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Best advice my dad ever gave was: The middle class is disappearing. In the future there will be only rich and poor. Your job is to end up on the correct side of

by Swizec 6y ago

Best advice my dad ever gave was: The middle class is disappearing. In the future there will be only rich and poor. Your job is to end up on the correct side of that line. He then peaced out of my life but that part stuck.

capableweb 6y ago
I like this advice, because it's not dictating what "correct side" is, and it doesn't define "rich" as in "wealthy", so you can take this advice a little bit how you want to take it.
Wirerack 6y ago
I have felt the same thing for some time. With the rise of automation I expect this separation to get even worse. You, can't help but think that now might be the last chance to get on the right side, lest you get left behind in "digital serfdom".
scarmig 6y ago
> He then peaced out of my life but that part stuck. I guess he decided raising his child would cut too much into his savings rates. I don't disagree with his stance descriptively, but if we embrace it, it means committing ourselves to an amoral, spiritually impoverished future.
- Swizec 6y ago
  > I guess he decided raising his child would cut too much into his savings rates. Mmmm no it’s not that simple, but it’s a long story. Last I heard he was presumed homeless.
  - pc86 6y ago
    I've had a similar experience with my biological mom.
  - scarmig 6y ago
    Sorry, I shouldn't have projected my assumptions onto your particular story =)
    - dnautics 6y ago
      We all project - I orginally interpreted "peacing out" as in "peacing out from the world", as in "dying".
- skapadia 6y ago
  Do you think humanity has ever been anything other than amoral and spiritually impoverished at the global level?
  - discreteevent 6y ago
    No. At the global level most ordinary people are decent and just want to make a living - from my anecdotal experience of the few places I've been. The rich and those who want to get rich are different (some of the rich are decent but not most of them)
brmgb 6y ago
If your take away from "the world seems to be becoming less and less livable for most" is "I need to get on the side of the abusers as fast as I can", you might want to take a hard look at the person you have become.
- seizethecheese 6y ago
  I hope you’re satisfied with your morality when you’re old and on the wrong side of the line.
  - brmgb 6y ago
    There is no wrong side of the line. A manichean dichotomy between winners and losers is an unproductive way to look at the world. You can both be successful while trying to carry everybody up. Life is not a zero sum game. The end game of rising inequality is not a few living good lives while most suffer. It is chaos and instability.
amanaplanacanal 6y ago
I would phrase it a little differently. There is labor and capital. And the way things are going is that most of the returns are going to capital, not labor. Save and invest as much as you can, because I don’t see this changing.
- zarkov99 6y ago
  How does that jive with the incredible salaries of elite professionals, like computer scientists, lawyers, doctors, CEO's, when compared with the rest of the population? I think the importance of the labor vs capital divide is being exaggerated by the very elites who are making out as bandits from their labor. It is one way to assuage a guilty conscience I suppose.
  - Swizec 6y ago
    > How does that jive with the incredible salaries of elite professionals, like computer scientists, lawyers, doctors, CEO's, when compared with the rest of the population? It is important to turn that high income into assets. Living on cashflow is a losing bet long-term.
- zaroth 6y ago
  That’s the traditional way to model things. There’s another dimension that I find increasingly useful to look at. Capital is infinitely scalable. One person can put $1 to work, or one person can $100 billion dollars to work. Labor has a hard limit somewhere around 60-80 hours per week. One person cannot sustainably put more labor “to work” without capital. Labor is essentially time. So you have time and money. But not all hours you spend are the same. You can spend an hour fixing your car, or painting your house. The net effect of that hour is to provide a bit of value for perhaps up to a dozen people. Or you could spend an hour creating something that provides a bit of value many times into the future for thousands, millions, or billions of people. One is not inherently better than the other, but one is inherently more economically valuable than the other. So the lesson is if you are time rich but capital poor, and you want to get capital rich, you need to spend your time on things that provide a bit of value for an arbitrarily large number of people. In other words, one-to-many not one-to-one. There’s an upper limit to how much money your labor can make working 1-to-1 or even 1-to-N where n is small. There’s no limit to how much money your labor can make when N is large.
ryandrake 6y ago
As a parent with a kid, this inevitable bifurcation into "dirt poor" and "ultra rich" is obvious, and on every parent's mind these days. This is making school life for kids punishingly competitive. It's a-few-winners-take-all, with most of the winners already pre-determined by being born rich. Every middle class parent is taking extreme steps to get their kid a chance of being one of those winners. When I was a kid, there was college+professional job out there for the A and B students, and there were jobs at the factory or mill out there waiting for the C and D students. Now, it's success for the A++ students with the "right" extra-curriculars (and for the too-rich-to-fail kids), and unemployment/meth/prison for the remaining A, B, C, and D students.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  I'm seeing this, but the irony is that this is a losing strategy for many parents. I know a ton of people who internalized this lesson, got a Ph.D, and have been stuck in post-doc limbo for a decade. Or they went to law school and washed out when they realized they hated it (at least one of whom is now dead from what I think was suicide), or became a dentist and had their practice eviscerated by COVID. Meanwhile I did basically no homework between the ages of 11-24, graduated 2 years late from college after flunking a couple courses, spent all my "free" (= homework/class) time reading and fiddling around with computers, and ended up in one of those hot jobs. My parents freaked about me ever having a job or living on my own - my mom sent me a graduation card that said "Some call it graduation. We call it a miracle." I matched her final salary (after 35 years in the workforce) in my first year out of college. IMHO, the best skills you can teach your kid these days are: 1) supply & demand 2) compound interest 3) how to read what's "hot" and what people really care about 4) how to form a mental model of what's in someone's head and trade with them so they get what they want and you get what you want 5) statistics and 6) whatever labor-saving technologies of the day can make things more efficient and throw people out of work. That was software when I was a kid; it's probably things like deep neural nets and robotics now, and may be biotech/nanotech/material science by the time kids today get into the workforce. Lots of middle-class parents fight the last war and prepare their kids for the world they entered as 20/30-somethings. They need to stop stressing over economic realities now (which will be totally different by the time our kids enter the working world) and teach general principles for being able to look around you and make sense of the world, then trust the kid to be able to do that on their own.
dang 6y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25560987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25560987.

by Swizec 6y ago

capableweb 6y ago

I like this advice, because it's not dictating what "correct side" is, and it doesn't define "rich" as in "wealthy", so you can take this advice a little bit how you want to take it.

Wirerack 6y ago

I have felt the same thing for some time. With the rise of automation I expect this separation to get even worse. You, can't help but think that now might be the last chance to get on the right side, lest you get left behind in "digital serfdom".

scarmig 6y ago

> He then peaced out of my life but that part stuck. I guess he decided raising his child would cut too much into his savings rates. I don't disagree with his stance descriptively, but if we embrace it, it means committing ourselves to an amoral, spiritually impoverished future.

Swizec 6y ago
> I guess he decided raising his child would cut too much into his savings rates. Mmmm no it’s not that simple, but it’s a long story. Last I heard he was presumed homeless.
- pc86 6y ago
  I've had a similar experience with my biological mom.
- scarmig 6y ago
  Sorry, I shouldn't have projected my assumptions onto your particular story =)
  - dnautics 6y ago
    We all project - I orginally interpreted "peacing out" as in "peacing out from the world", as in "dying".
skapadia 6y ago
Do you think humanity has ever been anything other than amoral and spiritually impoverished at the global level?
- discreteevent 6y ago
  No. At the global level most ordinary people are decent and just want to make a living - from my anecdotal experience of the few places I've been. The rich and those who want to get rich are different (some of the rich are decent but not most of them)

brmgb 6y ago

If your take away from "the world seems to be becoming less and less livable for most" is "I need to get on the side of the abusers as fast as I can", you might want to take a hard look at the person you have become.

seizethecheese 6y ago
I hope you’re satisfied with your morality when you’re old and on the wrong side of the line.
- brmgb 6y ago
  There is no wrong side of the line. A manichean dichotomy between winners and losers is an unproductive way to look at the world. You can both be successful while trying to carry everybody up. Life is not a zero sum game. The end game of rising inequality is not a few living good lives while most suffer. It is chaos and instability.

amanaplanacanal 6y ago

I would phrase it a little differently. There is labor and capital. And the way things are going is that most of the returns are going to capital, not labor. Save and invest as much as you can, because I don’t see this changing.

zarkov99 6y ago
How does that jive with the incredible salaries of elite professionals, like computer scientists, lawyers, doctors, CEO's, when compared with the rest of the population? I think the importance of the labor vs capital divide is being exaggerated by the very elites who are making out as bandits from their labor. It is one way to assuage a guilty conscience I suppose.
- Swizec 6y ago
  > How does that jive with the incredible salaries of elite professionals, like computer scientists, lawyers, doctors, CEO's, when compared with the rest of the population? It is important to turn that high income into assets. Living on cashflow is a losing bet long-term.
zaroth 6y ago
That’s the traditional way to model things. There’s another dimension that I find increasingly useful to look at. Capital is infinitely scalable. One person can put $1 to work, or one person can $100 billion dollars to work. Labor has a hard limit somewhere around 60-80 hours per week. One person cannot sustainably put more labor “to work” without capital. Labor is essentially time. So you have time and money. But not all hours you spend are the same. You can spend an hour fixing your car, or painting your house. The net effect of that hour is to provide a bit of value for perhaps up to a dozen people. Or you could spend an hour creating something that provides a bit of value many times into the future for thousands, millions, or billions of people. One is not inherently better than the other, but one is inherently more economically valuable than the other. So the lesson is if you are time rich but capital poor, and you want to get capital rich, you need to spend your time on things that provide a bit of value for an arbitrarily large number of people. In other words, one-to-many not one-to-one. There’s an upper limit to how much money your labor can make working 1-to-1 or even 1-to-N where n is small. There’s no limit to how much money your labor can make when N is large.

ryandrake 6y ago

As a parent with a kid, this inevitable bifurcation into "dirt poor" and "ultra rich" is obvious, and on every parent's mind these days. This is making school life for kids punishingly competitive. It's a-few-winners-take-all, with most of the winners already pre-determined by being born rich. Every middle class parent is taking extreme steps to get their kid a chance of being one of those winners. When I was a kid, there was college+professional job out there for the A and B students, and there were jobs at the factory or mill out there waiting for the C and D students. Now, it's success for the A++ students with the "right" extra-curriculars (and for the too-rich-to-fail kids), and unemployment/meth/prison for the remaining A, B, C, and D students.

nostrademons 6y ago
I'm seeing this, but the irony is that this is a losing strategy for many parents. I know a ton of people who internalized this lesson, got a Ph.D, and have been stuck in post-doc limbo for a decade. Or they went to law school and washed out when they realized they hated it (at least one of whom is now dead from what I think was suicide), or became a dentist and had their practice eviscerated by COVID. Meanwhile I did basically no homework between the ages of 11-24, graduated 2 years late from college after flunking a couple courses, spent all my "free" (= homework/class) time reading and fiddling around with computers, and ended up in one of those hot jobs. My parents freaked about me ever having a job or living on my own - my mom sent me a graduation card that said "Some call it graduation. We call it a miracle." I matched her final salary (after 35 years in the workforce) in my first year out of college. IMHO, the best skills you can teach your kid these days are: 1) supply & demand 2) compound interest 3) how to read what's "hot" and what people really care about 4) how to form a mental model of what's in someone's head and trade with them so they get what they want and you get what you want 5) statistics and 6) whatever labor-saving technologies of the day can make things more efficient and throw people out of work. That was software when I was a kid; it's probably things like deep neural nets and robotics now, and may be biotech/nanotech/material science by the time kids today get into the workforce. Lots of middle-class parents fight the last war and prepare their kids for the world they entered as 20/30-somethings. They need to stop stressing over economic realities now (which will be totally different by the time our kids enter the working world) and teach general principles for being able to look around you and make sense of the world, then trust the kid to be able to do that on their own.

dang 6y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25560987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25560987.