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> hasn't it been dead and burried for decades? "It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." - George Carlin, like 30 years ago

• throwpoaster 2y ago
  America is the best country in the world for growing something new. Source: I am a non-American who does business in America.
  • BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    Even if I assume you’re right, upward mobility and ease of starting a business are quite different things.
    • throwpoaster 2y ago
      Yes, they are different: the latter is a prerequisite of the former.
      • coldtea 2y ago
        They're orthogonal. You can start and business and get downwards social mobility (lose your personal investment in a bussiness which fails). And inversely, you can get upwards mobility without starting a business (like with a promotion or getting a better job). Or rather, in the last decades, increasingly you can't. But traditionally, that was the way most people saw it. The "company man" going through the ranks, the immigrant who studies and gets a good job, etc. Building a business was always a thing for a minority. And since most new businesses fail anyway (and in most fields require capital, not to mention connections and lack, plus a specific set of skills like salesmanship and market savvy), "start a business" as a solution to social mobility at large, is a really bad idea. Starting a succesful business doesn't even necessarily translate to social mobility for others. In fact, it can happen even in a social mobility wise regressing economy. E.g. many people lose better paying jobs, and end up working on the cheap for some uber (pun intended) successful new business.
        • throwpoaster 2y ago
          This is only true if you consider absolute instead of expected value and cherry pick statistical outcomes. Successful business people start multiple businesses. Social class and economic class are different. Few successful welders go to the opera.
          • cowsandmilk 2y ago
            ????? What does any of what you wrote have to do with social mobility statistics? They don’t measure number of businesses or opera attendance when determining movement from bottom quintile of income to top quintile.
            • throwpoaster 2y ago
              You're talking about economic mobility specifically in terms of income. I am not.
          • coldtea 2y ago
            >Successful business people start multiple businesses. Which is irrelevant to the points discussed, no? Nobody claimed successful business people don't start multiple businesses. >Social class and economic class are different. Few successful welders go to the opera Social mobility in the context of this discussion is about getting better jobs and making more money. It's not about becoming an aristocrat or going to the Opera...
            • throwpoaster 2y ago
              > Nobody claimed successful business people don't start multiple businesses. Yes they did. Statistics were cited about business failure rates, which were one-shot rates. > Social mobility in the context of this discussion… Then you are talking about economic mobility, and the data cited in support of arguments about social mobility is a category error.
    • 627467 2y ago
      My thinking has been that society only pays attention to the mechanisms that favour upward movement while completely neglecting how to push down - from the top. Maybe because of naive concepts like "enlarging the cake for everyone" or - more likely - the top won't allow the protections they raised to be lowered.
      • coldtea 2y ago
        >naive concepts like "enlarging the cake for everyone" Yeah, that has been working a treat (pun intended)...
      • throwpoaster 2y ago
        How is “enlarging the cake” (usually the metaphor is “pie”) naïve?
        • BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
          If everyone’s slices get enlarged in proportion, the naive assumption, then it works as expected. If some people are clever enough to direct the enlargement towards their slices, then it doesn’t.
          • throwpoaster 2y ago
            The “growing the pie” metaphor has never been about growing all the pieces proportionately. It’s an illustration of how economic growth and Pareto optimization works: you can have a bigger slice (be richer) AND less of the pie (economy grew faster).
            • BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
              When I hear it nowadays, especially from politicians, it sounds more like another way to say “rising tide lifts all ships.” I think it’s taken on a more jingoistic meaning colloquially.
  • coldtea 2y ago
    >America is the best country in the world for growing something new The 27th best, if that new thing is supposed to lift your social/economic status upwards: "The US ranked 27th in the 2020 Global Social Mobility Index". But it might well be the best for people to build new businesses of scale (especially already well off people).
    • dandellion 2y ago
      That's because making it easy to start your own company will only provide upwards mobility to <1% of the population. My grandpa worked in agriculture, my dad in a factory, and I'm a software engineer. The only reason I became the first in my family to go to university is that in my country as long as I passed all my classes I was pretty much guaranteed to not pay a euro for attending university. I even went to one of the top 5 universities for CS in Spain, which might be crap compared to US ones, but economically I'm much better off than my parents. Affordable university education can provide upwards mobility to a lot more people.
      • Amezarak 2y ago
        In most of the US, as long as you are sufficiently academically qualified, you can go to a public university for free or nearly so. The exact standards vary by state, but they are not all that rigorous. The federal government on top of this provides means-tested grants to anyone regardless of academic qualifications that for poor people is likely to amount to 50-75% of public university or 100% of a two-year college. Where the US differs from a lot of European countries is a) a lot of people chase after their "dream" university, which may be private/more selective/out of state/etc and b) almost anyone can go to A university in the US, no matter how poor their grades. It just won't be free.
      • throwpoaster 2y ago
        As someone pointed out, education is not clearly a moral good of itself. The median Nazi was highly educated. https://youtu.be/aazlO39MPMg?si=12GOHejB6Tjt5_BA https://youtu.be/aazlO39MPMg?si=12GOHejB6Tjt5_BA
• booleandilemma 2y ago
  I've often wondered why our politicians should be so rich. Why are so many of them millionaires? It would be nice to have laws preventing this, somehow. Or maybe force them to donate x% of their wealth to the areas they represent every year, in addition to the standard taxes. Do politicians even pay taxes? :)
  • throwpoaster 2y ago
    Maybe the people who serve society at the highest levels should also have the biggest stake in its successful outcomes.
    • DaSHacka 2y ago
      That would still require what GP is suggesting, no? 1%'ers don't have to worry about the price of groceries nor affordable housing; they can just brute-force whatever they desire through excessive wealth. At least, that's the impression I get from the millionaires I know. Perhaps not all are like this (they gathered their wealth primarily via private equity) but I have no reason to think politicians would be any different.
      • throwpoaster 2y ago
        The rich care as much as much about how the price of groceries leads to social unrest as you do, maybe more. There are jerks everywhere. Most very wealthy people I know fund science and hospitals.
        • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
          That's the third time you've posted this exact line. You're starting to sound like a shill, and an uncreative one at that.
          • throwpoaster 2y ago
            Ad hominem attacks are the last recourse of the rhetorically defeated. I accept your surrender. Better luck next time.