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Comment by eanzenberg | Hacker News Reader

This idea is false. Intra-generational mobility in the US is quite strong. Half of people in the 1% are not in the 1% a decade later. About 50% of people move up 1 quintile from their starting quintile of income. I don’t have stats on how this compares to EU or other countries, but this shows a majority American people can move between income quantiles in their lifetime.

[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/inside-the-vault/spr...

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This. The US has an abnormally high social mobility, even compared to the EU. You have a better chance of moving to the top 1% here than anywhere else. I'm a Tier 1 FAANG engineer and worked very hard to get here, coming from a middle income family. By first studying hard and building projects to get into a Tier 1 university.

Tier 1 top-talent engineers are just worth multiples more than lower talent people and deserve to reap from their hard work and expertise. It's unfair to me and other FAANGs to say we don't deserve our lifestyle and are silver spoon.

That comment that tier 1 top talent engineers is way too universal, to put it kindly. I've worked 20 years as a dev and leader across two tier 1 companies and succeeded, think Faang. I'm maybe from a tier 3 undergrad. Intelligence, hard work, experience are all things that help me, but maybe also hubris, kindness, focus were important too. I was worth a lot because I worked hard and produced a lot. But I've also met way more productive and intelligent and capable people who were not at those tier 1 companies and not from tier 1 universities. It's like the old saw from my youth, if you think you are so great, a super genius, then probably you were not in a selective enough group (whether that is high school, college, grad school, company, life).

It can be better than EU while still being dismal. Although I'd love to see some stats (not anecdotes) showing that it's better on the whole, because that's certainly not the case for those I know of.

More importantly, measuring it as a single number for the entire country hides a lot of nuance that matters. It's rarely constant across the spectrum, and those at the bottom of it usually see far less social mobility than those higher up. US is pretty good at social mobility for middle class specifically, but really bad for those below that.

Regarding the "silver spoon" bit - why do you take a complaint about inequality to mean that you should be earning less? The way I see it, others should be earning more, and have quality of life closer to mine. And they would, if all that money wasn't collected as economic rent by their employers (in case of small businesses, the chain goes a bit further up, but there's always somebody skimming of wealth generated by other people at the end of it).

It's not as strong as western Europe or Canada so what are you comparing it to? China? Brazil? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_th...

Also, moving up a quintile is not that great of a move when you have to be in the top 10% to have a nice life in the US.

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