5 ms·

... a more interesting story than "200 M people who started with nothing, and ended up with nothing."

• wslh 16y ago
  Also, it's more or equally probable to win the lottery, casino, poker?
  • _delirium 16y ago
    A few of them are even pretty similar in the mechanics. The first person the article profiles is Harold Hamm, a wildcat driller who struck a huge well in 1971, more or less by luck (he doesn't appear to have used any of the geological-formation analysis that modern drilling uses). Gold-prospecting had some similar success stories.
  • btilly 16y ago
    Also, it's more or equally probable to win the lottery, casino, poker? One of those is not like the others. In the long run poker is almost entirely a game of skill.
• uuilly 16y ago
  If you're talking about the US this is a popular misconception. The number of rich and poor people does stay the same from generation to generation. But the people themselves move very fluidly through these brackets. One of the best predictors of income bracket is age. Young people are much more likely to be poor but they seldom remain poor. As they gain more experience they become more valuable and pull themselves out of poverty. Likewise many people with medium and large amounts of money lose it and become poor. Saying, "In 1990 10% of the US is poor and in 2010 10% are still poor" is pretty silly if most of 1990's poor are different people than 2010's poor. Tracking flesh and blood people through time using tax returns from the IRS yields dramatically different conclusions than tracking buckets of people using Census data. I'd like to do a visualization of income bracket churn in the US. From what I've read I imagine it would look roughly like this: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/23/movies/20080223_REVENUE_GRAPHIC.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/23/movies/2008022... Also Thomas Sowell has written extensively on this exact subject. Here is an article about this misconception that is a lot more elegant than this comment: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/income_confusion.html http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/income_con...
  • ahi 16y ago
    Krugman, among many others, disagrees. See: http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-mobility.htm http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-mobility.htm and http://www.bnet.com/blog/financial-business/as-income-mobility-falls-american-dream-fades/1160 http://www.bnet.com/blog/financial-business/as-income-mobili... Tracking flesh and blood people is a poor methodology as all but a handful of trust fund kids start at the bottom and work up.
    • andyv 16y ago
      Krugman thinks that Social Security is on financially sound footing...
      • te_chris 16y ago
        prove him wrong?
        • nickpinkston 16y ago
          This'll do: http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=5530&type=0 http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=5530&type=0
          • Locke1689 16y ago
            No it won't. There's no context there.
            • nickpinkston 16y ago
              CBO = Govt's Auditer, That graph = range of outlays they predict (best/worst), if CBO is unbiased OR biased towards govt AND best_case_outlays > revenue -> social security will blow up under current laws. $: True
              • Locke1689 16y ago