Hacker News Reader

Comment by zavulon | Hacker News Reader

> most people who make the world run—who care for kids, who grow food, who would rebuild after natural disasters and societal collapse—will never be rich, no matter how hard or well they work, because society is constructed with only so much room on top.

That is such bullshit (at least here in the US).

Nowhere in the article does the author support this claim. In fact, the whole American system is built to prove the opposite. Space at the top is NOT limited. Total wealth is NOT limited. Anybody who works hard (and smart!) can get there.

View on HN

>Nowhere in the article does the author support this claim. In fact, the whole American system is built to prove the opposite. Space at the top is NOT limited. Total wealth is NOT limited. Anybody who works hard (and smart!) can get there.

This is false. The USA has a very low rate of mobility between economic classes when compared to other first-world nations.

>42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints.

>Meanwhile, just 8 percent of American men at the bottom rose to the top fifth. That compares with 12 percent of the British and 14 percent of the Danes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-for-americans-to...

You criticize the article for a lack of support, then make an equally unsupported claim.

Personally, I know many, many intelligent hard workers who are barely getting by under their crushing debt. I feel lucky that I am not in their shoes.

I had a friend that chose to go to a $27000/year out-of-state university. She left school with a graduate degree and $140k in debt with the prospect of making around ~$40k/year.

Meanwhile, I went to my tax-subsidized home-state university. Paid for everything with Stafford loans and Pell grants. I left school with around ~20k in debt. Paid it off early.

Shouldn't we hold people accountable for their choices? It is possible to get a decent education and leave school with a manageable debt. People do it all the time.

In fact, the whole American system is built to prove the opposite. Space at the top is NOT limited.

By definition, it is. The question is whether one focuses on absolute or relative prosperity. Like you (I presume) I also prefer to focus on absolute prosperity because nothing can be done about relative prosperity's zero-sum nature.

However, it would be good to see less inequality. I'm not a hard-line "everyone-should-have-the-same-amount" egalitarian because that's a terrible idea-- people would lose the incentive to do the work that society needs-- but inequality has gone far beyond the point of being valuable or productive. Now it's just self-perpetuating and exists for no other reason.

Total wealth is NOT limited.

Sure. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people (95+ percent) end up working below their ability (a loss to them, and to society) because they lack the scarce social resources, credentials, and connections that have congealed "at the top". There are also inefficiency problems in a low-mobility society where (as we now see in the US) the wrong people are making the decisions.

Anybody who works hard (and smart!) can get there.

Total bullshit.

> Total bullshit.

I come from a home that lived below poverty level for most of my life, though we maybe disguised it well--most of my friends were middle-class.

I fell in love with computers at age 10, but I didn't have access to one outside of public school until age 16, when I bought one with money I earned at a job I took after school.

After off-and-on dedication to programming over the past decade, I've been working as a developer for approximately 1 year, and I have a very solid chance to get "there" if I choose to continue down this path.

I don't see what's preventing more-or-less anybody in America from taking these steps. I didn't do anything that is out-of-reach for any given person, nor did I, in any obvious manner, have a stroke of luck.

After off-and-on dedication to programming over the past decade, I've been working as a developer for approximately 1 year

Write again when you raise a seed round, then. Maybe you'll get there. I hope you do.

If you were from a rich background, you'd be turning investors away. You wouldn't even have to ask them for meetings and intros.

What are you talking about? I'm not, nor will I ever be, trying to raise funds.

This whole discussion is about how tech-people are on the gravy train and the starving artists aren't getting their fair share of it.

You had a stroke of luck by falling in love with computers. Did you do that because you knew it would pay off down the road?

My story is similar, only I decided to study communications and didn't do much computer stuff for half a decade. I quit halfway through my master's because I hated what I'd seen of academia. Faced with the need to make a living, I started doing freelance webdesign/development. I've done very well for myself ever since.

I didn't choose to go into web development because I knew it would be lucrative (more so than finishing my degree even). I also didn't choose to become a geek and tinker with computers at an early age.

I got lucky, and I'd argue that you did too. We're lucky that our passion is in demand.

That said, I worked really hard. I started out with clients that were way out of my league, and spent many nights frantically learning as much as I could. It wasn't just luck. But luck played a big role.

Not a chance. It's easy to be disillusioned by our little tech bubble. We have it easy, others do not.

Easy? Perhaps you have it easy. This comment makes the same mistake the article makes: Generalization.

Instead of stating that you have it easy, you say we have it easy. Instead of saying she had certain problems, the author says everyone has certain problems (and, more importantly, she leaps to systemic discrimination, class-warfare, etc. as somehow-implied conclusions).

Some of us actually have to work hard, even in tech, and had to work hard to "make it" in the first place. I didn't have to work as hard as she did, but others did (and I bet few of us are such attractive females as to have the options she did, which makes some of her criticism ring a little hollow). And my experience certainly hasn't been what I'd describe as easy.

Easy in the strict sense of job security. That's the only way I meant it.

Not many other professions can just up and leave and without a doubt land a job pretty much anywhere you like.

Hell I can go anywhere in EU and probably land a job, a freedom many don't have.

It's 10x, maybe even 1000x harder to make it as an artist or musician than to make it in finance, engineering, nursing, or accounting.

FYI, 'disillusioned' != deluded/misled/deceived

You're right, my bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com