8 ms·

> Realistically, however, it is rare to move more than one or two income brackets from where your parents were when they were your age. You state that like it'

> Realistically, however, it is rare to move more than one or two income brackets from where your parents were when they were your age. You state that like it's a bad thing. If you can bump a bracket or two per generation, 2 generations can take you from near-penniless to upper-middle class.

cocacola1 4y ago
Cold comfort to the near-penniless and penniless.
- ETH_start 4y ago
  Real life is filled with disappointments and limitations, even with the best social structures in place. The false promise of a social revolution that provides instant wealth and salvation for all is used by populists to gain power, but any attempt to realize this promise leads to worse outcomes for the public.
  - slondr 4y ago
    On the flipside, it's unclear to me why the penniless should care what the best outcome is for "the public," as nebulous of a concept that is.
    - ETH_start 4y ago
      I think people generally care about the public interest because of their shared humanity. People generally identify with their society and want to see it prosper. They should also care that their society remains well structured because it increases the probability that their own situation improves over the course of their life, and that their children/grandkids will be wealthy. They gain nothing from believing in the false promises of demagogues, except the ephemeral contentment of false hope.
      - kaibee 4y ago
        > I think people generally care about the public interest because of their shared humanity. People generally identify with their society and want to see it prosper. This is far from universally true, and to the small degree that it is true, it is an aberration from the vast majority of human history. > They should also care that their society remains well structured because it increases the probability that their own situation improves over the course of their life, and that their children/grandkids will be wealthy. Should they? Sure. Will they? History says it is very unlikely. What also comes to mind is the sociological study where they present two people with $100 to split between them. Person A decides the split, person B chooses whether to accept the split or reject the split, in which case the $100 is taken back and neither person gets anything. The problem with your whole philosophy is that it supposes that Person B will accept the split no matter how much it is skewed to Person A, because it is the 'rational' thing to do from an individual's perspective (any money is better than no money). However, what actually happens is that above the 60% - 70% mark, Person B will often reject the split, just to spite Person A. > They gain nothing from believing in the false promises of demagogues, except the ephemeral contentment of false hope. Demagogues work to convince people that they are getting an unfair split and that they should reject the split. It makes their job a lot easier to do if people really are getting an unfair split.
        ETH_start 4y ago
        >>This is far from universally true, and to the small degree that it is true, it is an aberration from the vast majority of human history. I think you're interpreting my statement to suggest that people generally prioritize the public interest over their personal interest. I'm not. I'm only claiming that people, ceteris paribus, generally would prefer that society at large prosper. But they would not at their own expense. >>What also comes to mind is the sociological study where they present two people with $100 to split between them. This is very true. Thiel famously believes in Rene Girard's theory that jealousy emerges from the mimetic instinct, and that religious admoninations against it are a social innovation to constrain the dark side of mimesis: https://perell.com/essay/peter-thiel/ https://perell.com/essay/peter-thiel/ >>It makes their job a lot easier to do if people really are getting an unfair split. Yes of course, but the presence of inequality does not suggest unfairness as such demagogues usually imply.
  - seadan83 4y ago
    I don't know if the promise is instant wealth and salvation, but at least those making 100x more than me would at least pay the same tax rate.
  - dools 4y ago
    Involuntary unemployment is the single biggest cause of poverty in developed economies and is a policy choice, not a limitation
    - ETH_start 4y ago
      Even if we levelled all wealth, life would be limited by the finiteness of resources, and only economic development - which this levelling would inhibit - would alleviate such scarcity. Consider what would have happened if society had followed John Stuart Mills' advice in 1848 and maximized for equal distribution of income, resulting in per capita GDP barely increasing from its $2,000 level over the last 170 years: "It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object: in those most advanced, what is economically needed is a better distribution" -John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848, book IV, chap. VI)
      - int_19h 4y ago
        One possibility is that such an egalitarian society would have produced more brilliant engineers and economists, by providing more opportunity to manifest one's talent to lower economic classes. And they then could, perhaps, figure out the unsustainability of their trajectory earlier, and correct it to produce somewhat slower but steady growth without environmental catastrophes, translating to better long-term outcome. "What if" is a wonderful game.
        ETH_start 4y ago
        A per capita GDP of $3,000 wouldn't have provided people with the surplus time to dabble in engineering and economics. It's a living standard that today we categorize as extreme poverty.
      - dools 4y ago
        Eliminating involuntary unemployment doesn’t require levelling of all wealth, it just sets the floor price for labour and maintains a buffer stock of employed people ready to be hired rather than a buffer stock of unemployed people who are less ready to be hired.
- barelysapient 4y ago
  Huh. I guess your attitude isn't shared by the two plus million people a year, who literally risk life and limb crossing our boarders, for a shot at being an undocumented alien.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    So by thus argument we have nothing to improve in this country untill standards of living sink to the level of North Korea and finally noone will be willing to immigrate
    - barelysapient 4y ago
      It’s not an argument. It’s an observable fact.
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        Pgizer Covid vaccine contains mercury, that is an observable fact.
        thomas2718 4y ago
        Source? I cannot find mercury in the list of ingredients in this FDA document: https://www.fda.gov/media/153716/download https://www.fda.gov/media/153716/download page 4.
    - nradov 4y ago
      The USA also has a positive net migration rate with the EU.
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        Does that still hold if you exclude poor post-soviet countries? they are like half of EU
        4y ago
cycomanic 4y ago
So we go very quickly from calls for meritocracy to oligarchy.
abeppu 4y ago
But the stats seem to show that it's substantially less common in the US than in a bunch of other developed countries, including countries that literally still have monarchs. A "Global Social Mobility Index" doesn't even put the US in the top 20. It looks like if you consider fathers in the bottom income quintile in Sweden and the US, the Swedish father's son is roughly 75% more likely to make it to the top quintile than the American, and the American's son is 68% more likely to remain n the bottom quntile than the Swede. That's a pretty big difference. If we value class mobility enough to talk about the "_American_ dream" maybe the US should actively work on improving that. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_economic_mobility_sawhill_ch3.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_econ... https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index-2020-why-economies-benefit-from-fixing-inequality/ https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index...
- randomdata 4y ago
  > It looks like if you consider fathers in the bottom income quintile in Sweden and the US, the Swedish father's son is roughly 75% more likely to make it to the top quintile than the American I'm not sure the American dream is income mobility, though. The American dream is wealth accumulation and amassing wealth often requires trading for a small, even no, income (e.g. founding a startup). At some point you will likely hope to cash out, but those capital gains will only be recorded as income approximately once in your lifetime.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  These studies of intergenerational class mobility can be highly problematic, because they often just look at income, very much less access to opportunity. The reason being patterns like the following are not uncommon: 1. John is a banking executive who makes millions of dollars a year. 2. John has a son, Jack. Jack sees how much his father worked and decides to take a very different path, becoming a documentary filmmaker. From his family's wealth, Jack never worries much about money, but his nominal income is quite low. 3. Jack has a son Joe who decides he'd rather live in the giant estate of his grandfather than the small suburban house of his father, and goes into banking. He gets help from his grandfather's contacts to land his first job. Thus, if you look at these 3 generations in isolation, you'd count them as going from the top quintile to the bottom quintile to the top quintile again. But, in reality, nothing about their social status has really changed, nor their access to opportunity. There was a post on HN from a couple years ago that looked at a study that said the rich families from Florence, Italy in the 1400s were still the rich families today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18872376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18872376. The argument was that there was much less actual social mobility than some other studies suggest.
nonethewiser 4y ago
Not that big of a stretch for that to happen in 1 generation honestly.
- brewdad 4y ago
  And yet it doesn't. Not in the aggregate.
franga2000 4y ago
We shouldn't even be talking in terms of generations. Bloodlines exist in biology, but we need to completely disregard them when talking about social issues. Working your ass off so you can send your children to a good school and they can then live a better life than you did should be considered a societal failure, not a success story of economic mobility. True mobility is when you can work reasonable hours at your horrible warehouse job, enroll in a higher education programme and in 2-3 years, switch jobs to something that pays better. No need to rack up decades of student debt, no need to work crazy long hours or multiple jobs just to afford a place to live.

cocacola1 4y ago

Cold comfort to the near-penniless and penniless.

ETH_start 4y ago
Real life is filled with disappointments and limitations, even with the best social structures in place. The false promise of a social revolution that provides instant wealth and salvation for all is used by populists to gain power, but any attempt to realize this promise leads to worse outcomes for the public.
- slondr 4y ago
  On the flipside, it's unclear to me why the penniless should care what the best outcome is for "the public," as nebulous of a concept that is.
  - ETH_start 4y ago
    I think people generally care about the public interest because of their shared humanity. People generally identify with their society and want to see it prosper. They should also care that their society remains well structured because it increases the probability that their own situation improves over the course of their life, and that their children/grandkids will be wealthy. They gain nothing from believing in the false promises of demagogues, except the ephemeral contentment of false hope.
    - kaibee 4y ago
      > I think people generally care about the public interest because of their shared humanity. People generally identify with their society and want to see it prosper. This is far from universally true, and to the small degree that it is true, it is an aberration from the vast majority of human history. > They should also care that their society remains well structured because it increases the probability that their own situation improves over the course of their life, and that their children/grandkids will be wealthy. Should they? Sure. Will they? History says it is very unlikely. What also comes to mind is the sociological study where they present two people with $100 to split between them. Person A decides the split, person B chooses whether to accept the split or reject the split, in which case the $100 is taken back and neither person gets anything. The problem with your whole philosophy is that it supposes that Person B will accept the split no matter how much it is skewed to Person A, because it is the 'rational' thing to do from an individual's perspective (any money is better than no money). However, what actually happens is that above the 60% - 70% mark, Person B will often reject the split, just to spite Person A. > They gain nothing from believing in the false promises of demagogues, except the ephemeral contentment of false hope. Demagogues work to convince people that they are getting an unfair split and that they should reject the split. It makes their job a lot easier to do if people really are getting an unfair split.
      - ETH_start 4y ago
        >>This is far from universally true, and to the small degree that it is true, it is an aberration from the vast majority of human history. I think you're interpreting my statement to suggest that people generally prioritize the public interest over their personal interest. I'm not. I'm only claiming that people, ceteris paribus, generally would prefer that society at large prosper. But they would not at their own expense. >>What also comes to mind is the sociological study where they present two people with $100 to split between them. This is very true. Thiel famously believes in Rene Girard's theory that jealousy emerges from the mimetic instinct, and that religious admoninations against it are a social innovation to constrain the dark side of mimesis: https://perell.com/essay/peter-thiel/ https://perell.com/essay/peter-thiel/ >>It makes their job a lot easier to do if people really are getting an unfair split. Yes of course, but the presence of inequality does not suggest unfairness as such demagogues usually imply.
- seadan83 4y ago
  I don't know if the promise is instant wealth and salvation, but at least those making 100x more than me would at least pay the same tax rate.
- dools 4y ago
  Involuntary unemployment is the single biggest cause of poverty in developed economies and is a policy choice, not a limitation
  - ETH_start 4y ago
    Even if we levelled all wealth, life would be limited by the finiteness of resources, and only economic development - which this levelling would inhibit - would alleviate such scarcity. Consider what would have happened if society had followed John Stuart Mills' advice in 1848 and maximized for equal distribution of income, resulting in per capita GDP barely increasing from its $2,000 level over the last 170 years: "It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object: in those most advanced, what is economically needed is a better distribution" -John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848, book IV, chap. VI)
    - int_19h 4y ago
      One possibility is that such an egalitarian society would have produced more brilliant engineers and economists, by providing more opportunity to manifest one's talent to lower economic classes. And they then could, perhaps, figure out the unsustainability of their trajectory earlier, and correct it to produce somewhat slower but steady growth without environmental catastrophes, translating to better long-term outcome. "What if" is a wonderful game.
      - ETH_start 4y ago
        A per capita GDP of $3,000 wouldn't have provided people with the surplus time to dabble in engineering and economics. It's a living standard that today we categorize as extreme poverty.
    - dools 4y ago
      Eliminating involuntary unemployment doesn’t require levelling of all wealth, it just sets the floor price for labour and maintains a buffer stock of employed people ready to be hired rather than a buffer stock of unemployed people who are less ready to be hired.
barelysapient 4y ago
Huh. I guess your attitude isn't shared by the two plus million people a year, who literally risk life and limb crossing our boarders, for a shot at being an undocumented alien.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  So by thus argument we have nothing to improve in this country untill standards of living sink to the level of North Korea and finally noone will be willing to immigrate
  - barelysapient 4y ago
    It’s not an argument. It’s an observable fact.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      Pgizer Covid vaccine contains mercury, that is an observable fact.
      - thomas2718 4y ago
        Source? I cannot find mercury in the list of ingredients in this FDA document: https://www.fda.gov/media/153716/download https://www.fda.gov/media/153716/download page 4.
  - nradov 4y ago
    The USA also has a positive net migration rate with the EU.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      Does that still hold if you exclude poor post-soviet countries? they are like half of EU
      - 4y ago

cycomanic 4y ago

So we go very quickly from calls for meritocracy to oligarchy.

abeppu 4y ago

But the stats seem to show that it's substantially less common in the US than in a bunch of other developed countries, including countries that literally still have monarchs. A "Global Social Mobility Index" doesn't even put the US in the top 20. It looks like if you consider fathers in the bottom income quintile in Sweden and the US, the Swedish father's son is roughly 75% more likely to make it to the top quintile than the American, and the American's son is 68% more likely to remain n the bottom quntile than the Swede. That's a pretty big difference. If we value class mobility enough to talk about the "_American_ dream" maybe the US should actively work on improving that. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_economic_mobility_sawhill_ch3.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_econ... https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index-2020-why-economies-benefit-from-fixing-inequality/ https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index...

randomdata 4y ago
> It looks like if you consider fathers in the bottom income quintile in Sweden and the US, the Swedish father's son is roughly 75% more likely to make it to the top quintile than the American I'm not sure the American dream is income mobility, though. The American dream is wealth accumulation and amassing wealth often requires trading for a small, even no, income (e.g. founding a startup). At some point you will likely hope to cash out, but those capital gains will only be recorded as income approximately once in your lifetime.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
These studies of intergenerational class mobility can be highly problematic, because they often just look at income, very much less access to opportunity. The reason being patterns like the following are not uncommon: 1. John is a banking executive who makes millions of dollars a year. 2. John has a son, Jack. Jack sees how much his father worked and decides to take a very different path, becoming a documentary filmmaker. From his family's wealth, Jack never worries much about money, but his nominal income is quite low. 3. Jack has a son Joe who decides he'd rather live in the giant estate of his grandfather than the small suburban house of his father, and goes into banking. He gets help from his grandfather's contacts to land his first job. Thus, if you look at these 3 generations in isolation, you'd count them as going from the top quintile to the bottom quintile to the top quintile again. But, in reality, nothing about their social status has really changed, nor their access to opportunity. There was a post on HN from a couple years ago that looked at a study that said the rich families from Florence, Italy in the 1400s were still the rich families today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18872376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18872376. The argument was that there was much less actual social mobility than some other studies suggest.

nonethewiser 4y ago

Not that big of a stretch for that to happen in 1 generation honestly.

brewdad 4y ago
And yet it doesn't. Not in the aggregate.

franga2000 4y ago

We shouldn't even be talking in terms of generations. Bloodlines exist in biology, but we need to completely disregard them when talking about social issues. Working your ass off so you can send your children to a good school and they can then live a better life than you did should be considered a societal failure, not a success story of economic mobility. True mobility is when you can work reasonable hours at your horrible warehouse job, enroll in a higher education programme and in 2-3 years, switch jobs to something that pays better. No need to rack up decades of student debt, no need to work crazy long hours or multiple jobs just to afford a place to live.