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How to succeed in America without even trying
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probably not. Fetuses are notoriously shit at carpentry.
Roughly 1/3rd of black and hispanic households and 14.5% of white households had zero or negative net worth in 2007. (as in prior to the Recession)
Something to keep in mind during all of these discussions is demographics. Not racial necessarily, though that certainly has an unfortunately large impact, but also age. Someone fresh out of college today has thousands of dollars in debt and only a couple years collecting a salary. If they manage to maintain gainful employment for most of their working years then yes they will likely be able to net a positive net worth by their retirement. However, most people are young. And most of us young people won't have such a relatively smooth path without major incident knocking you out of the workforce for a time. Even among those who do, the pace at which you accumulate more income than can be converted to wealth by frugality is largely stagnant today in comparison to two generations ago. Income and wealth basically doubled in the ~30 years between 1949 and 1979. It has increased much more slowly in the 30 years since then aside from for the wealthiest 5% of individuals.
Average family income growth, by income group, 1947–2007
Hmm?
u no it brodog
The economy is still recovering from imploding a few years ago, too. Its the middle class and poor who feel the brunt of that, not the wealthy.
Any chance that you could explain your original post?
If my google is correct, it's about a third.
Also, it's sad that you know of so few people that are financially secure, but it's definitely a thing that is possible.
tek'nically this is exactly wrong; it is the top end which saw their capital+wage net wealth most evaporate
of course it is unsurprisingly also the fastest to recover
Well I don't know many people who weren't born into poverty or near poverty, so clearly my sample is skewed, but that goes back to the point about social mobility and how even meeting your modest (and good) definition of "success" is outside the grasp of many, many people.
The median is the middle value of a data set and is thus the perfect value to refute or prove statements like the one given about the majority.
TI'm also not sure what the graph you posted is suppose to be ok since not only does it not have labels about what the percents mean, but if it's wealth then another page on the site has different numbers. Link you posted is assets only which confused me for a bit. However it appears combining the assets and liabilities charts from that website that people are poorer in 2010 then I thought and have more of their net worth tied in non-liquid assets than I expected. You still end up with about 13k that isn't expanded upon and I'm not sure how liquid that is.
Numbers if people care:
Net worth of the middle 5th in 2010: 61k (dropping from 110k in 2007)
House equity of the middle 5th: 39k (65% of total wealth)
Stocks in retirement accounts: 8.9k (15%)
Remaining: 13k (1.7 of this is in stocks not in retirement accounts)
Yeah, I'm not sure why the label wasn't part of the image. I edited for clarity, but it shows:
Share of total household wealth growth accruing to various wealth groups, 1983–2010
Well, yeah, if you're born into poverty you're pretty much fucked.
Unless the data set is so skewed towards one side that the difference between the median and the mean is fairly significantly impacted.
(in the sense of a debate, that is. We'll be stuck here all day flinging "but you haven't accounted for X" otherwise.)
I think that's a semantics argument.
We're not simply talking about success (which I agree, isn't necessarily the right word) we're talking about social mobility in general. I'm a 23 year old. Despite being young, I make a comfortable salary and will soon enter grad school (cost-free) which will increase my earnings further. I managed to do that because I have a college degree that my parents paid for. If my parents had been poor, I certainly wouldn't have gone to the school that I did and it's possible that I wouldn't have been able to go to college at all.
Example 1) Poor kid does okay in high school despite a terrible family situation. Joins the service and makes a decent $50,000 civilian equivalent after a few years. Isn't going to strike it hot but isn't likely going to starve if he's prudent with his own money (barring any messy personal mistakes).
Example 2) Middle-class kid does well in high school and goes to a state school for cheap, taking out loans to pay for his tuition. Ends up majoring in engineering and snags a partial ROTC scholarship. Gets stationed somewhere with a high cost of living, so he's pulling in close to $70k his first year which is more than his family combined. Goes to business school at night for free on the GI Bill and gets out to make $110k at age 27.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
He'd need 3 promotions in as many years in order to pull down $50k wages as an enlisted man.
One's propensity for hard work is a product of nature and nurture, both things out of your control.
Your intellect is a combination of what you start with and how you develop it, the former of which is always out of your control, and the latter often enough is as well.
So of the things you need to be successful, luck is by far the most important. Not saying you can do nothing and be successful, but even how well you can do things is influenced by things out of your control.
That said, I will point out that successful people like to say their success is their own doing, while unsuccessful people tend to be more fatalistic.
The point of the exercise is to determine how success can be attributed to two realms of influence: circumstance and character. Both circumstance and character are the result of external factors beyond one's control, and in fact circumstance tends to shape character, but that does not really undermine the fact that there is a potential causal link between character and success.
That said, I feel that the influence of circumstance on character is often underestimated (knowing what working hard can get you, having close examples and role models of hard work, having extensive support in terms of the knowledge and psychological reinforcement necessary for fruitful hard work, achievable and familiar goals at which hard work is directed - all of these are the result of circumstance).
like, not only is their material support - or lack of it - a huge factor in your future success, but their presence and parenting style are also crucial
you can have rich parents that absolutely smother any ambitions outside of their plans for you
you can have middle-class parents who kick you out at 18
you can have poor parents who work 3 jobs so you can get training to get great SAT scores and a scholarship
people like to say that they did whatever they did on their own, but very very few people, if given a trajectory by their parents - in any respect - tend to deviate from that path.
also, career choice matters a fuckton. this whole 'spend time in college racking up debt while you figure out what you want to do with your life' is a horrible practice that maybe was valid for half a generation at best. nowadays, college is far too expensive for you not to have a plan to get in and get out with maximum education for minimum debt load. if you're there to party, then you're ripping yourself off.
also, no matter what your high school guidance counselor says, finding a career is not about doing what you love. that's a goddamn luxury, when the stars of 'in-demand, high paying job" and "things i love to do that i have been trained to do" align. in today's economy, if you want to be a steel-drivin' man, you're out of a job, and it doesn't matter if that's your passion.
bottom line: do your research, find a field of in-demand jobs that pay well, get your degree, find a way to tolerate that job, and then do what you love on the side.
Registered just for the Mass Effect threads | Steam: click ^^^ | Origin: curlyhairedboy
As far as hard work goes, hard work is helpful in becoming a financial success in most cases. But only when combined with other factors. There are lots of people who work hard and have great work ethic, but who are working hard as a waitress or some other job that just doesn't pay a lot. There are also a lot of high-paying jobs where you just don't have to work very hard compared to, say, a ditch-digger.
Though honestly, where you're born is such a huge bit of luck everything that follows is practically rounding errors.
Also don't forget most military paychecks consist of far more than just basic pay. My taxable income last year was only 35 but my actual income was nearly double that.
If success is income, success is a matter of pure luck, if you end up being part of the business elite in a time when society worships people who sells things to other people, you will be absolutely rich.
Hard work is definitely not a factor. Most people work hard, and saying "I got here by working hard" implies that people who are not as rich as you are just lazy, which is untrue and insulting. A nurse pulling 12 hours shifts is working hard, but is not getting as much money as the CEO of a company. So "hard work" is not it. Hard work is something that unless you are really lucky you are going to have to do anyway whether you are rich or poor, with the difference that if you are rich you will be able to stop working hard whan you are older.
So what are the factors that define success as income? Well, it's working hard in a direction that will take you to a high income job. Let's for a moment reduce "succesful" to "CEO of a big-ass company". That CEO needs to have applied hard work in a direction that took him there, for that he needed:
1-The ability to work hard in that direction, which in this case could be a business administration degree. Having parents that motivate you to do such a thing is useful, and lucky, having parents that can pay for your college is even luckier, having parents that can send you to the college where all rich people meet so you can make contacts is even luckier, having parents that KNOW some of that rich people is definitely going to help.
2-The opportunity to use your hard work to prove yourself. This opportunity can arise through luck or can arise through living in an environment where you know people who can give you that opportunity.
3-Intelligence to know how to profit from opportunities. This is the only one factor that is legitimately yours.
Overall, or as tl:dr. Everyone works hard, that is not a factor in success because usually unsuccesful people have to work harder for less money. Intelligence is certainly required to be able to move within society. But the defining factor is whether you grow up in an environment that maximizes the opportunities you are going to have to apply your hard work in the right direction. This means: being succesful is normal for rich people (something that is proved by rich people saying that you "only need to work hard" to get rich), and succesful poor people have been incredibly lucky.
Second tl;dr: Social mobility is mostly bullshit.
And I'll just edit to say: People that say "hey, I got here by working hard!" live in their own alternate reality. I have yet to meet a single person, especially in the recession, who is not taking whatever job thay can and working incredibly long hours to just make ends meet. Implying that poor people are poor essentially because they didn't bother to try being rich is idiotic.
I can't speak for him, but this is how I see it:
We are not abstract intellects floating in the void. It is impossible to make any sort of a decision without a set of initial (and thus arbitrary) parameters being given to us, since there is no reason to decide on anything at all beyond the fact that we are wired to do so. A being cannot fully shape itself because wishing to go down a certain path already demands a set of wants and desires. A mind that was not preconditioned would have to act randomly initially, or not act at all - neither appears to give the individual more control. As such, free will and determinism have little to do with one another.
Alloting responsibility is ultimately a utilitarian need. You need to know who is responsible in order to act based on that knowledge. Whether or not their actions are ultimately predetermined by their personality and circumstances, you still need to correct undesired behavior and reward desirable behavior in order to form a functional society. Thus it is useful to make every individual responsible for themselves, excluding forceful intervention by other people.
Even if an individual was fated to decide to act in a certain way since the dawn of time, their current state the direct result of particles bouncing around in a box until this point, the decision was still that of said individual. That they were shaped in such a way that there was no other outcome is irrelevant to the action being their own in every useful sense. That you respond to a certain set of inputs in a certain fashion given certain conditions simply gives strong support to a persistent identity. One cannot decide based on nothing, and that which we base our decisions on had to come from somewhere else.
Now, odd things do happen when you apply this reasoning to inanimate objects. It is difficult to say that a ball decided to roll down the hill when it was placed in such a position where this was the only possible result, yet the difference between the ball and a man is rather small. I'll admit I do not yet know how to address this.
To be very concrete, I'll use myself as an example. Free public education, singled out for academic potential and placed in advanced classes (which were after school so I stopped going because c'mon fuck that), did well until about middle school. Basically my own immaturity caused me to flunk the 7th grade -- and be placed in "gifted" classes the following year olol -- and and to fuck up high school badly enough to make dropping out in junior year the only rational choice. I then got my GED and literally spent the next three years playing World of Warcraft and working a minimum-wage job at Walgreens.
Buuuuut... then I finally enrolled in community college, moved onto a local public uni (which was guaranteed to accept me because there's guaranteed acceptance for people coming from Florida CCs) where I benefited immensely from Pell Grant money and later student loans. 3.93 GPA atm (fuck you one econ class), and I think I'm being awarded by both the PoliSci and Intl. Relations departments, plus being inducted into Phi Beta Kappa (for free because I couldn't afford the $75 induction fee). I was also selected for Harvard Divinity School's fly-undergrads-up-and-give-them-a-three-day-seminar-on-why-they-should-apply program in fall 2011, and was just recently accepted to their Master in Theological Studies program for this fall with full tuition and stipend.
The point of this post isn't to toot my own horn (though I understand if people may see it that way) -- it's to show that if you're aware (read: made aware by people who care about you) of opportunities, you can do relatively well for yourself in this country. The problem is that too many people are not made aware, and we as a nation are suffering as a result. This NPR piece and this NYT story detail just how bad the problem is; the Ivies are desperately seeking kids like me. If we just never apply -- and I wouldn't have if a friend hadn't encouraged me to -- our chances of getting in and moving up the SES ladder are substantially reduced out of the gate.
You may be able to make it, there may be this slim possibility, but it is so so small it's not worth talking about.
I disagree.
Talking about Pell Grants, Headstart, and other programs that actively help poor people become not-poor is definitely worth talking about, imho.
At no point did I say that. There are very real structural challenges keeping people from getting ahead, and they need to be addressed through programs and policies like the ones I benefited from.
Also I feel the need to emphasise the importance of paying student loans vs, having your parents pay the fees.
Take two people, A and B. A is from an upper middle class family or an upper class family. Her parents pay for her to go to university.
Take B. B is from a lower income family, his parents can't afford uni fees so he takes out a student loan.
Both graduate with flying colours, both get extremely prestigious, high paying jobs. Exactly the same paying job.
B will always be poorer than A, more than that, the difference between their net wealth will increase each year. The interest can really add up.
The OP was talking about some list of billionaires so that's what I was talking about. I was being generous to cut it to half of that amount.
Even if you want to consider "rich" as a much lower amount (say, net worth $1M+), the sentiment is the same, just the amounts are different.
Want to thank @Kana for coming up in here with some real data, too.
iirc student loan payments are capped at some percentage of income now. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, or if there's some kinda loophole that still makes it difficult to pay back your student loans. I'm not saying student loans are not A Thing That is Detrimental -- I've got ~$12k of it myself -- but in the interest of accuracy it is not imho as bad as you're making it sound.
All education (primary, secondary, and higher ed), but given that that isn't going to happen in the U.S. anytime soon, these stop-gap measures ("band-aids") are what we have here and now. Pell Grants have already been reduced, and will likely only be reduced further.
A will always be ahead, and how far ahead they are will always increase.
In general, the most important part is luck. We don't choose our parents - who they are, how involved they are, the life they lead us to, their wealth, etc. Let's not discount the elephant in the room - race, gender, and sexual orientation.
It's possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps (a metaphor funny because it's a literal impossibility), use available resources, and make something out of nothing in America. It's even possible to fuck up badly and come out on top. But there are a million little factors outside of our control that influence how successful we are. For someone who is poor, it's much easier for just one fuckup - a car accident, an illness, a pregnancy, an arrest for stupid kid shit - one of the fuck ups that EVERYONE makes / has happen - to put them in a hole that hard work will never dig them out of.
And yeah, there are student loans and the military. That assumes you are smart enough not to get buried in loans going to one of the BS 'for profit' schools. Or with the military that you don't have a medical condition or background that precludes you. Putting the military out there assumes you are going into a useful MOS...and even so, you're still going to be ~5 years behind your peers when you get out and get your education. Or if you took out loans, especially if you had to work (and not getting valuable internships / experience / connections in your field) to survive or raise your family, you are still going to get out of college with a debt that, at best, is probably comparable to a new Cadillac.
Also keep in mind that the skills we learn as a children have a major bearing on how we live as adults. The skills a poor kid knows - like how to ride a bus or move in an afternoon are a lot less relevant than the skills a middle class kid knows, like how to balance a checkbook or make healthy dinners. When you get to the next level, the skills a rich kid has - like understanding when you need to hire an accountant (and knowing a trustworthy one) or discussing golf courses in Tahiti with the big boss have a huge impact on where we end up, our promotions, etc when you start talking about getting above the mid-management thresholds.
I think this sums up privilege pretty well...Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is. It's no guarantee we are going to win, but the more advantages we have, the easier it becomes.
And SKFM - your in-laws are not typical. You said they are both teachers...so I'm guessing they are boomers, probably ~60 right now? That means they both went to college at a time when college was mostly for the wealthy. They both worked at a time when mothers typically stayed at home, making the second income a bonus...and in a career that let them avoid most child care expenses (while remaining involved in your wife / her sibling's upbringing).
I don't know whether to be offended or amused by this comment.