Americans overestimate social mobility in their country
economist.com
economist.com
- Moving from bottom quintile to 2nd highest is significant mobility and completely ignored in this analysis.
- The analysis ignores the fact that the highest quintile in the US is higher in absolute terms than other countries. So moving from bottom to 4th may give more income than bottom to 5th in other countries.
- This analysis also ignores the changes of income within quintiles. The 3rd quintile in 1980 isn't the same income in 2020. 3rd quintile could see significant income improvements.
- This analysis also ignores government transfers.
- Countries that have a lower income spread, but overall less income would do better.
A person should not read the study or the article and think, “The reason this is nonsense is X.” Rather the thought should be, “I wonder how the study accounts for X.”
Some studies use household income over years to """prove""" that incomes have either fallen or stagnated. They just outright ignore that the size of the household went from 6+ to about 4. In this scenario a constant household income meant about 50% increase in per Capita income
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/opinion/the-triumph-of-ho...
Why should 1 out of 5 people belong to a group so wealthy that saying mobility is difficult should be considered problematic?
Why is it a bad thing that so many people are so wealthy? The more people who belong to the so-wealthy-it's-hard-to-achieve group, the better.
In the USA's case: for every one person who is that wealthy there are dozens of people struggling to put food on the table.
I don't know where you think 12% of Americans "struggle from food insecurity". But I don't trust your numbers because my anecdata says different.
On the other hand, I know people who spend less than $7 per day on their entire food budget. They receive just barely enough money per month to cover rent and food (and a little left over to pay for wifi and a small savings for computer upgrades) but they don't struggle from food insecurity. I live in Canada, though, so I don't know about the welfare situation in the US.
That might be a place to begin investigating the difference between your lived experience and more systematic data collection efforts.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
Per Federal Reserve studies, ~10-15% of US households have no discretionary income after all essential expenses, which includes food. For people in this financial state, any unplanned expense will cut into their already limited budget for food. Even though they have food, and won't starve, this risk is likely sufficient to be deemed "food insecure". However, in practice this is often offset by the myriad USDA and other food subsidy programs.
We received a lot of free food from the US government when I was a child, and I doubt the programs are less generous today. I definitely would have met the definition of "food insecure" at the time even though we always had food.
Where are we going with the money thing?
If the goal is everyone have money to access stuff (get to 0%)… why money?
Just provide stuff?
Socially make the story “this is how acquisition of stuff works and what stuff is available.”
Like we do now. Just minus the money.
Everyone lives under a quota for stuff given how much money they have.
What’s with the arbitrary data structure (dollar) and old man algorithms for dividing it up?
We're talking about the top 20% here. Not the top 0.1%.
But that sort of outcome seems almost impossible in America today due to more factors than I could probably name especially at this hour. But it seems clear to me that America has changed in the last 120-100 years in a way that locks people into their social classes/'earnings quintiles' while perpetuating, I assume to the advantage of the very wealthy, the myth that that old America of extreme social mobility still exists. This is a myth that needs to die if we're to adequately address our problems as a nation. I suspect the solution begins in the education industry.
Catching up in terms of wealth is probably a lot harder (because we continue to get richer).
Then you don't know enough about how well, for example, African and central Asian refugees or immigrants do in a single generation. Same for Hispanic immigrants within a generation or two.
In a generation? I moved here from Europe and within ~6 years accumulated as much wealth as my parents did in a lifetime.
The American dream is still alive and kicking for many if not most immigrants.
But my american friends have a fun joke they like to say: "Wow look at that immigrant work ethic! Wish I could work that hard" ... you could
“Bad” is extremely relative. Some of my good friends were actively getting bombed by USA just 600km south of my city when I was in high school. That’s like living in SF with an active warzone in LA, if they were in different countries ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The plight of a progressive Nigerian immigrant whose family was extremely wealthy prior to immigration is worth more than your story in today's climate.
Replace numeracy with programming and it happens right and left. We came from Eastern Europe with barely enough money to rent for a few months. Now we are in top percentile of earners in US. And have lot's of friends with a similar story.
Aren’t you just literally saying that social mobility is bad?
For argument's sake, let's say that number is a net worth of $500K. (Because that just so happens to be the minimum net worth to be in the top 20% of Americans[0].)
What would you prefer: a world where more or fewer people were able to amass that much wealth? To me, the obvious answer is more.
It does nobody any good for fewer people to be wealthy. Sure, you could look at the numbers and conclude that there's more class mobility, but that's just because more people are poorer, not because more people are making it to $500K.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/net-worth-t...
Sure, but if that number is such that a significant proportion of society is born with it and pass it along to their children while everyone else can't hope to get there, that's a very different society and social structure than one where a few extremely lucky people happen to achieve it each generation without a self-reinforcing class structure.
> It does nobody any good for fewer people to be wealthy
It could. If we actively redistributed wealth from the top quintile to the bottom quintile, it would do a lot of people a lot of good.
Society is probably better off when the median absolute wealth increases, which will be achieved by more people achieving higher wealth levels.
But as is becoming increasing clear (again), society is worse off when relative wealth distinctions grow (at least, if they grow too large).
If more people make it to $500k, the 5th quintile threshold will move up. That means that the gap between the bottom quintile and the top quintile will increase. We could choose to be happy that more people have made it to $500k, or we could choose to be upset that the gap between the lower 4 quintiles and the upper one has grown.
Why is it clear?
This sucks for basically everyone, rich or poor. I think we all have a selfish interest in making sure it doesn't come to that.
It seems that you don’t think that society is worse off as relative wealth inequality grows. Society is worse off when people who are mad for whatever reasons start to kill other people. And in any case we should note that it is not actual differences that rustle jimmies, but perceived differences.
Social mobility isn’t really about the “difficulty” of achieving any particular level of wealth. It’s about how many people who start at some lower level of wealth achieve some higher level of wealth. Income inequality is also not really about the “difficulty” of something. It’s not exactly “difficult” to inherit the wealth of the wealthiest person in the world, either, but it obviously can only happen to a very small number of people in the world.
Fewer. That wealth represents the obligation of other people to labor on behalf of the owner or their heirs. A world with lots of rich people is a world where the poor are born into indentured servitude. Equality allows the newborn to enter life debt free.
1. Wealth doesn't require a lot of labor to prop it up, especially not in an increasingly technological world where digital products enable infinite copies at no marginal cost, where code can "labor" in the background without manpower, and where the internet provides infinite distribution to all corners of the globe.
2. Labor today looks significantly different than it did in the past. It's increasingly fulfilling and service-like. In fact, many of the richest people spend exorbitant amounts of time "laboring," e.g. via writing or other creative pursuits.
3. A smaller wealth gap doesn't imply mobility of freedom from debt, any more than a shorter track implies faster sprinters. You can have a more equal society with a narrower distribution of wealth but also greater absolute poverty and misery.
Wealth represents owed labor, because ordinary people have an obligation to pay rent, and otherwise buy resources from the previous generation of humans, who allocated nature before they were born; so they have an obligation to work for owners; and wealth takes the form of ownership of a share of the work done by them.
That's the flawed assumption you're making. Wealth does not just come from labor. It largely comes from technology. Technology provides leverage. It's not uncommon that a single person today can do something that generates 10,000x the entertainment/utility/productivity/wealth any single person could have in the past.
The average person today is far wealthier than the average person hundreds of years ago, and we have fewer indentured servants, not more. That's because we can generate wealth much more easily today, thanks to technology. As a result, we should (and do) have far more wealthy people.
Also, just mathematically speaking, more wealthy people can't mean more servants. To use an extreme example, a society with 99% wealthy people could only have 1% servants, max.
> we can generate wealth much more easily today, thanks to technology
This is a different kind of "wealth." I certainly didn't mean to say anything against higher productivity etc.
I was saying that if someone has more wealth measured in dollars than everyone else in society, that person then has an effective power to prey upon or parasitize those others and their children. So that kind of wealth isn't a positive thing. But technology is different.
> ordinary people have an obligation to pay rent, and otherwise buy resources from the previous generation of humans, who allocated nature before they were born; so they have an obligation to work for owners; and wealth takes the form of ownership of a share of the work done by them.
Yes this is true. We're all part of a vast, interconnected, capitalistic network ("the market") of who people who own/make useful things and then sell/rent/loan them to others in the network.
But here's what's important: (1) Even if you're rich, you have to spend money on things created by others in the market. (2) Anyone has the ability to become a seller of things in the market.
In other words, it's not about owners vs workers. Rather, it's about consumers and creators. The "and" is important, because everyone is a consumer, plus everyone has the ability to simultaneously be a creator. Being a consumer isn't a bad thing, and doesn't make you subject to rich parasites in any way that I can see. Additionally, the internet and technology are only making it easier to become a creator.
Furthermore, this often is done at the expense of everyone else. Wealth may not be zero-sum, but that is only true in the abstract sense; I wouldn't be surprised if we found out that most people who are at the topmost quintile acquired their wealth by sucking value out of the system (e.g. rent-seekers, parasitic middlemen, etc.), rather than via value generation.
There is no problem that people are wealthy, the problem is that the wealthy people do not share (accountability, wealth, etc.)
* wealthy here is used in a relative sense, not in an absolute one. Obviously it's good that people in general are wealthy absolutely.
To be pedantic, exactly 20% are that wealthy.
> The more people who belong to the so-wealthy-it's-hard-to-achieve group, the better.
So-wealthy-it's-hard-to-achieve can only be defined compared to people who can't achieve it. Medieval kings were in that category but lived worse that we do.
They had "running water" -- as in servants would run and fetch the water. There was nothing inconvenient about the king's access to water. It would be served to him. How do you get your water?
Modern working class people in the wealthy nations do have better _medical care_ than medieval kings did. That doesn't justify broad statements about "lifestyle."
Medieval kings still ate poor food, you can see it on their teeth, they often had gravel etc in the bread wearing down the teeths etc. The houses, food and clothing, sanitation etc the kings had back then would be illegal to even offer to poor people toady.
When I lived on the minimum my government allows I could still buy higher quality raw ingredients than kings had access to 500 years ago and cook my own meals that are higher quality than was possible back then. It wont be as fancy, no, but it is better in every other regard, and I got access to the different wares year round while they had to account for seasons, spices basically non existent etc.
Yes, food and drink was probably better for them, because technology related to those can be replaced by manpower. For air conditioning, healthcare, lighting, or travel they had problems.
> How do you get your water?
I takes me a few seconds to get cold, pure water from my fridge.
The bigger benefit of running water I think is hygiene. I doubt they would have a hot shower. A hot bath would be possible for the king, but not other people. A lot of the servants would probably stink, and the toilets were holes in the side of the castle that went into the street. I think it smelled quite bad.
The big problem with your argument here is that it's special pleading. You just focus on some technologies that weren't available then. You don't even make an attempt to show that these very few specific things somehow dominate "lifestyle."
I think having full service everything, and no labor obligations, including architects who can build buildings (and know how to make them be cool in summer!) is very much more important to characterizing lifestyle than any specific technology.
Everyone once in a while, yes, but not for everyday people.[1]
>"lifestyle."
You're right, it does depend on the definition of lifestyle. Some people consider travel to be central to a fancy lifestyle, and that would be hard in the past.
>no labor obligations
Most people on HN likely have no physical labor obligations from employment. We have cushy programming jobs, and many can afford to eat out/order delivery every day and hire a cleaning and laundry service. I can get anywhere nearby in a fast and comfy car, not having to deal with a slow, bumpy, drafty, horse-smelling carriage. I don't even have to walk up stairs, I can take an elevator.
The king has the responsibility of running a kingdom. That sounds pretty stressful to me, much more so that my programming job.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-often-did-people-in-the-Middle-Age...
Much more than they’re willing to admit this controversy is about envy on that side. They cloak that envy in a veneer of concern for the poor and concern about the undue influence that money allows; both valid concerns. However, they then target policies that exacerbate poverty and make worse the absolute plight of the poor.
The other side is not willing to admit that for them it’s more than a bit about avarice. They hide that avarice in myths of the self made founder and myths about ethically conscious capitalism; both things you can find laudable examples of. However, many hide their privileged starting points and sell out immediately when profit conflicts with their morals.
Generally, we try to equalize the brutal laws of nature and offer equality of opportunity and try to remove blind, dumb luck from human life...with health care, with insurance, with social equality...sometimes, we succeed, but this is a failure.
Do you mean to say people who do nothing deserve wealth?
So not nothing.
> I’m sure they’d contribute nothing if they were able
So they're not even _able_ to do nothing.
Money is basically an abstract representation of power, so that's almost a tautology.
> Another reason would be that most rich people don't allocate capital in a way that's good for society
This is an interesting claim? What is good for society, and relative to whom?
I suppose the obvious comparison would be relative to "poor" people, but poor people don't really intentionally allocate capital at all by virtue of barely having enough for their immediate needs. Even the selfish rich people tend to invest their capital, usually into lucrative projects that make money by fulfilling some need of society. I guess i wonder if that's so bad, or at least if its worse than the other social classes would do.
-- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776
Decarbonization, novel drug research, preventative medicine, high speed rural broadband, public transport, nutrient rich foods, exercise, education.
That's not how money is made. You need some kind of parasitic mechanism to enable massive accumulations.
Why should some people be able to run much faster than I can?
It's not fair there are many men handsomer than myself. They should be required to wear a mask.
Your wealth can absolutely be taken away to help me afford food, shelter, and healthcare.
Furthermore, my handsomeness does not in any way directly gain me the aforementioned things needed to survive and thrive. Your wealth absolutely does.
Forcing Hollywood to hire fewer attractive actors and more unattractive actors will meaningfully transfer lucrative roles to less attractive people.
[1] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/evidence-shows-significant-in...
American mobility isn't bad because people can't make it to the top - you can, more so than almost anywhere in the world.
It's bad because a significant portion of people at the bottom stay stuck at the bottom their whole life. Compared to countries in Europe, this is a lot worse.
Note that they couldn't resist trying to find a bright side (the numbers are still quite _bad_, just not as bad as people think they are):
> But in Europe, climbing the ladder is easier than most people believe
It seems grotesque that many are born and stay very wealthy while so many others have little to no chance of ever experiencing even modest prosperity.
Another observation: No other quintile has actually grown its percentage of household wealth since the 1970s. The wealthy really have taken all of the gains. Perhaps it would be healthy for us to share some with the people who do all of the physical labor.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/203247/shares-of-househo...
You also presuppose that everything should be relative to absolute terms. What evidence do you have that social mobility should be relative to absolute terms rather than relative to the quintiles defined by the society a given person lives in?
Why would we expect mobility in absolute terms for a society that ranges from 1-100 in wealth, compared to a society than ranges from 40-50? We should expect mobility to be with respect to the society’s wealth range.
That is, suppose Bob is a rich banker. His kid Frank goes to private school and on to an Ivy League college, but seeing how distant and money-focused his dad was growing up, Frank decides to become a writer. Frank is certainly not poor, but he definitely lives on a very modest income and that is what his son John experiences growing up. John, not wanting to have to be in as modest circumstances as his Dad, decides to follow in his grandfather's footsteps and become a banker. His grandfather is even able to introduce him to some colleagues and get him some interviews at top investment banks.
Point being, if you just look at income, it will look like a dynamic economy with lots of economic mobility, with each generation moving from the top to the bottom of the economic latter, and vice versa. In reality, though, nothing really changed at all about their social class and the opportunities that were open to them. Unlike most people in the bottom half of the economic spectrum, Frank was basically there by choice.
Again, you may think this is an extreme example, but in my experience I have seen some version of that multiple times.
A little harder if you’re expected to be the bail out for your parents.
AFAIU, by dollar amount government transfers in the U.S. are roughly comparable to those in most European countries. However, a disproportionate amount of those transfers are spent on medical care, a consequence of the high cost of medical care in the U.S. Moreover, a disproportionate amount of government medical spending goes toward the elderly and small, high risk groups. IOW, even at comparable dollar amounts, government transfers in the U.S. simply don't provide the same sort of secure economic footing that people can use to get ahead in some other countries.
I keep hearing how the US has a "non-existant safety net" yet can help but notice safety net programs are more than half the federal budget.
Per Wikipedia, "At a cost of $56 billion in 2013, the EITC is the third-largest social welfare program in the United States after Medicaid ($275 billion federal and $127 billion state expenditures) and food stamps ($78 billion)".[1] That looks to me like Medicaid spending is nearly 8x that of EITC.
And that's just Medicaid. Medicare spending is greater still, though I don't know the breakdown of Medicare spending by revenue source--FICA vs straight government subsidy. The subsidized component may be less than Medicaid, or may already be accounted for by Medicaid.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit Wikipedia's source is http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/08/federal-spe...
What evidence shows that to be a fact? Do these Americans have proven wealth, or is it all on paper?
The other is that it's much easier to get out of the lower quintile in America than those same countries.
There's a couple reasons that might be. One is that social mobility is actually higher in America, but there's a ceiling over which it's hard to overcome unless you're born there. Whether that ceiling is immediately under the top quintile or somewhere lower is an interesting question.
Edit: as pointed out, I actually misread the first graph, which is probability of remaining in lowest quintile. So, yeah, data looks like all bad news to me (unless you count those people knowing fairly accurately how fucked they are as a good thing).
That's not what the first graph shows. What you say is true for "perceived" mobility, not for effective mobility. 33% of Americans stay in bottom quintile, much more than other countries.
70 years ago college was only for the elite. Today close to half of young adults go to college. Yet that didn't fix anything.
Just below is my response to someone else, and the point there is just as relevant as here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29537081
If the children of an astronomer really do turn out to be the best astronomers, then a meritocracy should theoretically allow them to become the best astronomers in the next generation.
But they do not get to be the astronomers JUST because they had a parent who was good at that. Every generation gets a reset; if genetics really do predict merit, then sure, the arrangement will look a bit like ancestry.
It's not how hard one works, it's how smart one works.
The second aspect is what does one do with the income one has, which has a crucial impact on the person's future.
It's about the support networks that kick in when you screw up or when bad luck befalls you. Lots of middle class kids (like mine) get multiple chances to try and fail. Their parents' wealth and social connections gets to work and cushions their landing, and like Silicon Valley folk, they get to try again.
The children of working class families do not have anything close to this level of support when things go wrong. They make a mistake, or just suffer some bad luck, and they are completely screwed. Yes, everyone can get up and try again, but the difficulty of doing this from zero with no support is routinely underestimated by people (like me and my kids) who've never had to do it.
Most immigrants in the US do not "stream over the border", more are arriving from Asian countries than Latin American countries. Those that arrive by air from another country typically have more than "nothing" on arrival.
"With the granting of work authorization and the imminent threat of deportation removed, DACA recipients have experienced pronounced upward mobility in their socioeconomic status."
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/deferred...
But TFA was about socioeonomic mobility within the USA, not comparisons with Mexico, Peru or Bolivia. The success of a specific subgroup [0] of undocumented immigrants at moving upwards doesn't refute the general mobility findings cited in TFA, nor does it prove or disprove that their success is about smart work vs hard work vs adversity support. And I didn't mean to imply that neither hard nor smart work play a role in any upward social mobility, but rather that many people forget the role played by adversity support (and it's not a small role).
[0] According the article you cite, DACA covers 832,881 people, which is about 11% of the total undocumented immigrant population in the US at present (and if tales about an uncontrolled wave were correct, even less).
It said that upward mobility is significantly lower in the USA than many other western industrial democracies, and also significantly lower than most Americans think it is.
Investing in yourself is how you become better than average.
I'm saddened by the persistent negativity I see here. Buck up, dude!
Maybe paying for college is an exception to the rule -- only because of all the grants, scholarships, loans, and income-based tuition.
With a single signature you can enter into debt and ruin your life, or enter into a bad marriage and do the same. Taking the right life decisions is essential.
I mean, it _is_ exceptional. Americans, per the article, are exceptionally overly optimistic about social mobility.
Social mobility is a different story. I was raised in a rural area, which is essentially a social class of its own. Since becoming an adult, I've found myself gravitating towards working-class people. I like the bluntness, the awareness of real issues, and the family values. I make more money than many of the yuppies who live a mile away, but socially, I'm several rungs "below" them.
I could get a nice haircut, mow my lawn properly, get divorced, and fit right in, if I chose to, but I don't want to. I think you'll find many lower-class Americans wouldn't, even if they knew how to.
Edit: by "Working class", I mean blue-collar and not wealthy. The salary cap is a little higher than the traditional definition, but I think it's a more accurate representation of middle America.
Sheltered, yes, ignorant, no. I know what being hungry is like, I remember how weird it was to wear brand-new clothes.
I'm not complaining, it was all perfectly normal to me at the time, but I'm not talking down at the poors, I'm talking about who I am.
*Mugged once and then learned how not to get mugged. People tried after that, didn't go well.
Don't know if I'd call it easy if it's something only 8 out of 100 people do. It also depends on the area. $100k in SF is a lot different than $100k in the mid-west.
You are not understanding the other possibilities here.
The other possibility is that yes, it is true that it is not that hard to make it to this level of success, but the stats are still true, and it is simply that people don't do this, for other reasons.
There are a multitude of reasons, as for why someone might not join lucrative fields, even if it isn't that hard to do so.
For example, maybe they simply aren't aware of it, or they incorrectly think it would be difficult. Or maybe there a social reasons why people don't do it.
Or maybe, in order to achieve that level of success they would have to move, and I know that lots of people don't want to do move.
My sister-in-law's fiancé is doing it as a journeyman, and he's making very close to what I do as a mid-level SWE.
This is not a very useful statement without a ballpark figure. Mid level SWE salaries range from <100k to >300k depending on the company.
How does the percentage change when you look at people with full-time jobs? With full-time professional jobs? Who are actively trying to optimise their income instead of for example prioritising family? I'd guess it becomes much larger very quickly.
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/tables/pinc-01/...
In any case what you’re proposing is selection bias. No one should be surprised that people who work full time are more likely to make six figures than those who don’t. And yes, if you cherry pick a group of “professionals” who receive larger salaries of course the percentage will increase. And it’s back to survivorship bias for the “prioritization” examples you mentioned. Unless you happen to have a random sample of people who don’t make six figures but would prefer to.
Being willing to show up full time is necessary but not sufficient.
> According to the 2020 census data linked below the percentage increases to around 24% for individuals who worked full time all year.
It said and implied nothing about people trying or not. GP attempted to cast this as "1/4 of people succeed, so it's easily achieveable"
Also, if I look at the people around myself and see that 1 / 4 are able to do something, it would probably be easy. So it’s the GPs own self awareness combined with the stat.
A house 50min (but not in a nice neighborhood, thank fucking god, I don't want to live among "nice people") from Boston and not generally having to worry about money (i.e. I'm not house poor in the slightest).
Though I did buy a couple years before 'rona and the inflation so I probably would be renting today.
I wasn't able to turn up any stats on lawn care though.
I should have remembered my audience and not made a joke about California's differences from the rest of the country.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/12/united-states...
There's almost nothing anyone could say that will apply to the whole population or the whole geography, certainly not anything that wouldn't apply equally well (or badly) to all Americans.
I responded to your original comment because you said "and in my area the working class is very Catholic, black, or both. YMMV, not valid in California." which you say is a joke. What's the joke? Now I don't want to accuse you of contributing to this because I have no way of knowing where your beliefs about CA came from by (I'm going to go off on a tangent here) but what I've seen when it comes to California is that people now use it as a negative example for almost every comparison, often without evidence. It's done so much that there's now there's a negative connotation to the state itself that certainly isn't valid in all cases. It's so insidious how a belief / stereotype can just appear out of no where if it's just causally spread out.
California is an exception to all sorts of rules, due in part to its diversity and insane wealth. I could have said "Marriage is known to the State of California to cause cancer" and have been making the same joke.
Please note that I'm northeastern, and Cali/NYC are the butt of almost every joke, because both places have such a massive disconnect from the reality of middle America. I bet people from rural California know exactly the feeling I'm describing.
It's one of those terms that are loosely defined (at least in certain societies) and mean very different things to different people.
Is an electrician earning US$80k/year middle class because he's well compensated for his work, or working class because he's doing manual labour?
In the 90s, I remember "family values" having been used by politicians as a polite euphemism for the very narrow "straight, Christian, atomic" view of what a family should be.
I'd definitely view a lack of divorce as a pretty big part of it.
But as you said, it's entirely personal and subjective. :)
% divorced among those married, by age 46:
Did not graduate from high school: 58.8
High school graduate, no college: 49.1
Some college or associate degree: 48.5
Bachelor's degree or higher: 29.8
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/pdf/marriage-and-d...
But that's just my reading of it.
>> HOW likely is someone to move up the economic ladder?
> It's not hugely difficult to earn six figures in the US if you're committed, work hard, and pick a good field.
> https://personalfinancedata.com/income-percentile-calculator...
>> An income of $100,000 for ages 40 to 100 ranks at the 89.82%
good to see evidence the article is correct in the wild.
It’s more of a function of how much you embrace the norms of formal education and institutions. This defines who do you trust, what do you care about and how do you think.
I’m inclined to think that this is a personality trait. Surely, personality is shaped by the environment too.
If you want to call what the article measures "economic mobility", OK. Regardless of terminology, the point is that Americans think it's easier than it actually is to go from the bottom quintile of income to the top. If "it's not hugely difficult" translates to "more than a 7.8% chance of going from bottom quintile to top", then you'd be among them.
Truly. And unfortunately while the headline says "social mobility" the article looks at economic mobility, specifically income quintiles (as opposed to wealth accumulation).
1. If Americans can’t read your emotes they put you in a “Uh this feels weird, that person is an emotionless robot” camp. You have to practice
2. It is not okay to ask “What’s that?” when someone proudly mentions which college they went to (because as a European you only recognize 4 or 5)
3. Talking about money with upper middle class people is impolite. They have never had money problems and do not understand why anyone would ever talk about money
4. You should instead talk about your investments
5. Saying “Charity? That’s what taxes is for” is considered trolling
6. Rent and real estate are the only times it’s socially acceptable to say “Damn, life is expensive”
7. You have to talk about helping the less fortunate
8. It is not okay to directly help the less fortunate on your street, wouldn’t want to make them feel like it’s okay to be there
9. You can only say positive things about your boss (because you aim to become them)
10. It is okay to say negative things about your boss’s boss’s boss
11. Every acquaintance is “a friend”
12. Real friends are “best/close friend”
13. Everyone hires cleaners and similar help, this is not considered a luxury
14. Everything is always awesome
15. You don’t fail, you are given an opportunity to grow
Also, the 'money talk' thing - that's Anglo, not American, and it's nothing to do with not understanding low income, it's basically avoidance of blunt status bragging, it's considered a bit crude. Which is why you'd have to talk about your investments in order to humble brag.
The point of #5 is that in a number of other countries, people believe that taxes should pay for the social services required by the unfortunate, the sick, the indigent, and so forth. Charity plays a minor role, because it is the job of the state to take care of its citizens.
Social justice, animal shelters, basic needs for foreign citizens etc..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_countr...
That isn't the reason at all. My parents struggled in the Depression, but they never ever talked about their money. The Depression taught them to be very, very frugal, a lifelong habit. (My family tended to keep cars for 30 years, for example.) I had no idea what my Dad had until after he passed away.
> You don’t fail, you are given an opportunity to grow
This is an attitude common to successful people at all levels. There's a reason it correlates with success.
But once you climb out of that, suddenly you stop talking about money. Figured US was the same
I bet it would be really, really hard to become an actual friend of Bill Gates, for an extreme example. I once was at a conference, where he was a speaker, and sat at the lunch table he sat at, along with 7 other people. It was sickening how they fawned all over him. He pretended not to notice, but can you imagine going through life with that happening all the time?
And yet, many people assert that it is indeed hard for them.
The easiest way to compare this between countries is to look at actual economic/social mobility, in the form of poor people becoming affluent, affluent people becoming poor, etc. Rather than theorycrafting or going off anecdotes, see what’s actually happening.
And the data says that the US doesn’t do so well here, IIRC.
I think that's true for White and Asian folks.
But the thing about America is that it has two, giant categories of people in a 'different lane' - notably those in poor Black urban neighbourhoods, and new Latino migrants particularly in Texas/Cali where they are highly segregated from the rest of society.
'Technically' you might argue they have that opportunity, but it's not really the case if they live in a situation wherein that reality has never dawned upon them, and their entire life context is skewed towards something else.
My distant cousin married a Latino man, their daughter was 17 and was making 'big money' helping her mother at the cleaning service. And by 'big money' I mean 'some money' for a kind of poor family, a 17 year old with any cash at all was living large. She had absolutely zero concept or aspiration of going to college, nobody she knew did that and was really keen on working, because it made her money and wasn't even keen on finishing high school.
The 'cultural gaps' between these communities are gigantic, it's like being in a different country.
America probably is 'technically the most open' but pragmatically, it's not the case.
I personally work at a Floridian company, and have a bunch of coworkers who come from the exact backgrounds you talk about. It's totally possible, it just has to be a known opportunity, not a pie-in-the-sky dream.
"it just has to be a known opportunity" - and this is the rub.
I think that this is far, far more than simply 'informing them they can go to college'. It's an entire life outlook, set of conscientious behaviours, that's almost impossible to contemplate if you're completely outside of positive conditions.
It is true that almost anyone can go to almost any public school, get into a hald-decent Uni and study STEM, and 'have a decent job'. But getting people into that modality is much more easier said than done, it's probably the 'hard part' actually.
The number of people who 'don't go to college and end up in in highly paid tech jobs' in the US is very, very small.
Race-based generalizations almost always end up leading you in the wrong direction. There's substantially more white people living below the poverty line compared to any other group [1] and those poor white communities are trapped by the same lack of awareness of opportunities as any of the minority groups you mentioned. Whites and Asians are over-represented in the affluent groups, which leads many people to look at things through a racial lens, but on a per capita basis, whites dominate the impoverished population.
So the 15 million impoverished white people are just lazy but the 8 million impoverished black people are systematically deprived of opportunity? It's so strange to me that SJWs feel the need to minimize the struggles of groups that are facing the same obstacles as the groups they are advocating for just because they have a common skin color with the majority of the affluent group.
That's an awful lot of projecting. Your use of logical fallacies is dizzying.
I think it's true for people from households that stress STEM, the utility of higher education, and asset management. My mother grew up in North Philadelphia, graduated from an HBCU with a Math degree at age 20, and was making six figures in the early 2000s as a Software Architect/Project Manager, after a brief stint running a small consulting firm. My father grew up in a poor area of Virginia, worked as an engineer (BS Math, MS Space Engineering) and then went to medical school at the age of 35 to became a radiologist. Both grew up during the Civil Rights Movement.
In comparison, my Japanese wife, from a blue-collar family of school teachers, is completely baffled at the idea of entrepreneurship, financial independence, real estate income, etc... She looks at my ~$95k salary and thinks "You make as much as a Japanese school principal, you're at the top." I look at it and think I'm behind the power curve for a 39yo with a STEM Masters degree, and behind the power curve in accumulated assets based on my assessment of long-term freedom, risk mitigation, and how I want to spend my time.
That's if you also had a healthy learning environment at school and home, can afford college, and have a healthy early development to be able to grow up into an sufficiently smart child. A lot of people in the bottom 20% don't have those initial conditions.
trades right now that are struggling to find applicants.
I believe that the opioid epidemic started out as a pain epidemic, with a population of people suffering chronic pain that they acquired from their jobs. I've hired people to work at my house, and the ones who are my age tend to be hobbling and broken.
I'd be more enthusiastic about the trades if I lived in a country with better unions, labor laws, health care, and safety net.
Now, some of the better trades are medicine and nursing related. Those tend to be indoors, in a better regulated workplace. Or computer programming.
grew up blue collar, still spend plenty of time with blue collar folks. just like there are fat unhealthy desk workers, there are beaten up tradesmen who didn't take care of their bodies. there are also healthy examples of both.
finally, these are required jobs that make our society function. hard to say they are oversold while most of the people on this forum make the proverbial fourteenth attempt at Uber for dogwalking. myself included.
I would consider any person engaged in skilled work that requires learning or training to be a tradesman, so yes a programmer fits in my opinion.
An interesting thing about programming is that we still haven't reached a consensus on what kind of training is needed. So we can say it's a trade, profession, or whatever, but that doesn't tell us anything useful about it.
From a great article I read recently:
“A solid, two-parent home is critical for a child’s future. There is simply no shortcut."
“ Poverty, even extreme poverty, is surmountable. What is nearly impossible to overcome is the instability—the psychological havoc—created by broken homes. Especially for boys.”
https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1456287662243991560
I'm sure that working class people are more aware of issues that affect them. I'm also sure the same applies to poor, middle class, and wealthy people.
They're all real issues.
I'm initially skeptical of studies that imply large-scale misunderstanding among the public about their own lives; here that Americans are too optimistic and Europeans are too pessimistic. I'm sure there's some truth to it, but it's not the whole story. The conclusion of the article is in part a reflection of the methodology.
...and that's why such comparisons should be done using percentiles instead of absolute values. Which they did.
> The conclusion of the article is in part a reflection of the methodology.
The biggest methodological flaw points in quite a different direction than you seem to be suggesting. Change in percentile across the income distribution is less informative than change in percentile across the wealth distribution, and that should be the age adjusted wealth distribution as well. Comparing my retirement income to somebody who's still working is practically useless. Comparing it to what my age peers have in the bank compared to when we were all much younger tells something close to the true story.
Only from a purely acquisitive standpoint, but not with respect to social mobility which is the subject here. Also, study after study has shown that life satisfaction is more highly correlated with relative income or wealth than absolute. If we want to use science instead of personal preference to determine what matters, you're flatly wrong.
> If 80% of your society is earning between $60k and $90K
Why choose such an unrealistic example when a real one is right there? Seems suspect TBH. The real distribution is nowhere near as tightly clustered around the median, and is quite asymmetric with a much longer tail at the high end. Also, why only consider changes in the middle? A small percentile difference at either end can have a much larger effect on quality of life.
> Relative mobility doesn’t buy you a vacation home.
The difference between second and fourth quintile actually does mean something like that, and does so regardless of prices or inflation. Absolute values are the ones that become meaningless without the context of prices in a particular time and place. The house I'm sitting in right now as I write this (vs. the dumps I grew up in) is a pretty good testament to the difference between first and fifth quintile, but the price of the house doesn't matter a damn bit.
It doesn’t make sense to measure income mobility in anything but absolute terms: Would you rather move one quintile in a wide income distribution or two within a much narrower one?
They were perfectly fine with ruining the life I built for myself, up until I blocked most of them and just moved to a different city. Work hard and cut off lazy people. Don't get involved of anyone who doesn't want to work, outside of laziness being disgusting upon itself, these people tend to cause unlimited drama. A person who's finishing up their PhD, while working full time doesn't have time to cause problems. Someone who's 28 or 29 and still doesn't work has plenty of problem causing time.
Once you understand this, and just to add, make sure if you're having trouble finding the right type of people where you live, you consider moving. I'm from LA, I've had so many strange situations created by people who I've alluded to above. The moment I left LA, I had a fantastic partner, and I've never had someone try to put me in a volatile situation since.
All of this sad, I've been very lucky. Medical conditions I'd be screwed. All it takes is a single severe medical condition to financially ruin you, and then you can't afford treatment, in this country says good luck try a go fund me
I’m not an economist, but I don’t think it’s a zero sum game considering the total productivity / economic output of a society can go up (or down). Your success doesn’t need to be at the expense of someone else’s success.
> you should be thanking the people who's life circumstances prevent them from learning to succeed
What?
What?
At the same time, I've met tons of adults who were in their '30s whose parents never just said no. Their parents never said you need to figure it out, get the hell out of my house. I got kicked out for the first time when I was 15, and then I went through an eviction about a year and a half later when I was 17, so I'm very well aware that every single day I need to work hard. I need to work so hard so I'll never go through an affection again.
Gossip, drama, lifestyle comparison, it's a recipe for failure (which is what social media supposedly encourages). I'm not any kind of benchmark for career-ambitious productivity, but there are things I like to do and personal goals I have in mind that allow me to surf on top of the "everywhere, all the time" human emotional whirlpool that would be very easy to get sucked into, thus saying goodbye to the 'who' and the 'where' I'm aiming at. Happy to listen to people who come to me for a sympathetic ear, but I'm not taking on your shit, mainly because I'd never ask you to take on mine.
Not sure if this captures it properly, but: The more you macro, the less you micro.
(I've had one semi-significant medical issue, but Australian private healthcare saved me from any severe recalculation of life priorities. I'm very thankful that I'm a generally healthy person).
Medical expenses are the single worse thing about American life, so many of us end up skipping medicines that we need. And these medicines are relatively inexpensive, maybe three or $400 a month. But when you can't afford it you can't afford it, and then say you have a heart attack and you end up in the hospital. Then you're in debt for 30 or $40,000, and you'll never escape.
I'm looking to potentially immigrate to Europe in the near future, I'm very tired of this American Life of struggle.
What's the best way to get a CS job in Australian or New Zealand
Then not every person.
The American system greatly adds roadblocks. There are many reasons besides personal medical conditions that your work hard mentality would have been irrelevant or completely out of reach.
Consider that about ten percent of Americans will spend at least a year in the top one percent and more than half of all Americans will spent a year in the top ten percent. This is visibly not the same for the more static –but nominally more equal –Europe. For instance, only ten percent of the wealthiest five hundred American people or dynasties were so thirty years ago; more than sixty percent of those on the French list were heirs and a third of the richest Europeans were the richest centuries ago. In Florence, it was just revealed that things are really even worse: the same handful of families have kept the wealth for five centuries.
I could make $10B. I still wouldn’t reach the top level of class. Maybe my kids kids will.
Here’s an attempt to say something positive about this: you guys should try to seek out those unglamorous industries, usually in unglamorous parts of the country, with people who have unglamorous ideas about the world.
Many of them unglamorously PRINT money using 1980s technology and will happily pay you whatever you ask them if you can help them do that more efficiently. There’s a good chance you can, because nobody else is really even trying.
Is there really anyone wrong with this? If you and your family are happy, and your needs are met, and clearly you have options -- does anyone else's definition of class really matter?
Are you talking about like oil/natural gas? Or what else
Most of the 0.1% inherited their wealth or at least came from an well educated background.
Poor people in USA have both free healthcare and education. If they're willing to fill-out some forms.
Edit:
Yes, contrary to the popular belief, poor people in USA do, in fact, get free health care and education.
How does that part work in practise? Are these forms something someone from a poor uneducated background can actually realistically fill out?
The way I see it many Americans I had the chance to talk with either take a gamble on their health or they spend not unsignificant time and energy to find their ways through the system. The first choice can turn out just fine, or (in many cases) completely catastrophic. The second choice takes away time and resources that could have been spent somewhere else.
Yes, at least in the 3 states where I know anything about how the systems work. It's all the same information you fill out to get your driver's license, kid's school lunch which, contrary to the prevailing trope around here, being poor does not make you too stupid to do. It's way less arcane than reporting loan interest on your taxes or trying to register a used car last registered by a dead guy.
Likewise, any poor person can go to the local community college and tell the person at the desk that they want to enroll in some classes and they will be directed to the financial aide office where they will receive help to sign up for FAFSA [0] and Pell Grants [1].
All of these forms are printed in about 5 languages. There are people in the offices there to literally help the poor people write their own names on the forms.
The Americans you hear about on the news that don't have healthcare are people who have incomes above the eligibility threshold to qualify for Medicaid, or are too young to qualify for Medicare. It's the people in the middle who fall through the cracks in the US.
You mean the people who potentially start out with their own business to get "filthy rich"?
Aha! But at such a low income you get the ACA subsidy! But the insurance plans you can get have really high deductibles. If you're making $20,000 a year and have a $17,000 deductible... that's life ruining if you actually get sick. That's not to mention all the other oddities that go with having these higher-deductible lower premium plans like having to work around non-formulary medications, getting referrals to covered providers (you will be really lucky to have a PCP that does the homework to make sure you are referred in-network), and general insurance fuckery.
I think it's just a little bit more complex than filling out a few forms.
They have whole databases on their computers that do this for them. Maybe they refer you to someone across town, or the next town over. But they're going to try hard to keep you in-network. This is also why Canadians are constantly paying out-of-pocket to come to USA to get their knee surgeries and back surgeries.
Oops, this is the second post to say basically the same thing.
Knowledge of what's available would probably go a long way towards helping people move up. My wife grew up in a small rural area with no job options besides Wal-Mart and fast food joints, and she hated it so much that she ended up getting enough scholarships to make money earning her undergrad. She's the first person in her family to go to college, and most of the rest think college is super expensive, and don't know about scholarships to help poor people go.
So, sometimes it leads to marketable skills, sometimes it doesnt. Sometimes it leads to skills that can transition out into the civilian world, but doesn't because of license and certifications constraints.
But yea, some people do join to get out of shitty small town. I did 5 years in the Navy because in my rural North Carolina town there were 2 other options, make the meth or consume the meth.
1. the American "rags to riches" story is one that the media bombards people with over and over again
2. Lots of people simply lie about the circumstances they come from
But I can see someone with a similar financial background, but growing up in a family that didn't value education, perhaps single parent working all the time struggling much more to get ahead.
His takeaway is that there is a yawning gap opening up between middle class and elites, and that neither group is well-served by this gap. The middle class have less mobility than before, at least when it comes to achieving super-elite levels. And the elite class work themselves to death and prompt their children to do the same.
1: https://www.amazon.com/Meritocracy-Trap-Foundational-Inequal...
America is still the best country in the world to start a business and take risks.
America still has more freedoms (speech especially) than most of the world. (Side note: The left wants to put more restrictions on speech, which is horrible, because Republicans will swing back into power and use it in the other direction.)
America holds NATO together. Europeans don't give us enough credit. And they're replete with their own crises to always be pointing the finger.
We need more unity. This division by ideology and class is giving us short sightedness and blunting our ability to make sound investments in the future.
Globalism is something that should be reevaluated. Our capital is being invested into the capabilities of rivals, and it doesn't pay dividends. Americans have been turned into buyers of cheap plastic goods, and we've lost the ability to make our own critical components and wares. Huge mistake, driven in part by these narratives.
We're optimists, but the media is telling us not to be. They want us to yell at each other and drive ourselves into the dirt.
'America has more freedoms than most of the world'. What is in parenthesis is a sweeping generalization and what are you defining as 'most of the world'.
I'm not even sure what you're getting at with the NATO statement in relation to social mobility.
Frankly I'm not sure what is perverse about this article. Isn't it called the American Dream for a reason?
But, I am seeing some rise of European exceptionalism and wonder if things have changed over in Europe? Is it more united? Even small things like '.eu' domain is proudly used. I'd be damned if I use '.us' domain. Just a small example of many.
About the only time I see HackerNews coming together is when we talk about semiconductor industry in USA. There is a sense of optimism to invest in US semiconductor industry - but it is short lived.
The earliest documented use of the specific term "American exceptionalism" is by American communists in intra-communist disputes in the late 1920s.
…..
However, the specific term "American exceptionalism" seems to have originated with American communists in the late 1920s. The earliest documented usage cited by the Oxford English Dictionary is from the Daily Worker, 29 January 1929: "This American 'exceptionalism' applies to the whole tactical line of the C.I. as applied to America."[8] In turn, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (who was likely aware of this earlier use) condemned the "heresy of American exceptionalism" in a tense discussion with Jay Lovestone of the Communist Party USA, after Lovestone echoed the arguments of other American communists that the U.S. is independent of the Marxist laws of history "thanks to its natural resources, industrial capacity, and absence of rigid class distinctions."[8][10] The term later moved into general use by intellectuals.[10][11] "American exceptionalism" was rarely used after the 1930s until U.S. newspapers popularized it in the 1980s to describe America's cultural and political uniqueness.
On the otherhand, I hardly ever hear a negative story in the media with regards to EU here in US-media.
As for freedom of speech we don’t really have it when it is against the national security state and imperial ambitions. We jailed Eugene Debs the politician for advocating against entering the first world war. We imprisoned the director of Spirit of ‘76 for making a movie on Yankee Doodle which was supposedly anti-British. We now have multiple tech censorship platforms instructed by politicians and the media to censor and deplatform even more.
We have the dollar as the global reserve currency and we can export our inflation. If a country threatens the dollar as a reserve currency by trying to sell their petrol in different currencies we bomb them to hell.
We have a great medical care system for the rich. The lower and middle class need not apply.
We have more flags on display than anywhere I have traveled to in Europe (maybe I missed their national holidays). Just come to Fleet Week in San Francisco to see the flags and uniforms on full display.
I know that it is all a big deal in US and the Americans I speak with every now and then all proudly always talk that greatness, but I would just care about being able to live a life with dignity with socialised services, government pension, sick days, etc, that do not depend on a specific company benefit but belong to the human being as a human being
So I still believe US has greatness, I can see Jeff Bezos created an empire, but then courier have no rights and people dies in a warehouse peeing in a bottle, I see the greatness of Elon Musk but then he just behaves like a child on twitter with non-sense leeching taxpayers
I've gone a bit off topic, but my point is, I am an employee with a government pension, 8% holiday allowance, sick days contribution that are paid monthly from my salary to the department of welfare with pension plan, as many in Europe, and my boss isn't worth thousand times than the average employee and I am not sure if he's classified in the wealthiest person of the world, I don't mind, we're not exceptional, but do our job and have life, I guess European exceptionalism is the lack of it?
I was just trying to get some perspective, so thanks! I’d like US to adopt some of the EU bits but without losing the entrepreneural drive and atmosphere. I believe some of them are mutually-exclusive.
Also worth noting corporate policies in EU:
> Sometimes European integration is a byproduct of American policy. Stubbornly national elements of policymaking, such as corporation tax, are slowly being mangled into EU matters thanks to American action. A recent American-led push to set a global minimum tax rate for big business has done more to shunt the EU towards a common tax policy than years of nagging and legal tricks by Brussels. Within the EU, low-tax countries such as Ireland and Hungary wield a veto on its tax affairs. Diplomatic force majeure by America overcame that.
Source: https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/06/17/the-eu-made-in-a...
I think their workers have a month of paid time off? The ability to have sick days without receiving them from coworkers? The ability to access socialised health care when they need it without going bankrupt? Paternity and maternity leave which might be nice or not depending on the union country in this case, for Siemens and VW in Germany I guess they have a lot of time off, as Italian I believe Italy doesn't have a good law on paternity leave, but that's improving afaik
--
I think as a system EU is good for being working class, but to be honest in the past few years I've met some cases where I was not happy, I have lived in Germany for few years and I left because the last company I was working with fired 5 people who were trying to set up a worker's union, and my last boss in Netherlands was too self-centric on the way he built his startup, so on his exit he bought a big villa with swimming pool, a new tesla, but of the marketing guy who grew the company 150% YoY for the last 3 years, backend developers and frontend developers, CS, no one got anything
While a friend's company who exit being sold to a US corp, gave even 3k to people who were interns for less than 6 months, and people working there longer got even bigger perks.
So I think bigger companies are more regulated compared to smaller ones, so I am not worried about them, some smaller ones have owners appear to have a big ego and greed drive, which is something I would like to improve in seeing beforehand
EDIT: So I think you shouldn't take anything from working culture, I think you guys should just go back to where you were a while ago
Not convinced. Serious illness can happen to anyone at any time, especially under the stress of running a business, and America has one of the weakest safety nets for a developed country.
> America still has more freedoms (speech especially) than most of the world.
The First Amendment is a great thing, but it can't maintain a culture of free speech on its own. The US's at-will firing (particularly combined with employer-dependent healthcare) means many Americans find it harder to express their views openly than people in other countries.
> Europeans don't give us enough credit. And they're replete with their own crises to always be pointing the finger.
European countries argue a lot, but there's a deep mutual respect underlying it. A willingness to reflect and see what other countries are doing better is vital in the long run.
> We're optimists, but the media is telling us not to be. They want us to yell at each other and drive ourselves into the dirt.
There's definitely a strain of hair-shirt criticism that's more interested in wallowing in self-denigration than making things better. But acknowledging the problems is important too.
US is at the top of the rung amongst OECD health index. The middle class is not too badly positioned. For the poor, there is Medicare: https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/health/
> The First Amendment is a great thing, but it can't maintain a culture of free speech on its own. The US's at-will firing (particularly combined with employer-dependent healthcare) means many Americans find it harder to express their views openly than people in other countries.
US is on par with UK and most OECD nations with regards to civil rights and liberties:
> The jurisdictions that took the top 10 places, in order, were New Zealand, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Denmark, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Estonia, and Germany and Sweden (tied in 9th place). Selected countries rank as follows: Japan (11), the United Kingdom and the United States (tied in 17th place), Taiwan (19), South Korea (26), Chile (30), France (33), South Africa (68), Argentina (70), Mexico (86), Brazil (88), Kenya (93), India (111), Russia (115), Turkey (119), China (129), Saudi Arabia (151), Egypt (157), Iran (158), Venezuela (160), and Syria (162).
28/40 life expectancy 3/40 reported health 18/40 social inequality
I can’t help but feel that that “reported health” is skewed with such a low life expectancy.
For clarity within these rankings the lower the number the better.
The breakdown on your link shows the US is scoring well because of high self-reported health, which seems very likely to be due to cultural factures. The objective part, life expectancy, is below the OECD average, and in line with the Czech Republic or Turkey.
> US is on par with UK and most OECD nations with regards to civil rights and liberties:
Cato is an American institution with its own biases. Just having a glance through their measurements, they consider female genital mutilation to be anti-freedom but male genital mutilation to be fine, and though this is supposedly a report on "negative rights" it considers countries that require people to call other people particular ways to be more free than those who aren't. They consider governmental ownership of industry to inherently reduce economic freedom, when often the opposite is true because of stronger fairness regulations on governments (e.g. privatized utility companies can deny service to individual more easily than governmental ones). And to return to my original point, despite talking about the importance of economic freedom and quoting Trotsky, their report doesn't even examine cases where people are excluded from employment through mechanisms other than law.
I am really surprised that this game still works, US needed USSR as an enemy to unite workers and keep them aligned in order to produce to fight communism, now it's the time of Russia and China, and "regimes", that from one side are being depicted as an enemy to fight and against which the people need to unite, and from another side are being used by corporations in order to manufacture and to grow their user base, I would suggest to Americans to stop caring about the enemy in China and to start caring more about their enemies in congress and in the CEO office
China is not our friend, we would do well to be wary as recent counter intelligence activities have shown.
The enemies in congress and corporations are two sides of the same coin. It's often all the same people moving back and forth between government, NGO, corporations, lobbying, media and then back again.
Corporations use their access to capital to capture market share often at the expense of a local / small business. While 'value engineering' everything until it's shitty.
The US is at worst mediocre amongst the developed countries, but people can't shut up about how terrible it is.
Every country has their issues, yet no other developed democracy cops it like the US.
Especially after Jan 6 riots and the absence of a bipartisan response to this event. It is hard to discount the notion that the US is about 1 or 2 election cycles away from a society changing political crisis. Peaceful transfer of power no longer seems like a given.
1 data based point and 1 anecdote news/item.
1) America is considered a flawed democracy [1].
2) A recent tweet [2] from Gavin Newsom highlights pervasive political fragmentation across the US. Using same legal mechanisms applied by Texas and considered by other red states to curtail abortion access, in this case to curtail access to assault rifles.
Your comment you say "we need more unity". As an outsider I cannot foresee an easy / pragmatic way for the US to move closer to such a goal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
[2] https://twitter.com/GavinNewsom/status/1469865185493983234
like what an authoritarian tried to do on Jan 6?
> We need more unity.
yes but how do you unite a deeply divided nation?
The global logistical issues caused by COVID, alongside China's recent belligerence, are seeing to the reversal of a certain amount of globalisation.
>Our capital is being invested into the capabilities of rivals, and it doesn't pay dividends. Americans have been turned into buyers of cheap plastic goods, and we've lost the ability to make our own critical components and wares. Huge mistake, driven in part by these narratives.
This was driven by large US companies seeking profits by offshoring the labour force to where the costs are absolutely minimised. I've believed for a long time that the US willingly and obliviously handed China the keys to the kingdom.
Additionally, the US has managed to dismantle much of the soft-power facade that used to be so well maintained.
There are no "well behaved" countries. Comparison with others is a zero-sum game. Self-analysis is required in order to know how to be better. Denial leads to repeating mistakes.
>Europeans don't give us enough credit. And they're replete with their own crises to always be pointing the finger.
Isn't The Economist a US publication? Looking at the About FAQ, I'm guessing they're US-based since the answer to this question:
Where is your head office?
Contains no reference to a city or country, but a street and a building, thus assuming a fair bit of local knowledge. Such a US trait.
The modern, global version of The Economist was created in “the tower”, as journalists refer to the tallest of the three brutalist concrete buildings that make up the Smithson Plaza (formerly The Economist Plaza) in St James’s Street. Commissioned by The Economist and designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, the tower was our home from 1964 until the summer of 2017, when we moved into the Adelphi, a 1930s art-deco office block on the Embankment.
I'm guessing they're not in Bruges.
"The Economist Group (legally The Economist Newspaper Limited) is a media company headquartered in London, England. It is best known as publisher of The Economist newspaper and its sister lifestyle magazine, 1843."
Sweden is 10 million people, arguably more egalitarian, but moving from <25% to >75% in Sweden is not nearly the same thing as going from the <25% of EU (say, most of the population of Romania) to >75% of EU.
Swedes at the 25% mark are probably in the 75% percentile for Romania already.
Obviously there is more to it, but it's a tricky comparison.
When I moved to Switzerland as a software engineer, I was considered a high earner, at the same time I didn't feel high on the social ladder as I was a foreigner.
Of course the real redistribution is the expropriation of the fruits of surplus labor time by those who work to heirs who do not. Redistribution in this context is giving value back to the workers who created that value.
The notion that created wealth is made by workers is not one that Marx credits to himself, but to another revolutionary - Benjamin Franklin.
* This is a survey published in 2018 with (survey) data gathered in two months of 2016
* mobility data comes from a different source for each country and they vary wildly in the period covered. Notable Italy and US data is post 2008 and the others pre 2008. Looks like there’s as much as a 12 year difference in child earning data across countries.
* sample characteristics (the income question mentioned in other posts, not clear these are used for quintiles):
* US 20k, 20-40k, 40-70k, 70k+
* UK £1.5k/mo, £1.5-2.5k/mo, £2.5-3k/mo, £3k+/mo
* FR (UK ranges but €)
* IT <€(?)1.5k/mo, 1.5-2.45k/mo, 2.45-3.35k/mo, 3.35k+/mo
* SE (SEK) <33k/mo, 33-42k/mo, 42-58k/mo, 58k+/mo
* population samples per bracket differ most between US and EU, EU comparisons are pretty similar. Nearly 2x income bracket 1 pop and sample % in EU(.27-.33) vs US (.16/.18)
* From what I’ve found 2004 (UK data) £ conversion rate to USD was ~1.9. (2012)€ was ~1.34. USD and Italy are from 2011-2012, a 2012 $ is 0.82¢ in 2004 $s. So 70k=57.6k and £3000/mo=04$68.4k=12$83.1k, €3000/mo=12$46.8k
* age dist differs non-UK EU has fewer under 30.(~.2 vs .27)
So the lowest UK rate is ~2x the lowest US rate, the US rate is a smaller portion of the pop/sample, and the US upper rate is nearly 1.5-2x of the sample as the Non-US (.39 vs .17-26). The EU top rate is ~0.56 the US top rate when converted to $ using 2012 numbers.
There’s also another important dynamic here. 2011-2012 was the European debt crisis. Italy, in particular, saw a big unemployment spike over the course of the selected years.
[the study](https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20162015)
Where in the world is it easiest to get rich? | Harald Eia | TEDxOslo
This all resonates well with my own beliefs, so I’m sure I’m biased. But good free education for everyone, automation to free up the lower rungs of the workforce and increase productivity, social safety net to make people less concerned about layoffs and work fluctuations.
If only the wealthy supported these policies, they would be more wealthy!
Basically, I think the US is likely the best for generational family mobility. I have seen this story many times with immigrants. The immigrants come over and work often very menial jobs. Their kids study hard and go to colleges and end up as white collar jobs. Their kids in turn (the grandkids) often go to elite colleges and end up with elite careers (lawyers, doctors, etc).
What makes you think this doesn't happen so much in other countries?
Lots of possible cause/effect: child-free lifestyles, exalting the even modestly well-off who choose to leave their children nothing, long-established families who have lost a living connection to their immigrant forebears, etc.
"Families are always rising and falling in America."
Neither wealth nor income is zero sum. Zero sum analyses are therefore not useful IMHO.
Simply earning more doesn't move your social class.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29485673
This article is from 2018 and the comment got no upvotes.
Strange little bubble here on HN.
This is my experience in Australia, which isn't as far along in the progression towards uber-capitalism as the US.
I genuinely try (although admittedly regularly fail) to avoid making generalisations as you are alluding to.
I happen to support a legal right to abortion, but I also understand why people don't like it. Let democracy decide. Let science provide research facts and figures. Let religions have their doctrines.