It may take awhile, but it ends by voting in political candidates that actually care about combatting greed and corruption again
With no clear options the only visible path to building a modicum of wealth is timing the next big crypto rugpull, hitting a 5 leg parlay, ripping a shiny charizard etc...
We can (and should) try and regulate away this kind of gambling but the underlying problem remains.
But it does fit the ultralibertarian mindset best, I guess. The right to the pursuit of happiness, not to actually getting it.
It is crazy to me that even when faced with the most irredeemable industry, one that is predicated on abusing addiction and human irrationality, one that takes and gives back nothing, the first reaction to this is to brush all of that off and go "but what about the construction permits?"
The American adoration for anything 'private' knows no bounds. When our corporate overlords will be scamming, poisoning and forming quasi-dictatorships to rule over us all for profit, they'll still be cheering that at least it's not one of those pesky public governments.
...and winning a life's fortune via gambling is even less viable. I agree with what you're saying about the lack of guaranteed paths to prosperity but turning to gambling is not a logical outcome stemming from it. There is no logic in gambling at all. It is purely a vice that preys on people's weaknesses.
Building wealth through real estate is also still totally possible outside of the HCOL metro areas. Try unfashionable areas like Cleveland or Oklahoma City. And let's not have any low-effort comments claiming that there are no good jobs available in those places: the actual economic data on median income to housing price ratios tells another story.
I am sympathetic to this argument, but there are problems. How do you get homes built if you make this change?
It's the land under the house that typically appreciates. Land is unlikely to depreciate unless the broader regional economy declines.
When you have a house you get basically a special token to have a house built under the codes, zoning, and other restrictions that were in place when it was built. And possibly the permission to build it all. Also a token that includes getting utilities, etc under the old rules. In many places this may have been done back in the 60s when "a guy and his pickup truck" could just build a house with almost no questions asked, and many of them were done that way. These tokens are generally appreciating (NIMBYism, increasing regulatory challenge, etc), commonly faster than the actual physical materials in the house are depreciating.
Coming back to why the burnt out trailers are worth $100k+ on $35k land where I'm at even though you'll just have to pay to raze them
1) It includes planning/zoning pre-approval, just re-do the same structure on the standing foundation and you won't have to spend a gazillion dollars doing everything back to the new rules.
2) The presence of the house includes the ability to use debt to mortgage the land up to a gazillion dollars. The exact same piece of land magically becomes mortgageable with the burnt out unusuable trailer on it, which let people bid the price to infinity during the covid era, then locked into high rates no one will give up. Meanwhile, I got one of these pieces of land for ~1/3 the price the exact equivalent raw land value was rolled into on mortgageable properties.
Think about it this way. If I build a house with the cheapest, shittiest, materials and the most illegalist of Mexicans 30 years ago. And then pass a bunch of laws that say nobody gets to do the thing I did, and now you need code-magic expensive materials and deport all the Mexicans, require expensive environmental reviews, and maybe even make it harder to legally build. That appreciates the value of my house -- because to substitute my cheap house you have to build an expensive house, so I can just charge almost as much as the expensive house and the market will bear it. Thus you end up with stuff like raw land value prices in my area not appreciating at all, yet house prices massively appreciating.
Real estate as "investment" is not helping anything here; it hurts home availability, first because prospective homeowners have to compete with capital that just wants to use those as store of value/for rentseeking (driving up demand/prices) and secondly because this creates incentives against building more houses (because that hurts those real estate "investors").
You need both capital (which folks don’t have access to) and the ability to absorb risk (which folks don’t have access to).
Similar advice is in the vein of just stay with your parents for free, have a relative invest $50,000 in your business to start it up.
This runs counter to your internal narrative as a self made person I’m sure, but have you ever worked for 40 hours a week and not had anything left after paying for your share of rent, food and utilities? This is the reality that doesn’t seep into forums like this, where the majority is wealthy, college educated, and broadly privileged in some way either through exceptional talent or background.
> let's not have any low-effort comments claiming that there are no good jobs available in those places
I will bite - homeownership is indeed higher in the rust belt, but many folks struggle to find jobs that meet the median without giving up their health and bodies, if they can find steady work at all.
¹ Terms and conditions apply.
People who don't shun and humiliate these silverspooners are more damaging than the gambling.
One of the main issues is that a lot of advice is presented as an unconditional, absolute guarantee to success. A college degree was never a guarantee of future success (contrary to great-grandparent's assertion), but the push to get everyone to get a college degree has rendered its utility as a helpful marker much more useless. Similarly, the ability to start your own business is difficult for most people, but even for poorer individuals, it is possible to start, say, a cleaning service with very little assets. (At the same time, such businesses are unlikely to make a whole lot of money at the end, but you might be able to move from working class to middle class, e.g.). A lot of contractor businesses--your plumbers and the like--are going to be from the lower middle class or middle class, and you can make some good money there, although that is also likely to be at the cost of your health much sooner than you expect.
This is not a super relevant statement as it can be made with a single example - the rate of mobility is down relative to when those who'd give the advice experienced (which has been compounding for at least the last 30 years, some say since the 1970s).
According to one economist in 2020, in the U.S., absolute mobility, the chance a child earns more than their parents, has fallen from about 90% to roughly 50%. Source: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/05/16/two-leadi...
> the push to get everyone to get a college degree has rendered its utility as a helpful marker much more useless
Social segregation also plays a really important role too, and cross class relationships have plummeted - as someone who is doing well but didn't go to college, the relationship building in college is a factor that will work against me my entire life.
I would never say that upward mobility is impossible, or that its not worth it to strive for it. I am saying that dismissing headwinds due to no guarantee of success doesn't really take into account severely constrained actual access to opportunity that continues to become more constrained over time.
Ah right, after a 14 hour shift you've left your car half way as that was how far she could take you. You are now on your knees with the god of all migraines, around you are small mountains of laundry as you fail to repair the washing machine while your ramen gets cold. Your mind locked in a loop, if I pay this bill how will I buy food, I need to pay this bill, I need to buy food. Then POOF suddenly it strikes you that you could start your own business. Adrenaline rushes though your veins. The whole business lasts about 20 seconds before you wake up in the laundry, shit what time is it, fk I have to walk to work.
Life is usually a struggle. No one should expect any different.
I think this starts to make an inferred narrative about how failure is inevitable and that its excessive complaining, when there is large amounts of data showing how it is genuinely more difficult.
Just your Ukrainian example, it was cheaper to live 25 years ago, the cost of college has gone up ~180%. Since 2001 incomes have gone up 64% while housing has gone up 136%, healthcare up 180%, food up 100% and transportation up 120%. Thats a different playing field.
The point being made isn't that failure has any inevitability. Most people will be able to make it work enough to live, and those who can't due to choices, trauma, disability, drug use, or excessive bad luck are the homeless people you see begging on freeway offramps and intersections. At the economy level its a numbers game. It will never be impossible to make it big, in the same way that some people with every single advantage will end up on the street without a penny.
Today a dreaming Ukrainian is quite likely to instead get ripped away by conscription kidnapping teams and used as cannon fodder on the front, and not even make it to America. The reality changes but the rule of thumb is still good, you do the best with what you have and make yourself ready for opportunity you might not ever get.
Everyone, everywhere, tries to optimize their local situation as best as they can with the skills and knowledge they have available. The further one gets into understanding how mental health works, the more one realizes that mindset is a result of experiences usually more than it is of willpower. People in poverty are exerting willpower to the maximum every single day. People are anxious for a reason, and depressed for a reason - these do not pop up like some contagious airborne virus, they're a result of the setting and society and their place in it.
I can recommend doing this to make a house for your own family but I think you have to be a bit insane to front your own money to build houses in almost anywhere in California as a business proposition unless you have a contracting license, which is to say, you already were able to make a decent living. I only got away with doing it for my family because all the people who could have brought the insane rules down upon me were kind enough to realize it was just a family trying to survive, they'd have fucked me with all sorts of inspections, shenanigans with the utility company, having trouble getting water, trades licensing, engineering stamps and plans, etc if they'd have gotten a sniff I had done this "again and again."
This kind of stuff did work fairly well up until in the 60s/70s before developers got in bed with the regulators/planning and zoning boards. Back then a guy and his truck could become a developer easily.
I don't hate the idea but it's not a bootstrapping plan. It's a plan for someone already bootstrapped.
Steps off soap box.
Wanting my tax dollars to go to children who can’t access food is not begging for a handout - you’re repeating middle school Republican propaganda at this point.
I’m a success story, but unlike you I’ve developed some empathy for the very real cycle of poverty I myself got out of, instead of the jingoistic “just create value”.
> They're in a small class of very privileged people, and they're pushing an ideology that has taken so many people from the world.
This is exactly how I feel about your ideology - that if only people would stop being a victim and think outside the box instead of complaining then they would see a better world. You’ve never dealt with disability or not being able bodied, you don’t see the value in anything other than what makes money.
There’s a spec of truth in it - some people turn their minds off and think of themselves as victims. I think of myself as a survivor, and a lucky one at that. I’ve overcome a lot and I can see where if many things outside of my control went the other way I could be dead right now. Wanting the path to be more clear for the next person is exactly the “see the world shine” that you advocate for.
We have the highest concentration of wealth ever in this country, because that’s what this system produces right now. Has it improved the world for the average person or made it worse?
Capitalism has VASTLY improved the world for the average person. A lot of the things you're doing are becoming the nanny for other people. That cripples their future. Instead of letting people become the best they can be, they will languish in average or low because the safety net allows them to just sit. This cripples countries and it destroys working ethic. I am not advocating for cutting protections for disabled people, but right now able bodied people are just sitting back and being victims.
> Instead of letting people become the best they can be, they will languish in average or low because the safety net allows them to just sit
We're not concerned with people being the best we can be. Else education wouldn't be on a shoestring budget, housing costs wouldn't force two parents to work with no pre-k childcare, our colleges wouldn't cost 10x that of other countries many of which are free, we'd provide healthcare not tied to employers so that people could take risks, we'd mandate maternity and paternity leave for parents so that they can bond with their children instead of leaving them with attachment disorders.
People are undeveloped for those reasons - it costs a lot of money and society is filled with middlemen maximizing the profit of every single human need. Our birth rate is horrible because its expensive, there is little hope for a better future, and there is no support within the country to have kids. We have a massive child poverty problem, and we can't even fund school lunches.
If you cared about people being the best, you'd care about that, not making sure that everyone gets punished. The system benefits business owners and investors, and everyone else serves them.
> I am not advocating for cutting protections for disabled people
Yet protections and programs continue to be cut!
Exactly! This is the mind set. So tell me, how do you progress when you are there?
Or even better, now that we've accumulated many people conditioned by streaks of failure, how do we maximize their productivity and tax revenue? Should be an easy question for you :)
Hardly. My grandfather was working under union rules as a machinist. No education beyond the 8th grade and what he learned in the US Navy during WWII. He was able to afford a house in a Lower Midwestern city (one that would be considered LCOL) and five kids.
I have a bachelor's degree that's paid for, a decent paying software job, and no wife/kids. Wanna guess how many homes I own in the same city?
College never guaranteed anything.
A college education may still be (statistically) a good investment:
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025/04/is-col...
Aside from the financial arguments, the social and personal development opportunities of living and studying with your peers can be pretty great in my experience. I went to a decent school and was surrounded by a lot of very interesting and smart kids and I had some truly great professors. I was really pushed beyond what I thought I could do and my biggest regret is that I didn't take a little extra time for more courses in the humanities (specifically literature and art history).
Gambling is the closest we've come to figuring out how to directly tax hope.
You don't have to spend a single penny to dream or hope some sort of better outcome for yourself in the next few days that has much better odds than winning the lottery.
They just like gambling.
So why to people suffering from poverty like gambling so much more than everyone else?
This is exactly right. Widespread gambling has a fundamental nihilism baked into it. If you believe hard work and frugality are the best path to success, then gambling doesn't feel like a good use of your income and energy.
But if you feel like your dreams are falling out of reach despite your hard work, if it starts to look like even big investors are really just playing a game (often with loaded dice) rather than acting on fundamentals, if grift seems like a more reliable path to success then hard work and ingenuity, then all of a sudden gambling seems a lot more sensible. Even if the odds aren't in your favor, you can at least get lucky when you gamble. When the game feels rigged its easy to believe that hardwork is destined for failure, whereas even loaded dice have some probability of landing in your favor.
No, instead we should tackle the actual root of the problem, and fix the economy. If everyone can make a living, afford housing, find jobs, and find something they love to do that pays, and get medical care they need, they won't turn to these things.
> I can't even figure it out as a thought exercise.
Others have offered contrived rules for solving it through policy, but these don't account for how to get those with power over us to institute such rules to bind their own hands and then to follow the rules to their own detriment
That leads to some game theory and math, with things like some form of ranked-voting, uncapping the House of Representatives, and maybe even proportional-representation rather than lots of just-one-winner races.
Candidates themselves and the way they campaign matters more. Cuomo had 3x the warchest than Mamdani had, for example.
Small dollar donations can also level the playing field for candidates that can gain some national appeal (this does come with its own set of problems and perverse incentives, though)
We pump spectacular amounts of money (~10% of GDP in the former case based on diffing high-end-of-normal healthcare costs for peer states with ours, and who knows how much in the latter but probably around the same) into white collar and blue collar (respectively) jobs programs and wage-supplementation that buy us basically nothing. A ton worse than a proper jobs program building public infrastructure (the CCC or something) or dumping that money into doctor training or whatever. Extremely poor ROI, but we can't touch them or GDP craters (nominally only—these aren't producing much in the first place, the P part of GDP, of course, which is probably part of why the US doesn't feel as rich as it looks on paper)
Healthcare was similar until the wage stagnation really started impacting the ability to deliver service. It went from 9% of GDP in 1970 to 19% today, supported by payroll that has risen way under inflation.
About 20% of the US economy is killing people, 20% healing people, and the rest is everything else.
Yeah, I wouldn't call all our military spending unproductive waste. I'm not insensitive to arguments even about building stuff we don't need simply in order to keep a particular industry healthy-enough that it's ready to expand in case of an actual, serious war. I think a good deal of it is, though, and the reason it's hard to tamp down is that it's not-so-secretly a jobs program that Republicans are willing to vote to fund (even if we'd get more out of spending the same money to have the same people build parks infrastructure or whatever).