Best advice my dad ever gave was: The middle class is disappearing. In the future there will be only rich and poor. Your job is to end up on the correct side of that line.
He then peaced out of my life but that part stuck.
He then peaced out of my life but that part stuck.
When I was a kid, there was college+professional job out there for the A and B students, and there were jobs at the factory or mill out there waiting for the C and D students. Now, it's success for the A++ students with the "right" extra-curriculars (and for the too-rich-to-fail kids), and unemployment/meth/prison for the remaining A, B, C, and D students.
Meanwhile I did basically no homework between the ages of 11-24, graduated 2 years late from college after flunking a couple courses, spent all my "free" (= homework/class) time reading and fiddling around with computers, and ended up in one of those hot jobs. My parents freaked about me ever having a job or living on my own - my mom sent me a graduation card that said "Some call it graduation. We call it a miracle." I matched her final salary (after 35 years in the workforce) in my first year out of college.
IMHO, the best skills you can teach your kid these days are: 1) supply & demand 2) compound interest 3) how to read what's "hot" and what people really care about 4) how to form a mental model of what's in someone's head and trade with them so they get what they want and you get what you want 5) statistics and 6) whatever labor-saving technologies of the day can make things more efficient and throw people out of work. That was software when I was a kid; it's probably things like deep neural nets and robotics now, and may be biotech/nanotech/material science by the time kids today get into the workforce. Lots of middle-class parents fight the last war and prepare their kids for the world they entered as 20/30-somethings. They need to stop stressing over economic realities now (which will be totally different by the time our kids enter the working world) and teach general principles for being able to look around you and make sense of the world, then trust the kid to be able to do that on their own.
But it sounds like you just lucked into your career because you enjoyed computers.
It is important to turn that high income into assets. Living on cashflow is a losing bet long-term.
There’s another dimension that I find increasingly useful to look at.
Capital is infinitely scalable. One person can put $1 to work, or one person can $100 billion dollars to work.
Labor has a hard limit somewhere around 60-80 hours per week. One person cannot sustainably put more labor “to work” without capital. Labor is essentially time.
So you have time and money. But not all hours you spend are the same. You can spend an hour fixing your car, or painting your house. The net effect of that hour is to provide a bit of value for perhaps up to a dozen people.
Or you could spend an hour creating something that provides a bit of value many times into the future for thousands, millions, or billions of people.
One is not inherently better than the other, but one is inherently more economically valuable than the other.
So the lesson is if you are time rich but capital poor, and you want to get capital rich, you need to spend your time on things that provide a bit of value for an arbitrarily large number of people. In other words, one-to-many not one-to-one.
There’s an upper limit to how much money your labor can make working 1-to-1 or even 1-to-N where n is small. There’s no limit to how much money your labor can make when N is large.
I guess he decided raising his child would cut too much into his savings rates.
I don't disagree with his stance descriptively, but if we embrace it, it means committing ourselves to an amoral, spiritually impoverished future.
Mmmm no it’s not that simple, but it’s a long story. Last I heard he was presumed homeless.
The end game of rising inequality is not a few living good lives while most suffer. It is chaos and instability.