5 ms·

My parents grew up poor in manner that is more extreme than anything OP described in the post and they always remind me that its just hard work and grit.

by wagwang 11mo ago

tekla 11mo ago
Both my parents came to America with less than $20 and nothing else but what they wore. I constantly think of how hard they worked to let me live such a leisurely life.
- bombcar 11mo ago
  Sadly many kids (college graduates) start out with -250k$ and the clothes they're wearing. Of course, they often have family they can fall back on, and education, but debt creates an entirely new class of 'less than dirt' poor.
  - phil21 11mo ago
    You have to be pretty well off to begin with in order to be in a position to take out $250k of student debt. It’s the kids who can’t even imagine going to college due to living in poverty growing up that are actually “less than dirt poor”. Someone who went to a fancy college enough to get that far into debt is going to be extremely privileged on average.
    - slaughtr 11mo ago
      You do not at all need to be well off to take $250k in student debt. In fact, the worse off you are the easier it is to do so. It’s how the US federal student loan aide works, essentially. The less you have the more they’ll loan.
      - phil21 11mo ago
        Totally different from my lived experience. Friends who grew up in middle class to upper middle class suburbs and parenting all took on college debt to varying degrees and varying outcomes 20 years later. Friends who grew up with me in the inner city around poverty and who grew up poor or worse didn’t even consider college as an option due to the costs. Almost no one growing up in actual poverty is going to be considering taking on six figures of college debt. The concept itself is utterly foreign and absurd. You simply already know at a young age it’s out of reach short of a full ride (sports or academic) scholarship. Even if you wanted to, your family doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for you to graduate college before you contribute to helping care for parents or younger siblings. This fact is socially reinforced by both family and your peers. The folks I know who ended up with massive life-ending crippling student debt all grew up insanely privileged compared to the average around me. They all pretended to grow up “lower middle class” but they are outright lying to themselves (and others) about it. It’s been interesting watching the student debt forgiveness debate under this lense. I don’t think a certain class of people understands just how tone deaf they are on the subject. Sure there are outliers, but I’m talking about generalizations here.
        slaughtr 11mo ago
        I mean maybe by being a poor person in college on federal student loans I ended up naturally around other poor people in college on federal student loans and it’s confirmation bias, but what you’re saying is a little too generalized for my lived experience. Lots and lots of people growing up in poverty take that FAFSA and run - it’s what everyone says is the only way out of poverty. I’ll give you this, though: most of the poor college students I knew (myself included) never made it to the $250k line because we eventually had to drop out because things like having to work to afford food made it harder to do well enough to stay in school and graduate.
moralestapia 11mo ago
>its just hard work and grit Which country, though? Because that's like 90% of the solution. The other 9% is good health. The remaining 1% is a mix of your community/family/friends and, sure, hard work and grit and whatnot.
- wagwang 11mo ago
  china 1962
  - magicalist 11mo ago
    > china 1962 that seems like a perfect historical period for a lesson on "just hard work and grit" being necessary but not nearly sufficient.
  - moralestapia 11mo ago
    Credit where credit is due. I could say "yeah, but that was your whole country", but that was definitely your parents and everybody else doing unpleasant things for a while to improve the well-being of everyone after them. Amazing. Edit: answer to @kragen. I have to do it like this as I'm (partially) censored on HN. xe doesn't mention xir parents leaving China, from the context of this conversation I would assume they are still in China since we are talking about the environment where people thrived.
    - kragen 11mo ago
      Well, the thing wagwang's parents did that improved the well-being of the people after them was to leave China. What the Chinese society had been collectively doing for the previous ten years, however, was creating "the deadliest famine and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history, with an estimated death toll due to starvation that ranges in the tens of millions (15 to 55 million)." And the following ten years included the first six years of the Cultural Revolution: > Estimates of the death toll vary widely, typically ranging from 1–2 million, including a massacre in Guangxi that included acts of cannibalism, as well as massacres in Beijing, Inner Mongolia, Guangdong, Yunnan, and Hunan. Red Guards sought to destroy the Four Olds (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits), which often took the form of destroying historical artifacts and cultural and religious sites. Tens of millions were persecuted, including senior officials such as Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Peng Dehuai; millions were persecuted for being members of the Five Black Categories, with intellectuals and scientists labelled as the Stinking Old Ninth. The country's schools and universities were closed, and the National College Entrance Examinations were cancelled. I don't think any of that can be accurately described as "everybody else doing unpleasant things for a while to improve the well-being of everyone after them." Chinese history, including in the 20th century, includes many of the brightest stars that have ever illuminated human history, and after the Cultural Revolution, a meteoric rise out of poverty, led by the same Deng Xiaoping whose son was tortured and crippled by Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution. But specifically in 01962 "everybody" was creating that poverty and worsening the well-being of everyone after them.
ChrisMarshallNY 11mo ago
That, and an environmnet that allows folks "from the wrong side of the tracks," to get ahead. For all its faults, the US is just such a place. I suspect that many other nations are starting to improve. At one time, the UK was a nation that you couldn't get ahead, unless you were of a certain class. I think that it is much more like the US, nowadays. You can hear lots of cockney accents in Harrods.
- wahern 11mo ago
  > I think that it is much more like the US, nowadays. IIRC, mobility indexes crossed quite a few years ago. IOW, UK is better than the US in this respect. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index, though it's a claim I've read based on other data and before that particular index was compiled.
  - jandrewrogers 11mo ago
    Social mobility doesn't measure financial welfare and is only weakly correlated with the ability to improve your financial situation. It is largely a measure of wage compression in the economy. If everyone makes similar wages then the population will be highly socially mobile even if those wages are mediocre. Absolute economic mobility matters much more in terms of having an opportunity to get out of poverty. High economic mobility increases wage variance and therefore naturally reduces social mobility scores since the latter is a relative rank measure. There are countries where increasing your income $10k makes you "socially mobile" and other countries where increasing your income $50k does not.
    - cycomanic 11mo ago
      Your statement doesn't really make sense and contradicts what research [1] is saying so you really back that up with a good argument and evidence. [1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2009/09/the-welfare-effects-of-social-mobility_g17a1d2d/221272634852.pdf https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
jandrewrogers 11mo ago
I think there is an element of "right country, right time" when it comes to being able to escape poverty with hard work and grit, though hard work and grit always helps. I am extremely fortunate to have been born in the US. My outcome would have been vastly harder to achieve almost anywhere else. Even in the US it was far from certain.
- kelvinjps10 11mo ago
  I'm immigrant that come to the us and always that the Americans complain is hardd to understand, like for example inflation they complain about being 3% in my country there was hyperinflation 1000%, also I didn't use to have running water(water would come every 3 days) and electricity would stop working every few days and it would take several hours or days to get fixed. then working here there is so many jobs and you can gain skills and double your income. Most Americans have a car (in my country this is a luxury) latest ¡phone (also a luxury) and most don't cook by themselves also a luxury. I have a year here and I quickly got a comfortable living and I just don't understand it when they complain.
  - dfxm12 11mo ago
    Some things are fake issues created by the media to give people a reasonable sounding cover to vote for politicians that have reactionary politics that they wouldn't cop to in public. This is why you hear people say they vote for Trump because of "the economy", even though when he and his party were in power the first time, the economy was on the downturn after he implemented policy (even before COVID) and every economist said Trump's proposed policies in 2024 would be bad for the economy. They were proven correct. People would rather seem like single issue voters who don't understand that issue than be thought of as racist, supportive of pedophilia, misogynistic, etc. See also: "but her emails"
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
  - pigpag 11mo ago
    In a democratic society, complaining is very important. It is probably why, by people complaining about a 5% inflation, the government had to take drastic moves to suppress it. If you don't complain, you eventually won't be able to complain. If you can't complain, you take anything shoveled to you by the government, poverty being the foremost.
gopher_space 11mo ago
Immigrants show up in America having been knocked down by life here zero times and then compare themselves to people who've been knocked down generationally.
- igor47 11mo ago
  Is "by life here" doing the heavy lifting in your comment? Because obviously immigrants haven't been knocked down by life here. I agree that folks have a pretty tough life generationally in America's rust belt. I disagree that this is unique or uniquely bad compared to many other places in the world. Although there is something pretty unique about the way American culture processes or encodes the hardship. Individualism can really make things worse...
- BobaFloutist 11mo ago
  I don't know how to tell you that some people have war in their country.
bccdee 11mo ago
I think that's a comforting lie people like to tell themselves. Lots of hard-working people never get their due. In reality, people who escape bad circumstances often just get lucky. That's hard to accept, because nobody "deserves" to get lucky. We want to believe we earned what we have, and that, if we had to do it all over again, we'd still end up succeeding. But often that's not true.
- kmijyiyxfbklao 11mo ago
  I think it's more comforting to think that you could've done nothing about your life being bad. It's so obvious that you need both good luck and hard work.
wiseowise 11mo ago
> they always remind me that its just hard work and grit Copium for poors.

My parents grew up poor in manner that is more extreme than anything OP described in the post and they always remind me that its just hard work and grit.

by wagwang 11mo ago

My parents grew up poor in manner that is more extreme than anything OP described in the post and they always remind me that its just hard work and grit.

tekla 11mo ago

Both my parents came to America with less than $20 and nothing else but what they wore. I constantly think of how hard they worked to let me live such a leisurely life.

bombcar 11mo ago
Sadly many kids (college graduates) start out with -250k$ and the clothes they're wearing. Of course, they often have family they can fall back on, and education, but debt creates an entirely new class of 'less than dirt' poor.
- phil21 11mo ago
  You have to be pretty well off to begin with in order to be in a position to take out $250k of student debt. It’s the kids who can’t even imagine going to college due to living in poverty growing up that are actually “less than dirt poor”. Someone who went to a fancy college enough to get that far into debt is going to be extremely privileged on average.
  - slaughtr 11mo ago
    You do not at all need to be well off to take $250k in student debt. In fact, the worse off you are the easier it is to do so. It’s how the US federal student loan aide works, essentially. The less you have the more they’ll loan.
    - phil21 11mo ago
      Totally different from my lived experience. Friends who grew up in middle class to upper middle class suburbs and parenting all took on college debt to varying degrees and varying outcomes 20 years later. Friends who grew up with me in the inner city around poverty and who grew up poor or worse didn’t even consider college as an option due to the costs. Almost no one growing up in actual poverty is going to be considering taking on six figures of college debt. The concept itself is utterly foreign and absurd. You simply already know at a young age it’s out of reach short of a full ride (sports or academic) scholarship. Even if you wanted to, your family doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for you to graduate college before you contribute to helping care for parents or younger siblings. This fact is socially reinforced by both family and your peers. The folks I know who ended up with massive life-ending crippling student debt all grew up insanely privileged compared to the average around me. They all pretended to grow up “lower middle class” but they are outright lying to themselves (and others) about it. It’s been interesting watching the student debt forgiveness debate under this lense. I don’t think a certain class of people understands just how tone deaf they are on the subject. Sure there are outliers, but I’m talking about generalizations here.
      - slaughtr 11mo ago
        I mean maybe by being a poor person in college on federal student loans I ended up naturally around other poor people in college on federal student loans and it’s confirmation bias, but what you’re saying is a little too generalized for my lived experience. Lots and lots of people growing up in poverty take that FAFSA and run - it’s what everyone says is the only way out of poverty. I’ll give you this, though: most of the poor college students I knew (myself included) never made it to the $250k line because we eventually had to drop out because things like having to work to afford food made it harder to do well enough to stay in school and graduate.

moralestapia 11mo ago

>its just hard work and grit Which country, though? Because that's like 90% of the solution. The other 9% is good health. The remaining 1% is a mix of your community/family/friends and, sure, hard work and grit and whatnot.

wagwang 11mo ago
china 1962
- magicalist 11mo ago
  > china 1962 that seems like a perfect historical period for a lesson on "just hard work and grit" being necessary but not nearly sufficient.
- moralestapia 11mo ago
  Credit where credit is due. I could say "yeah, but that was your whole country", but that was definitely your parents and everybody else doing unpleasant things for a while to improve the well-being of everyone after them. Amazing. Edit: answer to @kragen. I have to do it like this as I'm (partially) censored on HN. xe doesn't mention xir parents leaving China, from the context of this conversation I would assume they are still in China since we are talking about the environment where people thrived.
  - kragen 11mo ago
    Well, the thing wagwang's parents did that improved the well-being of the people after them was to leave China. What the Chinese society had been collectively doing for the previous ten years, however, was creating "the deadliest famine and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history, with an estimated death toll due to starvation that ranges in the tens of millions (15 to 55 million)." And the following ten years included the first six years of the Cultural Revolution: > Estimates of the death toll vary widely, typically ranging from 1–2 million, including a massacre in Guangxi that included acts of cannibalism, as well as massacres in Beijing, Inner Mongolia, Guangdong, Yunnan, and Hunan. Red Guards sought to destroy the Four Olds (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits), which often took the form of destroying historical artifacts and cultural and religious sites. Tens of millions were persecuted, including senior officials such as Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Peng Dehuai; millions were persecuted for being members of the Five Black Categories, with intellectuals and scientists labelled as the Stinking Old Ninth. The country's schools and universities were closed, and the National College Entrance Examinations were cancelled. I don't think any of that can be accurately described as "everybody else doing unpleasant things for a while to improve the well-being of everyone after them." Chinese history, including in the 20th century, includes many of the brightest stars that have ever illuminated human history, and after the Cultural Revolution, a meteoric rise out of poverty, led by the same Deng Xiaoping whose son was tortured and crippled by Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution. But specifically in 01962 "everybody" was creating that poverty and worsening the well-being of everyone after them.

ChrisMarshallNY 11mo ago

That, and an environmnet that allows folks "from the wrong side of the tracks," to get ahead. For all its faults, the US is just such a place. I suspect that many other nations are starting to improve. At one time, the UK was a nation that you couldn't get ahead, unless you were of a certain class. I think that it is much more like the US, nowadays. You can hear lots of cockney accents in Harrods.

wahern 11mo ago
> I think that it is much more like the US, nowadays. IIRC, mobility indexes crossed quite a few years ago. IOW, UK is better than the US in this respect. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index, though it's a claim I've read based on other data and before that particular index was compiled.
- jandrewrogers 11mo ago
  Social mobility doesn't measure financial welfare and is only weakly correlated with the ability to improve your financial situation. It is largely a measure of wage compression in the economy. If everyone makes similar wages then the population will be highly socially mobile even if those wages are mediocre. Absolute economic mobility matters much more in terms of having an opportunity to get out of poverty. High economic mobility increases wage variance and therefore naturally reduces social mobility scores since the latter is a relative rank measure. There are countries where increasing your income $10k makes you "socially mobile" and other countries where increasing your income $50k does not.
  - cycomanic 11mo ago
    Your statement doesn't really make sense and contradicts what research [1] is saying so you really back that up with a good argument and evidence. [1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2009/09/the-welfare-effects-of-social-mobility_g17a1d2d/221272634852.pdf https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...

jandrewrogers 11mo ago

I think there is an element of "right country, right time" when it comes to being able to escape poverty with hard work and grit, though hard work and grit always helps. I am extremely fortunate to have been born in the US. My outcome would have been vastly harder to achieve almost anywhere else. Even in the US it was far from certain.

kelvinjps10 11mo ago
I'm immigrant that come to the us and always that the Americans complain is hardd to understand, like for example inflation they complain about being 3% in my country there was hyperinflation 1000%, also I didn't use to have running water(water would come every 3 days) and electricity would stop working every few days and it would take several hours or days to get fixed. then working here there is so many jobs and you can gain skills and double your income. Most Americans have a car (in my country this is a luxury) latest ¡phone (also a luxury) and most don't cook by themselves also a luxury. I have a year here and I quickly got a comfortable living and I just don't understand it when they complain.
- dfxm12 11mo ago
  Some things are fake issues created by the media to give people a reasonable sounding cover to vote for politicians that have reactionary politics that they wouldn't cop to in public. This is why you hear people say they vote for Trump because of "the economy", even though when he and his party were in power the first time, the economy was on the downturn after he implemented policy (even before COVID) and every economist said Trump's proposed policies in 2024 would be bad for the economy. They were proven correct. People would rather seem like single issue voters who don't understand that issue than be thought of as racist, supportive of pedophilia, misogynistic, etc. See also: "but her emails"
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- pigpag 11mo ago
  In a democratic society, complaining is very important. It is probably why, by people complaining about a 5% inflation, the government had to take drastic moves to suppress it. If you don't complain, you eventually won't be able to complain. If you can't complain, you take anything shoveled to you by the government, poverty being the foremost.

gopher_space 11mo ago

Immigrants show up in America having been knocked down by life here zero times and then compare themselves to people who've been knocked down generationally.

igor47 11mo ago
Is "by life here" doing the heavy lifting in your comment? Because obviously immigrants haven't been knocked down by life here. I agree that folks have a pretty tough life generationally in America's rust belt. I disagree that this is unique or uniquely bad compared to many other places in the world. Although there is something pretty unique about the way American culture processes or encodes the hardship. Individualism can really make things worse...
BobaFloutist 11mo ago
I don't know how to tell you that some people have war in their country.

bccdee 11mo ago

I think that's a comforting lie people like to tell themselves. Lots of hard-working people never get their due. In reality, people who escape bad circumstances often just get lucky. That's hard to accept, because nobody "deserves" to get lucky. We want to believe we earned what we have, and that, if we had to do it all over again, we'd still end up succeeding. But often that's not true.

kmijyiyxfbklao 11mo ago
I think it's more comforting to think that you could've done nothing about your life being bad. It's so obvious that you need both good luck and hard work.

wiseowise 11mo ago

> they always remind me that its just hard work and grit Copium for poors.