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TheOtherHobbes

It's almost entirely based on your skills, the decisions you make, and your privileged background.

You're just not going to get past the first few rounds of the entrepreneur game if you're not a certain kind of person.

The US has terrible social mobility. Objectively, by any measure. This isn't up for debate.

Guess which state is #1 for social mobility?

Wrong. It's Utah, which is a low bar because it's 28th by GDP.

How about CA? 38th for mobility. TX? 45th.

It's a mythology of meritocracy excusing inherited privilege.

https://www.archbridgeinstitute.org/social-mobility-in-the-5...

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From your link:

Four Pillars of Social Mobility: To rank each state, we measured a series of indicators related to social mobility across four pillars: Entrepreneurship and Growth, Institutions and the Rule of Law, Education and Skills Development, and Social Capital. Scores for each pillar were combined and weighted equally to create a state’s overall social mobility score.

I would think a measure of social mobility would include income percentile vs parents' income percentile.

Here, this one uses the simplest metric possible; a poor child is much more likely to remain poor in the US than in the other rich western countries looked at.

https://www.businessinsider.com/american-dream-social-econom...

https://osf.io/preprints/osf/tb3qz_v1

Only if you're trying to be objective. "Social mobility" in this case is their invented metric to arrive at their prearranged outcome for the study.

> percentile vs parents' income percentile.

Wouldn't this be a much worse metric? It would have to net out to zero change on average by the definition of percentiles. If we take abs change to look at both downward and upward mobility, the measure wouldn't tell us where most downward mobility happened, up and down could all happen within the bottom 25% and none in the top 75% and this metric would say we are highly social mobile if there was a lot of movement there.

This is nonsense.

The US is full of billionaires who came from underprivileged positions.

Infact, your advice is worse than wrong, it is actively harmful, because you're discouraging people from trying by (falsely) telling them that their efforts don't matter and they were destined to fail from birth.

No, this is apparently information that clashes strongly with your prior beliefs. The US is packed solid with underprivileged adults who came from underprivileged positions, and highly privileged adults who came from highly privileged positions - regardless of whether it has a dozen counterexamples.

https://osf.io/preprints/osf/tb3qz_v1

You don't even need to look for the count of billionaires. My grandparents were poor-as-dirt farmers. My dad's education stopped at high school. He even went to a one-room schoolhouse until he was 14.

My brother and I are both college educated and, while not "rich", have a lifestyle and income my grandparents could have only dreamed about.

It is truly painful to watch people preach learned helplessness through failure and destitution as the only possible outcome.

This is common in Europe as well. I would guess more common than in the US.

It's a lot more common for children of poor parents to stay poor in the US than in (most of) Europe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index

Most people in mainland Europe are poor by American middle-class standards.

People living in Europe don't seem to agree, since they have the same access to credit cards and yet just choose to spend less.

Why oh why do Europeans in general choose to spend less than americans?

The relevant metric is not “did your grandparents farm” but “where in the socioeconomic continuum were your parents, and where are you”. In the US, these two answers are more likely to match than in other rich Western countries.

And need to compare with countries outside the US. It's misleading to try and talk about differences between states.

There are ~250 $1 million+ lottery winners in the US every year.

There are ~750 billionaires in total.

The average American has a better chance of becoming a billionaire through hard work and prudent investments if, at age 18, they decide to live in a cardboard box underneath a bridge and steal metals from construction sites to sell for cash to be used to purchase lottery tickets.

They can then win the multi-million-dollar prize and invest that wisely to reach billionaire status.

Easy! Why doesn't everyone do it?

Who are these billionaires from underprivileged backgrounds ?

> Who are these billionaires from underprivileged backgrounds ?

Larry Ellison, Oprah, François Pinault, Howard Schultz, Jan Koum, Kenneth Langone, Ralph Lauren, Sheldon Adelson, JK Rowling, George Soros, John Paul DeJoria… to name just a few.

I took a name randomly from your list, Sheldon Adelson:

“He began his business career at the age of 12 when he borrowed $200 from his uncle (equivalent to $3,385 in 2023) and purchased a license to sell newspapers in Boston.[23] In 1948, at the age of 15, he borrowed $10,000 (equivalent to $126,814 in 2023) from his uncle to start a candy vending-machine business.[24]”

I am not disputing that it’s possible to go from rags to riches. But don’t you find it ironic that a list of people who supposedly fit the description, doesn’t actually fit the description?

Where’s my rich uncle?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Adelson

Francois Pinault is French, and inherited a family business, that’s quite an upstart.

Rowling was British and had genuine financial issues, but lucked out with her book.

The US has very low average/median social mobility (and it'll only get worse due to insane education policies and less standardized testing), but it has very high variance.

Going from $15k a year to $150k is a lot more common in Europe,, but doing from $150k to $150m is a lot more common in the US, and it's the latter that creates most of the value.

You know that Sweden has a higher percentage of self made billionaires than the US?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/sweden-b...

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