Comment by mijustin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mijustin | Hacker News Reader

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-mobil... and 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.

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.

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.

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?

Yes. This is why using relative measures of class are flawed.

"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-...

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-amer...

He meant moving up in quality of life, not social status. It wasn't even implied, he said so rather specifically ("but really, that's beside the point.")

I'd much rather be lower class today than upper class in 1776. Comfort, medicine, availability of safe food, etc is all far better now for all classes than it was then for the upper class.

There's a big disparity, in some sense, between lower and upper classes in today's world, but the disparity doesn't show up in happiness or longevity so far as I know. Mostly it's about having nice things, or just wealth in general.

There's a big disparity, in some sense, between lower and upper classes in today's world, but the disparity doesn't show up in happiness or longevity so far as I know.

Actually it does: poor people are not as happy as well-off people, on average.

Also, for the past 30 or so years, US life expectancy for higher income workers has gone up substantially more then for lower income workers. See [1] for example, or search on "life expectancy by income level"

[1] http://www.minnpost.com/second-opinion/2013/03/income-gap-pl...

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.

>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.

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.

Don't forget the same level of intelligence and good looks

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.

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.

"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." Honoré de Balzac

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