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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

That's a nostalgic sentiment.

Looking at the top 10 richest people [0], most of them weren't born into anything close to the level of wealth they have now. None of them were poor, so "essentially anyone can become successful" is almost certainly an overstatement, but the ability to go from "raised by dentists/lawyers/professors/engineers" to "among the richest in the world" is evidence of considerable mobility.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires#Ann...

I spent more than a year working for the guy who went from "raised by ..." to "the richest man in the world". And when I say "working for", I mean "worked in the same converted garage".

Bezos' stratospheric economic "mobility" is not evidence of a more generalized economic mobility. In a system that is even vaguely capitalist, there will always be people who become incredibly wealthy without inheriting most of it. Their existence is not evidence of "considerable mobility", it's merely evidence of some sort of capitalistic economy.

The fact that the 10 richest people on earth were not born into stratospheric wealthy is a testament (of sorts) to capitalism; if you want to know about economic mobility, you're better off focusing on statistics, not the exceptions that prove the rules.

Exactly. We could have a system where every year 10 random poor people are chosen to become super wealthy. That isn't "economic mobility" in any meaningful or healthy sense.

How many of those 10 richest people came from families which weren't already in the top 5th income percentile?

Is that the social mobility that we care about? Anyone who is willing to work hard and already has the means to attend an Ivy League school can become a billionaire.

Top 5% in the USA, or top 5% in the world?

Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Sergey Brin were NOT top 5% in the USA. Depending what period in his childhood that you look at, Sergey Brin wasn't top 5% in the world either. (His family was educated, but they arrived in the USA as refugees from the Soviet Union.)

Several others started with rather less than you might expect. For example Elon Musk arrived in North America with only a few thousand dollars to his name, and had to work manual labor to get by. (Yes, his father was a businessman, but the two of them have a..difficult..relationship.)

It's my lived experience. I've watched it happen. Two of my jobs, both of my favourite ones in my careers, were working for companies founded by ordinary people from what I suppose are reasonably call disadvantaged backgrounds. One of them was started by Mo Ibrahim, who started life in Sudan too poor to afford shoes.

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

Though I agree with the sentiment and am all-in on democracy in general, personal stories are selection and survivor bias all the way down.

It might just be that you are the lucky one, and by definition, are surrounded by other lucky ones who landed similar jobs. Many millions others might have tried and failed and live in poverty or are dead. You'd need data on all those millions to talk about the % chance of someone succeeding, and to show it's better here vs there.

But that's all unhelpful. I think hope is important. I'd love to see us have a national consensus around equal opportunity, egalitarianism, and tolerance to different ways of life (and not just the "different" that I agree with!).

It’s possible to return to that prelapsarian state (at least to the degree it actually existed)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508

Ah, the good ol' days.

Exactly

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