of mobility is not an entirely separate topic, in that it's another distraction frequently employed to place problems on the individual and avoid talking about systemic changes that could take place to benefit people on a broader scale.

Their standard of living is going up.

And yet, if they or a family member have to visit the emergency room, they will likely be financially ruined.

I recently visited the ER for some chest pain which amounted to nothing and was charged $4,000 for it. Imagine what that would do to the 60% (!!) of Americans who can't come up with $500 for an emergency (see my top comment about stagnant wages, rising rent, and astronomical health care costs).

Comments like yours are easily and frequently used to distract from very real systemic problems that working class people still face. Access to cheaper smartphones doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, but food and housing security and the ability to get medical treatment without fear of going bankrupt sure do.

I'm not so sure about this. Ask a random lower or middle class American if their quality of life has gone up in the last 20 years, I'm willing to bet most will say no. The world is far more competitive, has undergone a large amount of cultural decay and fragmentation, and certain important things like housing, education, and healthcare have gotten far more expensive.

High rent is a reflection of that. The problems start when the standard of living grows faster than your income.

Edit: High rent grants you access to higher paying jobs but not everyone actually gets those.

It's interesting how political ideology and religion has so much in common when it concerns social mobility.

There are many different religions in the world, but I don't think it is a coincidence that the major religions tends to be very convenient for the top 1%.

They often teach that your life situation is a result of your actions (either in this life or the previous life), and if you follow all the rules you will be rewarded in this life or the next. There's a natural order to things, and it is all part of $deity's plan

Maybe people are waking up and realising that there are more to life?

Edit: This is not a rant against religion as a personal choice. I don't care about what you believe, so long as you do not use your religion as a tool to control politics.

> My college US history course ~20 years ago very much drove home the fact that (at least at the time) social mobility in the US was the same as in India.

This is flatly false, and to be honest it's a little embarrassing that you would parrot it without Googling it (which you were happy to do to pull up a tangential stat that didn't contradict the dishonest narrative you're pushing). The US is ranked 27th out of the 82 countries the World Economic Forum studied in 2020, and India is ranked _76th_.[1]

On top of that, note that Denmark is ranked #1 for social mobility in the WEF study. The relevant topic to this thread is pre-transfer social mobility (ie before taxes/welfare), where the US and Denmark look almost identical![2]

That doesn't suggest that Denmark's policies are useless: transfers are an effective poverty-fighting tool, and I have no doubt that the economic floor in Denmark is a much more comfortable one. I'm all for a stronger welfare state due to the human costs of poverty.

But this is all irrelevant to the topic at hand, and the false claim all over this thread that the US is uniquely bad at providing opportunity and mobility to those without it. We're better than the majority of the developed world at this, partially due to the productivity incentives created by how much more precarious poverty here is compared to OECD countries with the strongest safety nets. I should be clear: I don't think we're at an optimal point on the spectrum, and I think sacrificing some economic dynamism to palliate the human costs of poverty is worthwhile. But the claim that we're uniquely socially immobile by global or even OECD standards is a flat lie, propagated by people too simple-minded to understand the concept of a trade-off.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index...

[2] When looking exclusively at wages (before taxes and transfers), Danish and American social mobility are very similar. It is only after taxes and transfers are taken into account that Danish social mobility improves, indicating that Danish economic redistribution policies are the key drivers of greater mobility. Additionally, Denmark's greater investment in public education did not improve educational mobility significantly, meaning children of non-college educated parents are still unlikely to receive college education, although this public investment did result in improved cognitive skills amongst poor Danish children compared to their American peers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model

I’m going to ignore your insults and escalatory language and just point out the fact that the WEF’s definition of social mobility is vastly different than the one I mentioned. You’re conflating two completely different metrics. I’m happy to learn new things, have a constructive discussion, and to admit I’m wrong if that’s the case, but not interested in engaging in mud-slinging based on things my college teacher said twenty years ago.

A sibling comment to yours explains succinctly why your comment misunderstands mine: standard of living in the US is higher than India. The WEF’s metric is based on ranking the standard of living of each country against each other. It can be simultaneously true that the US standard of living is higher than India, and also that people born lower class in the US improve their lot at the same rate as people in India.

>social mobility in the US was the same as in India. The surprise, of course, was that India has a caste system, while the US narrative is freedom; if you work hard, you’ll get ahead.

The difference is that the average standard of living ins the US far exceeds India's standard.

Yes you may not make your way to billionaire high class status from the lower class but you certainly can drastically improve your circumstances by working hard. The alternative is not to work hard which definitely isn't going to make your life better.

Additionally, I'd like to know how you think society should be shaped? It seems the other option would be to follow a more socialist or communist route where "equity" is the ultimate utopia... and that typically just brings everyone down to a lower status instead of raising everyone to a higher one.

A milion of immigrants that come to US every year disagree with your "fact".

So do hundreds of millions of Americans, which is why the statistics are surprising. But having hope doesn’t make it happen. This is partly why it’s important to understand the reality of US social mobility.

US immigrants are, statistically speaking, at an even worse disadvantage than the American born lower class. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...

And yet they come and succeed. Their educated children move up to the middle class. The article you linked is an opinion piece of a single economist, who is critical of immigration.

If human ability follows normal distribution, there is a hard physical limit of how many people can move up the ladder each year. It physically impossible for every one to be at the same highest level. The good news is all level are getting higher year by year. The pie is growing for everybody.

That’s what 20% social mobility means: that one in five actually move classes. The majority of immigrants do not change classes, just like the majority of Americans do not change classes. It’s still possible, it’s just not the average outcome.

> The article you linked in an opinion pieces of a single economist, who is critical of immigration.

What article? I linked to a section of Wikipedia, and that section alone has 9 different citations by as many authors.

> The good news is all level are getting higher year by year. The pie is growing for everybody.

Others in this thread have misunderstood my remarks as you have. The metric of moving from one class quintile to another during your lifetime is relative. It does not depend on standard of living at all. The pie can grow, and social mobility (as defined by changing class quintiles) can be stagnant, at the same time.

> You have very, very, good odds of doing better than your parents if you manage to get to age 25 without incurring a felony record, addiction to something that will likely kill you or too many child support payments.

That is a laughably low bar, and it is unlikely for the trend you are describing to continue past the move from poor to lower middle class.

In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society with no class structure. We are so laughably far off from this everywhere in the world...

And note that I completely accept that becoming a billionaire is going to be extraordinarily rare and a product of BOTH extreme luck and good work ethic. Or I would accept that, if not for the fact that being born the child of a billionaire is a guarantee to this future, or as close to a guarantee as one can ask for.

>>In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society with no class structure. We are so laughably far off from this everywhere in the world...

Every time I make this argument on HN I'm met with two responses

1) I worked my ass off when I was young to get to where I am, why should we make this easy for anybody, it will just create a lazy society

2) why should MY money go towards helping anyone else

Both are really hard to argue against no matter how much statistical data you pull out showing that improving equality of opportunity improves the society overall, because both are very emotional arguments. People feel that way and it's hard to change.

PS - the "funniest" response I had to this was someone saying that US has "perfect" equality because literally anyone from any walk of life can become rich or a president. Yeah he acknowledged that some people have it much harder than others, but it doesn't matter because at the end of the day anyone can get rich so everything else is irrelevant.

People completely take for granted all the good luck, good fortune, opportunities, advantages, etc. (whatever you want to call the things that give them an upper hand as they go through life). We start and go through the first few years of life with zero input about where we are, where we go, what we eat, etc. As we get older, our choices don't increase all that much until we get to adulthood. Even when we do have choices, our choices have already been narrowed by someone else. Nearly every piece of information a person consumes was produced by someone else. Nearly everything that happens to a person is a result of something outside of their own mind. If you're doing well for yourself, then you can thank everyone around you because the world is more responsible for your accomplishments than you are. You may have worked incredibly hard, studying, reading, networking, and all that was probably necessary, but it accounts for a very small part of what got you there. If we're assigning percentages, it's in the single digits. For every person like you, there are 20, 30, 100 others who were just as willing and just as able to do the things you did, but maybe they didn't have the right information at the right time, maybe they didn't have the same networking opportunities, maybe they had to take care of their ailing brother, maybe they had more pressing issues.

Hardly anyone who has done well wants to accept this reality. They would have to change their perception not just of the world, but of themselves. They might feel very guilty, and people don't like that feeling.

People forget about bad luck too. Everyone gets the same amount of good luck in life. A few (ie Bill Gates) are at the right place at the right time and can go far, but nobody gets any more lucky breaks that anyone else, though a few breaks can go a lot farther than most of our breaks could.

For most people their luck is about equal to anyone else. which means you can't get a head because everyone else is moving as fast as you. However you are still moving forward.

> Yeah he acknowledged that some people have it much harder than others, but it doesn't matter because at the end of the day anyone can get rich so everything else is irrelevant.

I mean, isn't that applicable everywhere? Even the most totalitarian country really only requires a military coup or revolution and, if you've worked really hard, you too could be King Dictator God Emperor for life.

> In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society with no class structure. We are so laughably far off from this everywhere in the world...

That’s only if you assume there isn’t a generic component to traits that influence (broadly defined) success. But of course that’s not true.

We should expect Bill Gates to be much more intelligent, conscientious, and to have much better impulse control than typical people living in a trailer park. Ditto for many other traits. Therefore it’s much more likely that his children posses these traits compared to children born in trailer parks.

Genetic or learned behavior?

The behaviors that help you successfully move between lower rungs may (spoiler: they do) hinder you at higher rungs.

I'm inclined to agree with this, but could you elaborate on some of these behaviors? The ones that come to my mind are punctuality and subservience. Absolutely critical for a bottom-tier laborer, but nobody is upset if the CEO is late for a meeting.

> We should expect Bill Gates to be much more intelligent, conscientious, and to have much better impulse control than typical people living in a trailer park.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Even if there are genes for success, being successful is not proof of having those genes, and being unsuccessful is not proof of not having them.

Furthermore, if we assume that someone swapped Bill Gates' baby with a baby born in a trailer park, do you truly think that Bill Gates' genetic child will have a much better chance at success than the child Gates raised as his own?

> n a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society with no class structure.

Maybe aspirational, but it's not reasonable to expect this.

More educated parents both earn more money and educate their children more (and not per se due to their higher earnings).

It's hard to compensate for that.

This is absolutely correct. Suspect you started with a Tabula Rasa society where everyone began with the same resources. You would still see differentiation after n generations: wealth and influence can compound over time and groups of people would gain influence, power, and money. And this is the expected outcome of a perfectly meritocratic system.

> wealth and influence can compound over time and groups of people would gain influence, power, and money. And this is the expected outcome of a perfectly meritocratic system.

It is not. In a meritocratic system, children wouldn't inherit resources, access to education would be conditioned purely by merit, and so would access to jobs, finance opportunities etc.

The nepotism rampant (edit: was "inherent") in corporations, government, the finance industry etc. are exactly the things that keep the rich rich and the poor poor.

This is interesting, and I've never heard this definition of egalitarian. It certainly does solve the philosophical problem I've raised. I'm curious (genuinely) if large numbers of people are seriously suggesting such a system. How would it even be implemented? Well-off parents cannot buy their children clothing or food? They cannot give their used car to their children? Etc? That rich parents could not pay extra for the health care needs of their children? I could understand (if potentially not really agree with) something more limited, such as a specific inheritance tax. But I don't see how you prevent rich parents from sharing their resources with their children in the broad sense.

> It's hard to compensate for that

A good public education system goes a long way. At the moment in the US, rich kids benefit not just from the education their parents give them directly (which let’s face it is not necessarily that great just because they’re rich - how much has Ivanka benefited from Donald’s insights?) but also from the expensive schools that their parents can afford to send them too. Educational apartheid by wealth isn’t a necessary feature of a society. It can largely be legislated away given the social and political will to do so.

> Educational apartheid by wealth isn’t a necessary feature of a society.

It is a fundamental feature in class-based societies like USA, the UK and much of the rest of the Anglosphere. Maintaining the class structure and preserving the accrued intergenerational wealth from the upper strata of society means that the kids of those wealthier classes must acquire distinctive social manners and culture which sets them apart from the commoners.

> In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child.

A reasonably fair society shouldn't allow for children to be born and raised in trailer parks in the first place. State policies should be directed towards strengthening the family unit and improving the conditions for the average working class people. Once you have eliminated the precarious forms of existence in society and have established decent cultural norms for working class people by which they value education, upward social mobility will happen much more widely.

> In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child.

I don't agree with this. You are measuring equality of outcomes, not of opportunities. They are different.

No, I said equality of opportunity: both Bill Gates' child and the child born in the trailer park should, at birth, have the same chance to become extremely rich or extremely poor. That would mean that they have the same opportunities.

If you believe in a strong genetic component, than you can complicate the formula a bit.

>That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society

That might be what we expect from a perfectly egalitarian society, but expecting any free, democratic society to come even close to perfect egalitarianism is completely delusional.

That is not egalitarianism (which would mean something closer to everyone owning the exact same amounts), it is the standard definition of "equality of opportunity".

Where do you place the cutoff for opportunity? Are things like innate ability, motivation, interest in lucrative pursuits for their own merits, luck of the draw not also just another kind of opportunity? There is no standard because nobody can agree on a standard. The only thing we can say for certain is that the kind of society you propose will never be attained through free and democratic political processes. Make of that what you will.

There is no standard definition of "equality of opportunity"; and many definitions that are regularly-used focus primarily on an absence of unreasonable discrimination in application processes rather than fairness in the Rawlsian sense.

Besides we could only expect it in a society of clones. Genes matter.

How about high income through athletics or modeling? Should any two children be equally likely to make it professionally?

Sure, genes and other accidents of birth make the model more complex. But still, in our current society, if you were to take two identical twins and separated them from birth and made various income families raise them, and repeat this experiment 100s of times, you would still see remarkably little mobility.

Statistically next to nobody goes from anywhere to billionaire.

There are 2,755 billionaires in the world and 7.6 billion individuals, thats around 2.7 million to one. Not great odds for anyone to be frank.

Also is it any wonder people believe that they can't get anywhere when they are constantly told, they can't get anywhere. Seems a little self fullfilling to be frank.

The odds are pretty good if your parents are billionaires - a not particularly rigorous search suggests that some 1,186 of those inherited their wealth or 'self made' an empire already worth hundreds of millions into a billion.

It's disingenuous to suggest that a minimum wage worker with no safety net isn't getting anywhere because they're not trying, and to contrast their accomplishments with someone who started with wealthy, powerful parents.

For some, the adage "shoot for the moon - if you miss, you'll land among the stars" is fine. Take some risks, start a business, make a bet; the worst that can happen is you have to declare bankruptcy and move into a family member's vacation home. For others, the adage is more like "don't you dare shoot for the moon, if you miss, you and your family will be hungry and cold in a homeless shelter".

My understanding is that social mobility implies being able to climb the ladder from destitute to poor, poor to modestly wealthy, etc. and not referring to jumping to the 1% from destitution.

People like stories of extremely poor ending up rich and it doesn't help that the rich like to abuse these kinds of stories to better their optics.

What looks better on a millionaire:

* The poor guy that invested every cent he had and kept slaving away for years every day at the brink of certain failure.

* The rich kid that got several hundred thousand from his parents for his first company and knew exactly that failure just meant asking his parents for another go or having to switch to a management position that has probably been waiting for him since he was five?

Of course the first one looks better, you can also bet that any millionaire telling it is a habitual liar that paid a good sum to have some PR guy find ways to navigate around his actual rich kid background without looking too obvious about it.

Except, some of us really did grow up in trailer parks and make it. Mostly through hard work. Luck too, but it isn't a completely false narrative. I am sure there are a lot of biases at play and that is not the statistically average way someone becomes a millionaire, yet it does actually happen.

Some people win the lottery too, it doesn't mean it's actionable advice or good policy. It also happens to be statistically easier if you can afford more tickets.

Exactly.

And everyone seems to think that the fact that all the billionaires came from a situation of decent familial wealth enabling them to make big bets refutes the fact that most people who don't screw up too bad end their career much better than they started and that most people's kids manage to start a rung up or so. Plumber sends his kids to community college and all that.

> Plumber sends his kids to community college and all that.

This is precisely the wrong model, one which accepts that there is no guarantee of equal opportunity. You're describing a promise almost as unworkable as the promise of heaven: if you're born poor, and you do everything well in life, your grandchildren's grandchildren will have a chance to enjoy the good life!

That is not what a democratic free society should mean.

That's exactly the point. For example, my parents sacrificed a lot of give me and my brother the opportunity to get a good education, and now when they want to retire, they are unable to do it safely, as they could not accrue the wealth required to retire. They literally lived just to improve my chances of having a good life, which I might not have even succeeded on that.

Is this fair to them? Definitely not.

It's traditionally three generations, not six. And it's just human nature to look at things in a relative sense. If you are living a lot better than when you grew up, you are very likely to be comfortable and stop there. Similarly your parents might just be happy to see you reach that next rung, rather than pushing for more.

Immigrants doing it in one generation, working blue collar jobs while sending their kids to the ivy league or med school, prove it's not based on real barriers either way.

Why does the millionaire's kid deserve a better shot at success than the plumber's kid?

He doesn't. Nobody deserves anything.

If the plumber's kid not successful if he goes to school, gets a white collar job and generally lives better than his parents?

Ok, sure, but that isn't the same thing as meritocracy is it? It is hard to justify to the population at large that billionaires earned their wealth and deserve to keep it when they could only get to that position by being born out of the right womb. That's just a different kind of aristocracy.

Is this the reality at least in Europe? Especially with regards to people not leaving parents' houses, marrying much later, having less kids, and generally having less disposable income.

There always was some upward social mobility and that is usually called IIRC a safety valve. Very bright and fortunate can come from rags to riches, but honestly there are very very few. But from what I remember from my sociology book, the large majority of people stay the same or, go to +1 or -1 social class level (if there are about 7) compared to their parents.

I think this is the essential question.

My hypothesis is that working hard can move you a few deciles on the income ladder (and position your children to start from higher up the ladder than yourself).

I also think though that people misestimate the slope of the income curve at various points, and that it becomes exponentially harder to get up the curve in the top quartile (I.e. going from a ~$30k (~25th percentile) to ~$60k (~50th percentile) to ~$120k (~75th percentile) to ~$500k (~99th percentile))

Lastly, I generally don’t see people that are not hard workers advancing (perhaps they might not advance as much as they should or would like) but I definitely see them make marginal progress vs people who haven’t worked as hard

I guess the implication is that only a small minority of poor people are trying hard enough to avoid these scenarios, but if the reality reflects that most don't, what is the role of willpower or 'managing' here?

Learned helplessness is the bigger factor. You get beat down so many times that it seems pointless to think further ahead than the next paycheck.

That may once have been true, but it's certainly not true today. Kids born in the 2000s can expect to earn less than their parents, as income has been pushed up to the ultra-wealthy.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/social-mobility-upwar...

Sure, maybe if your parents are affected by one of those factors.

I think this fits parents expectations as well. If you raise your children well, they will have a better life than you did. If you don't, your child is hitting the reset button on their branch of the family tree

If you raise your children well, it loads the dice for them having a better life than you did, but doesn’t guarantee it.

In 2019, immigrant entrepreneurs made up 21.7 percent of all business owners in the United States, despite making up just over 13.6 percent of the population and 17.1 percent of the U.S. labor force. As an immigrant I can assure you that my starting position was not that great. It is super sad to see the west being turned into an epicurean type world.

That statistic, by itself, is meaningless. Immigrants have almost double the poverty rate of US natives too.

The point of the parent is not to say "you can't do anything to improve" but that, in general, starting conditions are the major factor deciding how much you can improve. Someone born in a poor family with hard access to education will need to work much more than others born in rich families to reach the same point. Maybe instead of saying "just work hard" to everyone we should also focus on those inequalities so people have the same opportunities to work hard and improve themselves.

>That statistic, by itself, is meaningless. Immigrants have almost double the poverty rate of US natives too.

Most immigrants come to America desiring to improve their circumstances from what they dealt with in their home countries. This means they're coming in at a much lower standard than people who've been in the US their whole life. This would explain why they have a higher rate of poverty. It has nothing to do with America being uniquely bad at helping immigrants improve their lives. You don't immediately achieve a higher standard of living just by showing up somewhere. It takes time and work. In a few generations they will improve their circumstances. This is what has happened with every large immigrant population that has entered America (Italians, Jews, Irish, etc.)

Exactly what are immigrants not allowed that citizens born in the US are? I'm having a hard time understanding what opportunities they would need.

At some point in the past every one of those rich families had an individual who did something to achieve more than the average person. So, if you don't like it then it would seem that you're suggesting we just allow immigrants (or low class) people to skip that by giving them things? Now, that would mean that everyone gets raised up to a similar level again and we're back in the same position where all the average people feel they're not being treated fairly because they don't have what upper class people have. Eventually you end up in a scenario where the only way to even it out is to bring down the people that are outliers and have mad their way into the upper echelon of society.

It's because immigrants proactively make their lives better while average Americans reactively complain about why their lives aren't perfect

For people who immigrate to the US from a reasonable or well off quality of life, they are often less risk averse in the US than your average US citizen from my sampling.

Many take risks to start businesses, make big purchases, pursue a novel career and so on. These are often fairly large financial risks, many with bankruptcy as an option, and I often ask what their backup plan is should their risky endeavor fail. I often hear some quick poorly thought out plan and after a few more questions, the real backup plan emerges: or I'll just go back home.

If you're not fleeing dire conditions, many immigrants come to the US to gamble for an opportunity to great success. If they succeed, they stay, if they fail, they go home. I had several immigrant friends that did just this. The vast majority now live back in their home countries and based on their social media, they seem to be doing quite well there. The few who have stayed are doing markedly better than they did in their home countries, jumping several socioeconomic brakets.

Or it’s because a fraction of immigrants does do with means and for the express purpose of this, essentially self-selecting for the task?

Immigrants also make up a disproportionate portion of poverty population.

Yeah, it's real simple, there is no stuff unless you make stuff.

Agreed, some of these posts are appalling. Hard work may not pay off but not working hard is guaranteed not to pay off.

Not working hard but replacing that work with something else rewarding can be its own payment. Being a ski or surf bum can be amazing and open up opportunities through networking.

If you get into a job at the right level due to educational or social advantage, you can get by working a lot less hard doing the same thing than someone who comes in as an intermediately-skilled contractor.

Working smart, taking risks (eg selling something illegal), and grifting are well-trodden paths that pay off despite reduced day to day effort.

> epicurean type world

I am curious what exactly do you mean by this? Adopting philosophy of Epicurus, in my view, can be very beneficial to a person.

It's a steady decline from 100% to just 21.7% over hundreds of years.

How do they get the capital to start a business? Do they come to the US already wealthy or well-connected? Many people I know would be interested in doing the same but aren't sure how.

Yup. There is no doubt individual effort matters. But the extent to which it matters is sharply constrained by systemic factors. And escape from those factors is often about luck, not effort.

I'll use myself as an example. Going by parents, I do way better than one would expect. But I was lucky to be born into a time where my neuroatypicality was suddenly useful in an industry big enough that it created social upheaval and space for some to rise. Lucky indeed; 50 years earlier I would have made a mediocre car mechanic, somebody who only worked hard on the rare car problem that was interesting.

And timing aside, two other lucky items pointed me at tech. One was getting an early computer (TRS-80 CoCo) as a gift from a well-off friend of my mom's. The other was my dad being a software developer himself. Which only happened because in the mid 1960s his dad was an exec at an insurance company that had just rented one of these newfangled minicomputers but didn't know what to do with it. My dad didn't have any training, but he was a) smart and b) a bad student in college, so my grandfather used his connections to try him out on computing. Something that was only possible because they were white; Milwaukee had no black insurance executives in 1965.

Have I worked hard at points? Sure. Have I worked half as hard as a restaurant prep cook or a single mom who cleans offices at night? Nope. Indeed, the hardest times I worked were at the shittiest, lowest-paying jobs. Working the grill at McDonald's. Running an injection molding press to make mirror rims for cars I couldn't possibly afford. Since getting into tech my life has been comparatively cushy, and getting cushier. Way better than what my middle-school automated career counseling service suggested I was destined for: bowling pin machine mechanic.

>Starting conditions (where one was born, levels of wealth and opportunity there, one's parents' education and jobs) are shockingly predictive about an individual's future.

Starting conditions are a factor, but a terrible predictor. If you look at income by the quintile you are born into, it is closer to random than 1:1 predictive.

It is most true for the poor, where those born into the bottom 20% have about 45% chance of ending up in the same quintile. This means most people born into the bottom 20% improve their economic status, and most people currently in the bottom 20% started above it. On the opposite end, a majority of people born into the top 20% end up in a lower quintile. [1, table 2]

https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/70266/...

> Starting conditions are a factor, but a terrible predictor. If you look at income by the quintile you are born into, it is closer to random than 1:1 predictive.

Closer to random would mean a 20% chance of ending on any quintile from any quintile. From your report (which has data from 1991, quite few things changed since then), the probability of being at the top 20% is 3% if you are in the poorest quintile, 40% if in the richest. That's not "closer to random" and definitely not a terrible predictor, given that's just a single factor in social studies.

Not to mention that the quintile method is just an approximation. You don't know if the 24.5% of people in the bottom quintile who get to the next one moved from being 0% to 39% or from 19% to 21%.

> This means most people born into the bottom 20% improve their economic status, and most people currently in the bottom 20% started above it

Well, that's a minimum. If starting conditions weren't a factor you'd have 80% improving their status, not 55%. You can rephrase the statistic in another way, such as saying that 13% of the people at the lowest quintile should be in the highest income bracket, but they're not there because they started poor. Or that 22% of the people in the highest quintile are there not because they worked hard enough, but because they just started there.

Random would mean 20% of ending in the same quintile, perfect predictor would mean 100%, so 40% is much closer to random.

>you can rephrase the statistic in another way, such as saying that 13% of the people at the lowest quintile should be in the highest income bracket, but they're not there because they started poor.

You say "should" but it seems like this is only true if you expect (and want) completely random results.

> Random would mean 20% of ending in the same quintile, perfect predictor would mean 100%, so 40% is much closer to random.

Something that doubles or reduces by 10x the random probability is not "closer to random". I doubt that if you tell something that a factor is "closer to random than to a perfect predictor" they'd expect something like that.

> You say "should" but it seems like this is only true if you expect (and want) completely random results.

There is quite a lot of randomness involved in where one ends up. There is a random distribution of ability, of work industry, location, country, luck, connections, timings... quite a lot of factors so that you'd expect that randomness to dominate over the whole population and things be close to ~20%. In fact, countries with higher social mobility tend to be fairly close to that 20%. In Spain (which is by no means the best at social mobility, but it's the only one I have data at hand from) we are pretty far from that 43% chance of staying at the lower quintile, and also far from the 3% of moving from bottom to top: https://widgets.elpais.com/mapbox/2020/07/atlas-renta/pc_nac...

>Something that doubles or reduces by 10x the random probability is not "closer to random". I doubt that if you tell something that a factor is "closer to random than to a perfect predictor" they'd expect something like that.

This shouldn't be a matter of what the layman thinks, it is a question of statistics. If someone said or thought that the class you were born into has a bigger impact on outcomes than other factors, they would be wrong.

Can you check your link, as it has no text.

> Starting conditions (where one was born, levels of wealth and opportunity there, one's parents' education and jobs) are shockingly predictive about an individual's future

Where do you think these "starting conditions" come from?

We've lost interest in the long game. The system looks much fairer if you think about your family rather than yourself. And sure enough, immigrants continue to come to the US looking for economic opportunities, which often take the form of small businesses, and then their kids become doctors and lawyers.

The immigrants who come to the US are, by and large, already relatively wealthy. Especially if they come here with the capital to start a small business, or to send their children to medical school.

Can you provide stats to back this up? Many come here as refugees or cross the border illegally from very poor countries.

Are those the immigrants whose kids have a good chance of becoming doctors and lawyers?

> > immigrants continue to come to the US looking for economic opportunities, which often take the form of small businesses, and then their kids become doctors and lawyers

> Especially if they come here with the capital to start a small business, or to send their children to medical school.

I'm not sure what part of my comment or its parent made you think anyone was talking about refugees or illegal immigrants.

> Hard work leading to social mobility has always been the exception, not the rule. Most will not beat the odds since if they did, those wouldn't BE the odds

These claims simply don't hold up against scrutiny.

In the US, children born into a family in the bottom quintile of household income have a 58% chance to step up into a higher income bracket as adults, a ~30% chance to realize an above average income as an adult, and a 6% to reach the top quintile.

Being born into poor circumstances makes things undeniably harder, but the claim that working hard won't lead to a better life is patently false (and imo extremely pernicious).

Source: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_econ...

Reading through these comments, I see an onslaught of unverifiable claims. I'd really appreciate evidence.

But, be born into US is already 5%. Maybe not top 5%.

I think we need more studies and evidence to create meaningful predictions.

Now, I’m going to remove any moral or emotional thoughts for a moment.

Sure there may be a correlation between wealth and future success, but hasn’t that always been the case - it’s a fact of nature. The most successful genes are able to procreate leading to success. What we did is say “all humans need to have the same vindication’s” and ensure infant mortality was near zero. As a consequence even the least able to produce can (a) survive but importantly (b) reproduce.

If you want maximal improvement to society, reduce the points subsidies. Quickly, only those helping society will procreate.

All of our poor, all of them. Are a creation of our society. Historically, the weak and unfit didn’t survive. Those hardy enough to survive the system procreated and made a stronger society over time. today, we have the weak and unfit leading more weak and unfit. Eventually, this system will collapse.

Appeals to "survival of the fittest" piss me off, because they necessarily give up on the idea of improving society. I don't want to replace my ethics and hopes for the world with a barbaric version of pre-history. As a person who wouldn't be alive without corrective glasses and modern medicine, who also considers himself fairly productive, I'm might be a bit biased.

Besides, if you really want the end result of human nature, you'd just get what we have today. Humans are, overall, compassionate for fellow humans. It's why we tend to the sick. Hell, our compassionate nature is so strong we sympathize with sick or disabled animals.

That's not what it means. Corrective glasses and modern medicine are exactly the kind of improvement that results from universal darwinism, when incentives are correctly aligned. Darwinism also applies to groups of people and ideas, not just individuals and genes.

To play devil's advocate: Rich kids are doing cocaine in Ferraris. It's the poor kids that make stuff happen.

> Starting conditions (where one was born, levels of wealth and opportunity there, one's parents' education and jobs) are shockingly predictive about an individual's future. Hard work leading to social mobility has always been the exception, not the rule.

That could be true for USA where the mobility reached an equilibrium.

There’s a level of wealth that is below ‘lambo for kids’ that still provides a vastly different life experience than ‘occasionally have to hock something to keep the lights on.’

There’s also wealth that manifests itself as parents investing in their kid’s startups and providing social access to other elites.

Also, I was acquainted with a high school kid who had a supercar. He also was subjected to domestic violence, which curbed the majority of envy I had for his situation.

There was an odd period of time between roughly 1820 and 1970 where economic and industrial growth outpaced loans and other passive financial products in both stability of returns and rate of returns. This period minted many wealthy individuals as well as a large middle class as starting position matters less if GDP is growing at 5-10% consistently.

This isn't to say that starting position doesn't matter, I'm sure most of the vanderbuilts are still doing reasonably well.

When interest rates and returns on labor are low it becomes difficult to get ahead by either working smart or hard for the majority of individuals.

Even in the tech sector, the most lucrative approach is to simply work with a dominant firm. Founders/Employees give up too much equity and have too little cash flow to compete.

Taken to the extreme this economy looks more like a feudal economy of court jesters, peasants, and lords then the proto-industrial economies Adam Smith wrote about.

This might be what happens when inflation is too low. You can get away with a lot of money shuffling games and end up ahead without doing anything productive. If there was 5% inflation you would actually have to make sure that you are doing something useful, otherwise inflation would eat away at your wealth but workers can just switch jobs to get a raise.

Low interest rates are an indicator that something is going wrong. Companies stopped hiring people and they already have done all the investments they could possibly do. The quick hack is to just let the government "steal" all the low interest money and spend it to generate inflation.

What we are seeing during this pandemic is that businesses are waking up. They are realizing that they actually have to work or else their paper wealth is going to disappear into nothing.

Fundamentally the problem is that cash is a low risk asset and the risk of actually doing work is too high compared to risk free money.

Starting conditions are also heavily correlated with the qualities that lead to them, which are both culturally and genetically hereditable.

There is also a chilling effect where even the people who have the qualities needed to succeed, judge their own chances by the median of their peers, and thus don’t bother in the first place. This is one of the reasons I advocate for big-population standardized tests just a self-assessment tool for students. It won’t help most underprivileged people, but it will at least help the best of them, and get a positive feedback loop going.

I myself probably would not have worked hard enough if I did not consistently place high in these tests, as I was from a rather small city, and born with an under-confidence bias.

I've been a mid-level manager, upper-level manager and now run my own company. I simply won't hire or promote someone who isn't a hard worker.

Does it guarantee success? Nope.

Is it a requirement for success in many circumstances? Yep.

What if I came to work at your company as janitor? And I did a great job. Worked hard. Attention to detail. Polite, and easy to work with. Arrived early every day. Stayed late. The best janitor in every way.

What are the chances I would move into another position at your company?

My guess is 0%.

You might keep me employed, and not fire me. Maybe pay me a little more. But there would be no realistic hope to jump up to the next level.

That's been the case for a long, long time.

But now something new is happening. Now professionals at many companies are realizing that they are in the same position. They see that hard work will not lead them to jump to the next level.

You're 100% wrong.

If you showed that much initiative, I would absolutely try to train you in other skills.

I own a software company, and while we don't have a physical office, I'm always offering education material to employees who want to learn new skills.

My mentor had a saying that I agree with fully - skill can be taught. Effort can't.

If you're willing to put in the effort, I'll make sure you're rewarded.

man i am 100% agree on this.. this notion that someone wil see through your effort and you will get chances to move higher up.. are just illusion.

You're right. If you're lucky enough to be born in the US, you're going to have a better life than 90% of people in the world and 90% of people who have ever existed.

At the heart of this debate is the Western ingrained belief in free will, a statement often used by the rich to justify inequality, despite plenty of evidence supporting the contrary.

https://m-g-h.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale-4fecf80...

How do you measure social mobility and what does the data show?

I don’t have time right now to grab the data, bu last time I looked, there was actually a surprising amount of movement between the various quintiles of wealth from one generation to the next.

It’d be great if you included data that supports your claims.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-...

And gini coefficient for 12 countries with a higher gini coefficient than the US. https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-where-intergenerat...

Starting conditions are not orthogonal to hard work. Educated parents are more likely to teach their kids work ethics, and once you are hired your parents are not helping you with your job.

It's not enough to be lucky. Most people still need to work hard to get ahead.

On the other hand I don't think you ever in the history had as wide opportunities as you do now

You can live in some shithole where 400$/month is easily enough to live without struggle, learn hard computer stuff and then work remotely for X times more than you needed to live.

How are you going to skew the odds if you aren't even trying?

Internet is huge advantage, you can not only have access to good information/knowledge/tutorials/blabla about something,

but also you can meet professionals with decades of experience in $something significantly easier

> On the other hand I don't think you ever in the history had as wide opportunities as you do now

There were periods in history with great opportunities where many people actually really richer. Economies always went up and down, where up literally means opportunities.

Brief periods, for a few. Basically no different from now.

in US or worldwide?

Both.

> A lot of us are just so deluded by survivorship bias borne of listening only to success stories, but it seems more and more people are seeing through the illusion.

I don't think we can conclude that from anything. It could just as easily be that our previous optimism was warranted but we've become influenced by a more pessimistic media narrative. To be clear, I don't have a position because there doesn't seem to be enough evidence one way or another.

It sounded like an intuition rather than a conclusion.

It’s an intuition that’s very familiar to those born without a leg up.

There’s always hope. This isn’t about hope. It’s about seeing things as they are, as the parent suggested.

> It sounded like an intuition rather than a conclusion.

Fair enough.

> It’s an intuition that’s very familiar to those born without a leg up.

I was born to a blue collar family and I lived in a trailer until I was 6. I don't share the intuition.

I worked through college while my classmates skipped class, spent loads at starbucks, restaurants, etc. I double majored and graduated with a fraction of the debt of my peers, and I picked majors that are likely to pay well. I now make multiples of what my parents made together. N=1 and all that, but it's not "intuition of those born without a leg up".

If you lack the intuition, it might not be because it doesn't exist. It might be because you were not so intuitive, at least about the nature of the people around you. I don't mean that to sound negative, some people have good fortune with their intuitive sense in the same way some have good fortune to make all the "right" choices at the right time.

It sounds like you made it through some trying circumstances. Good on you. It doesn't mean the rest of us who have witnessed the other side of the veil are incorrect in our own intuitions.

I wish I had grown up with the worldly insight to make money out of any situation along my way without losing my sense of myself or my principles. Instead I encountered recessions and empty job markets. C'est la vie. We all get our breaks somewhere.

So, to extend on that, my point was never one is more noble than the other—but pointing out that asking for datasets and conclusions about intuitions is like asking artwork to explain itself.

No worries. Maybe it’s luck, or maybe it’s mindset. Maybe the messaging (from the press or even from one’s own community) that life is hard, that only the exceptional few escape their circumstances, etc becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

I think it’s somewhere in the middle, and America needs to make some reforms so we don’t have billionaires and abject poverty at once; however, I don’t think the media narrative is helping.

Well, it depends. This short tedxoslo had some nice points ("Where in the world is it easiest to get rich?" Hint: not the US): https://youtu.be/A9UmdY0E8hU

He's talking about social mobility from 8:30

This. It is so obviously in-your-face true that I laugh out loud whenever somebody claim that they are “self-made” and owe nothing to the people and society who raised them, protected them, fed them etc. until they finally “made it”.

“70 percent of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation, and a stunning 90 percent by the third.” -money magazine

Initial Conditions really don't mean much in the long term trend. Short term, sure.

society is an extremely thick swamp

hard work is only one small ingredient

I'm a hard worker, I love it.. if the task suits me, i won't leave.. why did I fail ? people are jealous of your performance (inferiority), feel guilty of not being fast enough, are afraid of being thrown out because of you, and more and more politics (faster performance will be exploited by managers to pressure others in sad ways so people assemble/unionize and will restrict performance as leverage).

Unless you value yourself enough, society will drag you down to its level

Sort of curious, What lifestyle are people entitled to ?

What effort are they responsible for putting forth to better their life ?

Who is responsible for ensuring they have a good life ?

As a matter of physical reality, the universe owes us nothing. It was quite content to allow such things as the Atlantic slave trade and the Holocaust, which took people’s lives completely out of their own hands and utterly destroyed them. Were those people “entitled” to better? The question is, I think, utterly meaningless. Were these morally abhorrent events that should never be repeated? From my own moral point of view, and that of many other people, absolutely.

The effort of changing society to give more people more opportunity is generally undertaken on a moral basis alone. If you aren’t convinced by the premise, asking leading moral questions as if they have objective answers isn’t going to tell you anything you don’t already “know”, and it also isn’t going to provoke any kind of useful discussion around how we might implement real policies to this effect.

What is moral about teaching people they dont need to work to survive ?

In the context of this thread, and in particular the top level comment you initially replied to, who do you imagine is suggesting we teach people that?

Well, lets look at society.

We have the rich who use the govt to oppress the people and preserve their wealth.

We have the poor who think the govt will help them

We have a large group of people who just want to work to survive

What rules would you put in place and how would you go about doing that to ensure the rich / powerful didnt corrupt the system ?

The US was designed with a constitution defining the rules a govt could work within and the bill of rights was added to ensure the govt didnt enroach on the peoples rights so they could control the govt

This design failed as did all the rest... why ?

Because people are inherently lazy and dont want to be bothered. So you think its better to simply feed these folks and ensure they are ok will somehow motivate them to work ?

Capitalism works better than most systems and in fact many of the so called socialist countries arent. They are capitalist countries that have strong social programs funded by said capitalism

Perhaps instead of letting the govt get away with violating the rules it was bound by we start enforcing the rules ?

Do you honestly believe this? What would you tell this to someone who wasn't born into wealth or opportunity? You're pretty much screwed, don't bother?

What impact do you think teaching nihilism has on children? I don't believe its true, but even if it were, it's not a useful model for life.

That is not even close to what nihilism means.

I don't think we should be lying to children. We should teach them honestly, even if the truth sometimes hurts. Maybe some of them will eventually be able to make life better for those who are less fortunate.

And just because somebody has next to no chance of living a cushy western lifestyle doesn't mean they're screwed and shouldn't bother. People can still live fulfilling lives.

>> What would you tell this to someone who wasn't born into wealth or opportunity? You're pretty much screwed, don't bother?

I think it's better to be realistic about your chances and it may help to drive the political discourse into the right direction as well. After all this is a political issue.

In the end as others have said here it's more important to have a balanced, happy life and good health than to chase the lotto ticket in a rigged game.

> After all this is a political issue.

It's really not. Hard work does lead to a better life. It's fulfilling in its own right, at least for me. That's why I go to the gym and push myself regularly. If I loaf around all day, I don't feel well. I find meaning and satisfaction from being productive or putting in effort. It's not only societal but biological.

Things are harder for some people, sure. But for children, the bar is so low in the US that a minimal amount of effort could put you on the right track. My experience was basically that showing up and doing what you're supposed to do puts you above 50% of your peers. Consider Hoboken High School. 12% of students are math proficient. NJ is 42, while the graduation rate is 90%. The bar is very low.

[0] https://www.publicschoolreview.com/hoboken-high-school-profi...

Taking personal responsibility for my life has completely revolutionized it, even being > 40 years of age. The idea of working as hard as one can and as much as possible is game changing. Optimizing for effort and learning and health (mental/physical/emotional) creates meaning in one's life and enables an entirely different mindset from 'the normal drudgery' that I see so much of on my social feeds.

than to chase the lotto ticket in a rigged game

That's just a strawman. We're not talking about winning the lottery. This is about whether you improve your outcome by participating in the workforce in some meaningful way.

From the article:

>Despite strong economic performance, a majority of respondents in every developed market do not believe they will be better off in five years’ time.

That shows a disconnect between opportunity out there and people's feeling that they will take part in that opportunity.

Obviously people should do what they can to improve their situation. If someone is living in poverty, they should do what they can to get out of it.

But we're being fundamentally dishonest if we end the conversation there. People who are born poor have to work much harder to get out of it. Mistakes or misfortune that wouldn't be a big deal for someone in the middle class can be catastrophic for the poor. Ignoring that doesn't help anyone.

The point isn't "what do we teach our children?" The point is "how do we make society better for everyone?" And the individual view does not help with the latter.

Amazon warehouse workers who don’t make numbers and are let go work MUCH harder than I ever had to, and I was born into a single parent lower middle income. For me, luck was finding a social circle centered around stuff like Unix shell accounts and building Linux boxes.

You tell them the truth: the people in power do not want you to grow out of poverty, and you must work to convince them (through democratic means) to let you have a chance.

You're right that telling somebody they are screwed wouldn't help. What would help is figuring out the factors that actually lead to success. I'm guessing things like education, good healthcare, financial literacy, access to capital, role models, etc... all matter.

Work on programs to make sure these basic things are available to everybody. Start mentorship and apprenticeship programs early. Work for a strong social safety net so that people don't have to worry if they start a business and it fails, they won't be homeless or without healthcare.

So don't teach hopelessness. Instead recognize the failures and fix them.

If you've got shitty social mobility

You might want your children to think social mobility is possible if they work hard enough

But you don't want your politicians to think social mobility is possible through hard work. Because if they don't know you've got a social mobility problem, how are they going to fix it?

>> If you've got shitty social mobility

>> You might want your children to think social mobility is possible if they work hard enough

I'd definitely want my children to work hard, understand how the world works, but I also don't want them to spin their wheels for 25yrs only to realize their car was on a jack and not going anywhere.

There are glass ceilings in certain countries and especially in certain industries. Recognizing that is important IMHO. I hope we break all such glass ceilings, but one has to recognize they are present, recognize the odds, and then make a decision to give away large parts of your time to attempt to do that.

I love your point about different philosophies and views for thinking about personal things vs policy. I wish this was more common in general. Similarly I want to work hard and never friend on social welfare, yet I think society should take good care of everyone and am happy to pay for it even if I never ever want it for myself

Why would it be nihilism? A person's purpose in life doesn't have to be tied to working hard (especially if that strategy has diminishing returns).

I was raised to believe certain truths, such as hard work and sacrifice pays off. It's guided much of my life, from pursuing education, building a career, settling down and starting a family. I couldn't imagine what my life would be if I had believed that I am incapable of changing the circumstances of my being. It would be incredibly hard to live in an arbitrary society. That would likely lead me to the idea of nihilism.

> such as hard work and sacrifice pays off

Most don't disagree with that. The point is that the rate is different for different people. For some people, a decent live (house, bed, food) will take a lot of effort. For others, they might be born already into that.

What's important is that this is a discussion about policy and systemic problems. You can't address systemic issues with individual solutions (such as "poverty would be solved if people worked hard"), it's nonsense the same way it is to address individual problems with systemic solutions ("if you're homeless, ask the government to enact affordable housing policies).

That's an admirable life. But, then, there are people like me: Mostly lazy, but focused on creative expression, learning things, helping friends and family, and supporting community.

My life still has purpose. I just don't work very hard.

There are plenty of people working hard and making sacrifices who will never be well-off financially. Good work ethic is an advantage, but does not guarantee a good life.

Working smart doesn't equal working hard. You can put in 12 hours a day at work doing pointless shit like reformatting powerpoints and that would technically be considered "working hard" but that's probably not going to help you make money in the future.

> What would you tell this to someone who wasn't born into wealth or opportunity? You're pretty much screwed, don't bother?

I would tell them that they better advocate for a more equitable society or, yes, they are screwed. Too often self-empowerment is used as a way to tamp down any kind of organized push for equity. This is very convenient for those that benefit from the status quo.

I would argue that a truly useless model for life is pretending that the deck isn't stacked and letting those stacking it make out like bandits.

> Do you honestly believe this? What would you tell this to someone who wasn't born into wealth or opportunity?

I can take a guess. Notice GP's emphasis on starting conditions without an explanation of where those starting conditions come from. If personal effort is fruitless (an "illusion," as GP puts it), then they must originate with something else. In this ideology that's usually thought to be exploitation, one group oppressing another and getting rich off their labor.

It's popular in part because it's partly true; stealing is certainly one way to get rich. But so is building. It doesn't have to be zero sum. Unfortunately it's easy to believe that it is because it excuses mediocrity. It's harder to believe that every choice matters because it entails more suffering in the short term.

> Do you honestly believe this? What would you tell this to someone who wasn't born into wealth or opportunity? You're pretty much screwed, don't bother?

What you say is that one should lie to people for their own good.

Also practically, none of that implies that doing absolutely nothing is a good idea. You are better off to work then to not work. It makes you eat better, buy new computer once in a while or new sofa. However, don't expect to become rich by working hard in your dead end job with zero chance of promotion.

And you wont be telling those people anything new. They all know that no matter how hard you work at moving those Amazon box in warehouse or driving Uber, they are earning for immediate survival and wont raise through the ranks.

I would tell them the truth that they are more likely to get stuck close to where they are. That could be more motivating than selling them a fairy tale and watch them screw up their 1 or 2 shots that they might afford.

If you say upfront that the odds are against you, then I think it can spark more conscious decisions.

That's exagerated.

I would tell them "dont get fooled by tales of money. Take care of your body, your relationships, because thats where your wealth is. "

It's not a useful model for life, but it's a useful perception to convey to your constituents.

"You're being held back by a system that works against you! Send me to Washington, and I'll fix it!"

Wash, rinse, repeat.

How paternalistic. Now can we step into reality.

Maybe starting conditions are heavily predictive. Does it matter that much? The fact is mobility has never been more available. The problem is the "work hard" narrative. It's about working smart, not hard (that is a boomer mentality).

I think the real reason people struggle is because they just don't know how to take advantage of the opportunity available. It used to be easy - get some basic knowledge and find a hard working 9-5. Now that isn't the best path and while there is a lot more opportunity it is more open ended and one needs to find their own way.

“False consciousness is a term used by some to describe ways in which material, ideological, and institutional processes are said to mislead members of the proletariat and other class actors within capitalist societies, concealing the exploitation intrinsic to the social relations between classes.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness

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