How People Get Rich Now

Looking at that link, in particular I really like the 3 tier "chance of out-earning parents" chart because it shows that while average upward mobility may have gone down, there's a sharp decrease in upper classes moving up while the decrease for lower classes is much less. This means that the rich in fact get richer less so than lower class people move up, and by a huge margin, than in the mid 20th century.

Also I like the stagnant wage growth numbers because it demonstrates that the corporations are no longer the gatekeepers to economic opportunity. If you're more likely to make money starting a business than getting a job somewhere and working there 30 years, this is good for everyone because their economic prospects aren't dictated by McDonalds and General Motors. It means a more diversified economy, more opportunity beyond the beaten path, and more creativity driving economic growth.

I'd also like to see the criteria for "upper", " middle" and "lower" used in the chart about income distribution. Judging by the first graph of "is it all bad news?" I'd say it's a hard dollar amount delimitation, a very bad metric, because while that would appear to show a bad trend, all it shows is that more people have higher amounts of money. The only way to get a clear picture is to weight income/wealth with purchasing power as the delimiter between classes.

Another note on this first graph, it clearly shows that less people are in the lower class and lower middle class, and more people are in the middle, upper middle and wealthy class with each graph since 1967, which means people have gotten richer and as a whole life is getting better for people economically. Ideally what you'd want to see is the bars to the right of each sample get bigger and the bars to the left get smaller with each sample, and you almost see exactly that. I'd like to see the same graphs in 20 years and that will tell if upward mobility has actually decreased. I'd also like to see this graph weighted with purchasing power.

From those graphs, upward mobility looks perfectly fine, I'm getting the sense it peaked about 20-30 years ago, but has not had a sharp decline and is definitely still higher than it was 50 years ago.

> Of the 40 new fortunes in 1982, at least 24 were due primarily to oil or real estate

In 1982, oil and real estate was technology. Information technology was still research and not ready for big business. One could argue that those two were based on exploiting natural resources, but so is tech, it's exploiting the natural resources of human attention and information, it's not making flying cars. In that sense , the way people make money has not changed much: make something people want that exploits and indefensible resource, rinse, repeat. Like big oil, the big tech of today can keep on making billions without building any new tech. I really dont enjoy this hero worship of tech, it's 2020 those days are gone.

I had the exact same thought when I read pg's statement, "Why are people starting so many more new companies than they used to, and why are they getting so rich from it?". People aren't starting so many more new companies than they used to - they're starting significantly fewer, and that's a bad thing.

pg is obviously focused on the tech side of businesses, but if you look at the US business climate more broadly, tech is a poor indicator for what's been happening the last several decades.

Safe to say PG has a healthy amount of Survivorship Bias.

You sound more out of touch than an alien from outer space. No way is 150k worse quality of life than a janitor 50 years ago.