Filthy Lucre
m.vice.com
m.vice.com
> My friends who came closest to attaining the American Dream did it by breaking the rules on how to get there.
and
> For my friends and I who fought our way to moderate financial success, money came from transgressing society's norms. With much luck, it required doing the ambitious work everyone said you weren't ready for, then getting mocked and rejected for it, until, slowly, the wall began to crack. You could never do what you were supposed to, never stay quietly in your place.
There's something about these statements that ring very true.
Upward mobility in the USA has always been difficult for women and minorities; now it's increasingly difficult for men as well. There just aren't that many rising from the bottom, and getting to the top. Positions are more entrenched. Sources: http://business.time.com/2012/01/05/the-loss-of-upward-mobil... and http://www.pewstates.org/projects/economic-mobility-project-...
The author is identifying a response to the glass ceiling: by hacking the system and breaking the rules.
Upward mobility never existed in the romanticized fashion that people like to talk about. There was never a point in time where billionaires sprang out of the ground like dandelions. The most "mobile" periods in history were when vast stores of untapped wealth were first being tapped. Westward expansion, the gold rush, etc. That's obviously not going to be 100% of the time.
Today, I guess the closest thing is the internet. And a lot of people have gone rags-to-riches (or the more realistic not-riches-to-riches) through the internet. Maybe it's less mobility than, say, a hundred years ago, maybe not.
But really, that's beside the point. Every single person in the entire world has been "moving up" for the last 300 years. Things are constantly getting better. Even if we completely disregard the social progress that's been made (think abolition of slavery), the rapid progression of technology is constantly raising everyone's standard of living.
In the USA, there's a lot of data that says both absolute & relative mobility is getting worse:
> The income of a typical working-age family grew considerably in the late 1990s. Around 2000, it stopped growing. In 2007, it started falling.
and
> An under-rated source of income growth for the middle class in the last 30 years, in face of slow-growing hourly wages, has been increased hours and the rise of dual-earner households, where the mother and father supplement each others' income. As a result, household income might actually understate* the middle-class crisis by counting the rising participation of women.*
Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/12/a-giant-...
Because "absolute mobility" uses household income as a barometer, it appears on the surface that households are doing better. But we've actually added a lot of dual-income earning families since 1950, which skews those stats. In reality:
> The typical family with a stay-at-home wife/mom has seen incomes grow only 1 percent, after inflation, since 1980.
> The good news here is that women have the degrees, the means, and the freedom to work when they want to. The bad news is that the Typical American Family has only seen rising incomes in the last half century because of working wives.
Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-amer...
I'd much rather be lower class today than upper class in 1776. Comfort, medicine, availability of safe food, etc is all far better now for all classes than it was then for the upper class.
There's a big disparity, in some sense, between lower and upper classes in today's world, but the disparity doesn't show up in happiness or longevity so far as I know. Mostly it's about having nice things, or just wealth in general.
Actually it does: poor people are not as happy as well-off people, on average.
Also, for the past 30 or so years, US life expectancy for higher income workers has gone up substantially more then for lower income workers. See [1] for example, or search on "life expectancy by income level"
[1] http://www.minnpost.com/second-opinion/2013/03/income-gap-pl...
Doesn't that just define a new lower class? If everyone moves up to the middle-class, isn't that the new lowest class?
Wouldn't the upper middle class from 50 years ago be pretty happy as lower middle class today? (I believe so) If so, doesn't that signify some solid progress?
Youtube - let's just allow people to upload the videos, we'll worry about angry mob of copyright holders when we earn enough to lawyer up and create some bogus/overzealous tech gimmick to calm them.
Google - let's copy the web to our servers, and publish snippets of it to anyone who asks. People won't notice copyright violation and accidental breakins to insecure parts of the web as long as we are useful and huge.
Zynga - let me addict you to giving us your money with a help of this virtual cow and other game mechanics I just copied off my competition.
Facebook - why don't you show us all how rich you are and where your kids go to school.
Gender and minority status are often mentioned as factors that influence success potential, but social class is seldom mentioned.
Instead, we have meritocratic ideals, a few meritocratic policies, and a distinctly uneven playing field, which does not result in a meritocracy. Wealth buys political power which consolidates wealth, and we end up where we are, with a very clear distinction between the 1% and all the rest of us.
A fine artist, (successful, credential-festooned, with inherited money), told me that I was too focused on commerce to be an artist. A real artist endured poverty. Being poor was edifying, filled with moral uplift. I spent weeks in a murderous rage.
But I'm not sure what she expects. She and other liberal arts students constantly complain about the 1%, but they're the ones who chose to go into a field which the market doesn't reward.
Yet they're the same people who scoff at and disparage people studying finance or computer science. We chose to study lucrative things, a choice which is equally open to them.
Ultimately, we have to confront the fact that certain industries just don't scale. We don't need more English majors or artists, so if you choose to study that it's your own choice. Welcome to the free market.
> Those with money usually think they deserve it. But most people who make the world run—who care for kids, who grow food, who would rebuild after natural disasters and societal collapse—will never be rich, no matter how hard or well they work, because society is constructed with only so much room on top.
> I thought of the workers busting their backs lifting boxes at warehouses, while an electronic tracker yelled at them to work faster. Are their egos too big?
> I got my first job at a candy store when I was 14. I worked in the stockroom. I would open a box, take out a smaller box, put a rubber band around the smaller box, and put it back inside the big one. I lasted two days. This job, I remember thinking, does not make use of my intellectual abilities. When I did need work, I went straight into the naked-girl industry.
did you even read the article? it's extremely myopic of you to say that this is about "liberal arts students".
congrats on the upvotes for continuing the STEM circlejerk, tho.
While I consider myself a proponent of the free market, I think my work as a programmer blinds me to how much rent seeking underlies other high earning professions in the US. Doctors, lawyers, financiers, accountants don't really operate in a free market, rather they work in a system that is better understood as defined by laws. The reason all these fields (with exceptions for parts of medicine) are so lucrative, is because they have thrived in a system mandated or failing to be regulated by law. It is naive to think that said groups do not wish to sustain and propagate that privilege. Market adaption is an important force, but one that for all practical purposes exists within a framework society has created. I am expecting Americans to slowly get to terms with this reality as the economy recovers after long period of credit expansion and it dawns on more people that it has always mostly been a zero sum game.
EDIT: grammar
I doubt anyone would seriously say that a heart surgeon doesn't deserve big bucks for performing heart surgery. But most highly-paid people in the medical profession aren't doing heart surgery. For the most part, they're getting paid by hiding behind regulations that say they can't be replaced by people with less education who would work for less.
Same goes for the legal profession, to some extent. The fact that you can't represent clients in court without passing the bar is both a consumer protection (we don't want scam artists bilking clients) AND a subsidy to the legal profession. It may be a subsidy we are "OK" with, but don't deny that it is a subsidy.
I agree on not painting broad brushstrokes. But there are some discernable patterns.
* You need money to get more money
* Once you have money and manage to keep getting more of it, it's easy to feel entitled to this situation and not recognize how fortunate you were to end up there
From another angle: if you keep saying that "it's easy to become middle class even if you are poor", then the article has points that say it's actually not the case. The article also argues that rich people don't understand their advantageous position.
It shouldn't be easy to become middle class. Our planet can not sustain that with current technological level. But again "middle class" might mean different things for different people.
As well I'm pretty sure that rich people understand what position they are in if we speak about sustainable assets.
The point is: its expensive being poor. The rich receive so many more benefits and rewards in their world, simply for the fact that they 'are rich' and thus 'have more potential' than the poor.
Until we realize that the poor are kept there by the wealthy, we'll never solve income-inequality in the world. Without such 'rich bubbles' existing in our society, there is no hope for us all to rise.
(If the answer is simply "insufficient wealth redistribution", what is the right amount of wealth redistribution? I.e., at what amount of redistribution do we declare that the wealthy have done enough, and the problem must lie not with them?)
Another example: access to legal services (in the US) is essentially required for fair treatment under the law. Poor people cannot afford legal services, and so will generally not get fair treatment under the law. So a mistake/misunderstanding/relatively minor infraction that would be a mere hassle for a richer person can be life-ruining for a poorer person. In the US, we've gone so far as to apply wildly different penalties to "poor people's drugs" and "rich people's drugs" (obviously stereotypes, but the stereotypes have some basis in fact and are why the laws were written that way).
Poor neighborhoods are more likely to experience elevated crime levels. In the US, this means they are often militarized. This makes everyone that lives in them more at risk for life-ruining run-ins with the law. The people of NYC have decided that it's fair for non-white juveniles to be subject to stopping & frisking anytime, for no cause. This is a tax for which no benefit is derived by the payers.
There are tons of examples like these that have nothing to do with redistribution. If you read the papers, you'll see examples every day.
One possible solution to this is to try and segregate rich from poor as much as possible. That will certainly reduce the harm these rich villains cause. Maybe we need barriers preventing the rich from entering poor neighborhoods (and vice versa, in the interest of fairness). That should reduce crime in poor neighborhoods and improve the schools, right?
I agree with you on the war on drugs.
Poor people are held down by the chains of their own bad habits, not by rich people.
It's the poor and minorities the cops choose to scrutinize and enforce against most.
Few times have I seen such obliviousness to white middle-class privilege on HN.
I'd have to challenge AutoCorrect's implicit assertion that (s)he doesn't break the law. There are so many laws that the assertion is a little difficult to believe. Your explanation is far more likely...
ie - this is the US and it's far better to be white than black, or rich than poor.
And the worst is to be poor and black.
Aside from this, militarization leads to people who didn't even break the law being incarcerated or killed. Take a look at the Innocence Project, and AFAIK they don't even handle people wrongfully convicted of minor offenses.
I recently attended a large art opening in a very wealthy city. The party was full of millionaires and billionaires. Everywhere: free food, free drinks, free everything. I felt more connection with the waiters and servers than I did with any of the rich people enjoying the fruits of all the servers work ..
What I think has to happen is that the rich have to realize that their privilege has to be shared, and they simply have to share it as much as they can. This dividing line between 'me and them' has to disappear. I don't think that wealth-redistribution by the government is any sort of solution; what has to happen is that society has to enlighten itself to the point where these greedy, self-indulgent people do not get created by societys' institutions.
I tipped the waiters, anyway. Nobody else in the room did.
This is like saying the poor rob the rich because they get free ketchup at Burger King.
The political system. Same as it's been for thousands of years.
Being a politician is expensive; fundraising, free time and access is required to rise through the ranks and get stuff done. Also, especially in the US, there is this issue of campaign donations. Giving to someone's campaign is also participating in politics.
And then there is the issue of becoming part of the party apparatus. At my present university, a state university in the Northeast US both College Republicans and Democrats are near invisible. In contrast, at my previous uni, a member of the Ivy League in New England, both parties managed to invite all sorts of established party members, and they were recruiting for campaigning. Think internships.
Yet here on HN we see the benefits of state universities extolled. They may be cheap, but that's because one of the things you go to college for is to build a network of peers and established figures in your chosen field.
Imagine you are stranded on a desert island with one other person and the only source of food is coconuts for which you must climb trees. You are worse at climbing trees than your fellow cast away. He climbs the trees before you, takes most of the coconuts, and hoards them. When you ask him for some coconuts he says you should have practiced climbing more as a child.
Is this unfair? Who is being unfair to you?
Imagine you are stranded on a desert island with 3 other persons and the only source of food is coconuts for which you must climb trees. The 4 persons are you (adult 1), who is worse at climbing trees than your fellow cast away (adult 2). There is also child 1 who adult 1 is responsible for, and child 2 who adult 2 is responsible for. Both child 1 and child 2 have zero experience climbing trees and must depend on the adults. Adult 2 climbs the trees before you, takes most of the coconuts, and hoards them. When you ask him for some coconuts for both you and your child, he says you should have practiced climbing more as a child.
Whether his actions are considered fair or unfair, should your child have to suffer for your own lack of tree climbing experience?
Additionally, if you look at this in terms of evolution, is it okay for adult 1 and child 1 to die off, while adult 2 and child 2 to prosper, effectively moving towards a less diverse population?
His logic is stupid at best, of course. You can practice climbing trees as an adult, and you'll probably progress significantly faster than you would as a child.
His response should be "No, I collected these myself, and you can collect yours yourself."
Fair, from my perspective, is taking care of others, especially those weaker than me. I happen to have been born in a nurturing environment, with above-average intelligence, and lots of valuable experiences that inform my decisions. While I do work hard, it sometimes shocks me how many things 'came free' for me.
From my perspective, it is not wrong that I happen to have won the lottery. It is also not wrong that others have not, and have less than me. But I would say it is unfair for me to not share my advantage with others, and to try to increase happiness of those around me through this.
That said, I respect that your view of fairness is different. I just don't like it, and choose to be different, and I'll fight for my version of fair...
Unfair would be if you collected the coconuts, and then somebody else came and took them from you just because he could. Which is not the case.
Yes, it's unfair to take his coconuts. He earned them, and risked injury (which could mean his life in this contrived example) to collect them, and they are his.
How they will be used is up to him, if things are fair.
How about this scenario: if the coconuts are equally retrieved, both climbers will have their lives threatened. Is it unfair for one of the climbers to take from the other at that point, when simply by having an equal share they are both threatening the life of each other?
Of course you probably have a difference of opinion from your previous position in this case, though I'm not sure how you'll sort it out.
I don't believe there's any inherent right of the poor climber to demand something from the good one. I think he has the right to exist and compete for the same coconuts, and that wherever that lands him is fair.
I have a big heart, and I'd hope that any better climber would share his coconuts, but I don't believe they should ever be taken from him or that he should be prohibited from climbing just because he's good at it, etc.
pretty sure causing someone to starve is, indeed, harming them.
Is it unfair or unjustified for you to take coconuts from him?
What the second person should do is to offer the first person something (maybe he can peel/cook coconuts better?) in return for some of the coconuts. Or find alternative means of food that do not involve climbing.
The problem with these life-boat scenarios is that you try to twist the problem in a scenario wherein the only solution is to harm one or the other person. In real life, there are more options and nuances. And regardless, initiating force is a clear no-no, regardless of the justification - else society quickly escalates into mob rule and might-is-right.
The coconuts in this scenario are a shared resource. Neither individual owns the island or the trees. If there are plenty of coconuts on the island for both people, then a simple, "fair" solution for both people to survive is for each person to simply take the number of coconuts that they need.
Yet the answers suggest that a good climber is entitled to take most or all of the coconuts as their ability allows, even if this causes harm to other cast aways. But theft by the poor climber is never justified. Both actions cause harm, but one is considered just while the other is not.
I don't know about you but I'd hate to live in a world with no artists. I agree with you that she should know what she's getting into, which is why everyone I know has always told me that if you want to be an artist, you've got to love what you do (FYI, I'm not an artist). But just because our society doesn't reward artists monetarily doesn't mean artists don't have a right to complain about it. Sometimes the free market doesn't solve everything.
Prices are determined at the margin, not in aggregate. The question is whether you'd hate to live in a world with one fewer artist. I think we could manage.
I.e. if the first 10 artists in the world increase wealth by $100k/each, and the 11'th artist increases wealth by $10k (due to diminishing marginal returns), then the price of an artist will be $10k. That's how much society loses if one artist quits. The remaining $90k x 10 artists is captured by society as consumer surplus.
(This is true of all professions with competitive employment markets.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Basic_struc...
Infinite buyers and sellers (infinite patrons)? Homogenous products (all artists are fungible)? No barriers to entry and exit (anyone can stop what they are doing and become an artist, tomorrow)?
Two semesters of undergraduate economics can make you very confident in things that are utterly wrong, if you're not careful.
There's no risk of that since they're willing to work for next to nothing. It not a good choice as a profession, but otherwise it is quite an attractive occupation.
Probably they are being "paid" something other than money, and that's what's so attractive to them.
Certainly it's not "basically nothing."
This times 1000. For an example of this attitude, just go through artist-turned-hacker Maciej Ceglowski's [1] essay "Dabblers and Blowhards" (http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm), with the last line:
"But you, sir, are no painter. And while you hack away at your terminal, or ride your homemade Segway, we painters and musicians are going to be right over here with all the wine, hash, and hot chicks."
Make no mistake, I personally think Maciej is without an ounce of malice, and often writes tongue firmly in cheek. Yet the attitude he displays in this essay does exist in reality in a lot of liberal arts majors, like the author of this piece. I'm never sure whether to be angry, or just amused at the airs of people like her who have never had to deal with actual, grinding poverty, and expect the world to fall into their laps.
[1] Ceglowski (@baconmeteor) is the founder of Pinboard.
But I'm not sure what the commenter expects. They and other HN commenters constantly complain about "liberal arts students against the 1%", but they're the ones who chose to go into a field which the market rewards for poor and ethically questionable work.
Yet they're the same people who scoff at and disparage people who achieved financial success in a much more challenging business. The author claims her success was because of privilege, not because of choices she made or didn't make.
Ultimately, we have to confront the fact that not everyone can be a tech slave. It's easy to hire "app" programmers, so if you choose to study that, it may be because it's a gravy train, not because it's your choice. Welcome to the free market.
> if you choose...it's [not] your choice
How could it be any more your choice, when you literally put the decision in the same sentence?
"I am a deity destined to succeed" is a belief held too often by people who have early success in their lives.
Given that the 'number of attempts' part of the equation is generally quite a small number, if you do the basic maths implied by your comment then you can see how valuable it is to be able to afford a couple more tries at success for people with moderate chances.
That same maths also shows how difficult it is to succeed at the bottom end of the 'probability of success per attempt' space, and how even very small increases in that probability can make large (expected) changes in outcome.
They never even take a shot at making themselves valuable.
Comparisons to rich people are irrelevant and envy-driven. The rich are rich. So what? Do they deserve it - why do you care?
You can make yourself comfortable without luck or brilliance. Just look around you, see what the world is paying for, and do it.
If you choose not to do something in that set, you should acknowledge that you won't get the same pay for it.
Arguments that you should be taken care of the same way aren't really arguments against the American Dream, they're just a leftward political view. Which is fine, but don't convolute them.
Not when their riches come at the expense of everyone else.
For instance the Walton family who occupy 6 of 10 slots on the richest americans list benefits from an estimated $15 Billion ( with a B ) a YEAR ( every year ) subsidy from the taxpayers to support their employees who could not survive ( as in feed their families ) without supplemental food assistance; not to mention medicare, disability etc. Not to mention the fact that the company they control got to be such a wealth production engine by arbitraging it's way around labor and environmental protections by exporting it's externalities to unregulated emerging economies.
All the people who got pushed into extremely bad mortgages and then lost their jobs because the economy crashed; they were stolen from by Rich People.
All the people who've had their lives destroyed by the financial shenanigans distorting our healthcare system were stolen from by Rich People.
I don't know about you, but given the trail of destruction left behind by rich people in the past 5 years alone; we should be handing them a bill, or showing them the door.
Now, I'm sure many rich people are very nice if you know them socially; but as a class, they're killing this country and this planet.
>All the people who got pushed into extremely bad mortgages and then lost their jobs because the economy crashed; they were stolen from by Rich People.
Those people share at least the majority of the blame for this. A bank does not put a gun to your head and force you to sign an ARM for a house you really can't afford.
I'd call it 60/40 blame. 60 clueless people, 40 banking sector shenanigans.
Remember that if either side hadn't done what they did, the crisis probably wouldn't have happened.
Caveat emptor is the disguise force and fraud hide behind.
Go read this paper about what actually happened. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1421837
It's hard to claim that person A stole from person B if both A and B lost money.
...and you're getting pressure-talked by a mortgage agent who keeps telling you all about how this has a super-low interest rate for the first three years, and no income verification or down payment required, and that $150k house will be worth $175k, easy, maybe even $200k before the interest rate goes up, and it's a great market so you'll be guaranteed to flip the house in time and make a profit, and real estate always only goes up in value...
...and you give in to the relentless sales pitch and sign the papers, then sure, we can assign a percentage of the blame to you. But if you think it's a precise 50/50 split or anything close to that, I think you are a terrible judge of the situation.
(and that's without getting into the bits alluded to in my previous comment, like the fact that many of the lenders knew there was no chance these loans would be good, but were happy to do it anyway since they also knew they'd never be on the hook when the loans went bad, which is out-and-out undeniable fraud and has basically gone unquestioned and unpunished because of "well, everybody was to blame" narratives that try to sweep those inconvenient facts under the rug)
Well, you don't have to be a financial expert to understand the generalities of what you can and cannot afford.
The rest of what you describe can be equally attributed to greedy people thinking, "if the price doesn't rise, I'll bail in 3 months. No loss." I know some of those people.
>But if you think it's a precise 50/50 split or anything close to that, I think you are a terrible judge of the situation.
I know you read stories about the strawberry picker who can't speak english "pressured" into buying the million dollar home, but those cases were extremely rare.
The majority were people with $40,000 in income deciding to buy the $750,000 house, rather than the $200,000 house, because, you know, the American Dream says renting is bad and looking wealthy is a necessity. Give me the most money you can for the biggest house possible! This happened across the globe.
Oh, and you're forgetting the other major factor of the American specific bust: people who used their home equity to fund consumption. Mostly boomers. I guess those were also the unfortunate, duped poor, buying vacation homes, jet-skis and third cars?
It seems that your understanding of the situation is drawn from the mainstream, "evil-bankster" meme. But that only works because it's a populist sentiment. There is plenty of blame to go around; give it to the greedy.
The industry which sprung up around CDOs did two extremely dangerous things:
1. Because of the demand for mortgages from the CDO industry, created an incentive for lenders to make as many loans as possible.
2. Disconnected the people who were actually issuing the loans from the consequences, if and when the borrowers defaulted (since the actual lenders could immediately sell the loan into the CDO-bundling food chain, thus recovering their money so they'd no longer need to worry about the loan being repaid).
The combination of the pressure of (1) and the lack of consequences in (2) meant lenders drastically relaxed their policies, issuing loans to people who they knew they never would have lent to if they (the lenders) were going to be on the hook financially in case of default.
Meanwhile, it has been demonstrated beyond doubt that the larger entities which were offering CDOs to investors were promoting them as high-grade investments, with help from ratings agencies who either utterly failed in their function or were themselves complicit in the deception, even though those entities knew otherwise and were taking their own private actions in the market, aimed at profiting when (not if) CDOs failed to perform as advertised.
The result of this is was a large-scale transfer of wealth, largely from duped investors and duped borrowers (for make no mistake: knowingly issuing a loan to someone not qualified for the loan is a form of duping), largely to a relatively small and select group of people who were either involved in the lending and bundling food chain, or in offering CDOs to investors.
These are not memes. These are facts. This was a massive fraud perpetrated upon multiple groups.
You can, if you wish, say that the desire to play real-estate mogul or conspicuously consume played a part in driving people to take out loans, and assign some part of the responsibility to those people. You cannot, however, support in any way, based on the known and undisputed facts, the assertion that the borrowers bear (to quote precisely the original words to which I replied) "the majority of the blame" for this. The deliberate and knowing fraud in the CDO industry outstrips that as the noonday sun does a candle.
Like picking fruit, working in a stockroom, or staffing the support phones? There's plenty of paid menial work out there that won't give you 'success'.
It's the first part that's the kicker, and contentious here.
Similarly the "we're all sociologists here" assumptions that come with the common belief that a few largely-shared disagreements with American politics and economy that have somehow turned into truisms here.
If you're disappointed, make a point. As it is you're complaining for its own sake, which is adding exactly as much as the comments you're complaining about (possibly less).
That is such bullshit (at least here in the US).
Nowhere in the article does the author support this claim. In fact, the whole American system is built to prove the opposite. Space at the top is NOT limited. Total wealth is NOT limited. Anybody who works hard (and smart!) can get there.
This is false. The USA has a very low rate of mobility between economic classes when compared to other first-world nations.
>42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints.
>Meanwhile, just 8 percent of American men at the bottom rose to the top fifth. That compares with 12 percent of the British and 14 percent of the Danes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-for-americans-to...
Personally, I know many, many intelligent hard workers who are barely getting by under their crushing debt. I feel lucky that I am not in their shoes.
Meanwhile, I went to my tax-subsidized home-state university. Paid for everything with Stafford loans and Pell grants. I left school with around ~20k in debt. Paid it off early.
Shouldn't we hold people accountable for their choices? It is possible to get a decent education and leave school with a manageable debt. People do it all the time.
By definition, it is. The question is whether one focuses on absolute or relative prosperity. Like you (I presume) I also prefer to focus on absolute prosperity because nothing can be done about relative prosperity's zero-sum nature.
However, it would be good to see less inequality. I'm not a hard-line "everyone-should-have-the-same-amount" egalitarian because that's a terrible idea-- people would lose the incentive to do the work that society needs-- but inequality has gone far beyond the point of being valuable or productive. Now it's just self-perpetuating and exists for no other reason.
Total wealth is NOT limited.
Sure. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people (95+ percent) end up working below their ability (a loss to them, and to society) because they lack the scarce social resources, credentials, and connections that have congealed "at the top". There are also inefficiency problems in a low-mobility society where (as we now see in the US) the wrong people are making the decisions.
Anybody who works hard (and smart!) can get there.
Total bullshit.
I come from a home that lived below poverty level for most of my life, though we maybe disguised it well--most of my friends were middle-class.
I fell in love with computers at age 10, but I didn't have access to one outside of public school until age 16, when I bought one with money I earned at a job I took after school.
After off-and-on dedication to programming over the past decade, I've been working as a developer for approximately 1 year, and I have a very solid chance to get "there" if I choose to continue down this path.
I don't see what's preventing more-or-less anybody in America from taking these steps. I didn't do anything that is out-of-reach for any given person, nor did I, in any obvious manner, have a stroke of luck.
My story is similar, only I decided to study communications and didn't do much computer stuff for half a decade. I quit halfway through my master's because I hated what I'd seen of academia. Faced with the need to make a living, I started doing freelance webdesign/development. I've done very well for myself ever since.
I didn't choose to go into web development because I knew it would be lucrative (more so than finishing my degree even). I also didn't choose to become a geek and tinker with computers at an early age.
I got lucky, and I'd argue that you did too. We're lucky that our passion is in demand.
That said, I worked really hard. I started out with clients that were way out of my league, and spent many nights frantically learning as much as I could. It wasn't just luck. But luck played a big role.
Write again when you raise a seed round, then. Maybe you'll get there. I hope you do.
If you were from a rich background, you'd be turning investors away. You wouldn't even have to ask them for meetings and intros.
This whole discussion is about how tech-people are on the gravy train and the starving artists aren't getting their fair share of it.
Instead of stating that you have it easy, you say we have it easy. Instead of saying she had certain problems, the author says everyone has certain problems (and, more importantly, she leaps to systemic discrimination, class-warfare, etc. as somehow-implied conclusions).
Some of us actually have to work hard, even in tech, and had to work hard to "make it" in the first place. I didn't have to work as hard as she did, but others did (and I bet few of us are such attractive females as to have the options she did, which makes some of her criticism ring a little hollow). And my experience certainly hasn't been what I'd describe as easy.
Not many other professions can just up and leave and without a doubt land a job pretty much anywhere you like.
Hell I can go anywhere in EU and probably land a job, a freedom many don't have.
The fact that you can fly at all is something that a person 100 years ago would be astounded at. The fact that you can do so cheaply and relatively easily is something someone 50 years ago would have envied.
That's not to say that there aren't improvements to be made to society through politics, but that would be an argument for a site where that's on topic: it is off topic here according to the guidelines.
Things like reading 'every dollar I clawed', makes me think that so many of these people are so focused on the actual dollars and have no real appreciation for the true challenges that the bottom 20% suffer.
That's why I think many people here don't feel sorry for the authors of these pieces. Not only are they considered to be living well, the authors don't even appreciate the challenges of those who aren't. Discussing people who are treated like cattle in airports is not an effective argument for those who can't afford to fly, or eat. I disagree with airport treatment, but I don't think the 'rich' are to blame here either.
But what sets her off is that ordinary millionaires can get that kind of treatment in exchange for a little money.
And notice, it wasn't some fictional millionaire she created who described the people in coach in that horrible way. It was she, liberal hissyfitpants herself, who did it.
What the article is interested in, and what she had a problem with, is that people feel like they, and those more well off, are entitled to their amenities. They should be more aware of their luck and should consider how other people may have been unlucky, instead of dumb, lazy or evil.
>But it’s too much to ask bankers to justify the bonuses they sucked off the public teat. >A culture that forbids employees from comparing salaries helps companies pay women and minorities less
I don't understand these people who are hostile towards "bankers" and "big businesses" as they call them. Usually they seem to blame poverty to their wealth, and failure to their success. You may not become wealthy studying to be an accountant but you sure as shit will more likely have a stable career than somebody trying to make it in the arts. Yet the accountant is now the enemy. Somebody founds a company and it starts making a lot of money, suddenly he is responsible for everyone around him having no money. This is our generation, no wonder they call us entitled.
I mean she even mentions the economic system being rigged but she can't see that it is precisely that which needs to change. Businesses and bankers are trying to make it, like everyone else. Don't complain about them then vote for Obama.
The article was well written and thoughtful. It pointed to a plausible cultural phenomenon using well thought out examples, made personal through the writer's own life story. You can agree with it or disagree, the things it discusses are very much open to interpretation. It is, after all, an article written by an artist, not a scientific survey. However, you chose to insult the author and that really only reflects badly on you. Consider the following points:
1) Calling the author "miss" in what is clearly meant to be an insult strongly suggests that you are sexist. It implies that being female is reason alone for intellectual belittlement. If you genuinely have gone through your whole life without noticing that one gender is not mentally superior to the other then you must be unbelievably dense.
2) The term "liberal" relates to opinions on personal freedoms. It doesn't have anything to do with the content of the article. Perhaps you meant "liberal arts major". Either way, this particular word is generally used to imply a bias on the part of the author. Since you don't really point out any concrete examples of bias, (you don't even seem to have understood the content of the article), in this context, this word probably just means "I disagree with the opinions and personal values of the author". Which I wouldn't consider an insult, given my opinion of you so far.
3) If you had used the word "socialist" instead of "liberal" then maybe you might have come a tiny step closer to making a coherent argument. The article does actually represent a socialist viewpoint. However, that word alone isn't really an insult, unless meant to imply a bias, as discussed above.
4) "Hissyfitpants" implies that the author was angry when she wrote the article. Moreover, it belittles her anger as being illegitimate and trivial. If the author had been angry about how rich people are treated at airports, then I suppose that would have been quite trivial. However, the tone of the article is measured and not at all angry. Also, the author is not critical of how rich people are treated at airports. She talks personally about how it feels to be treated differently and extrapolates from that about how the culture, values and attitudes of the rich have diverged from the rest of the population. I'm guessing your reading comprehension isn't great.
5) The insult should have been capitalised since the word "miss" implies that it is meant to be a name.