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Americans overestimate social mobility in their country

economist.com

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Re: Americans overestimate social mobility in their country

#381

Post by atoav »

kube-system wrote: post #109
atoav wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they're willing to fill-out some forms. How does that part work in practise? Are these forms something someone from a poor uneducated background can actually realistically fill out? The way I see it many Americans I had the chance to talk with either take a gamble on their health or they spend not unsignificant time and energy to find their ways through the system. The first choice can turn out just fine, or (in…

It works pretty well. 23% of Americans use Medicaid. (which means it surprisingly covers more people than UK's NHS) About half of all births in the US are paid for by Medicaid. The Americans you hear about on the news that don't have healthcare are people who have incomes above the eligibility threshold to qualify for Medicaid, or are too young to qualify for Medicare. It's the people in the middle who fall through t…

> It's the people in the middle who fall through the cracks in the US.

You mean the people who potentially start out with their own business to get "filthy rich"?

Re: Americans overestimate social mobility in their country

#382

Post by tdfx »

_dark_matter_ wrote: post #378
tdfx wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then go back and read what I replied to instead of what you wanted to think I was saying. The original poster stated "white and asian people don't have this problem" but the numbers show this clearly is not true.

hmm, I did, a few times. I don't see that quote in the parent. They do say that white and Asian people have more opportunity which these numbers clearly confirm.

>> "it's not hugely difficult to earn six figures in the US if you're committed, work hard, and pick a good field." > I think that's true for White and Asian folks.

So the 15 million impoverished white people are just lazy but the 8 million impoverished black people are systematically deprived of opportunity? It's so strange to me that SJWs feel the need to minimize the struggles of groups that are facing the same obstacles as the groups they are advocating for just because they have a common skin color with the majority of the affluent group.

Re: Americans overestimate social mobility in their country

#383

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

WalterBright wrote: post #372
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most people recognize that a life growing up in the USA followed by the legal right to work and live here is a fairly huge step up in socioeconomic status from where most DACA-covered folk would have been had they not come to the USA. But TFA was about socioeonomic mobility within the USA, not comparisons with Mexico, Peru or Bolivia. The success of a specific subgroup [0] of undocumented immigrants at moving…

I'm not refuting the TFA. I am refuting the notion that people in American cannot move upwards. There is no group more disadvantaged than immigrants, who arrive with nothing, have no support structure, are discriminated against, and often don't even know the language. Yet they can and do succeed, as the DACA cohort shows.

Nothing in the TFA or anyone's comments (dangerously broad, I know) said that people could NOT move upwards.

It said that upward mobility is significantly lower in the USA than many other western industrial democracies, and also significantly lower than most Americans think it is.

Re: Americans overestimate social mobility in their country

#384

Post by _dark_matter_ »

tdfx wrote: post #382
_dark_matter_ wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm, I did, a few times. I don't see that quote in the parent. They do say that white and Asian people have more opportunity which these numbers clearly confirm.

>> "it's not hugely difficult to earn six figures in the US if you're committed, work hard, and pick a good field." > I think that's true for White and Asian folks. So the 15 million impoverished white people are just lazy but the 8 million impoverished black people are systematically deprived of opportunity? It's so strange to me that SJWs feel the need to minimize the struggles of groups that are facing the same ob…

Hmm, I don't see anything about white people being lazy in the parent either. I see that you're not interested in debate based on facts but are driven by your ideology. I wish you luck in reading different viewpoints and making your own decisions based on facts rather than what you've been told to believe.

Re: Americans overestimate social mobility in their country

#385

Post by tdfx »

_dark_matter_ wrote: post #384
tdfx wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "it's not hugely difficult to earn six figures in the US if you're committed, work hard, and pick a good field." > I think that's true for White and Asian folks. So the 15 million impoverished white people are just lazy but the 8 million impoverished black people are systematically deprived of opportunity? It's so strange to me that SJWs feel the need to minimize the struggles of groups that are facing the same ob…

Hmm, I don't see anything about white people being lazy in the parent either. I see that you're not interested in debate based on facts but are driven by your ideology. I wish you luck in reading different viewpoints and making your own decisions based on facts rather than what you've been told to believe.

> I see that you're not interested in debate based on facts but are driven by your ideology

That's an awful lot of projecting. Your use of logical fallacies is dizzying.

Re: Americans overestimate social mobility in their country

#386

Post by kube-system »

atoav wrote: post #381
kube-system wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works pretty well. 23% of Americans use Medicaid. (which means it surprisingly covers more people than UK's NHS) About half of all births in the US are paid for by Medicaid. The Americans you hear about on the news that don't have healthcare are people who have incomes above the eligibility threshold to qualify for Medicaid, or are too young to qualify for Medicare. It's the people in the middle who fall through t…

> It's the people in the middle who fall through the cracks in the US. You mean the people who potentially start out with their own business to get "filthy rich"?

I don’t understand your comment. I’m referring to people who have incomes too high to qualify for Medicaid but do not have a high enough income to afford good health insurance.

Re: Americans overestimate social mobility in their country

#387

Post by csallen »

DarylZero wrote: post #342
csallen wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have some flawed assumptions. 1. Wealth doesn't require a lot of labor to prop it up, especially not in an increasingly technological world where digital products enable infinite copies at no marginal cost, where code can "labor" in the background without manpower, and where the internet provides infinite distribution to all corners of the globe. 2. Labor today looks significantly different than it did in…

What flawed assumption do you think I'm making? Wealth represents owed labor, because ordinary people have an obligation to pay rent, and otherwise buy resources from the previous generation of humans, who allocated nature before they were born; so they have an obligation to work for owners; and wealth takes the form of ownership of a share of the work done by them.

> Wealth represents owed labor

That's the flawed assumption you're making. Wealth does not just come from labor. It largely comes from technology. Technology provides leverage. It's not uncommon that a single person today can do something that generates 10,000x the entertainment/utility/productivity/wealth any single person could have in the past.

The average person today is far wealthier than the average person hundreds of years ago, and we have fewer indentured servants, not more. That's because we can generate wealth much more easily today, thanks to technology. As a result, we should (and do) have far more wealthy people.

Also, just mathematically speaking, more wealthy people can't mean more servants. To use an extreme example, a society with 99% wealthy people could only have 1% servants, max.

Re: Americans overestimate social mobility in their country

#388

Post by DarylZero »

csallen wrote: post #387
DarylZero wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What flawed assumption do you think I'm making? Wealth represents owed labor, because ordinary people have an obligation to pay rent, and otherwise buy resources from the previous generation of humans, who allocated nature before they were born; so they have an obligation to work for owners; and wealth takes the form of ownership of a share of the work done by them.

> Wealth represents owed labor That's the flawed assumption you're making. Wealth does not just come from labor. It largely comes from technology. Technology provides leverage. It's not uncommon that a single person today can do something that generates 10,000x the entertainment/utility/productivity/wealth any single person could have in the past. The average person today is far wealthier than the average person hund…

OK. That's not an assumption though. I explained the reasoning behind that claim. You didn't address it.

> we can generate wealth much more easily today, thanks to technology

This is a different kind of "wealth." I certainly didn't mean to say anything against higher productivity etc.

I was saying that if someone has more wealth measured in dollars than everyone else in society, that person then has an effective power to prey upon or parasitize those others and their children. So that kind of wealth isn't a positive thing. But technology is different.

Re: Americans overestimate social mobility in their country

#389

Post by DarylZero »

Thorrez wrote: post #375
DarylZero wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot baths without running water were available to ordinary people. They would boil water on a stove and put it into the bathtub. The big problem with your argument here is that it's special pleading. You just focus on some technologies that weren't available then. You don't even make an attempt to show that these very few specific things somehow dominate "lifestyle." I think having full service everything, and no lab…

>Hot baths without running water were available to ordinary people. Everyone once in a while, yes, but not for everyday people.[1] >"lifestyle." You're right, it does depend on the definition of lifestyle. Some people consider travel to be central to a fancy lifestyle, and that would be hard in the past. >no labor obligations Most people on HN likely have no physical labor obligations from employment. We have cushy p…

The grapes are sour.

Re: Americans overestimate social mobility in their country

#390

Post by systemvoltage »

1cvmask wrote: post #69
systemvoltage wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd just like to point out one thing I've noticed quite a bit and would love Europeans to chime in - that is - European exceptionalism. We, Americans, were known for American exceptionalism but that has eroded to a point where I haven't heard a single good thing about America in the last decade or so. We're shameful and contemptful of our nation. Slightest positive thing is considered nationalistic and right-wing, so…

That cause we not only own .com we even own ICANN at it’s true root. We have nuclear powered carrier groups with real projection of power. Europe has nothing in real terms to compare. A simple example is two formerly grand colonial European powers both invaded and attacked Libya. They literally ran out of mumitions and ordnance. Obama had to come and save the day to destroy Libya. Another example is we left Afghanist…

It's not EU, but go to Switzerland. Swiss branding permeates literally every thing. Can't go for 5 mins before noticing a Swiss flag in Zurich. Even people of Wyoming would be put off by this much about nationalism.
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