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> You have very, very, good odds of doing better than your parents if you manage to get to age 25 without incurring a felony record, addiction to something that

> You have very, very, good odds of doing better than your parents if you manage to get to age 25 without incurring a felony record, addiction to something that will likely kill you or too many child support payments. That is a laughably low bar, and it is unlikely for the trend you are describing to continue past the move from poor to lower middle class. In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society with no class structure. We are so laughably far off from this everywhere in the world... And note that I completely accept that becoming a billionaire is going to be extraordinarily rare and a product of BOTH extreme luck and good work ethic. Or I would accept that, if not for the fact that being born the child of a billionaire is a guarantee to this future, or as close to a guarantee as one can ask for.

IQunder130 5y ago
>That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society That might be what we expect from a perfectly egalitarian society, but expecting any free, democratic society to come even close to perfect egalitarianism is completely delusional.
- TheTrotters 5y ago
  Besides we could only expect it in a society of clones. Genes matter.
- simiones 5y ago
  That is not egalitarianism (which would mean something closer to everyone owning the exact same amounts), it is the standard definition of "equality of opportunity".
  - NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
    There is no standard definition of "equality of opportunity"; and many definitions that are regularly-used focus primarily on an absence of unreasonable discrimination in application processes rather than fairness in the Rawlsian sense.
  - IQunder130 5y ago
    Where do you place the cutoff for opportunity? Are things like innate ability, motivation, interest in lucrative pursuits for their own merits, luck of the draw not also just another kind of opportunity? There is no standard because nobody can agree on a standard. The only thing we can say for certain is that the kind of society you propose will never be attained through free and democratic political processes. Make of that what you will.
gambiting 5y ago
>>In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society with no class structure. We are so laughably far off from this everywhere in the world... Every time I make this argument on HN I'm met with two responses 1) I worked my ass off when I was young to get to where I am, why should we make this easy for anybody, it will just create a lazy society 2) why should MY money go towards helping anyone else Both are really hard to argue against no matter how much statistical data you pull out showing that improving equality of opportunity improves the society overall, because both are very emotional arguments. People feel that way and it's hard to change. PS - the "funniest" response I had to this was someone saying that US has "perfect" equality because literally anyone from any walk of life can become rich or a president. Yeah he acknowledged that some people have it much harder than others, but it doesn't matter because at the end of the day anyone can get rich so everything else is irrelevant.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  > Yeah he acknowledged that some people have it much harder than others, but it doesn't matter because at the end of the day anyone can get rich so everything else is irrelevant. I mean, isn't that applicable everywhere? Even the most totalitarian country really only requires a military coup or revolution and, if you've worked really hard, you too could be King Dictator God Emperor for life.
- mitchdoogle 5y ago
  People completely take for granted all the good luck, good fortune, opportunities, advantages, etc. (whatever you want to call the things that give them an upper hand as they go through life). We start and go through the first few years of life with zero input about where we are, where we go, what we eat, etc. As we get older, our choices don't increase all that much until we get to adulthood. Even when we do have choices, our choices have already been narrowed by someone else. Nearly every piece of information a person consumes was produced by someone else. Nearly everything that happens to a person is a result of something outside of their own mind. If you're doing well for yourself, then you can thank everyone around you because the world is more responsible for your accomplishments than you are. You may have worked incredibly hard, studying, reading, networking, and all that was probably necessary, but it accounts for a very small part of what got you there. If we're assigning percentages, it's in the single digits. For every person like you, there are 20, 30, 100 others who were just as willing and just as able to do the things you did, but maybe they didn't have the right information at the right time, maybe they didn't have the same networking opportunities, maybe they had to take care of their ailing brother, maybe they had more pressing issues. Hardly anyone who has done well wants to accept this reality. They would have to change their perception not just of the world, but of themselves. They might feel very guilty, and people don't like that feeling.
usaar333 5y ago
> n a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society with no class structure. Maybe aspirational, but it's not reasonable to expect this. More educated parents both earn more money and educate their children more (and not per se due to their higher earnings). It's hard to compensate for that.
- foldr 5y ago
  > It's hard to compensate for that A good public education system goes a long way. At the moment in the US, rich kids benefit not just from the education their parents give them directly (which let’s face it is not necessarily that great just because they’re rich - how much has Ivanka benefited from Donald’s insights?) but also from the expensive schools that their parents can afford to send them too. Educational apartheid by wealth isn’t a necessary feature of a society. It can largely be legislated away given the social and political will to do so.
  - bluetomcat 5y ago
    > Educational apartheid by wealth isn’t a necessary feature of a society. It is a fundamental feature in class-based societies like USA, the UK and much of the rest of the Anglosphere. Maintaining the class structure and preserving the accrued intergenerational wealth from the upper strata of society means that the kids of those wealthier classes must acquire distinctive social manners and culture which sets them apart from the commoners.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- everdrive 5y ago
  This is absolutely correct. Suspect you started with a Tabula Rasa society where everyone began with the same resources. You would still see differentiation after n generations: wealth and influence can compound over time and groups of people would gain influence, power, and money. And this is the expected outcome of a perfectly meritocratic system.
hashmymustache 5y ago
How about high income through athletics or modeling? Should any two children be equally likely to make it professionally?
- simiones 5y ago
  Sure, genes and other accidents of birth make the model more complex. But still, in our current society, if you were to take two identical twins and separated them from birth and made various income families raise them, and repeat this experiment 100s of times, you would still see remarkably little mobility.
TheTrotters 5y ago
> In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society with no class structure. We are so laughably far off from this everywhere in the world... That’s only if you assume there isn’t a generic component to traits that influence (broadly defined) success. But of course that’s not true. We should expect Bill Gates to be much more intelligent, conscientious, and to have much better impulse control than typical people living in a trailer park. Ditto for many other traits. Therefore it’s much more likely that his children posses these traits compared to children born in trailer parks.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Genetic or learned behavior? The behaviors that help you successfully move between lower rungs may (spoiler: they do) hinder you at higher rungs.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    I'm inclined to agree with this, but could you elaborate on some of these behaviors? The ones that come to my mind are punctuality and subservience. Absolutely critical for a bottom-tier laborer, but nobody is upset if the CEO is late for a meeting.
- simiones 5y ago
  > We should expect Bill Gates to be much more intelligent, conscientious, and to have much better impulse control than typical people living in a trailer park. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Even if there are genes for success, being successful is not proof of having those genes, and being unsuccessful is not proof of not having them. Furthermore, if we assume that someone swapped Bill Gates' baby with a baby born in a trailer park, do you truly think that Bill Gates' genetic child will have a much better chance at success than the child Gates raised as his own?
bluetomcat 5y ago
> In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. A reasonably fair society shouldn't allow for children to be born and raised in trailer parks in the first place. State policies should be directed towards strengthening the family unit and improving the conditions for the average working class people. Once you have eliminated the precarious forms of existence in society and have established decent cultural norms for working class people by which they value education, upward social mobility will happen much more widely.
Zababa 5y ago
> In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. I don't agree with this. You are measuring equality of outcomes, not of opportunities. They are different.
- simiones 5y ago
  No, I said equality of opportunity: both Bill Gates' child and the child born in the trailer park should, at birth, have the same chance to become extremely rich or extremely poor. That would mean that they have the same opportunities. If you believe in a strong genetic component, than you can complicate the formula a bit.

IQunder130 5y ago

>That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society That might be what we expect from a perfectly egalitarian society, but expecting any free, democratic society to come even close to perfect egalitarianism is completely delusional.

TheTrotters 5y ago
Besides we could only expect it in a society of clones. Genes matter.
simiones 5y ago
That is not egalitarianism (which would mean something closer to everyone owning the exact same amounts), it is the standard definition of "equality of opportunity".
- NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
  There is no standard definition of "equality of opportunity"; and many definitions that are regularly-used focus primarily on an absence of unreasonable discrimination in application processes rather than fairness in the Rawlsian sense.
- IQunder130 5y ago
  Where do you place the cutoff for opportunity? Are things like innate ability, motivation, interest in lucrative pursuits for their own merits, luck of the draw not also just another kind of opportunity? There is no standard because nobody can agree on a standard. The only thing we can say for certain is that the kind of society you propose will never be attained through free and democratic political processes. Make of that what you will.

gambiting 5y ago

>>In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society with no class structure. We are so laughably far off from this everywhere in the world... Every time I make this argument on HN I'm met with two responses 1) I worked my ass off when I was young to get to where I am, why should we make this easy for anybody, it will just create a lazy society 2) why should MY money go towards helping anyone else Both are really hard to argue against no matter how much statistical data you pull out showing that improving equality of opportunity improves the society overall, because both are very emotional arguments. People feel that way and it's hard to change. PS - the "funniest" response I had to this was someone saying that US has "perfect" equality because literally anyone from any walk of life can become rich or a president. Yeah he acknowledged that some people have it much harder than others, but it doesn't matter because at the end of the day anyone can get rich so everything else is irrelevant.

SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
> Yeah he acknowledged that some people have it much harder than others, but it doesn't matter because at the end of the day anyone can get rich so everything else is irrelevant. I mean, isn't that applicable everywhere? Even the most totalitarian country really only requires a military coup or revolution and, if you've worked really hard, you too could be King Dictator God Emperor for life.
mitchdoogle 5y ago
People completely take for granted all the good luck, good fortune, opportunities, advantages, etc. (whatever you want to call the things that give them an upper hand as they go through life). We start and go through the first few years of life with zero input about where we are, where we go, what we eat, etc. As we get older, our choices don't increase all that much until we get to adulthood. Even when we do have choices, our choices have already been narrowed by someone else. Nearly every piece of information a person consumes was produced by someone else. Nearly everything that happens to a person is a result of something outside of their own mind. If you're doing well for yourself, then you can thank everyone around you because the world is more responsible for your accomplishments than you are. You may have worked incredibly hard, studying, reading, networking, and all that was probably necessary, but it accounts for a very small part of what got you there. If we're assigning percentages, it's in the single digits. For every person like you, there are 20, 30, 100 others who were just as willing and just as able to do the things you did, but maybe they didn't have the right information at the right time, maybe they didn't have the same networking opportunities, maybe they had to take care of their ailing brother, maybe they had more pressing issues. Hardly anyone who has done well wants to accept this reality. They would have to change their perception not just of the world, but of themselves. They might feel very guilty, and people don't like that feeling.

usaar333 5y ago

> n a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society with no class structure. Maybe aspirational, but it's not reasonable to expect this. More educated parents both earn more money and educate their children more (and not per se due to their higher earnings). It's hard to compensate for that.

foldr 5y ago
> It's hard to compensate for that A good public education system goes a long way. At the moment in the US, rich kids benefit not just from the education their parents give them directly (which let’s face it is not necessarily that great just because they’re rich - how much has Ivanka benefited from Donald’s insights?) but also from the expensive schools that their parents can afford to send them too. Educational apartheid by wealth isn’t a necessary feature of a society. It can largely be legislated away given the social and political will to do so.
- bluetomcat 5y ago
  > Educational apartheid by wealth isn’t a necessary feature of a society. It is a fundamental feature in class-based societies like USA, the UK and much of the rest of the Anglosphere. Maintaining the class structure and preserving the accrued intergenerational wealth from the upper strata of society means that the kids of those wealthier classes must acquire distinctive social manners and culture which sets them apart from the commoners.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
everdrive 5y ago
This is absolutely correct. Suspect you started with a Tabula Rasa society where everyone began with the same resources. You would still see differentiation after n generations: wealth and influence can compound over time and groups of people would gain influence, power, and money. And this is the expected outcome of a perfectly meritocratic system.

hashmymustache 5y ago

How about high income through athletics or modeling? Should any two children be equally likely to make it professionally?

simiones 5y ago
Sure, genes and other accidents of birth make the model more complex. But still, in our current society, if you were to take two identical twins and separated them from birth and made various income families raise them, and repeat this experiment 100s of times, you would still see remarkably little mobility.

TheTrotters 5y ago

> In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society with no class structure. We are so laughably far off from this everywhere in the world... That’s only if you assume there isn’t a generic component to traits that influence (broadly defined) success. But of course that’s not true. We should expect Bill Gates to be much more intelligent, conscientious, and to have much better impulse control than typical people living in a trailer park. Ditto for many other traits. Therefore it’s much more likely that his children posses these traits compared to children born in trailer parks.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Genetic or learned behavior? The behaviors that help you successfully move between lower rungs may (spoiler: they do) hinder you at higher rungs.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  I'm inclined to agree with this, but could you elaborate on some of these behaviors? The ones that come to my mind are punctuality and subservience. Absolutely critical for a bottom-tier laborer, but nobody is upset if the CEO is late for a meeting.
simiones 5y ago
> We should expect Bill Gates to be much more intelligent, conscientious, and to have much better impulse control than typical people living in a trailer park. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Even if there are genes for success, being successful is not proof of having those genes, and being unsuccessful is not proof of not having them. Furthermore, if we assume that someone swapped Bill Gates' baby with a baby born in a trailer park, do you truly think that Bill Gates' genetic child will have a much better chance at success than the child Gates raised as his own?

bluetomcat 5y ago

> In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. A reasonably fair society shouldn't allow for children to be born and raised in trailer parks in the first place. State policies should be directed towards strengthening the family unit and improving the conditions for the average working class people. Once you have eliminated the precarious forms of existence in society and have established decent cultural norms for working class people by which they value education, upward social mobility will happen much more widely.

Zababa 5y ago

> In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. I don't agree with this. You are measuring equality of outcomes, not of opportunities. They are different.

simiones 5y ago
No, I said equality of opportunity: both Bill Gates' child and the child born in the trailer park should, at birth, have the same chance to become extremely rich or extremely poor. That would mean that they have the same opportunities. If you believe in a strong genetic component, than you can complicate the formula a bit.