11 ms·

Filthy Lucre

126 points by lkrubner 13y ago

mijustin 13y ago
Two quotes stand out for me: > My friends who came closest to attaining the American Dream did it by breaking the rules on how to get there. and > For my friends and I who fought our way to moderate financial success, money came from transgressing society's norms. With much luck, it required doing the ambitious work everyone said you weren't ready for, then getting mocked and rejected for it, until, slowly, the wall began to crack. You could never do what you were supposed to, never stay quietly in your place. There's something about these statements that ring very true. Upward mobility in the USA has always been difficult for women and minorities; now it's increasingly difficult for men as well. There just aren't that many rising from the bottom, and getting to the top. Positions are more entrenched. Sources: http://business.time.com/2012/01/05/the-loss-of-upward-mobility-in-the-u-s/ http://business.time.com/2012/01/05/the-loss-of-upward-mobil... and http://www.pewstates.org/projects/economic-mobility-project-328061 http://www.pewstates.org/projects/economic-mobility-project-... The author is identifying a response to the glass ceiling: by hacking the system and breaking the rules.
- mcantelon 13y ago
  >Upward mobility in the USA has always been difficult for women and minorities; now it's increasingly difficult for men as well. Gender and minority status are often mentioned as factors that influence success potential, but social class is seldom mentioned.
  - dsr_ 13y ago
    USAns like to pretend that social class doesn't exist, because meritocracy. That doesn't describe what we actually have, though. Meritocracy would require that everyone start at the same level - of wealth, of privilege, of safety and health and education and food. Instead, we have meritocratic ideals, a few meritocratic policies, and a distinctly uneven playing field, which does not result in a meritocracy. Wealth buys political power which consolidates wealth, and we end up where we are, with a very clear distinction between the 1% and all the rest of us.
    - grinnbearit 13y ago
      Don't forget the same level of intelligence and good looks
  - doodyhead 13y ago
    The Economist often runs interesting pieces it. Perhaps the most surprising finding is that, in the past few decades, we have had far higher social mobility in Europe than in the US.
- wyager 13y ago
  I don't buy this at all. Upward mobility never existed in the romanticized fashion that people like to talk about. There was never a point in time where billionaires sprang out of the ground like dandelions. The most "mobile" periods in history were when vast stores of untapped wealth were first being tapped. Westward expansion, the gold rush, etc. That's obviously not going to be 100% of the time. Today, I guess the closest thing is the internet. And a lot of people have gone rags-to-riches (or the more realistic not-riches-to-riches) through the internet. Maybe it's less mobility than, say, a hundred years ago, maybe not. But really, that's beside the point. Every single person in the entire world has been "moving up" for the last 300 years. Things are constantly getting better. Even if we completely disregard the social progress that's been made (think abolition of slavery), the rapid progression of technology is constantly raising everyone's standard of living.
  - vacri 13y ago
    Upward mobility is not "people become [m|b]illionaires". It's climbing up the social scale. Going from lower-middle-class to upper-middle-class is significant and a sign of upward mobility. Mostly though, it's about getting out of poverty and into the middle classes.
    - sejje 13y ago
      Serious question: Doesn't that just define a new lower class? If everyone moves up to the middle-class, isn't that the new lowest class? Wouldn't the upper middle class from 50 years ago be pretty happy as lower middle class today? (I believe so) If so, doesn't that signify some solid progress?
      - yummyfajitas 13y ago
        Yes. This is why using relative measures of class are flawed.
  - mijustin 13y ago
    "Every single person" in the world has not been moving up. ;) In the USA, there's a lot of data that says both absolute & relative mobility is getting worse: > The income of a typical working-age family grew considerably in the late 1990s. Around 2000, it stopped growing. In 2007, it started falling. and > An under-rated source of income growth for the middle class in the last 30 years, in face of slow-growing hourly wages, has been increased hours and the rise of dual-earner households, where the mother and father supplement each others' income. As a result, household income might actually understate* the middle-class crisis by counting the rising participation of women.* Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/12/a-giant-statistical-round-up-of-the-income-inequality-crisis-in-16-charts/266074/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/12/a-giant-... Because "absolute mobility" uses household income as a barometer, it appears on the surface that households are doing better. But we've actually added a lot of dual-income earning families since 1950, which skews those stats. In reality: > The typical family with a stay-at-home wife/mom has seen incomes grow only 1 percent, after inflation, since 1980. > The good news here is that women have the degrees, the means, and the freedom to work when they want to. The bad news is that the Typical American Family has only seen rising incomes in the last half century because of working wives. Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-americas-marriage-crisis-makes-income-inequality-so-much-worse/280056/?utm_content=buffera55d7&utm_source=buffer http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-amer...
- scotty79 13y ago
  Operating on the boundaries of norms is also prequisite for becomming vastly successful company (maybe not actual prequisite but one of ways): Youtube - let's just allow people to upload the videos, we'll worry about angry mob of copyright holders when we earn enough to lawyer up and create some bogus/overzealous tech gimmick to calm them. Google - let's copy the web to our servers, and publish snippets of it to anyone who asks. People won't notice copyright violation and accidental breakins to insecure parts of the web as long as we are useful and huge. Zynga - let me addict you to giving us your money with a help of this virtual cow and other game mechanics I just copied off my competition. Facebook - why don't you show us all how rich you are and where your kids go to school.
- MaysonL 13y ago
  The one that hit me was: A fine artist, (successful, credential-festooned, with inherited money), told me that I was too focused on commerce to be an artist. A real artist endured poverty. Being poor was edifying, filled with moral uplift. I spent weeks in a murderous rage.
- greendata 13y ago
  "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." Honoré de Balzac
thatthatis 13y ago
I have immense respect for successful people, like the author, who recognize that their success is a factor of skill, opportunity, cash, and luck. "I am a deity destined to succeed" is a belief held too often by people who have early success in their lives.
- wyager 13y ago
  Luck is probabilistic. Persistence allows one to exponentially reduce the chance of a negative outcome. If you fail, try again. And again. And again. Of all the self-made rich people that I know, their one common trait is persistence. They failed a lot. They didn't let bad luck stop them.
  - thatthatis 13y ago
    We agree on the effect that perseverance has on finding good luck.
  - mrow84 13y ago
    To translate the article into your probability of success framework: wealth confers both a higher probability of success at each attempt, and the ability to make more attempts without becoming impoverished. Given that the 'number of attempts' part of the equation is generally quite a small number, if you do the basic maths implied by your comment then you can see how valuable it is to be able to afford a couple more tries at success for people with moderate chances. That same maths also shows how difficult it is to succeed at the bottom end of the 'probability of success per attempt' space, and how even very small increases in that probability can make large (expected) changes in outcome.
    - thatthatis 13y ago
      This is one of the best explanations of how wealth can buy luck that I think I've ever read. Thank you.
  - sejje 13y ago
    And frankly, of all the poor people I know (I own a local bar so I know many, many poor people), they share a common trait: they don't even try. At ANYTHING. They never even take a shot at making themselves valuable.
calroc 13y ago
Um this is just babble, and not about hacking?
gvickers 13y ago
The American Dream is not "work hard and you will be successful", the American Dream is "Work hard at something people are willing to pay you to do and you will be successful".
- beaner 13y ago
  The people who make the most noise about the American Dream failing them are mostly young whites who've chosen personal, liberal arts pursuits as a career, with the expectation that society should support them at it. Comparisons to rich people are irrelevant and envy-driven. The rich are rich. So what? Do they deserve it - why do you care? You can make yourself comfortable without luck or brilliance. Just look around you, see what the world is paying for, and do it. If you choose not to do something in that set, you should acknowledge that you won't get the same pay for it. Arguments that you should be taken care of the same way aren't really arguments against the American Dream, they're just a leftward political view. Which is fine, but don't convolute them.
  - olefoo 13y ago
    > Comparisons to rich people are irrelevant and envy-driven. The rich are rich. So what? Do they deserve it - why do you care? Not when their riches come at the expense of everyone else. For instance the Walton family who occupy 6 of 10 slots on the richest americans list benefits from an estimated $15 Billion ( with a B ) a YEAR ( every year ) subsidy from the taxpayers to support their employees who could not survive ( as in feed their families ) without supplemental food assistance; not to mention medicare, disability etc. Not to mention the fact that the company they control got to be such a wealth production engine by arbitraging it's way around labor and environmental protections by exporting it's externalities to unregulated emerging economies. All the people who got pushed into extremely bad mortgages and then lost their jobs because the economy crashed; they were stolen from by Rich People. All the people who've had their lives destroyed by the financial shenanigans distorting our healthcare system were stolen from by Rich People. I don't know about you, but given the trail of destruction left behind by rich people in the past 5 years alone; we should be handing them a bill, or showing them the door. Now, I'm sure many rich people are very nice if you know them socially; but as a class, they're killing this country and this planet.
morgante 13y ago
It's awfully hard to discern a point in this rambling piece. But I'm not sure what she expects. She and other liberal arts students constantly complain about the 1%, but they're the ones who chose to go into a field which the market doesn't reward. Yet they're the same people who scoff at and disparage people studying finance or computer science. We chose to study lucrative things, a choice which is equally open to them. Ultimately, we have to confront the fact that certain industries just don't scale. We don't need more English majors or artists, so if you choose to study that it's your own choice. Welcome to the free market.
- dylandrop 13y ago
  Teachers get paid basically nothing to do their work. So should no one be a teacher just because it pays poorly? Absolutely not. I don't know about you but I'd hate to live in a world with no artists. I agree with you that she should know what she's getting into, which is why everyone I know has always told me that if you want to be an artist, you've got to love what you do (FYI, I'm not an artist). But just because our society doesn't reward artists monetarily doesn't mean artists don't have a right to complain about it. Sometimes the free market doesn't solve everything.
  - Luc 13y ago
    > I don't know about you but I'd hate to live in a world with no artists. There's no risk of that since they're willing to work for next to nothing. It not a good choice as a profession, but otherwise it is quite an attractive occupation.
    - k-mcgrady 13y ago
      There are plenty of people willing to work for close to nothing. That doesn't mean it's right to pay them close to nothing.
      - sejje 13y ago
        The idea that so many choose it implies they aren't being paid "close to nothing." Probably they are being "paid" something other than money, and that's what's so attractive to them.
hackaflocka 13y ago
If you told miss liberal hissyfitpants that Barack Obama and his family (or Bill Clinton and his family for that matter) were treated like that (the way she was treated in the first class lounge) whenever they fly, she won't have a problem with it. But what sets her off is that ordinary millionaires can get that kind of treatment in exchange for a little money. And notice, it wasn't some fictional millionaire she created who described the people in coach in that horrible way. It was she, liberal hissyfitpants herself, who did it.
- tehwebguy 13y ago
  The article wasn't about the first class experience, it was just the first few paragraphs to set the stage.
- Confusion 13y ago
  She doesn't have a problem with anyone being treated like that. What the article is interested in, and what she had a problem with, is that people feel like they, and those more well off, are entitled to their amenities. They should be more aware of their luck and should consider how other people may have been unlucky, instead of dumb, lazy or evil.
  - berrypicker 13y ago
    I definitely felt a sense of bitterness towards the rich: >But it’s too much to ask bankers to justify the bonuses they sucked off the public teat. >A culture that forbids employees from comparing salaries helps companies pay women and minorities less I don't understand these people who are hostile towards "bankers" and "big businesses" as they call them. Usually they seem to blame poverty to their wealth, and failure to their success. You may not become wealthy studying to be an accountant but you sure as shit will more likely have a stable career than somebody trying to make it in the arts. Yet the accountant is now the enemy. Somebody founds a company and it starts making a lot of money, suddenly he is responsible for everyone around him having no money. This is our generation, no wonder they call us entitled. I mean she even mentions the economic system being rigged but she can't see that it is precisely that which needs to change. Businesses and bankers are trying to make it, like everyone else. Don't complain about them then vote for Obama.
toto_tutu 13y ago
hmmm
davidw 13y ago
One of the ways to be happy is to look at what you have in an objective fashion, rather than looking at relative wealth. Rankings are zero-sum games in that someone is always one rung up from you, and someone else one rung down. In absolute terms though, we live in a time of amazing prosperity. The fact that you can fly at all is something that a person 100 years ago would be astounded at. The fact that you can do so cheaply and relatively easily is something someone 50 years ago would have envied. That's not to say that there aren't improvements to be made to society through politics, but that would be an argument for a site where that's on topic: it is off topic here according to the guidelines.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
zavulon 13y ago
> most people who make the world run—who care for kids, who grow food, who would rebuild after natural disasters and societal collapse—will never be rich, no matter how hard or well they work, because society is constructed with only so much room on top. That is such bullshit (at least here in the US). Nowhere in the article does the author support this claim. In fact, the whole American system is built to prove the opposite. Space at the top is NOT limited. Total wealth is NOT limited. Anybody who works hard (and smart!) can get there.
- falcolas 13y ago
  You criticize the article for a lack of support, then make an equally unsupported claim. Personally, I know many, many intelligent hard workers who are barely getting by under their crushing debt. I feel lucky that I am not in their shoes.
  - ryanackley 13y ago
    I had a friend that chose to go to a $27000/year out-of-state university. She left school with a graduate degree and $140k in debt with the prospect of making around ~$40k/year. Meanwhile, I went to my tax-subsidized home-state university. Paid for everything with Stafford loans and Pell grants. I left school with around ~20k in debt. Paid it off early. Shouldn't we hold people accountable for their choices? It is possible to get a decent education and leave school with a manageable debt. People do it all the time.
- pkinsky 13y ago
  >Nowhere in the article does the author support this claim. In fact, the whole American system is built to prove the opposite. Space at the top is NOT limited. Total wealth is NOT limited. Anybody who works hard (and smart!) can get there. This is false. The USA has a very low rate of mobility between economic classes when compared to other first-world nations. >42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints. >Meanwhile, just 8 percent of American men at the bottom rose to the top fifth. That compares with 12 percent of the British and 14 percent of the Danes. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-for-americans-to-rise-from-lower-rungs.html?sq=mobility&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-for-americans-to...
badman_ting 13y ago
There is something disappointing yet deeply unsurprising about the collective reaction to this piece. Well, here we are.
- mildtrepidation 13y ago
  If you're describing the general HN "I'm not impressed, here are some ancillary-to-the-point minutiae to debate" attitude, I'm not sure what else you could have expected. Similarly the "we're all sociologists here" assumptions that come with the common belief that a few largely-shared disagreements with American politics and economy that have somehow turned into truisms here. If you're disappointed, make a point. As it is you're complaining for its own sake, which is adding exactly as much as the comments you're complaining about (possibly less).
pedalpete 13y ago
I disagree with the complaints about the 1%. I think that is the wrong focus. With the exception of the First Class Flight example in this article, I've seen too many people focus on the 'divide' in the sense of actual dollars, rather than the lifestyle that the other 80% live, which I believe is actually quite good. Things like reading 'every dollar I clawed', makes me think that so many of these people are so focused on the actual dollars and have no real appreciation for the true challenges that the bottom 20% suffer. That's why I think many people here don't feel sorry for the authors of these pieces. Not only are they considered to be living well, the authors don't even appreciate the challenges of those who aren't. Discussing people who are treated like cattle in airports is not an effective argument for those who can't afford to fly, or eat. I disagree with airport treatment, but I don't think the 'rich' are to blame here either.
- lhc- 13y ago
  Did you read the article? I'm not sure you can argue she doesn't know anything about being poor or the experiences of the bottom 20% when much of the article was describing how she used to be poor and the difficulty in surviving in that world and getting out of it.

126 points by lkrubner 13y ago

Two quotes stand out for me: > My friends who came closest to attaining the American Dream did it by breaking the rules on how to get there. and > For my friends and I who fought our way to moderate financial success, money came from transgressing society's norms. With much luck, it required doing the ambitious work everyone said you weren't ready for, then getting mocked and rejected for it, until, slowly, the wall began to crack. You could never do what you were supposed to, never stay quietly in your place. There's something about these statements that ring very true. Upward mobility in the USA has always been difficult for women and minorities; now it's increasingly difficult for men as well. There just aren't that many rising from the bottom, and getting to the top. Positions are more entrenched. Sources: http://business.time.com/2012/01/05/the-loss-of-upward-mobility-in-the-u-s/ http://business.time.com/2012/01/05/the-loss-of-upward-mobil... and http://www.pewstates.org/projects/economic-mobility-project-328061 http://www.pewstates.org/projects/economic-mobility-project-... The author is identifying a response to the glass ceiling: by hacking the system and breaking the rules.

mcantelon 13y ago
>Upward mobility in the USA has always been difficult for women and minorities; now it's increasingly difficult for men as well. Gender and minority status are often mentioned as factors that influence success potential, but social class is seldom mentioned.
- dsr_ 13y ago
  USAns like to pretend that social class doesn't exist, because meritocracy. That doesn't describe what we actually have, though. Meritocracy would require that everyone start at the same level - of wealth, of privilege, of safety and health and education and food. Instead, we have meritocratic ideals, a few meritocratic policies, and a distinctly uneven playing field, which does not result in a meritocracy. Wealth buys political power which consolidates wealth, and we end up where we are, with a very clear distinction between the 1% and all the rest of us.
  - grinnbearit 13y ago
    Don't forget the same level of intelligence and good looks
- doodyhead 13y ago
  The Economist often runs interesting pieces it. Perhaps the most surprising finding is that, in the past few decades, we have had far higher social mobility in Europe than in the US.
wyager 13y ago
I don't buy this at all. Upward mobility never existed in the romanticized fashion that people like to talk about. There was never a point in time where billionaires sprang out of the ground like dandelions. The most "mobile" periods in history were when vast stores of untapped wealth were first being tapped. Westward expansion, the gold rush, etc. That's obviously not going to be 100% of the time. Today, I guess the closest thing is the internet. And a lot of people have gone rags-to-riches (or the more realistic not-riches-to-riches) through the internet. Maybe it's less mobility than, say, a hundred years ago, maybe not. But really, that's beside the point. Every single person in the entire world has been "moving up" for the last 300 years. Things are constantly getting better. Even if we completely disregard the social progress that's been made (think abolition of slavery), the rapid progression of technology is constantly raising everyone's standard of living.
- vacri 13y ago
  Upward mobility is not "people become [m|b]illionaires". It's climbing up the social scale. Going from lower-middle-class to upper-middle-class is significant and a sign of upward mobility. Mostly though, it's about getting out of poverty and into the middle classes.
  - sejje 13y ago
    Serious question: Doesn't that just define a new lower class? If everyone moves up to the middle-class, isn't that the new lowest class? Wouldn't the upper middle class from 50 years ago be pretty happy as lower middle class today? (I believe so) If so, doesn't that signify some solid progress?
    - yummyfajitas 13y ago
      Yes. This is why using relative measures of class are flawed.
- mijustin 13y ago
  "Every single person" in the world has not been moving up. ;) In the USA, there's a lot of data that says both absolute & relative mobility is getting worse: > The income of a typical working-age family grew considerably in the late 1990s. Around 2000, it stopped growing. In 2007, it started falling. and > An under-rated source of income growth for the middle class in the last 30 years, in face of slow-growing hourly wages, has been increased hours and the rise of dual-earner households, where the mother and father supplement each others' income. As a result, household income might actually understate* the middle-class crisis by counting the rising participation of women.* Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/12/a-giant-statistical-round-up-of-the-income-inequality-crisis-in-16-charts/266074/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/12/a-giant-... Because "absolute mobility" uses household income as a barometer, it appears on the surface that households are doing better. But we've actually added a lot of dual-income earning families since 1950, which skews those stats. In reality: > The typical family with a stay-at-home wife/mom has seen incomes grow only 1 percent, after inflation, since 1980. > The good news here is that women have the degrees, the means, and the freedom to work when they want to. The bad news is that the Typical American Family has only seen rising incomes in the last half century because of working wives. Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-americas-marriage-crisis-makes-income-inequality-so-much-worse/280056/?utm_content=buffera55d7&utm_source=buffer http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-amer...
scotty79 13y ago
Operating on the boundaries of norms is also prequisite for becomming vastly successful company (maybe not actual prequisite but one of ways): Youtube - let's just allow people to upload the videos, we'll worry about angry mob of copyright holders when we earn enough to lawyer up and create some bogus/overzealous tech gimmick to calm them. Google - let's copy the web to our servers, and publish snippets of it to anyone who asks. People won't notice copyright violation and accidental breakins to insecure parts of the web as long as we are useful and huge. Zynga - let me addict you to giving us your money with a help of this virtual cow and other game mechanics I just copied off my competition. Facebook - why don't you show us all how rich you are and where your kids go to school.
MaysonL 13y ago
The one that hit me was: A fine artist, (successful, credential-festooned, with inherited money), told me that I was too focused on commerce to be an artist. A real artist endured poverty. Being poor was edifying, filled with moral uplift. I spent weeks in a murderous rage.
greendata 13y ago
"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." Honoré de Balzac

thatthatis 13y ago

I have immense respect for successful people, like the author, who recognize that their success is a factor of skill, opportunity, cash, and luck. "I am a deity destined to succeed" is a belief held too often by people who have early success in their lives.

wyager 13y ago
Luck is probabilistic. Persistence allows one to exponentially reduce the chance of a negative outcome. If you fail, try again. And again. And again. Of all the self-made rich people that I know, their one common trait is persistence. They failed a lot. They didn't let bad luck stop them.
- thatthatis 13y ago
  We agree on the effect that perseverance has on finding good luck.
- mrow84 13y ago
  To translate the article into your probability of success framework: wealth confers both a higher probability of success at each attempt, and the ability to make more attempts without becoming impoverished. Given that the 'number of attempts' part of the equation is generally quite a small number, if you do the basic maths implied by your comment then you can see how valuable it is to be able to afford a couple more tries at success for people with moderate chances. That same maths also shows how difficult it is to succeed at the bottom end of the 'probability of success per attempt' space, and how even very small increases in that probability can make large (expected) changes in outcome.
  - thatthatis 13y ago
    This is one of the best explanations of how wealth can buy luck that I think I've ever read. Thank you.
- sejje 13y ago
  And frankly, of all the poor people I know (I own a local bar so I know many, many poor people), they share a common trait: they don't even try. At ANYTHING. They never even take a shot at making themselves valuable.

calroc 13y ago

Um this is just babble, and not about hacking?

gvickers 13y ago

The American Dream is not "work hard and you will be successful", the American Dream is "Work hard at something people are willing to pay you to do and you will be successful".

beaner 13y ago
The people who make the most noise about the American Dream failing them are mostly young whites who've chosen personal, liberal arts pursuits as a career, with the expectation that society should support them at it. Comparisons to rich people are irrelevant and envy-driven. The rich are rich. So what? Do they deserve it - why do you care? You can make yourself comfortable without luck or brilliance. Just look around you, see what the world is paying for, and do it. If you choose not to do something in that set, you should acknowledge that you won't get the same pay for it. Arguments that you should be taken care of the same way aren't really arguments against the American Dream, they're just a leftward political view. Which is fine, but don't convolute them.
- olefoo 13y ago
  > Comparisons to rich people are irrelevant and envy-driven. The rich are rich. So what? Do they deserve it - why do you care? Not when their riches come at the expense of everyone else. For instance the Walton family who occupy 6 of 10 slots on the richest americans list benefits from an estimated $15 Billion ( with a B ) a YEAR ( every year ) subsidy from the taxpayers to support their employees who could not survive ( as in feed their families ) without supplemental food assistance; not to mention medicare, disability etc. Not to mention the fact that the company they control got to be such a wealth production engine by arbitraging it's way around labor and environmental protections by exporting it's externalities to unregulated emerging economies. All the people who got pushed into extremely bad mortgages and then lost their jobs because the economy crashed; they were stolen from by Rich People. All the people who've had their lives destroyed by the financial shenanigans distorting our healthcare system were stolen from by Rich People. I don't know about you, but given the trail of destruction left behind by rich people in the past 5 years alone; we should be handing them a bill, or showing them the door. Now, I'm sure many rich people are very nice if you know them socially; but as a class, they're killing this country and this planet.

morgante 13y ago

It's awfully hard to discern a point in this rambling piece. But I'm not sure what she expects. She and other liberal arts students constantly complain about the 1%, but they're the ones who chose to go into a field which the market doesn't reward. Yet they're the same people who scoff at and disparage people studying finance or computer science. We chose to study lucrative things, a choice which is equally open to them. Ultimately, we have to confront the fact that certain industries just don't scale. We don't need more English majors or artists, so if you choose to study that it's your own choice. Welcome to the free market.

dylandrop 13y ago
Teachers get paid basically nothing to do their work. So should no one be a teacher just because it pays poorly? Absolutely not. I don't know about you but I'd hate to live in a world with no artists. I agree with you that she should know what she's getting into, which is why everyone I know has always told me that if you want to be an artist, you've got to love what you do (FYI, I'm not an artist). But just because our society doesn't reward artists monetarily doesn't mean artists don't have a right to complain about it. Sometimes the free market doesn't solve everything.
- Luc 13y ago
  > I don't know about you but I'd hate to live in a world with no artists. There's no risk of that since they're willing to work for next to nothing. It not a good choice as a profession, but otherwise it is quite an attractive occupation.
  - k-mcgrady 13y ago
    There are plenty of people willing to work for close to nothing. That doesn't mean it's right to pay them close to nothing.
    - sejje 13y ago
      The idea that so many choose it implies they aren't being paid "close to nothing." Probably they are being "paid" something other than money, and that's what's so attractive to them.

hackaflocka 13y ago

If you told miss liberal hissyfitpants that Barack Obama and his family (or Bill Clinton and his family for that matter) were treated like that (the way she was treated in the first class lounge) whenever they fly, she won't have a problem with it. But what sets her off is that ordinary millionaires can get that kind of treatment in exchange for a little money. And notice, it wasn't some fictional millionaire she created who described the people in coach in that horrible way. It was she, liberal hissyfitpants herself, who did it.

tehwebguy 13y ago
The article wasn't about the first class experience, it was just the first few paragraphs to set the stage.
Confusion 13y ago
She doesn't have a problem with anyone being treated like that. What the article is interested in, and what she had a problem with, is that people feel like they, and those more well off, are entitled to their amenities. They should be more aware of their luck and should consider how other people may have been unlucky, instead of dumb, lazy or evil.
- berrypicker 13y ago
  I definitely felt a sense of bitterness towards the rich: >But it’s too much to ask bankers to justify the bonuses they sucked off the public teat. >A culture that forbids employees from comparing salaries helps companies pay women and minorities less I don't understand these people who are hostile towards "bankers" and "big businesses" as they call them. Usually they seem to blame poverty to their wealth, and failure to their success. You may not become wealthy studying to be an accountant but you sure as shit will more likely have a stable career than somebody trying to make it in the arts. Yet the accountant is now the enemy. Somebody founds a company and it starts making a lot of money, suddenly he is responsible for everyone around him having no money. This is our generation, no wonder they call us entitled. I mean she even mentions the economic system being rigged but she can't see that it is precisely that which needs to change. Businesses and bankers are trying to make it, like everyone else. Don't complain about them then vote for Obama.

toto_tutu 13y ago

hmmm

davidw 13y ago

One of the ways to be happy is to look at what you have in an objective fashion, rather than looking at relative wealth. Rankings are zero-sum games in that someone is always one rung up from you, and someone else one rung down. In absolute terms though, we live in a time of amazing prosperity. The fact that you can fly at all is something that a person 100 years ago would be astounded at. The fact that you can do so cheaply and relatively easily is something someone 50 years ago would have envied. That's not to say that there aren't improvements to be made to society through politics, but that would be an argument for a site where that's on topic: it is off topic here according to the guidelines.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

zavulon 13y ago

> most people who make the world run—who care for kids, who grow food, who would rebuild after natural disasters and societal collapse—will never be rich, no matter how hard or well they work, because society is constructed with only so much room on top. That is such bullshit (at least here in the US). Nowhere in the article does the author support this claim. In fact, the whole American system is built to prove the opposite. Space at the top is NOT limited. Total wealth is NOT limited. Anybody who works hard (and smart!) can get there.

falcolas 13y ago
You criticize the article for a lack of support, then make an equally unsupported claim. Personally, I know many, many intelligent hard workers who are barely getting by under their crushing debt. I feel lucky that I am not in their shoes.
- ryanackley 13y ago
  I had a friend that chose to go to a $27000/year out-of-state university. She left school with a graduate degree and $140k in debt with the prospect of making around ~$40k/year. Meanwhile, I went to my tax-subsidized home-state university. Paid for everything with Stafford loans and Pell grants. I left school with around ~20k in debt. Paid it off early. Shouldn't we hold people accountable for their choices? It is possible to get a decent education and leave school with a manageable debt. People do it all the time.
pkinsky 13y ago
>Nowhere in the article does the author support this claim. In fact, the whole American system is built to prove the opposite. Space at the top is NOT limited. Total wealth is NOT limited. Anybody who works hard (and smart!) can get there. This is false. The USA has a very low rate of mobility between economic classes when compared to other first-world nations. >42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints. >Meanwhile, just 8 percent of American men at the bottom rose to the top fifth. That compares with 12 percent of the British and 14 percent of the Danes. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-for-americans-to-rise-from-lower-rungs.html?sq=mobility&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-for-americans-to...

badman_ting 13y ago

There is something disappointing yet deeply unsurprising about the collective reaction to this piece. Well, here we are.

mildtrepidation 13y ago
If you're describing the general HN "I'm not impressed, here are some ancillary-to-the-point minutiae to debate" attitude, I'm not sure what else you could have expected. Similarly the "we're all sociologists here" assumptions that come with the common belief that a few largely-shared disagreements with American politics and economy that have somehow turned into truisms here. If you're disappointed, make a point. As it is you're complaining for its own sake, which is adding exactly as much as the comments you're complaining about (possibly less).

pedalpete 13y ago

I disagree with the complaints about the 1%. I think that is the wrong focus. With the exception of the First Class Flight example in this article, I've seen too many people focus on the 'divide' in the sense of actual dollars, rather than the lifestyle that the other 80% live, which I believe is actually quite good. Things like reading 'every dollar I clawed', makes me think that so many of these people are so focused on the actual dollars and have no real appreciation for the true challenges that the bottom 20% suffer. That's why I think many people here don't feel sorry for the authors of these pieces. Not only are they considered to be living well, the authors don't even appreciate the challenges of those who aren't. Discussing people who are treated like cattle in airports is not an effective argument for those who can't afford to fly, or eat. I disagree with airport treatment, but I don't think the 'rich' are to blame here either.

lhc- 13y ago
Did you read the article? I'm not sure you can argue she doesn't know anything about being poor or the experiences of the bottom 20% when much of the article was describing how she used to be poor and the difficulty in surviving in that world and getting out of it.