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Comment by twobitshifter | Hacker News Reader

I think the first step is to admit we have a problem. People don’t like the United States being labeled as anything less than exceptional. If you look at the Amazon workers, Uber drivers, door dashers, etc in this country it’s amazing how hard people can work and not get ahead. 2nd and 3rd jobs can be necessary to just make ends meet. The story that hard work is all it takes in America does need to be questioned.

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Talk with any patriotic person and you'll quickly notice that American exceptionalism relies on comparing the United States to the worst countries in the world and ignoring the existence of other developed nations. Eventually followed by "well at least we can talk about it, unlike <authoritative country where people disappear>" and so therefore all indiscretions must be absolved and ignorable since we have the "unique" ability to criticize the government at all, which isn't unique or exceptional or a well implemented vehicle of change.

"Yeah, well Liberia also rejected the metric system".

"Yeah, well Eritrea also taxes it's ex-patriots."

"Yeah well, Cops in Brazil will beat you up too"

...or, worse, when a comparison with another developed country is brought up, its successes are simply rejected as the result of eeeeevil socialism, which destroys freedom, don't you know.

or a generic assumption of high taxes in a completely different tax system, while not understanding their own tax system

There's a few ways to look at the data. One is that it's harder to move to the top quintile in America than some other countries, and people perceive it's much easier than it in in America compared to those places.

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).

> The other is that it's much easier to get out of the lower quintile in America than those same countries.

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.

Actually, yeah, that graph is for probability or "remaining" which I missed. Thanks for the heads up.

Even beyond that, interpreting financial mobility is a tricky thing. For example, countries that have had high levels of meritocracy in the past may exhibit less financial mobility because people are already sorted into their merited economic brackets.

How can "merited economic brackets" span generations?

Genes. Of course people like you don't believe in genes, but it explains most things we see here. It is really hard to make poor people successful even if you give them resources, a top 10% childhood is extremely cheap compared to how much society derives from those, if it was that easy then Governments would already mass produce those.

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.

What's a "person like me" ? What do I believe? Or not believe?

I guess this is because we do not have blue blood:(

The answer to your comment is obviously genes, so the only reason anyone would write in such a comment is that they reject that explanation. Blank slate people are always everywhere in threads like this.

Wrong.

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

Culture / upbringing tend to be passed on to some extent from one generation to the next, unless every child is raised in state boarding schools. And on the innate side, whether one hits the genetic lottery is correlated with whether one's parents and grandparents hit the genetic lottery.

For all of its problems, the core concept of a meritocracy is that you don't get positions in life simply based on ancestry.

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 amazing how hard people can work and not get ahead

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.

For a lot of people, it's not about how hard or how smart one works.

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.

All those immigrants streaming over the border with nothing manage to do it. Nobody said it was easy, but it is possible.

You've got data on how many southern-border-crossing immigrants make it into the US middle class? I couldn't find any.

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.

So, for example, all those news stories about DACA immigrants are fake news?

"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...

I think most people recognize that a life growing up in the USA followed by the legal right to work and live here is a fairly huge step up in socioeconomic status from where most DACA-covered folk would have been had they not come to the USA.

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).

I'm not refuting the TFA. I am refuting the notion that people in American cannot move upwards. There is no group more disadvantaged than immigrants, who arrive with nothing, have no support structure, are discriminated against, and often don't even know the language. Yet they can and do succeed, as the DACA cohort shows.

Nothing in the TFA or anyone's comments (dangerously broad, I know) said that people could NOT move upwards.

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.

With so much income inequality, differences in savings rates cannot possibly be that important.

What you do with the savings makes all the difference. For example, you could invest it to upgrade your job skills, making for a much higher income level. Investing it at the current negative 4% or so is not much better than setting it on fire.

Investing in yourself is only worth it if you are better than average. People who aren't just waste time and money trying. But if you are better than average then investing in yourself is huge. That is essentially the only reason investing in a start-up would be better than just investing in someone else's start-up, you have to bet that you are better than the other people. And then if you keep reinvesting in yourself and you are consistently better than the CEO's of big companies then you become a billionaire, but of course most people don't generate those returns when you invest in them.

> Investing in yourself is only worth it if you are better than average.

Investing in yourself is how you become better than average.

I'm saddened by the persistent negativity I see here. Buck up, dude!

That's really not how.

But I would just say the same thing. The differences in income inequality are going to completely swamp any such effect from differences in spending.

Maybe paying for college is an exception to the rule -- only because of all the grants, scholarships, loans, and income-based tuition.

Plumbing, welding, etc., are very well paying trades one can train for. College is hardly the only path to leveraging oneself into a more lucrative career.

I wasn't saying college was the only path. I was saying it's the only place where the amount of money you SPEND on "leveraging yourself" isn't broadly determined by your income.

> It's not how hard one works, it's how smart one works.

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.

> People don’t like the United States being labeled as anything less than exceptional.

I mean, it _is_ exceptional. Americans, per the article, are exceptionally overly optimistic about social mobility.

This is the fundamental barrier toward progress in this country: The idea that America is somehow already perfect.

This kind of complaint is usually made by people who haven't lived in other, more socialist first world countries, for example in Europe. If you would have the chance to do so, you would realize how bad it is in Europe when you're stocking shelves or driving a taxi.

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