471–480 of 715 posts
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> On the other hand I don't think you ever in the history had as wide opportunities as you do now There were periods in history with great opportunities where many people actually really richer. Economies always went up and down, where up literally means opportunities.
in US or worldwide?
Working hard but doing so for someone else can often not lead to significant gains. Many services like Uber or InstaCart or even McDonalds or Amazon Warehouse or Walmart or Retail Sales or call center, you can work hard but there is no where to progress to. Your rewards are capped. You need to find a way to work hard such that your rewards are not capped artificially. Startups were you get equity. Large companies whe…
IMHO, this misses the point. How the fuck can Elon/Tesla buy bitcoin, do a pump and dump, and walk away with enough money to cover 300 lifetimes of me working. Or some kid in a basement that bought GME options gets to retire and not work a day in their life. Also the guy that VC gifted 6 figures (multiple years of me working) of equity just because he wanted more money from the acquisition. Watching people get a bunc…
You're ignoring risk. Do you feel the same way when people win lotteries? Because everybody has access to Robinhood, so nothing is stopping you from gambling on penny stocks or random crypto and you just might get retirement money or lose it all.
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> How much social mobility we talking? ([...] only talking about the US) My college US history course ~20 years ago very much drove home the fact that (at least at the time) social mobility in the US was the same as in India. The surprise, of course, was that India has a caste system, while the US narrative is freedom; if you work hard, you’ll get ahead. I don’t remember the sources, but the rate of social mobility (…
> My college US history course ~20 years ago very much drove home the fact that (at least at the time) social mobility in the US was the same as in India. This is flatly false, and to be honest it's a little embarrassing that you would parrot it without Googling it (which you were happy to do to pull up a tangential stat that didn't contradict the dishonest narrative you're pushing). The US is ranked 27th out of the…
A sibling comment to yours explains succinctly why your comment misunderstands mine: standard of living in the US is higher than India. The WEF’s metric is based on ranking the standard of living of each country against each other. It can be simultaneously true that the US standard of living is higher than India, and also that people born lower class in the US improve their lot at the same rate as people in India.
I can’t think of any way to improve your lot in life without working hard. Unless you inherit money or win the lottery, no one is going to hand you a better life. We have a safety net for the disabled. If you are able-bodied and refuse to work hard yet still complain that life gave you a raw deal, I don’t have any sympathy for you. Everyone I know who is very successful (outside of FAANG employees who seemingly coast…
(I say that as a first-generation immigrant, albeit one who moved at a really young age, so I kind of straddle the line and understand both perspectives)
Solutions for immigrants might not generalize to the whole population because of this filter effect.
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I think there's also other cases where kids grew up without education (like myself) - but could have, but if i were to have kids now i'd value education immensely. Ie i'm not an immigrant, my lack of early education is a result of my family being poor and making poor decisions. However now my values have shifted drastically. Ironically i would consider myself very lucky. Not wealthy by any means, but far better off t…
If you are far better off than the average American household you could definitely consider yourself wealthy.
Point being, I think people are more aware of the unattained wealth above them than the levels they've already surpassed. (Myself included). The comment you replied to strikes me in the same way, though not nearly as blatant!
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In 2019, immigrant entrepreneurs made up 21.7 percent of all business owners in the United States, despite making up just over 13.6 percent of the population and 17.1 percent of the U.S. labor force. As an immigrant I can assure you that my starting position was not that great. It is super sad to see the west being turned into an epicurean type world.
Agreed, some of these posts are appalling. Hard work may not pay off but not working hard is guaranteed not to pay off.
If you get into a job at the right level due to educational or social advantage, you can get by working a lot less hard doing the same thing than someone who comes in as an intermediately-skilled contractor.
Working smart, taking risks (eg selling something illegal), and grifting are well-trodden paths that pay off despite reduced day to day effort.
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IMHO, this misses the point. How the fuck can Elon/Tesla buy bitcoin, do a pump and dump, and walk away with enough money to cover 300 lifetimes of me working. Or some kid in a basement that bought GME options gets to retire and not work a day in their life. Also the guy that VC gifted 6 figures (multiple years of me working) of equity just because he wanted more money from the acquisition. Watching people get a bunc…
> Watching people get a bunch of money over and over for no work starts to make you question things. You're ignoring risk. Do you feel the same way when people win lotteries? Because everybody has access to Robinhood, so nothing is stopping you from gambling on penny stocks or random crypto and you just might get retirement money or lose it all.
I mean that's the point. Lotteries are supposed to be lotteries. The economy is supposed to be an economy where people earn what they receive.
Starting conditions (where one was born, levels of wealth and opportunity there, one's parents' education and jobs) are shockingly predictive about an individual's future. Hard work leading to social mobility has always been the exception, not the rule. Most will not beat the odds since if they did, those wouldn't BE the odds. A lot of us are just so deluded by survivorship bias borne of listening only to success sto…
How do you measure social mobility and what does the data show? I don’t have time right now to grab the data, bu last time I looked, there was actually a surprising amount of movement between the various quintiles of wealth from one generation to the next. It’d be great if you included data that supports your claims.
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On the flip side there are plenty of examples of kids being pushed into higher education who would have been much better off going to a trade school. Working as a plumber, an electrician, or a carpenter can be quite lucrative, and they are certainly things that society needs. Being pushed into higher ed is so much different than having an internal drive to do it. I'm glad that she's doing well and hopefully they can…
> Working as a plumber, an electrician, or a carpenter can be quite lucrative This narrative about wealthy trades people like plumbers and welders is not well supported by any data. The ones who do well are the ones who start businesses and hire people, so they become business owners, but most trades people don’t end up there and they obviously can’t all do it. You should know that the U.S. Fed (St. Louis) published…
The data suggests that people who hold a 4-year degree have X ratio of income. That's two things: the people and the degree, not just the degree.
From a previous study, a related (but inexact) surprising outcome emerged: After adjusting for applicant scholastic aptitude, the additional benefit from attending an elite school is “generally indistinguishable from zero.” Excerpt from article*: In November 2002, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a landmark paper** by the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger that reached a startling conclusion. For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
* - https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-ma...
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You realize that humanity is several hundred thousand years old, and most of that was brutal slavery, of the strong imposing their will on the weak, of kings and chieftains using their gangs to take from the rest? If you think American slavery was unique, you need to get your money back for you education. The Romans had a special tool to knock out the teeth of slaves so they could be better abused sexually. The N. Af…
> Just like it is in the norm in nature for the strong to take from the weak. This is tautological. Why? Because I'm 99% certain that the only definition you have of "the strong" and "the weak" is based on who takes from whom. Ecologies don't tend to work the way human societies do, and should probably not be used as analogies or metaphors for them.
What humans have today is an aberration from history and nature and should be protected at all costs. And those that would destroy it can't fathom the kind of hell life was for 99.9% of humanity just a bare fraction of our history ago.