10 ms·

U.S.A., Land of Limitations?

133 points by kareemm 11y ago

comrade1 11y ago
I'd be interested in the stats in the other direction - how low of a chance of someone born in the upper quintile ending up in the lower quintile. The u.s. seems to be disproportionally high in mediocre people being at the top, being there through famil money. Basically britain's upper class twits satirized by Monty Python.
- dlg 11y ago
  Brookings, a center-left think-tank, has a pretty good summary of a lot of stats about income-mobility http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Reports/2008/2/economic%20mobility%20sawhill/02_economic_mobility_sawhill_ch1.PDF http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Reports/2008... (Also, a shorter note from the center-right AEI https://www.aei.org/publication/tracking-the-same-households-over-time-shows-significant-income-mobility/ https://www.aei.org/publication/tracking-the-same-households...)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
eigenvector 11y ago
I have said this to so-called progressives until I am out of breath. Class and economic inequality is the most pervasive and dangerous form of inequality facing us today in the rich world. We dwell on forms of inequality that are broadly ostracised and largely eliminated, while the elephant in the room is economic inequality that our business and political leaders endorse as enthusiastically as Confederate leaders embraced slavery. Many people today believe that the poor deserve their lot in life, just as people would have said about African-Americans a century ago. Presidential candidates and senators say it openly and without rebuke. Both houses of Congress are controlled by people who talk euphemistically of the super-rich (who increasingly derive their wealth from inheritance not ingenuity) as "job creators". Meanwhile anywhere from a quarter to a third of our population is languishing with no jobs or shitty jobs, poor health, broken families and is always one parking ticket away from financial ruin. This is the greatest challenge of our generation. We have to fix this.
- plurinshael 11y ago
  Total agreement. But curious, you've had to explain this to progressives until you're out of breath? The progressives in where I live are the only ones talking about this, and the (so-called) conservatives are the ones able to deftly brush the subject aside. Trippy.
  - timr 11y ago
    Yeah, exactly. My impression is that Bernie Sanders (and to a lesser, but more ironic extent, Trump) are getting traction precisely because the mainstream candidates are all more-or-less beholden to different flavors of generational wealth. In my experience, progressives are the ones who are pushing the class issue.
  - crdb 11y ago
    Without knowing anything about OP, I could think of a probably too simplistic explanation, which is that both the perceived problem and perceived best solutions would differ and he belongs to the "other" camp. Left: "there's an inequality of ability due to economic conditions, and the solution is redistribution" e.g. affirmative action to push women/minorities/etc. into the workplace, taxes on the wealthy to finance programs for the poor, social housing quotas in every new development... "Right" (usually more libertarian than where the GOP stands these days): "there's an inequality of opportunities due to regulations, and the solution is removing regulations" e.g. Milton Friedman observing that the minimum wage increased black teenage unemployment and pushed many low-skilled black teenagers permanently out of the workforce as they were unable to get that first step on the job ladder; or Uber as a second, ad-hoc source of income for low earners being regulated out as an option as any Uber driver becomes an "employee"; or most extreme, that public schools are always a bad thing because the government monopoly on education means no effective oversight or pressure for teachers to perform.
    - eigenvector 11y ago
      With that remark I've fallen into the trap of separating the entire spectrum of views into two camps: progressive (liberal) and conservative. In reality this is not the case, but in general you can at least divide people into those that profess to care about inequality (and believe the government has a role in solving it, since politics is after all fundamentally about the government) and those who don't think it is a problem. The latter group's views I disagree with, but I can't find much common ground with which to argue from. They don't think it's a problem and they don't want to do anything about it. Among the former (people who would self-identify as progressives), I often find people fixated on certain pet issues relating to legacy social programs (you mentioned a few of them), rather than the broader picture of how a whole swath of the population is falling behind regardless of their colour or gender. These are the progressives who are caught up in, say, pushing for more generous public-sector pay, as if that helps the guy with no high school diploma. Or in fighting housing development on the grounds that it pushes out the poor, without asking why the poor can only afford to live in shitty neighbourhoods to begin with. I feel like many progressives are invested in fighting the symptoms of inequality rather than the causes.
known 11y ago
http://www.businessinsider.com/social-mobility-is-a-myth-in-the-us-2013-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/social-mobility-is-a-myth-in-...
WalterBright 11y ago
On the other hand, it's never been easier to: 1. get educated 2. start a business 3. access the global marketplace 4. invest
- w1ntermute 11y ago
  This sort of attitude just shows how great the disconnect is between the haves and the have-nots. Many of these individuals who lack privilege may not even have proper internet access, or the literacy skills required to harness the internet even if they did. Deep-seated social ills cannot simply be solved by ubiquitous internet access and ever cheaper consumer electronics. Indeed, recent studies on MOOCs have shown that the majority of their users are (surprise, surprise) young, white males with college degrees and a privileged background. One could even make the argument that MOOCs are actually exacerbating inequality, rather than reducing it.
  - qrendel 11y ago
    Regarding MOOCs, part is that is likely cultural - some groups are more likely to have been enculturated in communities where independent learning and self-study is acceptable, if not actively encouraged, versus being discouraged by social ostracization or physical violence in others. The broader issue of drastic differences in outcome, where some people can't get a job scrubbing toilets while others are getting 250k job offers, is also probably due to the winner-take-all employment environment that an increasingly developed economy creates. Use of technology amplifies productivity, so that differences between different quantiles of worker productivity become larger, and companies have more incentive to hold out for the potential employees at the top of the food chain. And as it becomes a more competitive environment, there's less incentive for the less competitive members to bother participating whatsoever. Since increasingly more of society's functions can be performed by smaller segments of the population it shouldn't even be that much of an issue, except that, especially in the US with its widespread "screw the non-contributing zeroes" and "let them die" attitudes, no one wants to consider restructuring the system to support the huge portion of the population that didn't "make it," despite that being the same population that the same highly productive individuals are being produced by and drawn from. So my suggestion is it results from productivity differences due to technological advancement, and social welfare programs will not eliminate those differences, they can just help sustain the necessary population that will never be making 250k a year working as a senior engineer for a large tech company.
elchief 11y ago
This was also true when i took Economics of Inequality at university in 1997. Western Euro countries and Canada were ahead of America back then. From an outsider's perspective, if you're gonna make it rich, do it in the USA to make it crazy rich, but you're going to have a hard time making it from the bottom 10th to the top 10th.
- Joeri 11y ago
  So, you should leave the US to become rich, then return to turn that wealth into superwealth?
  - elchief 11y ago
    If you can swing it, sure
CamperBob2 11y ago
Rick acknowledged that he had made bad choices. He drank, took drugs and was arrested about 30 times. But he also found the strength to give up alcohol when he felt he was turning into his father. What distinguished Rick wasn’t primarily bad choices, but intelligence, hard work and lack of opportunity. If you were arrested 30 times, I'm going to guess that bad choices are, in fact, one of the primary distinguishing characteristics of your life. There are a lot of poor people with backgrounds ranging from unexceptional to tragic who haven't been arrested once. This doesn't invalidate Kristof's larger point, of course, but it does mean he's not very good at picking reasonable, actionable examples. Short of taking away Rick's free will, Clockwork Orange-style, there may not be much we could have done for him. I disagree that Rick's life story invalidates the "American Dream," or even calls it into question.
itistoday2 11y ago
Basic Income.
Aoyagi 11y ago
?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share Please, don't do that. As for the article itself, I thought it's common knowledge that in most civilized world, social mobility is decreasing and income gap is increasing.
anindyabd 11y ago
> "We like to boast of America as a land of opportunity, and historically there is truth to that" I keep hearing this, but where is the evidence? Was there any objective research done to figure out whether at any point there was really some sort of magnificent economic mobility in the U.S.? There's lots of anecdotal evidence, sure -- stories of people who immigrated here with nothing and made it big, movies, novels, etc... but how do we know we're not just hearing about the exceptions, and that in the vast majority of cases, which do not capture people's imaginations, the poor stayed poor and the rich stayed rich?
- nhaehnle 11y ago
  One aspect is that well into the 19th century, perhaps even in the early 20th century, people in the US could participate in the massive land grab in the west. Basically, whenever the social framework got too bad, people could leave and at least go farm somewhere, giving them a living standard not too much below, and perhaps even higher, than that in larger cities. The land grab is over now, but attitudes take some time to catch up. This is particular interesting in comparison to Europe, where land grabs of this style have not happened in the last 1000 years or so. When the social framework got too bad, some people might have left to the Americas, but the people who stayed fought to solve those social problems. I suspect that this is a large part of what drives the difference in perception of welfare spending between Europe and the US. It is also compatible with attitudes slowly shifting in the US to be more European.
  - marcoperaza 11y ago
    Another perspective: while Americans were building a prosperous society of free men, the Europeans were continuously slaughtering each other, first for dynastic power, and then to impose their top-down "solutions" to the social problems you're talking about. Today the Europeans have so saddled themselves with taxation and regulation that they underperform economically. Their welfare systems have not solved poverty, but have fostered a culture of dependency on the state. In the pursuit of economic equality, they have succeeded mostly in raising the cost of living and creating a hostile environment for business. Because it's impossible to fire someone, firms are wary to hire, contributing to staggering youth unemployment. Minorities and immigrants are much more poorly integrated than in the US. Europe exerts little influence on world politics outside of the EU. Yes, I'm presenting just one side of the picture, but it's the side that's consistently ignored when the American left is clamoring for European-style socialism.
nhebb 11y ago
Aside: I met Rick Goff when I was in high school. My dad lived in Yamhill and was friends with him. One day we drove out to his place, turning off the gravel road toward a barn. Stepping inside the barn was a surreal experience. There, out in the middle of nowhere, in a fucking barn, was a freshly painted 1950's Rolls Royce. It was beautiful. I don't know if he's a good example of the economic class divide, though. I understand Kristof's larger point and that he's writing from his own life experiences, but I think Goff's situation is more demonstrative of the rural-urban economic divide than a class divide. He had a skill that people were willing to pay him for, but he chose to restore cars out in the country, in his barn. I can't speak for Goff's life choices, but during my summers in Yamhill and having relatives that lived in rural areas, I met a lot of people who would rather eke out a meagre existence in the countryside than move to where the jobs are. Part of economic mobility is just plain mobility.
lordnacho 11y ago
It's very hard to get even not particularly wealthy middle class people to see this. People have very aggressive in debates with me about how hard they worked and how they should be allowed to pass their advantages on to their kids. There's also an oft repeated trope about how it's about values and character, which isn't entirely false, but besides the point. It seems to be a basic human bias; we think everything positive that happens to us is due to our own merit, and everything bad is due to circumstance. In a country like the US, where I'm guessing people don't really mingle, you end up getting some very bitter people who either think they are being pulled down by the rabble or they are being held down by the aristocrats.
- saiya-jin 11y ago
  > It seems to be a basic human bias; we think everything positive that happens to us is due to our own merit not all, but if one decides to move for work and opportunities, giving up close family, many friends, various safety nets that they bring (financial, personal etc.), start from 0, working hard relentlessly and then is successful (whatever that means), then coming back and listening some envious BS talk about privileged/lucky/whatever by people who eat junk food not because they have to, sit their evenings in front of TV consistently, never ever considered learning something in their (massive) free time etc. They started on +- same level, have same internet as me. Do you really blame anybody successful? I don't. I want to give back, and I am doing that. But not to random Joe, but to my dearest - family and friends. If everybody does that, the very few truly unlucky remaining can be dealt generously with state social systems. This is what made US so famous and strong in past - that your success won't be averaged with those that don't break a sweat, your success will be yours. And more you work on it, bigger it might be. Remove this incentive, and many very bright people will steer their energy elsewhere, and humanity gains less.
raceyT 11y ago
Why didn't Kristof help this guy? It's not a systemic failure when a congenital alcoholic ruins his life, it's a human one.
rayiner 11y ago
My wife was listening to Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People," a book written in 1936 aimed at sales and business people. One thing that struck me was a chapter where he talks about empathizing with people. He gives the example of Al Capone. If we had been born with Al Cappne's body and mind and his circumstances, we would have been him. Therefore, people deserve very little credit for what they've accomplished and conversely very little discredit for what they've not. He ends the section with the saying "there but for the grace of God go I." It's interesting because the intended audience of the book was not social progressives. It seems like a concept that wouldn't have been controversial at the time. It rings very differently in today's culture, where we like to talk about choices more than circumstances.
- gozo 11y ago
  You might be interested in this ted talk, it touches upon this subject 6+ minutes in, but the whole thing is interesting. http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_philosophy_of_success?language=en http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_ph...

133 points by kareemm 11y ago

I'd be interested in the stats in the other direction - how low of a chance of someone born in the upper quintile ending up in the lower quintile. The u.s. seems to be disproportionally high in mediocre people being at the top, being there through famil money. Basically britain's upper class twits satirized by Monty Python.

dlg 11y ago
Brookings, a center-left think-tank, has a pretty good summary of a lot of stats about income-mobility http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Reports/2008/2/economic%20mobility%20sawhill/02_economic_mobility_sawhill_ch1.PDF http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Reports/2008... (Also, a shorter note from the center-right AEI https://www.aei.org/publication/tracking-the-same-households-over-time-shows-significant-income-mobility/ https://www.aei.org/publication/tracking-the-same-households...)

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

eigenvector 11y ago

I have said this to so-called progressives until I am out of breath. Class and economic inequality is the most pervasive and dangerous form of inequality facing us today in the rich world. We dwell on forms of inequality that are broadly ostracised and largely eliminated, while the elephant in the room is economic inequality that our business and political leaders endorse as enthusiastically as Confederate leaders embraced slavery. Many people today believe that the poor deserve their lot in life, just as people would have said about African-Americans a century ago. Presidential candidates and senators say it openly and without rebuke. Both houses of Congress are controlled by people who talk euphemistically of the super-rich (who increasingly derive their wealth from inheritance not ingenuity) as "job creators". Meanwhile anywhere from a quarter to a third of our population is languishing with no jobs or shitty jobs, poor health, broken families and is always one parking ticket away from financial ruin. This is the greatest challenge of our generation. We have to fix this.

plurinshael 11y ago
Total agreement. But curious, you've had to explain this to progressives until you're out of breath? The progressives in where I live are the only ones talking about this, and the (so-called) conservatives are the ones able to deftly brush the subject aside. Trippy.
- timr 11y ago
  Yeah, exactly. My impression is that Bernie Sanders (and to a lesser, but more ironic extent, Trump) are getting traction precisely because the mainstream candidates are all more-or-less beholden to different flavors of generational wealth. In my experience, progressives are the ones who are pushing the class issue.
- crdb 11y ago
  Without knowing anything about OP, I could think of a probably too simplistic explanation, which is that both the perceived problem and perceived best solutions would differ and he belongs to the "other" camp. Left: "there's an inequality of ability due to economic conditions, and the solution is redistribution" e.g. affirmative action to push women/minorities/etc. into the workplace, taxes on the wealthy to finance programs for the poor, social housing quotas in every new development... "Right" (usually more libertarian than where the GOP stands these days): "there's an inequality of opportunities due to regulations, and the solution is removing regulations" e.g. Milton Friedman observing that the minimum wage increased black teenage unemployment and pushed many low-skilled black teenagers permanently out of the workforce as they were unable to get that first step on the job ladder; or Uber as a second, ad-hoc source of income for low earners being regulated out as an option as any Uber driver becomes an "employee"; or most extreme, that public schools are always a bad thing because the government monopoly on education means no effective oversight or pressure for teachers to perform.
  - eigenvector 11y ago
    With that remark I've fallen into the trap of separating the entire spectrum of views into two camps: progressive (liberal) and conservative. In reality this is not the case, but in general you can at least divide people into those that profess to care about inequality (and believe the government has a role in solving it, since politics is after all fundamentally about the government) and those who don't think it is a problem. The latter group's views I disagree with, but I can't find much common ground with which to argue from. They don't think it's a problem and they don't want to do anything about it. Among the former (people who would self-identify as progressives), I often find people fixated on certain pet issues relating to legacy social programs (you mentioned a few of them), rather than the broader picture of how a whole swath of the population is falling behind regardless of their colour or gender. These are the progressives who are caught up in, say, pushing for more generous public-sector pay, as if that helps the guy with no high school diploma. Or in fighting housing development on the grounds that it pushes out the poor, without asking why the poor can only afford to live in shitty neighbourhoods to begin with. I feel like many progressives are invested in fighting the symptoms of inequality rather than the causes.

known 11y ago

http://www.businessinsider.com/social-mobility-is-a-myth-in-the-us-2013-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/social-mobility-is-a-myth-in-...

WalterBright 11y ago

On the other hand, it's never been easier to: 1. get educated 2. start a business 3. access the global marketplace 4. invest

w1ntermute 11y ago
This sort of attitude just shows how great the disconnect is between the haves and the have-nots. Many of these individuals who lack privilege may not even have proper internet access, or the literacy skills required to harness the internet even if they did. Deep-seated social ills cannot simply be solved by ubiquitous internet access and ever cheaper consumer electronics. Indeed, recent studies on MOOCs have shown that the majority of their users are (surprise, surprise) young, white males with college degrees and a privileged background. One could even make the argument that MOOCs are actually exacerbating inequality, rather than reducing it.
- qrendel 11y ago
  Regarding MOOCs, part is that is likely cultural - some groups are more likely to have been enculturated in communities where independent learning and self-study is acceptable, if not actively encouraged, versus being discouraged by social ostracization or physical violence in others. The broader issue of drastic differences in outcome, where some people can't get a job scrubbing toilets while others are getting 250k job offers, is also probably due to the winner-take-all employment environment that an increasingly developed economy creates. Use of technology amplifies productivity, so that differences between different quantiles of worker productivity become larger, and companies have more incentive to hold out for the potential employees at the top of the food chain. And as it becomes a more competitive environment, there's less incentive for the less competitive members to bother participating whatsoever. Since increasingly more of society's functions can be performed by smaller segments of the population it shouldn't even be that much of an issue, except that, especially in the US with its widespread "screw the non-contributing zeroes" and "let them die" attitudes, no one wants to consider restructuring the system to support the huge portion of the population that didn't "make it," despite that being the same population that the same highly productive individuals are being produced by and drawn from. So my suggestion is it results from productivity differences due to technological advancement, and social welfare programs will not eliminate those differences, they can just help sustain the necessary population that will never be making 250k a year working as a senior engineer for a large tech company.

elchief 11y ago

This was also true when i took Economics of Inequality at university in 1997. Western Euro countries and Canada were ahead of America back then. From an outsider's perspective, if you're gonna make it rich, do it in the USA to make it crazy rich, but you're going to have a hard time making it from the bottom 10th to the top 10th.

Joeri 11y ago
So, you should leave the US to become rich, then return to turn that wealth into superwealth?
- elchief 11y ago
  If you can swing it, sure

CamperBob2 11y ago

Rick acknowledged that he had made bad choices. He drank, took drugs and was arrested about 30 times. But he also found the strength to give up alcohol when he felt he was turning into his father. What distinguished Rick wasn’t primarily bad choices, but intelligence, hard work and lack of opportunity. If you were arrested 30 times, I'm going to guess that bad choices are, in fact, one of the primary distinguishing characteristics of your life. There are a lot of poor people with backgrounds ranging from unexceptional to tragic who haven't been arrested once. This doesn't invalidate Kristof's larger point, of course, but it does mean he's not very good at picking reasonable, actionable examples. Short of taking away Rick's free will, Clockwork Orange-style, there may not be much we could have done for him. I disagree that Rick's life story invalidates the "American Dream," or even calls it into question.

itistoday2 11y ago

Basic Income.

Aoyagi 11y ago

?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share Please, don't do that. As for the article itself, I thought it's common knowledge that in most civilized world, social mobility is decreasing and income gap is increasing.

anindyabd 11y ago

> "We like to boast of America as a land of opportunity, and historically there is truth to that" I keep hearing this, but where is the evidence? Was there any objective research done to figure out whether at any point there was really some sort of magnificent economic mobility in the U.S.? There's lots of anecdotal evidence, sure -- stories of people who immigrated here with nothing and made it big, movies, novels, etc... but how do we know we're not just hearing about the exceptions, and that in the vast majority of cases, which do not capture people's imaginations, the poor stayed poor and the rich stayed rich?

nhaehnle 11y ago
One aspect is that well into the 19th century, perhaps even in the early 20th century, people in the US could participate in the massive land grab in the west. Basically, whenever the social framework got too bad, people could leave and at least go farm somewhere, giving them a living standard not too much below, and perhaps even higher, than that in larger cities. The land grab is over now, but attitudes take some time to catch up. This is particular interesting in comparison to Europe, where land grabs of this style have not happened in the last 1000 years or so. When the social framework got too bad, some people might have left to the Americas, but the people who stayed fought to solve those social problems. I suspect that this is a large part of what drives the difference in perception of welfare spending between Europe and the US. It is also compatible with attitudes slowly shifting in the US to be more European.
- marcoperaza 11y ago
  Another perspective: while Americans were building a prosperous society of free men, the Europeans were continuously slaughtering each other, first for dynastic power, and then to impose their top-down "solutions" to the social problems you're talking about. Today the Europeans have so saddled themselves with taxation and regulation that they underperform economically. Their welfare systems have not solved poverty, but have fostered a culture of dependency on the state. In the pursuit of economic equality, they have succeeded mostly in raising the cost of living and creating a hostile environment for business. Because it's impossible to fire someone, firms are wary to hire, contributing to staggering youth unemployment. Minorities and immigrants are much more poorly integrated than in the US. Europe exerts little influence on world politics outside of the EU. Yes, I'm presenting just one side of the picture, but it's the side that's consistently ignored when the American left is clamoring for European-style socialism.

nhebb 11y ago

Aside: I met Rick Goff when I was in high school. My dad lived in Yamhill and was friends with him. One day we drove out to his place, turning off the gravel road toward a barn. Stepping inside the barn was a surreal experience. There, out in the middle of nowhere, in a fucking barn, was a freshly painted 1950's Rolls Royce. It was beautiful. I don't know if he's a good example of the economic class divide, though. I understand Kristof's larger point and that he's writing from his own life experiences, but I think Goff's situation is more demonstrative of the rural-urban economic divide than a class divide. He had a skill that people were willing to pay him for, but he chose to restore cars out in the country, in his barn. I can't speak for Goff's life choices, but during my summers in Yamhill and having relatives that lived in rural areas, I met a lot of people who would rather eke out a meagre existence in the countryside than move to where the jobs are. Part of economic mobility is just plain mobility.

lordnacho 11y ago

It's very hard to get even not particularly wealthy middle class people to see this. People have very aggressive in debates with me about how hard they worked and how they should be allowed to pass their advantages on to their kids. There's also an oft repeated trope about how it's about values and character, which isn't entirely false, but besides the point. It seems to be a basic human bias; we think everything positive that happens to us is due to our own merit, and everything bad is due to circumstance. In a country like the US, where I'm guessing people don't really mingle, you end up getting some very bitter people who either think they are being pulled down by the rabble or they are being held down by the aristocrats.

saiya-jin 11y ago
> It seems to be a basic human bias; we think everything positive that happens to us is due to our own merit not all, but if one decides to move for work and opportunities, giving up close family, many friends, various safety nets that they bring (financial, personal etc.), start from 0, working hard relentlessly and then is successful (whatever that means), then coming back and listening some envious BS talk about privileged/lucky/whatever by people who eat junk food not because they have to, sit their evenings in front of TV consistently, never ever considered learning something in their (massive) free time etc. They started on +- same level, have same internet as me. Do you really blame anybody successful? I don't. I want to give back, and I am doing that. But not to random Joe, but to my dearest - family and friends. If everybody does that, the very few truly unlucky remaining can be dealt generously with state social systems. This is what made US so famous and strong in past - that your success won't be averaged with those that don't break a sweat, your success will be yours. And more you work on it, bigger it might be. Remove this incentive, and many very bright people will steer their energy elsewhere, and humanity gains less.

raceyT 11y ago

Why didn't Kristof help this guy? It's not a systemic failure when a congenital alcoholic ruins his life, it's a human one.

rayiner 11y ago

My wife was listening to Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People," a book written in 1936 aimed at sales and business people. One thing that struck me was a chapter where he talks about empathizing with people. He gives the example of Al Capone. If we had been born with Al Cappne's body and mind and his circumstances, we would have been him. Therefore, people deserve very little credit for what they've accomplished and conversely very little discredit for what they've not. He ends the section with the saying "there but for the grace of God go I." It's interesting because the intended audience of the book was not social progressives. It seems like a concept that wouldn't have been controversial at the time. It rings very differently in today's culture, where we like to talk about choices more than circumstances.

gozo 11y ago
You might be interested in this ted talk, it touches upon this subject 6+ minutes in, but the whole thing is interesting. http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_philosophy_of_success?language=en http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_ph...