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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

1. The USSR had (and has) much more resources per population. Japan achieved great wealth with insignificant natural resources.

2. Middle class and rich people rarely immigrate. It's the poor that do. Did you know that the reason the Titanic was built was to en-masse ship poor people to the US? The first class bit was mostly window dressing. The money was to be made by cramming poor people in below decks. In colonial times, America was populated mostly by people escaping prosecution, indentured servants, sons who weren't first born and were not going to inherit anything, teens whose parents could not support them, etc. The Chinese and Japanese people came to escape poverty.

Furthermore, South America was and is rich in resources, but it remains poor. Nothing like the US happened there.

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> Did you know that the reason the Titanic was built was to en-masse ship poor people to the US? The first class bit was mostly window dressing.

Third-class passage was £8, approximately $1000 in today's currency, i.e. more expensive than an equivalent trans-atlantic flight today, and too expensive for poor people to typically consider.

> Middle class and rich people rarely immigrate. It's the poor that do.

"The median income of foreign-born households in 2016 was $53,200, compared to U.S. born resident’s median household income of $58,000."

That seems like middle class people to me.

Do we have different definitions of poor?

> Third-class passage was £8, approximately $1000 in today's currency, i.e. more expensive than an equivalent trans-atlantic flight today, and too expensive for poor people to typically consider.

Desperately poor people spend well over that to get smuggled across the Mexican border today.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/30/world/smuggli...

> A decade ago, Mexicans and Central Americans paid between $1,000 and $3,000 for clandestine passage into the United States. Now they hand over up to $9,200 for the same journey, the Department of Homeland Security reported last year. Those figures have continued to rise, according to interviews at migrant shelters in Mexico.

> Some would-be migrants give up homes, cars, livestock and even farmland tilled by their families for generations and take on debt to pay the fees.

You can call people who are willing to spend and have access to $10,000 desperate, but I don't know how useful it is to call them poor.

Your last sentence quoted clearly describes people with inherited wealth. In my opinion, that's not describing a poor person, by almost any measure. It falls into the sibling commenter's category description of petit bourgeoisie.

Those people are really poor, they bet their lives on those $10000 that they don't even own. They are not "willing to spend", they are willing to lose their life for it, it's a huge difference.

They borrow it from the extended family, everyone chips in, it's like a risky investment that some day can pay off.

When the extended family funds are not enough, they borrow from the "organized crime", i.e. the narcos.

Sometimes they don't pay the whole sum before and now they own to the coyotes, which are also the narcos.

During the immigration process, they are getting abducted, executed (whole buses of immigrants were killed in Mexico), the rules change midway, usually they own more money at the end that were agreed at the start.

Definitively they are not the petit bourgeoisie.

Subsistence farmers tend to have both land and homes, yet are desperately poor, eking out just enough of a living to survive.

Some go into debt, hoping there'll be opportunity on the other side of the border. Some lose their lives when they aren't able to pay those debts back to the coyotes.

I'm not going to claim that living a subsistent lifestyle on your own land is a wonderful utopia - I don't think that.

But, relative poverty in this situation would mean that you don't have your own land, to do this.

Wikipedia comments that subsistence farmers typically have meaningful economic power in their community: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsistence_agriculture

> too expensive for poor people to typically consider.

Seriously? Poor people spend a grand on iPhones.

Besides, have you seen those pictures of immigrants going through Ellis Island clutching their battered suitcases? Do they look like rich people to you?

> That seems like middle class people to me.

Yup. Came poor and moved up to middle class.

BTW, I am properly amused by your theory that the US became a superpower via rich people immigrating and transferring their money to the US. That doesn't even pass the sniff test.

> Seriously? Poor people spend a grand on iPhones.

Where? Poor people get second-hand iPhones, or subscribe to plans that bill you in small installments over a few years. And even those who manage to save up and buy a new one - in a modern civilization, a smartphone is a basic necessity, right there after food and shelter.

> That seems like middle class people to me.

Seems like just below middle income, which is typically deep in the working class and pretty far from the petit bourgeoisie, the balance-of-capital-and-labor-dependence middle class between thr working and capitalist classes.

That's a fine definition, but puts middle class in at least the top 10%, if not comfortably the top 1%, by wealth and income.

My question was whether we have different definitions of poor - if you are distinguishing poor as everyone below middle class, and this is your definition of middle class, then you're simply claiming that everyone is poor.

Saying "poor people do X" now just boils down to "some people do X" [for example, the claim that poor people buy $1000 retail iPhones]. To me, that's not a very useful or interesting definition for this purpose.

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