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Comment by didgetmaster | Hacker News Reader

Every discussion about the 'top 10%' seems to make the underlying assumption that the set of people who fall under that category are consistent. While there are certainly individuals who enter the top 10% (or top 1%) and stay there; there are large numbers of people who move in and out of those categories.

For me personally, I am in the top 10%; but a few decades ago, I was not.

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The statistical evidence for your claim is not good. There is certainly a generational effect in that 5 year olds are typically not in the upper decile, simply because they generally have little to no individual wealth or income. But in the USA at least, most people die in the same decile they were born into.

Something I've seen a lot is claims about individuals being self made, climbing the ladder from grit and ingenuity and such. Look at Bezos, he's an example of climbing the ladder! Or Zuckerberg!

And when you dig a bit more, you kinda find out this isn't really true?

I mean look at this AI summary of asking "Was Jeff Bezos born into wealth"

> Jeff Bezos was not born into wealth; his mother was a 17-year-old student and his adoptive father was an impoverished Cuban refugee who arrived in the U.S. alone at age 16. However, his maternal grandfather owned a large Texas ranch and later provided roughly $250,000 to help fund the launch of Amazon

Oh so his parents weren't wealthy only his grandparents. That's totally different

You know what my Grandpa gave me? A used car worth about 3 grand. Still amazing, I'm still very grateful to him! But the comparison here is absolutely not in the same league!

And I'm still a fortunate one, because many people get much less than a car from their families

The question is how many people get $250k from their family and lose it all.

Everyone's life is a mix of skill and luck, so to discredit skill, you would need to quantify the luck. An easy example is a lottery winner, a hard example is a Bezos. Any investor with the foresight to see what Bezos could do with grans money, would jump past her in line and give him triple.

> The question is how many people get $250k from their family and lose it all

I don't think that really matters? The fact that they even had that shot at all is such an incredible opportunity above people whose family simply cannot afford to even try

But if you have the skill to turn $250k into much more money, anyone with $250k and that knowledge will give it to you.

There are far far more stories of investors giving nascent broke startups money than families.

You have to have access to far more than $250k to be willing to blow that creating a startup. I may give my kids $250k for a house to live in. I do not have enough for them to yolo it on a dot com startup.

Exactly! And while a well off person may have a memory of a time in their life when they were not doing well (like in school, starting their career etc.) that can be misleading. You tend to end up like your parents more then was true three or four generations ago for many reasons: tax policy, less physical mobility, people tending more to marry with similar levels of education or income.

People debate how much social mobility there is in the US, but it seems pretty clear that the trend has been toward less mobility. The founding fathers of the US did not want to replace one aristocracy with another. Obviously there are some who think the change makes sense-- not me.

This is bourgeois idealism. In reality, the people in the top 10% remain there and rarely fall

This is a good point I haven't considered in the past and worth to take into the overall discussion.

Here's what I found asking AI:

  US Household Wealth Distribution (Q1 2026, Fed DFA)

  Group       | Share of US Total Net Worth
  ------------|-------------------------
  Top 0.1%    | 14.4%
  Top 1%      | 31.6%
  Top 10%     | 67.9%
              | 
  Bottom 90%  | 32.1%
  Bottom 50%  | 2.5%

So, the top 10% holds roughly as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined.

The top 1% alone holds more than the entire bottom 90% minus the upper-middle segment.

To be in the top 10% you would need roughly 1,8 Million $ in assets (that's probably 90% of HN useerbase)

Basically, the bottom 50% are a slave class that doesn't even participate in the economy.

LE: The richest 20% are the only ones powering the U.S. economy, per Moody's Zandi. K-shaped economy all the way.

Those numbers for 2026 may be right, but they absolutely do not mean that anyone who finds themselves in one of those categories must stay there.

While there are many people who are currently in the bottom 50% and will probably stay there; no one is a slave who has to stay there.

My original post (which is somehow unpopular on HN) points this out. I spent my first 30 years in that group and worked my way out of it.

>no one is a slave who has to stay there

That's like saying not everyone who finds themselves homeless must stay homeless, as if they can just choose to go buy a house.

>I spent my first 30 years in that group and worked my way out of it.

And what did the job market look like over the those 30 years versus today? You probably weren't competing with infinity AI bots at every resume application.

Not here to steal your thunder and deny your individual success story, but the tired "I pulled myself by my bootstraps" doesn't mean anything to the people who are strugling.

The vast majority of the homeless in the US, are homeless by choice. They are addicted to drugs and/or refuse to get a job.

You don't have to be able to afford to buy a nice house in order to escape living on the streets.

You might think that my story is tired, but literally millions of people in this country have done the same thing. Telling people who are struggling that they can't improve, certainly doesn't help.

You are making the common mistake of confusing two different things: the absolute capacity for an individual to improve their income over their lifetime, and the relative capacity to improve based on their current decile. If progress depended solely on merit, you would expect economic growth to be more or less evenly distributed across the percentiles---the "rising tide raises all boats" idea. That this doesn't happen suggests that people in higher deciles not only have more wealth, but are more likely to acquire additional wealth. Many wealthy people---and even some poorer ones---maintain that this is because the wealthy must be more industrious. But the vast majority of wealthy people started life in the upper deciles. And it's clear that having wealth makes it easier to make more wealth.

If you doubt this, consider the following thought experiment: imagine two strangers, identical in ability. One wins a million dollars in the lottery, the other is poor. If you were forced to wager your net worth on which twin is likely to make the most money over the next 12 months, who would you bet on? Now think about what kind of qualities would it take to get you to change your bet. How much smarter and harder working would the man with nothing have to be to overcome the advantage of a million dollars? Or even $100,000? You might say, yes, maybe in one year money would have the advantage---but surely an advantage in industriousness would win out in the long run? The mathematical answer is no, because the lottery winner will have a bigger advantage at the beginning of year 2 than he did at the start. If you bet on him in year 1, the bet is even surer in year 2. The reality is that he will continue to pull away. And that's what we see in the real world distribution of wealth: the gap between the wealthiest decile and the next poorest continues to expand, creating increasing social and political strain, as we can plainly see today.

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