Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevear | Hacker News Reader

I am really glad someone else has noticed this and feels the same way.

This quote from that thread pissed me off all morning: "If you told the common man any time in history other than the baby boomer generation, that the way to get rich was 'hard work' and 'Budgeting' they would die of laughter."

Every day I feel more and more alienated by the victim mentality on Reddit. It seems to be the only tangible by-product of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

I don't even know why I visit Reddit anymore.

View on HN

Why are you pissed off? That quote seems basically accurate, although we can quibble about how far back we have to go for it it apply and what exactly qualifies as the "common man".

Through much of history, hard work and budgeting where not the road to riches--they were the road to not starving or, in good times, to being reasonably well off. The path to being rich was often blocked by ethnic background, religious background, or social class.

Yes, some people were able to break through those barriers, but that usually took more than just hard work and budgeting. They needed luck or brilliance.

I'm not sure why you would find that quote so offensive, but to be fair, the disillusioned youth on Reddit are probably just as sensitive to the "anyone can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps" assertions by smug boomers (like the GP). Such a world-view is increasingly at odds with an economic reality in which income inequality is higher than its been in decades, and growing.

High income inequality is not at odds with the ability for folks lift themselves out of poverty or social mobility in general.

It may not be inherently at odds, no, but I haven't seen any evidence or studies that social mobility is in any way increasing - and it does seem counter-intuitive that social mobility could increase at the same time as income inequality.

http://www.economist.com/node/15908469

"How rising inequality affects social mobility is still unclear. Those born since inequality started to rise sharply are only just now becoming adults. However there are some troubling signs according to two papers to be presented at the Tobin Project, an alliance of scholars, this month. Christopher Jencks of Harvard University finds that income inequality has been accompanied by a widening gap in college attendance. Ms Sawhill argues that a rising correlation between income levels, likelihood of marriage and level of education will make society more stagnant."

"It may not be inherently at odds, no, but I haven't seen any evidence or studies that social mobility is in any way increasing - and it does seem counter-intuitive that social mobility could increase at the same time as income inequality."

The Internet has given many more people opportunities..if they choose to take it. There is so much free information out there..there's no reason why more people aren't able to pick up a new skill and bring themselves out of poverty.

If you don't have the Internet, pretty much every city in the US has free access at a library.

There's more to social mobility than just skill, however. As a hypothetical example, if a currently poor person who is genetically/psychologically predisposed to shyness and introversion learns a new skill, they'll still have the difficulty of forming the social connections necessary to know how to apply that skill toward generating life-altering levels of income.

But high income inequality and low social mobility (low social mobility isn't particularly in question) together as facts are at odds with a significant likelihood of folks to lift themselves out of poverty. Proving the "ability" is an existence proof about the future probability of anyone in the class escaping poverty being nonzero, and sets a very low bar for what is acceptable for society, in my opinion.

Yeah I don't know how a country full of people who have been conned by their government over and over again could feel like victims...

That's not "rich". That's called working for the man. It is depressing because of the jobs out there are bullshit jobs. No one needs to be stacking shelves at walmart or the gap - people can click on amazon.

If you take a real look around much of the economy is this b.s. burger flipping and shelf stacking, and much of the rest are the welfare queens otherwise known as government employees and corporate managers. There is such an epic wastage of the world's human resources that anyone in the know would cry themselves to sleep. Occupy Wall Street is nothing in comparison to the scale of the problem.

Though your post was probably downvoted for its unrealistic pessimism, I have to agree with the idea that much of humanity's labor is wasted. The question remains, however, what do people do with their time, and how do they feed themselves, when their labor is entirely replaced by machines?

That is the zillion dollar question right there. We're facing it now and it's only going to get worse.

The economic system we have in place now seems like it breaks down when a portion of your population cannot join the workforce in any sort of useful fashion.

I don't think you can solve this problem with the current ideologies of the common American. It goes against the "core values" of many Americans so any attempt to change the system will be met with much opposition.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com