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Comment by seabass-labrax | Hacker News Reader

I learnt to ride with extra wheels attached to the side of the bicycle, and as a result, I almost never fell during that learning process.

Translating the analogy back, what you describe is the entrepreneurial fail-until-you-win method. The alternative method of progression is that of apprenticeship or gradual promotion, which in my country is associated with traditionally middle-class professions like finance, medicine and law. In such a conventional career, success is almost guaranteed, as the number of people entering the profession is very close to the number retiring out of it, and the assumption is that, because the endeavour has always been profitable, it will be for you too.

Ideally, the profession as a whole gradually improves under this system, but no individual member of it has to engage in any more than an average level of risk to be personally successful.

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Yeah, well, such safe avenues don't lead to making a billion.

And unsafe avenues aren't an option for the majority of people in the US.

Not buying that. America is not a nation of poor people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States

Most of "poor people" in USA would be considered above average in other countries and continents.

So they're financially secure enough for risky speculative investment?

Context matters. If they moved to those other countries and continents, which have lower costs of living, they’d be fine. But: moving costs money and time they don’t have (since they’ve gotta work 3 jobs to put food on the table), those other countries and continents have even less opportunity to build a business, and so on.

It doesn’t really matter that you think “poor people” aren’t really that poor. They are, and risk is much harder to stomach when it means becoming actually homeless. Denying that is sticking your head in the sand.

Well, how about you actually look?

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/04/11/58percent-of-americans-a...

60% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck.

Living paycheck-to-paycheck is quite often a lifestyle choice showing more lack of planning and of financial skills than poverty.

Feel free to actually show some empirical evidence to support your assumptions.

Said someone who has never grown up in poverty. rolls eyes

Been in both situations; grew up impoverished, now doing well.

Living paycheck to paycheck is never a lifestyle choice; there are choices that come out of that because even poor people don’t want to feel poor, but given the option, not a single one in most cases would prefer to be paycheck to paycheck.

I grew up under the utter misery of communism. Even my illiterate grandmother working the earth knew to always have a valuable or two put aside to bribe the party representatives in case one of us got sick or in trouble.

That doesn't give you a useful perspective on the logistics of poverty in the US. This isn't some kind of qualification based on a misery meter.

I also lived in the US. My roommate with half my salary had a car twice as expensive as mine. He had house payments while I was renting. Restaurants and bar outings while I stayed home reading. No wonder he was always broke on salary day...

The “stop drinking Starbucks” is old and nonsensical. That isn’t why people are poor.

> That isn’t why people are poor

So for you I guess lazy people don't exist? People who refuse to learn, change and adapt? People who just wanna smoke weed, play xbox, jerk off to pornhub and eat Nachos (not necessarily in that order)? People who'd rather make a quick buck doing some border-line illegal "deals" than have a regular honest job? People who would rather play the popularity game in high school than study? People who would rather slack off around the watercooler at work than do what "the boss" asks? People who prefer to coast although their field is changing under them?

It must be nice to live in a world without such people...

Of course they exist. They are a minority, though, and the trope of representing people in poverty as lazy is tired and old, in addition to inaccurate.

Different worlds it is then. In mine, they are the great majority.

I’m not sure what any of that has to do with the topic at hand? My parents also fled communism.

It’s not that poor people don’t want to save and invest; it’s that because cost of living in most places has far outpaced salaries, there literally is no money to save.

Most Americans live under mountains of debt. My mother had thousands and thousands of dollars in credit card bills because she had to, in order to survive and support a family of four. And we lived in the projects in Brooklyn.

She never told me about it until I was in my twenties, because she never wanted to worry me with it, and moreover, she never wanted me to know we were poor. Pride is a real thing.

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