41–50 of 98 posts
The thing that frustrates me the most about this situation is the waste of human capital this represents for society. Now, I'm a firm believer that society is advanced mostly by a small minority of highly talented individuals - the intelligent, creative, charismatic, and hardworking few change the game for everyone else. Now, what happens when those rare talents are born into the cycle of poverty? What lessons do the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that people like you can escape is very encouraging: it means we still have class mobility -- if you've got the skills and work ethic, you can be born into the lower class and quickly rise above that.
No, not quickly, on the contrary, there's an inverse relationship: "...the United States and United Kingdom had the lowest intergenerational vertical social mobility ..." "...Studies have also found "a clear negative relationship" between income inequality and intergenerational mobility.[27] Countries with low levels of inequality such as Denmark, Norway and Finland had some of the greatest mobility, while the two co…
The thing that frustrates me the most about this situation is the waste of human capital this represents for society. Now, I'm a firm believer that society is advanced mostly by a small minority of highly talented individuals - the intelligent, creative, charismatic, and hardworking few change the game for everyone else. Now, what happens when those rare talents are born into the cycle of poverty? What lessons do the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a great quote from a Terry Pratchett Discworld novel: "The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard…
That quote always bothers me, because most long-term savings like that aren't nearly so clear in numerical terms.
I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies. Virtually all federal, state, and local programs either mandate or imply that case managers must be hired or deployed. Each one of those people, and each one of their interactions, carries a cost. The situation is different from but still analogous to the one pg describes in "Makers Schedule, Managers Schedule": http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html .
The thing that frustrates me the most about this situation is the waste of human capital this represents for society. Now, I'm a firm believer that society is advanced mostly by a small minority of highly talented individuals - the intelligent, creative, charismatic, and hardworking few change the game for everyone else. Now, what happens when those rare talents are born into the cycle of poverty? What lessons do the…
Pretty harsh. I'd bet the shirt you are wearing was made by a hard working person you consider not important enough to matter, yet worth taking a shirt from.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that people like you can escape is very encouraging: it means we still have class mobility -- if you've got the skills and work ethic, you can be born into the lower class and quickly rise above that.
Don't kid yourself. There's a wide gulf between a worldview based on a few anecdotal successes and the more realistic picture emerging from a flood of statistics, which not only show the rarity of mobility, but indicate that it's declining - esp. for those unfortunate enough to be born at the bottom. Yes, people can win Olympic Gold (we're not competing against robots yet), but very few will and those who do will hav…
There's a saying, it goes like this: "its expensive being poor", and its really the truth. If you don't have enough money to buy in bulk, you end up paying way more for the smaller amount of product. If you can't afford to spend time on something because you have a limited number of calories before you become unproductive, and therefore have to work on aquiring more calories, then you're stuck in a feedback loop of n…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't kid yourself. There's a wide gulf between a worldview based on a few anecdotal successes and the more realistic picture emerging from a flood of statistics, which not only show the rarity of mobility, but indicate that it's declining - esp. for those unfortunate enough to be born at the bottom. Yes, people can win Olympic Gold (we're not competing against robots yet), but very few will and those who do will hav…
The number of people that can win an Olympic Gold is arbitrarily fixed. The number of people that can become financially successful isn't.