Comment by mbfg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mbfg | Hacker News Reader

I think a big part of the despair is the obvious difference between what children are taught is the american dream vs what the american reality is.

We are told america is the best place on earth with all the doors open to you to be rich. That all other forms of government are flawed and we have excellence here everywhere you look.

And then you look at reality and see something else. Sure there are pockets of excellence and the dream still lives in fits and starts, but for the general person, they are likely shut out from any real hope of this grand vision.

You add in COVID and the lockdowns, and economic turmoil, and then people start realizing that the whole race is kind of pointless. I can be poor busting my butt at a crappy job i hate, or i can be poor moving in with family and being 'unproductive' (for some definition of societal unproductivity).

Women, on the other hand, haven't been given the same advertising on the American dream that men have, which obviously is a terrible thing, but in this one sense probably helped them survive and prosper even when life sucks in a modern world.

I'm supposing the sell-job of an equivalence of the 'american' dream in other countries is not nearly so commercial, and blaring. And so kids are likely not so shocked at the difference between expectations and reality. Throw in that many other countries are flat out better in many social structural ways, and i think that explains why, it's especially troubling in America.

>Women, on the other hand, haven't been given the same advertising on the American dream that men have

There is a documentary, "Born Rich" [0]. It's interviews with the children of very rich people, done by one of their peers. I noticed that in the film there is stark difference between the girls and the boys: the girls were all well adjusted, enjoying their wealth, happy, satisfied, seemingly well-aware of their good fortune; but for ALL the boys wealth meant having a full-blown existential crisis.

This is oblique support for your claim: the classic American dream for women results in being taken care of by a wealthy man in a nice house, maybe with kids, where even house duties become negligible if he's really rich. But men and boys are supposed to work, first at learning then finding something you like then getting good at it. Your work defines you in a very profound way - a profundity that is reflected in our last names. If you're a rich boy, it's like you've been denied an identity. (I recall one of the young men who, to save his sanity, disavowed his inheritance to take a job as an oil field worker. And he seemed the best adjusted of the boys.).

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_Rich_(2003_film)

Well thats depressing, I saw a similar documentary that didnt really have anything stark across gender lines, but did show how some private high school students in NYC had trouble reconciling their circumstance with the public housing across the street. The most apt similarity being how one boy took his life after pushing the school administration to lower admission costs for needy.

It's a uniquely American thing.

I studied abroad for a semester in England, and in one of the classes I took there the (Australian) professor asked us what socioeconomic class we thought we belonged to. It was a good university, but most of the British kids answered "working class." When he asked "Why?" they answered, "Because our parents work."

That always stuck with me. In England, the aristocracy is alive and well. They don't have to work, and they don't pretend to. They do live comfortably, but they're highly educated and reasonably well adjusted. They don't have to partake in the charade that they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, and they generally don't blow their family's fortune over a debauched decade in Vegas like their American counterparts either.

They also haven’t invented or built anything meaningful in several hundred years…

The Royal Society would disagree

I think the Royal Society could probably be considered biased.

The English or rich kids?

If the former, it might be worth remembering that ARM, which many consider the be the next big leap in computing (there was a thread saying it just yesterday) is an English company. Of course I could give many more examples, the technology you're using to post this comment for one, but I think I've made my point.

If the latter, I imagine thats too generic a group to say

The aristocracy. The staleness at the top has made Europe globally weak and bordering on irrelevant. (Not that the US in its current trajectory is all that far behind)

Except for the WWW, of course.

Wasn't Alan Turing English and middle class?

That must have been a former polytechnic. I'm willing to be most university students in the UK would say they are middle class. Oxbridge is full of the upper class (although that is slowly changing).

The definition of "middle class" in the UK is different... Unintuitively middle class denotes a social standing well into the top decile - members of the middle class would be typically educated with a graduate or professional degree, top-5% salary, multiple properties, children in private schools. (Whereas in the US, any white collar person - so basically half the population - is "middle class".)

Yes, the UK middle class is over-represented at Oxbridge, but the definition is so narrow that they are outnumbered by the lower classes - state school kids and other riff-raff constitute two-thirds of Oxbridge classes, especially outside the upper-class signal subjects like Classics.

>top-5% salary

Well that's hardly the middle is it.

It's not the median but not intended to be - it is in the middle between the upper class (<1%) and the lower class, which used to be more than 90%; it's a description of all the professional jobs (doctors, lawyers, merchants) which are neither serf/farmer/servant/laborer nor the upper class.

Isn't this because British people see class a bit differently? Like you can win the lottery but don't consider yourself upper class because you weren't born in the right family/attended the right schools/whatever? Same as you can be down to your last penny, but you are from the Duke's family or whatnot and still consider yourself upper class?

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

"A million one, a million two / A hundred more will never do" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XCQNpjWmRE

I’ve tried to articulate this a few times but you’ve bested all of my attempts.

> We are told america is the best place on earth with all the doors open to you to be rich. That all other forms of government are flawed and we have excellence here everywhere you look.

What other countries are great compared to America? With all its flaws America is the only country where you can dream of building spaceships, create multi billion dollar tech companies in less than a decade.

Any ideology that forces individual to be less ambitious for the prosperity of the group only gives more power to the enforcer's of the ideology. As an insider you may not realize how powerful America's culture of individual freedom has impact on other countries.

I was collecting FANG salaries in the states. I was in the 1% for my age, and most people would consider this the "American dream".

I was miserable.

I moved to Japan with a much lower income, but my standard of living is so much more higher.

> you may not realize how powerful America's culture of individual freedom has impact on other countries

Does individual freedom include not wearing masks? Does individual freedom include feeling unsafe from crime?

Japan feels much safer than any urban center in America, especially during this pandemic. This feeling of taking public transit without anxiety throughout the pandemic alone is already worth forgoing those FANG salaries.

I grew up in Portland, Oregon. That place has deteriorated. Parts of San Francisco is more dangerous than Vietnam or Egypt. NYC is filled with confrontation for all sorts of minor problems, none of which you would ever face in Tokyo.

> Any ideology that forces individual to be less ambitious for the prosperity of the group only gives more power to the enforcer's of the ideology.

This is not inherently unique to America or individual liberty. In fact, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is based on the idea that the whole benefits because the individual is acting in their own self regard, not altruistically for society at large.

Asian countries are collectivist with much less individual freedom.

> What other countries are great compared to America? With all its flaws America is the only country where you can dream of building spaceships, create multi billion dollar tech companies in less than a decade.

Speaking of great, how about China? China's bullet train networks span longer than the rest of the world combined. All of that was built within a decade. They have spaceships and unicorns too.

what kind of work do you do in Japan?

> the only country where you can dream of building spaceships, create multi billion dollar tech companies in less than a decade

And all you need is hard work, persistence, and a couple tens of millions burning a hole in your back pocket... and a legion of people, like you, who don't have that kind of capital to do the heavy lifting.

What percent of top tech companies were funded by multiple millions in personal or family money? We're on YC's website, which invests $500k in startups ($125k until just recently). I thought most startups were venture funded.

Many startups get a lot of family and friends funding. On top of this - a lot of startups are having someone do unpaid work before they get funded. This usually means someone had support to pay rent, food, insurance, etc.

Varies a lot but all the people I know who are relatively young and doing startups come from pretty wealthy families.

With all its flaws America is the only country where you can dream of building spaceships...

Pedantically, literally anyone anywhere can dream of building spaceships. But let's examine that claim on the basis of people who have actually done it.

- Musk has, but he's South African.

- Bezos crossed the Kármán line so he's done it, but he hasn't reached orbit yet so calling New Shepherd a 'spaceship' is a slightly dubious claim.

- Branson hasn't either and he's British anyway.

- Carmack isn't in the news for space stuff any more, so maybe he's given up?

Looking at the evidence of 'billionaires and their space toys', I think 'not Americans' are a little ahead.

> Musk has, but he's South African.

Musk is a US citizen and he did all of this in the US. The point is about the opportunity provided by the country, not about where you were raised.

He moved to the US when he was 19. He didn't grow up with "the American Dream".

Musk was born wealthy. So I'd say he grew up with more than "the American Dream"

He moved to the US after reading a lot of tech publications and realizing that that's where all the action was

> With all its flaws America is the only country where you can dream of building spaceships, create multi billion dollar tech companies in less than a decade.

Why are these top priorities? Metrics like happiness seem like much more valuable metrics than number of spaceships or massive tech companies.

> "What other countries are great compared to America? With all its flaws America is the only country where you can dream of building spaceships, create multi billion dollar tech companies in less than a decade."

--to be honest, the vast majority of people just don't care, because it is completely detached from any experience they have, and is in fact kind of obnoxious to them. To them, your evidence is a category error.

How do countries treat their poor->lower middle class, is more salient for a judge of societal excellence, for them. Is a country interested in raising the ceiling or the floor? America has always been focused on raising the ceiling.

Why can't you dream of that in other countries? I come from Sweden and I don't see why swedes baby have those dreams (or realize them in Sweden). Example multi billion dollar companies; Spotify, Klarna (to name a few). We do have SAAB Aerospace and we do have launchpads for rockets. Then, we're less than half the inhabitants of NYC so our course it's less chance that we at any moment in time have any people building rockets than the US (with 30 times more people).

I have a hard time seeing we're unique.

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