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Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

The context of the convo is the bottom quintile of earners.

I do think people in the bottom quintile should not have kids (until they remedy their income issues), I do think people in the bottom quintile should take more serious measures to both preserve their cash flow, and to improve their income.

I do think the bottom quintile should not be a "for life" sentence, and to the extent that I'm correct I've shared some paths for them to escape that.

It's definitely worth addressing that the US could use additional social mobility and mixing, but I think we're far from "people cannot move classes if they want to" as well.

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>>I do think people in the bottom quintile should not have kids

I have some terrible news for you about birth rates and what this would do to society.

>>until they remedy their income issues I'd like you to define "work", "necessary work for society to function", "low-skill jobs" and "value" (as it pertains to a human life). I have a feeling we have very different definitions and that leads us to very different conclusions about what people can do.

>>I think we're far from "people cannot move classes if they want to" as well. Probably because you're not a social scientist/sociologist! We're talking about the bottom quintile, and it's very hard to become part of the upper crust, and it's very hard to leave American poverty[1,2]. But yea, some guy working a blue collar job can probably have kids that have white collar jobs.

1- https://harris.uchicago.edu/news-events/news/has-class-mobil... 2- https://web.archive.org/web/20091003184000/http://www.americ...

> I do think the bottom quintile should not be a "for life" sentence, and to the extent that I'm correct I've shared some paths for them to escape that.

Skimming through your posts in this conversation, I really don't feel like you have.

And I think one part of the problem is you don't seem to have acknowledged that, for the most part, people in this quintile do not have the tools to move out of it by choice, and this is increasingly true as inequality grows (so, for instance, if you were lucky enough—and I do mean "lucky"—to be or know someone who made it out 20, 30, 40 years ago, you cannot assume that similar options remain available today).

When households are already spending literally every penny that comes in to afford rent, food, clothing, heat, medical care...which of those gets sacrificed on the off-chance that it might, some day, be enough to bootstrap themselves up out of that bottom quintile?

No. That is not a realistic or compassionate way to view the situation at all.

The bottom quintile is where many people will be their entire lives, and that is not going to change, so we as a society must ensure that it is a "place" where people can live healthy, comfortable lives, rather than a constantly-stressed squalid scramble.

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