Wealth inequality is high. High enough you can feel it like a vibe in the air. The richest people in the world are telling everyone to get onboard with technology that is determined to make a lot of those same people's jobs redundant. All with an explicit goal of increasing the price of stock most of those people do not own.
IMO there's two economies, maybe divided by those who participate in the stock market and those who don't. We, Americans, have largely given up trying to improve the lives of people not in the first group. Economies are living, breathing entities and we're just grinding poorer people for fuel so richer people can have another house, another boat, another company. A lot of regular joes are really stressed out about paying rent. The loss in faith is warranted.
This isn't based on economic theory or anything, it's just a political choice we have made as a country. We've chosen to reward those who move money around and trade capital more than we reward those who labor. And this at a time when, supposedly, the country is trying to increase its ability to build things.
We're on the same wavelength. To me, I find it hard not to think about our explosive growth as a country happening at the same time we refuse to expand representation of the public. These charts are very frustrating to me: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN11547
The people in power do not want to lose control, but clearly have no idea how to manage the scale of what has been built. There's an American leadership crisis going on right now that is hard to ignore, both in public and private life.
We should go back to having the house filled with 1 representative per 10,000 people. Also, we should do something new and have all the representatives in the house be chosen by lottery.
Normal people are not represented in congress, because politicians are not normal people, but if we chose people by lottery we would have a branch of congress filled with normal people. They would have time enough to study the issues. Some of them would be stupid, but this is no worse than the current crop of politicians.
I don't normally reply twice to the same thread, but I just wanted to say that I wish that the US had been founded with a co-equal branch of government comprised of people drawn via lottery (probably voluntary) like in ancient Greece:
I believe that this was one of the great mistakes by our founders. I'm sure that many suggested it, but unfortunately their ideas were suppressed due to our roots in slavery, colonialism and aristocracy (meritocracy today).
A couple of American politicians were executed in their homes a few months ago and one of the two presidential candidates was nearly JFKd in front of hundreds of cameras last year. A few years ago, a mob stormed the capital and erected a gallows to hang the sitting vice president if they could lay hands on him.
That’s violent enough even if you don’t consider the fact that de facto martial law is about to descend on major cities all over the country in the next few weeks. I’m doubtful that Greeks were anywhere near as volatile or violent as Americans are today.
What you're describing are anomalies. Most Presidental candidates are not "nearly JFK'd" nor do mobs storm the Capitol with regularity. For all of its cultural pretensions of being a nation of armed patriots always ready to "water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants" the US political system is for the most part incredibly stable and nonviolent. In ancient Greece, meanwhile, violent mobs, assassinations and tyranny were the norm rather than the exception.
To make the tax incidence on wages and capital gains equivalent, you must first deduct losses due to inflation and risk. For wages, inflation and risk round to zero. For long-term capital gains inflation and risk are large and often the majority of the "gain". Short-term capital gains are already taxed like wages.
In the US, unlike some other developed countries, there is a very limited ability to deduct losses due to inflation and risk from long-term capital gains. Consequently, if they made the tax rate the same as wages then the tax incidence on capital gains would be much higher than wages.
As a policy matter in the US, they fix this large difference in tax incidence by reducing the tax rate instead of adjusting the cost basis for inflation and allowing full deductibility of losses.
If you pencil out the implications of these two policies, I suspect you'd find that you like the way the US does it better. Making risk and inflation deductible to equalize tax incidence enables a lot of financial structuring.
Your point is undercut by the vastly lower effective tax rates rich Americans pay vs middle class workers. It's the norm in this country for someone making millions of dollars/year to pay a significantly lower tax rate on that income than anyone working a decent paying job.
A horseshoe shaped tax graph by income is clearly against the intent and spirit of a progressive tax code so something is very much broken and has been so for decades.
Imagine the risk of not being able to diversify your portfolio and putting all dependency on one income source. How do layoffs, broken health/major sickness, automation, local downturns get compensated by reducing future taxes? If I'm laid off for a year, then find a new job, I still pay the full tax amount on my income from that point forward, no 'loss deduction' from a year being unemployed. If I get sick with cancer and miss years of work then return, I still pay the full tax amount on my income.
I agree with you that it is unfair that people with variable income pay more taxes than people with steady income even if average income is the same. I’m a poster child for people disadvantaged in this way.
That said, I do recognize that mitigating this is really hard without introducing even more complexity to the tax code, which has its own cost.
Wages have no risk when you receive them. It is cash on the barrel. The only risk is counter-party such as your employer going bankrupt before you receive your paycheck. Not zero but statistically very low. Any inflation that happens after receiving wages is on the individual to the extent no one requires them to eat that inflation. (This is an issue during hyperinflation but the is very far from that.)
It was to point out, that giving asset sales an insurance break, or risk break, would only makes sense if we gave working people gapped-income and risk breaks.
Which is to say, that neither makes sense.
The way I would put it is, money inflates if you simply hold it, but it has time value almost always greater than inflation. If you don't at least do that, you are choosing to waste value.
So giving a tax break for inflation would be giving people a break on losses, that capitalism already accounts for. Such as naturally higher interest rates when inflation is higher.
(Yes return on asset balancing mechanisms are not perfect in time, but as noted, neither is employment.)
Seems like it'd be relatively easy to allow one to 'smooth' their income over multiple years. Imagine paying 100 income at 40% tax year 1 and 0 income year 2. A scheme where you could retcon things to be 50, 50, each at say 30% for a 10k refund (or at least credit) seems very doable.
Balderdash! Inflation and risk do not round to zero for wage income - wage income for the most part is NOT indexed to inflation and is certainly NOT guaranteed.
You do not owe future taxes on wages based on inflation, capital does. This difference is separately meaningful in both economics and policy. If you do not understand the distinction then you will always be confused by capital tax policy globally, not just in the US.
Whether or not your wages increase with inflation is an unrelated discussion.
That capital gains is not adjusted for inflation, so if you buy something and it keeps its inflation adjusted value and then you sell it, you have to pay capital gains tax as if that inflation was your profits.
As for risk, if you buy something, then you go bankrupt so you lose it all, the state doesn't pay you the negative capital gains tax from your losses. That is the risk part that workers never have to deal with, there is no such thing as negative salary but negative capital gains happens all the time. You can't cancel out those losses if you didn't make profits elsewhere.
> The way we calculate risk is inherently extremely biased towards the wealthy.
We are talking money here, we tax money so we talk about how money is risked.
We don't tax your health or wellbeing, it is true that those are serious risks worse than monetary risk, but it isn't something the tax office should deal with so it isn't a part of this conversation.
I don't understand how inflation and risk wouldn't/aren't priced in. You have $1000. You can: put it in your mattress, put it in 'safe' treasury bonds at inflation +a few percent, or yolo it in NVIDIA. Yes if bonds are returning less than inflation you don't buy them and that makes financing more expensive but it's not somehow unfair vs the other things you could do with capital.
Seems like return is roughly proportional to risk(1-tax)investment so changing tax should affect everything proportionally (barring cheating/avoiding the system in some way).
> Inflation should be low and we should make it in the interests of the rich that it stays so.
The prevailing opinion of a lot of progressive economists is just the opposite: standard policy for 40 years post-Volcker was to run with low inflation, loose money and slack labor markets, and probably all this did was keep wage growth depressed.
The brief inflationary period in 2022-2023 was fantastic for low-income workers, it was the only serious growth in real wages they'd seen in a half-century. But voters revolted and probably guaranteed we'll go back to the low inflation, high unemployment policy for another generation at least.
Growth in wages is meaningless if inflation consumes it.
My opinion is that inflation is generally a bad idea but the thing that really matters is inflation volatility. The market will adjust for whatever the inflation rate is (unless its extreme) but volatility just results in loss.
That's why I specifically said real wage growth. In 2022-2023 wages for the bottom ~35% of workers increased at their fastest rate after accounting for inflation. Inflation-adjusted wages for the middle ~40% were basically flat and decreased for the upper quartile. And since that last cohort is the one which dictates policy, they'll make sure it won't happen again.
This reply is a complete non sequitur. Taxing capital gains as ordinary income does not mean the removal of a "reward for risking capital" because the potential upside is still unlimited compared to working a wage job.
>> The richest people in the world are telling everyone to get onboard with technology that is determined to make a lot of those same people's jobs redundant.
The richest people I know are trying to convince everyone
1. There is a "worker shortage" in an attempt to bring in immigrant workers whom they can boss around and keep on a leash
2. That "AI is taking jobs" so you cannot point the people who are really taking jobs -- policy makers
3. There is "low unemployment" to perpetuate the myth that the economy is great
4. "Anyone can make it" while their nepo-babies get back-door access to jobs at top firms and claim "they worked hard up the ranks"
I agree, I think this is a longer way to say what I was feeling. It's a rigamarole by people with too much money. If they had less money, they wouldn't be able to do it. So at the end of the day the root cause to me is the inequality. it allows special treatment and the ability to manipulate our daily life (through social apps, news, etc) in a way that they are completely insulated from, feeling no pain whatsoever. Huge policy failure to let so few people have so much influence
> Wealth inequality is high. High enough you can feel it like a vibe in the air.
I agree, but I think it's more than just a "vibe in the air". Throughout my youth and young adulthood, we (GenXers) knew vaguely about rich people, but nothing specific, just that rich people existed and they had nice stuff. Now, thanks to social media and the decline of humility, the lifestyles of rich people isn't just known, it's pushed in front of our faces constantly. And too often the message is straight from A Bronx Tale: "The working man is a sucker".
I thought about that, but anecdotally i know many renters addicted to Robinhood. i think housing prices and therefore the cash necessary to get a loan have shifted this divide a bit
I guess, but ... people then vote to give those rich folks power.
I don't doubt there are vast differences in opportunity and even rights at this point, but I don't think that's how people see it. Not if they're trying to get more of those folks in power.
If you're smart or lucky enough to to land that 6-figure job, then times are pretty good. There are tons of stories on subreddits, e.g. r/FIRE, r/investing, r/fatfire, etc., of people with large nest eggs and home ownership at an early age. But those are outliers. There are many opportunities to get rich if you are lucky and or smart enough to land them, like in tech or finance. But this is not much consolation for those who lack those attributes. By statistical certainty, most people cannot be exceptionally smart or talented.
The following site breaks down the living wage required for families of various sizes, and the wage of various industries.
I compared the living wage for my own family size with the average wage per industry and realized there were only 3 industries I could earn a living wage in, management, computers, or legal. Fortunately I have experience in the computer industry (surprise HN).
Let me spell it out. The following industries provide a below living wage, on average, for a single parent with one child: business & financial operations, architecture & engineering, life, physical, & social science, community & social service, education, training, & library, arts, design, entertainment, sports, & media, healthcare practitioners & technical, healthcare support, protective service, food preparation & serving related, building & grounds cleaning & maintenance, personal care & service, sales & related, office & administrative support, farming, fishing, & forestry, construction & extraction, installation, maintenance, & repair, production, transportation & material moving.
My issue with "living wage" calculations is that they never compromise. I live in a county with great public transit. The living wage before taxes is listed as 61k for a single adult. Over 9k of that is allocated to transportation costs. Did I mention the great public transit? All of the buses are free.
Internet + mobile is 1500? Well gigabit fiber + mint mobile would run you 1200/year, so where is the extra 300 coming from?
American consumers are unwilling to tighten their belts for long term gains, and it shows. The comment you replied to mentioned r/FIRE - a lot of people on that subreddit don't have insane incomes, they just live well below their means.
This isn't to say it's not hard: it is. We live in a consumerist society and going against that is not easy. Having a low wage job is not easy. But saying the cost of living is as high as the livingwage site says is just not true. Their methodology is to obtain data from expenditure statistics - the problem is the average American is way too into consuming and spends beyond their means.
I guess a "living wage" probably implies living an "normal" American life, which isn't maximally tightening the belt.
Even with good public transportation, driving saves a lot of time. The extra $300 probably comes from a combination of needing to buy a new phone and new computer periodically, hidden taxes and fees, and also it's reasonable to expect a "normal" living wage to include enough to cover at least 2 or 3 of the cheapest options--more than just one single bottom-of-the-barrel option.
Again, you make good points, and I agree some skepticism about their "living wage" numbers are justified. At least they break it down to give a glimpse into some of their logic.
The problem is that the "normal" American consumes greatly beyond their means. What I described isn't maximally tightening the belt, it's a very reasonable and satisfying way to live.
I don't have a car, I ride a bike, walk, or take public transit. In no way do I feel restricted in my daily life. I have a 6 year old iPhone that if you amortize would be $100/year (well under that extra 300).
A lot of Americans would consider no car and an old phone to be untenable. How would I get to work? You live closer to work. It's too expensive to live closer to work. Well is it once you get rid of your car(s)? There are genuinely going to be some areas of the country where this is not possible (living in proximity to work where a car is not needed). But those areas typically do not have a "cost of living crisis."
What about needing a laptop for the internet? There's $1000, and you need to upgrade every couple years. I spent $2000 to build a desktop myself 10 years ago; it still works well enough, it plays the games I like, but Windows wont support it anymore, it's end of life; there's $200 a year.
Again, "living" implies a little wiggle room and having access to more than just the one cheapest bottom-of-the-barrel option.
What if you lose your phone? You'll have to buy another. Can we include that potential expense in the budget? A "living" wage implies you're not set back for years because you lost one item.
The living wage calculation on that website does not constitute your last paragraph. I'd argue that not including a savings/retirement investment portion makes it a much worse number.
As for a computer, your desktop will work fine with Linux. A laptop doesn't need to cost 1000, again we are over consuming. If your hobby requires a computer, that would be from recreational expenses, not required technology spending.
Living has lots of wiggle room, but it starts with understanding what you actually NEED vs what you think you need, then wiggling from there. If you start with inflated base monthly expenses your true requirements become obscured.
I'm privileged. I don't actually know what a healthy retirement savings rate is because I'm certainly well above that in my own savings. But part of why I'm well above that is because I truly cut down on a lot of unneeded spending that I see many of my peers doing.
<By statistical certainty, most people cannot be exceptionally smart or talented.
These are words that most won't like to read or reply to, but are none the less true. After working with many people for many years, it became apparent that some of us are "smarter" then others. Through the fluke(?) of genetics/whatever of life, some can only attain a certain job status. A compassionate society and government must take this into consideration. We tend to label some as "lazy" who can't rise in economic status, but in many instances,they are doing the best they can.
Are they good? Sure you can go on vacation and drop some coin living lavishly,
but if the rest of your friends and family are struggling to pay rent while you've FIREd, wouldn't you, oh I dunno, feel guilty? Wouldn't you rather not watch the world burn? Wouldn't you rather live in a world where you want to have kids and they'll have a future?
I think that also assumes that you're able to use that entire 6 figures for yourself. And that you're able to save in these HCOL places that the 6 figures are made. And/or that you're married.
Many of the people that I know in that 6 figure range (the "normal" 100-300ish range) are helping others. Family and the like.
It's also 3-4k for an apartment in many of the HCOL places. That's before food, transportation, and taxes.
And many people are doing it solo, not married.
I'm not saying 6 figure earners are to be pitied. I'm just saying that the money goes out the door just as quickly as it comes in.
I've only known a "good" economy from about 1995-1999 when the internet went mainstream and for the briefest of moments, we got a taste of what public investment in tech feels like.
The powers that be quickly saw the danger in that and IMHO orchestrated the Dot Bomb, 9/11, the Housing Bubble, etc to keep as much money as possible out of public hands so that the average person wouldn't have the means to participate in the stock market.
Suze Orman told everyone to put their savings into Vanguard in the 2000s and they did. But since America chose to invest in McMansions and SUVs instead of moonshots and automation, Vanguard is now cannibalizing US real estate rather than making venture capital available to small businesses and startups in its insatiable hunger for profit. Along with countless other zero-sum game thinkers who choose to work within existing systems of control rather than pursuing innovations which could raise the median standard of living. This is why as America has been losing its empire status as holder of the world's reserve currency, it's been colonizing itself, particularly its young.
So that's my greatest disappointment with the present era. That we collectively chose to invest in private profit rather than shared prosperity.
Now, tons of people will complain that I'm oversimplifying and will kick and scream in resistance to what I'm saying. But at the end of the day, personal wealth represents wages withheld from workers. I don't know why we worship people who have reached positions of power and wealth, whose purpose for existing seems to be to withhold resources from everyone else.
Sincere question:
Do you have thoughts as to how we can invest our $ if our goal is to support the "good economy" instead of attempting to ride the wave of the rich getting richer?
I would like to be part of the solution instead of contributing to the problem, but it is challenging to identify companies in which to invest without supporting the status quo.
I am not "rich," but wish I could better vote with what assets I do have.
Consider politicians like Graham Platner. Invest money, or even time, to help people who put working Americans ahead of the oligarchy get elected. If you're in Maine, even better, you can vote with your vote as well.
Importantly, pay attention to primary elections as well general elections.
Basically, don't invest through investment companies. They'll chase the big profits because that's what they're paid to do. Even "green" or "sustainable" funds might invest in pharmaceutical companies that produce treatments instead of cures, or psuedo-science companies chasing net-energy loss concepts like clean coal or hydrogen, for example.
Instead, invest in specific technologies and goals:
- Low-cost solar panels and windmills
- Alternative chip designs like RISC-V and high-multicore (64+ cores)
- Peer to peer communications systems, alternatives to cellular/5G
- Robotic/hydroponic automated organic food production
- Incubated/cloned meat and meat alternatives without side effects like FODMAP
- mRNA vaccines, CRISPR, treatments for genetic disorders
- Low-cost EVs, LiFePO4 batteries, high-kW inverters, axial flux motors
- Heat pumps, thermal energy storage, concentrated trough solar
- Labor-saving inventions and assistive devices for freight, construction, etc
- Companies that openly support public education, single-payer healthcare, etc
- Incubators like Y Combinator but that provide smaller $10,000-$100,000 VC
- Open source projects/collaborations that distribute risk like Humble Bundle
- Mass transit like electric busses/high-speed rail (boring but global demand)
- Strike Debt and other loan forgiveness efforts that buy up loans in default
- PACs, unions, environmental groups working to unseat incumbants
- Foreign aid programs aimed at education, especially women and girls
- Independent investigative journalists and media
- Local bond efforts for better public schools, libraries, parks, etc
- Stocks/groups working to legalize cannibis and end the war on drugs
- Builders of tiny homes and alternative housing like yurts and earthships
Avoid:
- Crypto (untraceable exploitation, black markets, human trafficking, etc)
- Mutual funds and index funds (same reason as investment companies)
- FAANG/GAMMA (high profit, low innovation over market cap)
- MLMs (often tied to fundamentalist religious organizations and lobbyists)
- Foreign currencies (profits from exploitation and environmental degradation)
People to emulate (these are merely breadcrumbs towards ways of thinking):
- MacKenzie Scott
- Bill McKibben
- Michael Pollan
- Derrick Jensen
- Thom Hartmann
- Howard Zinn (deceased)
- Ed Abbey (deceased)
- John Muir (deceased)
- Frank Church (deceased)
- Terence McKenna (deceased)
See also:
- Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty
- The Jungle and other books by Upton Sinclair (deceased)
- Nickel and Dimed and other books by Barbara Ehrenreich (deceased)
If I ever win the internet lottery, I'll work towards getting matching funds to tackle the biggest problems facing humanity:
1) That starts with liberating all peoples from forced labor, exploitation and subjugation so that they can self-actualize. Which looks like freeing capital from "black holes" of concentrated wealth, specifically moneyed interests and wealthy individuals who hoard resources and choose to do none of what I've stated above, at great expense to the rest of humanity. That's done not through competition or direct confrontation, but by getting everyone "off the grid" to disrupt the supply and demand curve which always results in the wealth inequality and late-stage capitalism we see today when there isn't regulation.
2) Then also improving quality of life universally, so working towards providing free treatments for all conditions/illnesses/injuries across borders.
3) Then also promoting kindess, mindfulness, and other cultural movements which move us away from othering and back towards reconnection to foster the common good. This looks like a rejection of reason for its own sake, and replacing that with the pursuit of meaning. So deciding collectively that using electronic devices in public is impolite, ending surveillance capitalism, tearing down the economic walls which separate us from our neighbors, etc. So that we can once again gather in small communities that provide mutual aid, childcare and tool/resource sharing so that we aren't forced to take on so much individually for our basic survival.
I think it may be possible to recruit AI to do all of this holistically and rapidly shift into the reality that we may have envisioned for the 21st century, a bit like the rapid technological growth we saw during COVID-19, when the first vacation that billions of people ever had resulted in 10-20 years of innovation in just 1-2 years. That's the key, that getting real work done requires escaping the menial labor that extracts profit from the working class.
So that's what I would do: use AI to examine thousands of stocks to find which ones trend similarly and which one correlate inversely, and come up with a plan to start moving profit the opposite direction from where it's moved traditionally. Then invest that cashflow into countless underemployed people whose talents, dignity and divinity haven't been recruited yet effectively because they've only been put to use in the service of capital.
After sleeping on it, I realized that what I wrote is based on my perceptions and projections. Putting one's disposable income towards ego-based goals and expecting a return is no different than what billionaires do. So the most altruistic thing to do instead is to put resources into goals that are determined democratically, without expectation of recognition or reward.
In other words, pay our taxes. Help the poor. Be of service to others. I'm not sure that it's possible to be the change we wish to see in the world and also make a profit.
I know that flies in the face of western culture and philosophy. So I would propose that the cognitive dissonance we experience when we try to integrate the views of people who see everything that's wrong with the world and the views of people who are grateful for what is, stems from imbalance. Sitting with opposing viewpoints makes us uncomfortable because we're confronted with inconvenient truths that implicate us. Then our avoidance of accountability creates the systems of control which trap us in the never-ending cycle of endless work with nothing to show for it.
Some examples of that might be the pageantry of the British royal family that papers over the class war happening under its watch, the performative displays of strength put on by China to curtail clandestine shell games carried out by the US, and even our idolization of celebrities who dine on the backs of the proletariat while the world burns.
The best way to break the spell is to get educated. If you think that Jordan Peterson, Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman make a lot of sense, then try Scott Galloway, Margaret Atwood and John Keynes. Loosely: the former build walls, the latter tear them down.
What I've learned in my own life is that wrestling with tough decisions and making the hard calls creates shadows in our psyche. Our choices form an identity which cements attachments that connect to densities that lower our spiritual vibration. So the wealthiest and most powerful people who have gone to the greatest lengths to achieve their goals are the ones most separated from their souls.
Meaning that if we want to help the less fortunate and reduce suffering, we need to work on healing our leaders. They don't want to be healed though. But maybe they can be reminded.
I had the utmost respect for Elon Musk when he was sleeping in his car to get real work done. But when he used his power and influence to dismantle the federal government through DOGE and cut aid that could result in millions of deaths worldwide ..not so much. When he arguably got the first reusable rocket into orbit with SpaceX, great! When he ignored the concerns of astronomers to fast track Starlink without bothering to give the satellites an anti-reflective coating, boo! It's not him I'm disappointed with, but his choices and lack of empathy when it counted.
The blind pursuit of efficiency creates injustice, and the refusal to rectify it creates intolerance. I think we've lost sight of what evil is because we've tied our identities to an immutable past which doesn't actually exist, because there's only now. I'm reminded of the quick and easy path in Star Wars, and when the Oracle in The Matrix said that we can never see past the choices we don't understand.
If we keep viewing the world through duality, with black and white thinking, good vs bad, us vs them, then we'll merely be custodians cleaning up the mistakes of the uber rich.
I think what I'm trying to say is that if we envision a better world and embody our dreams now, then we'll manifest a new timeline that escapes the will of people who would subjugate us.
What that means as far as where you place your energy is up to you. Imagine that!
> Vanguard is now cannibalizing US real estate rather than making venture capital available to small businesses and startups in its insatiable hunger for profit.
I'm not sure you understand what Vanguard does. They are not an investment bank nor a VC firm. They run mutual funds and ETFs, so the assets that "Vanguard" owns are owned by the fund holders (in fact in the case of Vanguard, the fund holders also own Vanguard itself).
I live in a community full of high-achieving GenZ who did 4-7 AP courses, studied their butts off for the SAT, got into good universities....only to not find any jobs when they graduate with STEM degrees. A dozen neighbors' kids have been asking me for zero-salary jobs just to get experience.
For any current students reading this, it's entirely doable to finish your program with real experience and connections under your belt. Not just with internships, but TA, research, and student org leadership experience absolutely count too. There are tons of overlooked low-stakes zero-experience opportunities available only to university students, and it's really useful to develop the habit of identifying and pursuing those.
When I was an undergrad researcher back during the height of the Great Financial Crisis, I had a handful of internship and full-time offers at various national labs and similar orgs thanks to my supervisor tipping me off about those opportunities and making introductions on my behalf.
When you participate in things beyond your classes, you get an "in" on certain paths unavailable to other folks. You're not any smarter than your peers, but having that initiative lets you avoid competing with them directly. My particular path is just one of many.
Do not go to college if you have to spend any money on it. If you do that's everyone telling that you don't belong there and you'll have a hard life if you ignore them.
This is a take that maybe makes sense for wealthy children or the upper middle class?
I paid for school (admittedly not that much, I stayed in state and lived in relatively poor accommodations). I’m also the only one of my siblings to not be a felon or dead before 45. Life is often a game of deltas: given the same or similar starting conditions, where did you wind up?
If you keep making delta positive outcomes, eventually you’ll wind up somewhere interesting.
> Do not go to college if you have to spend any money on it.
I cannot think of a single person in my extended family across three generations for whom that heuristic is true. I don’t doubt that it applies in some situations. I can’t tell you what the actual ROI is; but “belonging there” seems a little encumbered by assumptions about the diversity of ways and timings in which young people develop academically and emotionally.
> Do not go to college if you have to spend any money on it.
“If your family isn’t well-off or you didn’t work hard enough in high school to get any scholarships, college isn’t for you” is certainly an interesting take, and it seems like a much too simplistic heuristic.
Pretty much all of the good stuff I've done in my life have resulted from going off the beaten path. AP courses and SAT scores are the core of the beaten path, so everyone is competing for the same stuff. But the world is big, actually, and there's incredible opportunities for meaningful work once you start looking around more broadly. These sorts of jobs aren't necessarily "stable" employment, but I've never once felt precarious. Rather, I find that doing meaningful work with concrete impact tends to create more opportunities dynamically - if you can demonstrate that you get shit done, people will want your help getting their shit done. And if the work you choose is meaningful, it is very easy to make the case that you've done good and important things.
Capitalism allows trading money for solutions to problems: The massive problem in this system is that people and groups with less money end up with a surplus of problems. There are schools that need help with their tech stacks. There are legal aid groups who need better ways to process massive amounts of text. There are kids all over the world who need better ways to learn math, languages, etc. Plugging in and helping people solve their concrete problems is IMHO the best way to get started.
While I agree with you on everything, this doesnt really work for everyone
1. It requires a level of maturity and wisdom most recent graduates do not have (I certainly didn't have this when I graduated). Despite all my entrepreneurship courses in college, working at a dot-com startup, etc, I wouldn't have been able to do this out of college.
2. Not everyone is going to be enterprising. Historically, we've provided a path forward to smart people who just want a line job, not start/sell a business
Your CV indicates you graduated in 2006, so effectively into a different world. You should consider carefully how the world has changed for young people entering the workforce before dispensing advice, because they find themselves in a very different landscape to you and advice like "Plugging in and helping people solve their concrete problems is IMHO the best way to get started" is trite and frankly insulting.
Lemme try to put it another way, because I am suggesting a different way to think about the idea of work, which /also/ was not the dominant way of thinking about things when I was a student. The notion that you go get credentials in order to get a job standing in a spot and doing a thing and get paid is... perhaps fine, for the trades. But, as I mentioned above, the beaten path is saturated, and you will find yourself in what is essentially a lottery system. (Perhaps most of what has changed since 2006 is that the odds of the lottery have gotten worse...)
Alternatively, you can think of yourself as a problem-solver for hire. You might be more or less specialized as a problem solver, but ultimately, you're asking someone to pay you money in exchange for regularly engaging in creative problem solving to make their business/NGO/whatever run better. Plenty of people come out of school or whatever and have no problem solving ability. And some people create more problems than they solve.
How do you prove that you're worth hiring then? With a portfolio of problems that you have successfully solved. How do you get that portfolio? By plugging into some area you're interested in and solving people's concrete problems.
You note "the beaten path is saturated" - how do you reconcile that with two facts:
1. Fact 1: There is unusually high unemployment rate for new STEM graduates, including those with advanced degrees like MS and PhDs
2. Fact 2: Our politicians and business leaders are noting there is a "massive shortage of workers in STEM" and thus we need to import hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to meet the demand.
How can both be true and in line with your position?
These are perfectly consistent with what I'm saying. There is a market for labor, and if what you're selling is your credentials, you're in a flooded commodity market and will have a bad time.
Fact one says, yes, the beaten path is saturated. Fact two says that business leaders and politicians will happily look for the cheapest variety of the commodity available to them.
My point ultimately is that you'll have a better time if you don't act like a commodity.
> Lemme try to put it another way, because I am suggesting a different way to think about the idea of work, which /also/ was not the dominant way of thinking about things when I was a student.
You don't need to restate your point. I understood and it's what's trite and insulting to new grads.
> Alternatively, you can think of yourself as a problem-solver for hire.
This isn't the alternative and hasn't been for a decade. It's absolutely mainstream thinking among students and new grads that the traditional career is dead and that they need to take alternative routes, one of the most common being to present themselves as "problem-solvers for hire", with personal brands, turning friends into networks, etc.
It's so common it's a trope, and of course the market of businesses who need problem-solvers for hire is absolutely saturated. It's a segment exploited by employers for cheap labour and terrible opportunities for progression as you're competing against so many people, many in LCOL areas.
So after their entire youth being told the same thing you're saying by podcasters, influencers, slightly older peers, etc and then arriving into a labour market which is absolutely barren, your advice is trite and it is insulting.
It's even worse than when challenged, you assume I must not get your profound advice and choose to reiterate it, instead of reflection on the possibility that the world and opportunities you enjoyed 20 years ago simply don't exist any more. Not that there aren't other opportunities.
> But, as I mentioned above, the beaten path is saturated, and you will find yourself in what is essentially a lottery system.
The irony of this comment.
> By plugging into some area you're interested in and solving people's concrete problems.
Yes, you and literally everyone else. It's almost ridiculous how out-of-touch this is.
> perhaps fine, for the trades.
As an aside, this is an absurdly arrogant comment.
But they still will be faring better than others though. I am sure STEM grads are doing better than law school grads or humanities grads. But graduating in STEM in 2009-2010 would have been awesome. right at the takeoff of a decade-long economic expansion and tech boom. It was much easier to be hired
> But graduating in STEM in 2009-2010 would have been awesome. right at the takeoff of a decade-long economic expansion and tech boom. It was much easier to be hired
The S is STEM is pretty broad and includes many fields that have nothing to do with "tech". I graduated with a science degree in 2009-2010 and it was fucking awful. The only job I could find was at the University I went to and it paid like $5/hr above minimum wage. I left the field entirely pretty quickly.
We have flooded the STEM market with foreign workers. Sometimes we don't even give the foreign workers real jobs, we pretend they are "grad students" and pay them a pittance doing high level science at the universities. I generally like all the foreign folks I've worked with, but they are definitely suppressing the wages of natives to an insane degree.
You could just as easily argue that we simply aren't creating enough jobs to make use of the labor force, which traditionally has been a very dangerous place for an empire—especially the core—to be in.
The US is quickly becoming something else than the core of the global economy. The signs have been there already: advanced chips are done somewhere else, manufacturing in general is done in other places as well. What we see now is the biggest companies hiring in other countries like India and employing AI instead of workers. The US population is becoming less and less relevant.
I agree the empire is in a very dangerous place because it has expanded the labor force more rapidly than it has expanded supply of jobs. This is an existential risk to the empire.
The elites have put themselves in a position where the two main options are the sentiment above or Luigi Mangione. It honestly scares me a bit what's coming.
> If the foreigners were positively contributing to the economy their economic output would create jobs as well.
They do—actually, by a massive margin compared to citizens born here—we just don't have the legal immigration framework set up to support this.
EDIT: I was unaware a "debate" was even happening, I was just clarifying that immigrants start businesses at a massively higher rate than birthright citizens do.
How many of them are real? Some of them have been posting the same position every month.
Out of those that are real, how many of them are completely out of touch with what they're asking for? Whether low salary, unrealistic expectations regarding experience/skills, etc?
Out of those that pass the above filter, how many of them have unrealistic application requirements such as tech tests, etc?
And so on. Hiring is a market for lemons, with scammers on both sides.
How many of those are true entry level (degree but no relevant job experience yet) and either remote or local to these people?
Even with experience I have found applying to full remote jobs to be difficult these days, they are generally voids that thousands of resumes get submitted to and you'll never even know if yours was looked at.
I've had better luck via networking and recruiters with jobs that are asking for at least occasional in-person visits which means that the city / metro area you live in remains very important to your ability to land a job.
For those who have no experience, one can gain experience while in college:
1. contribute to a significant open source project
2. write some significant work of software
3. design and build your own computer
4. build a robot something
5. work as an intern in industry
6. do work as a research assistant
When I was at Caltech, students did (entirely on their own):
1. built a gas powered helicopter from scratch
2. built a tracked robot with an arm and a manipulator
3. built an electronic synthesizer
4. built a functioning railroad that ran through the dorm
5. many built a single board computer for their own use
6. designed and built the campus radio station
7. one fellow designed, built, and sold custom speakers in the student workshop. After graduating, he turned it into a real business and made a fortune
and so on. In other words, turn yourself into someone useful to a company.
You gotta realize that "experience" refers to "professional" or "commercial" experience, i.e. you gain experience by having the status of an employee at a company and having relevant job title.
Being impressed by accomplishments listed in a resume requires actually looking at a resume, which most recruiters don't do ;) And even if they do, and even if the recruiter is impressed, they look for X number of years, not for accomplishments.
I think you're right that it did used to work that way but now all the juniors are competing with people like me who have done all of that and also have five years of professional experience at large companies.
I don't know you, so I will speculate that something else is going on. There are a lot of ways to not get hired.
For example, one guy I interviewed spent all his time asking about what benefits he was going to get. He had no interest whatsoever in what he'd be doing, and what the company was doing. No hire.
Unfortunately, such is commonplace. This gives the savvy interviewee an advantage - approach the interview from the employer's point of view. Save your questions about how much vacation you'll get until after the employer has decided to hire you.
Oh you're a recruiter? I am curious about something, I hope you can share what you think: is it a red flag when the candidate doesn't ask questions during interview? I often don't have questions because I have a good enough idea of the company and of what I will be doing already, so I don't ask that kind of questions, and I also don't ask about benefits because I don't really care. Is this seen as bad?
Showing interest in the company is very helpful. Asking questions like how does the company make money, what is their criteria for a successful employee, what does the division you're applying for contribute to the success of the company, what kind of person are they looking for, and so on.
First of all I don't think you should be surprised that pay is the most interesting thing to potential employees? That is the entire reason they're tolerating you. If I just want to work on interesting things you would only get in the way.
Secondly, yeah, I'm not like that. I've got three or so side projects (I guess they're just projects now) I'm actively working on and have been building things with my teens. It doesn't matter anymore socially, like everything else in the US your counterpart just never shows up.
I tend to agree with you more often than not but in this case, that's not very realistic. The caliber of students and the opportunities available at CalTech are head and shoulders above those at the average college with a CS program.
Most colleges have shops and facilities for students to make their own projects. All it takes is interest and get-up-and-go from the students.
BTW, Caltech places emphasis on get-up-and-go in their student selections. I was a marginal candidate, and I found out years later that my projects I worked on in my spare time made the difference. I was always building things in the garage and in the high school shop. (But I didn't tell them about the flame thrower I made from a lawnmower.)
I think the gap between what the companies looking for and what the individuals has to offer is increasing.
When a company advertises a role, they are increasingly looking for someone who either has done the same exact job in the exact specific niche with proven success for a number of years, or an absolute super star who would excel at anything thrown at them.
Most people are neither, so matches are exceedingly rare.
What about internships? Are those people at good universities not doing internships, or do internships not count as experience? Don't companies hire interns?
Sample of 1... we hire interns across our organization every summer. HR, marketing, engineering, etc. And across our locations (US, India, Mexico). We make full-time offers to a decent number of them (not a majority, but more than a few).
And as a manager, I'd absolutely lean towards a recent graduate with some experience over no experience. My "success rate" for grads who have co-op experience (full-time job, often delays graduation by a semester or year) is the highest. Next would be those that had long-term part-time employment (university IT office, etc). Then basic internships. And last, no experience at all - and the "success rate" on them has been low enough I probably wouldn't chance hiring another one.
1 "Zigment (https://zigment.ai) | Bangalore / Bengaluru, India | Full-time | ONSITE"
2 "Rinse | IT Manager / Network Administrator / System Administrator | Hybrid in SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York (Brooklyn), Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Washington DC, or Newark. (Primarily remote with some on-site responsibilities.) | Full-time | https://www.rinse.com"
3 "CVector | Full Stack Software Engineer | USA | REMOTE | Full-time | $75k – $120/yr + 0.3% – 1%"
maybe I missed a few because I'm not a new grad and I'm happy at my current company
If you go to workatastartup.com and select experience 0-1 years, you'll see, coincidentally with the previous number I wrote, about 200 results. Is there something wrong with them? Genuine question, because I tried applying and never got a response.
Those postings get flooded with applicants, many of them not new grads. New grads are competing with experienced people just to get a foot in the door. Both of those groups have to compete with an AI-generated flood of grifters and scammers and a AI-driven resume filter judging them on whether they match the AI-generated criteria for getting the AI-generated posting which was created because some middle manager wanted to get his nephew a job.
When we had a role open (also a YC company) we had iirc about 400 applicants, we narrowed down to the 50 that were legal to work in the UK, and then interviewed about 20 of those.
Anyway, if all of those people applied to each of the companies in who's hiring, and got hired, the unemployment rate for this subset of applicants would still be 50%. And this was for a junior role as well.
On the flip side, back in the 70's Boeing used to do things like hire up people with no immediate experience, teach them C for three months, and then hire them into roles as programmers. I'm not sure you can decide what's "normal" based on what was happening two decades ago. Two decades ago, we were smack between two big economic crashes. And all this depends so, so much on geographic locale.
Yeah my mentor and a very talented engineer got his start as the QA guy in the 80s. He was hired out of high school because he delivered newspapers to someone's house that worked there.
Nowadays you've gotta be chair of your local Mensa organization to get a zero experience internship
>> 70's Boeing used to do things like hire up people with no immediate experience, teach them C for three months, and then hire them into roles as programmers
In the 70's we didnt have NAFTA, so you couldnt just send the jobs to Mexico
In the 70's we didnt have the H1B program, where you could have a permanent "shortage of workers" and re-direct jobs to immigrants
In the 70's we didnt have Zoom, so you couldnt just send the jobs offshore
Why not? At any point in time since then there have been new technologies that don't exist. As a company, you can always make the call to hire people without that specific experience and train them, or you can punt and wait for a 3rd party to do the training for you. Clearly, companies have by and large settled on the latter, but IMO it's unclear there's actually a good argument for it.
I got out of school in the mid 90's, and had three good job offers to choose from within a month of graduating. It wasn't because I was special, as most of my friends had similar experiences. It just matters what kind of job market you happen to graduate into.
Isn’t this a bit obvious? I mean I’ve known this since I started working in 1997. The first job you have generally shatters this illusion that job security and economic gains are tied to “hard work”.
In the sense hard work is needed but only if you see if adding to what you consider a quality of life (which could be economic gain, generational wealth, bragging rights to a promotion, etc.). Each person has their criteria.
If you work in corporate America, hard work isn’t going to save you from layoffs or get you a bigger bonus unless that work is tied to making someone high up in your reporting chain look really good.
The current American system is premised on people buying into this. If people don't there is no societal foundation which probably leads to societal change. It's like the one societal contract we have (had). Not society helps you, not society puts a roof on your head. Not we're in a society together, so when you get sick we help out. Purely just 'if you work hard, you will be rewarded, and the rewards will take care of the things our social model doesn't'.
To show that this isn't exclusive to USA - I heard that in Japan nowadays workers can't rely on their megacorp to provide them predictable work position and can be fired regardless of their tenure. This is all after being told for decades that megacorp is literally their family and they should dedicate their whole time to it.
As you say, it's obvious to pretty much anyone who's ever worked a day in their life but, at the same time, culturally we pretend otherwise. Guys like Musk or Bloomberg talk about working 90 hour weeks and sleeping under their desks. We still want the cultural myth of hard work = success, whatever the reality is, because this allows those who've achieved economic gain to feel better about themselves.
It's a cultural and messaging issue, you have to tear down the illusion and performance art. Bloomberg is 83, Jamie Dimon is 69, these folks holding court age out eventually. The work is in pushing the Overton window over time about the meaning, purpose, and value of work, as well as how it is performed. "What does the data show? What matters?"
(I exclude Musk in my example because his cult of personality is on a different level than the usual work effort cult pushed by the usual business suspects).
Where in corporate America have you worked? At my previous place, there was a well defined career ladder, and what work was necessary to climb it as an individual contributor (vs a manager). Putting in more work meant climbing that ladder, which lead to pay increases and bonuses, and there was a formula somewhere on Confluence as to how those were calculated.
You're in a meeting. A task comes up. Do you volunteer to do it? Taking on the task is additional work. It is also "sucking up". If you don't want to do something, and then make fun of the people that actually want to get things done and call them names, instead of, y'know, choosing to take on additional work, it's easy to believe that hard work doesn't get you anywhere, because you've chosen to divide things to do at work into "real" work, and "sucking up". There's not really a difference, but in one scenario you think you're better than the other person.
People like it when you do things for them. If you suck up all the work you can do at your job, in my version of corporate America I've experienced, you get promoted.
I thought the same thing as I left the church, but it's so ingrained in many people in ways they don't even realize.
Another commenter mentions the "just world fallacy," which I agree drives this sentiment directly: if you work hard, you get good things. If you got bad things, it's because you didn't work hard (enough).
There's lots of feedback loops that perpetuate this: survivorship bias, historic wealth (ye olde boomer-bought-a-house-on-a-single-factory-salary), startup CEOs. I find the description of the American poor who don't see themselves as poor but as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" to be incredibly true.
Additionally, in many cases the people who're the most affected have the least resources to make themselves heard, the classic "rich people don't have the same 24 hours a day as the rest of us."
So, yeah, to a degree it should be obvious to anyone who goes looking, but there's so many sociological effects layered on top of each other that make it counterintuitive to someone for whom the system is working well.
37% of people in the survey are unemployed. That is very high. Not at all representative of the general population (4 to 5%).
69% live in a home they or someone in their household owns.
That sounds a lot like young adults yet to get off their feet.
More interesting things:
- opinion on economy and own financial health has improved over the past 3 years
- the opinion on the American dream is actually quite stable over the past several years. There is a slight negative trend. You could write the same article 3 years ago.
>> 37% of people in the survey are unemployed. That is very high. Not at all representative of the general population (4 to 5%).
I think the confusion here is the definition of various BLS metrics on unemployment. If I have a STEM degree, for example, but was working as a cashier -- I wouldnt officially be considered unemployed. In practical terms, many of these individuals would label themselves as unemployed, as they may be seeking work aligned to their aspirations/degrees/years-of-training. Same for gig work, Uber driving, Door Dashing, Amazon deliveries, etc.
Also, once you are unemployed/underemployed for long enough, it gets treated as "structural unemployment" and doesn't get counted, hence the 4-5% figure you are citing.
I have friends' parents who were used to making 50k, 60k, or more. They dont have the same opportunities and now might be faced with making much less, often without benefits. In one case, I knew someone who was offered 35k p/t without benefits (thus, they would then just sink 20k of that into healthcare.) They did the math and the 35k was a net negative considering having to pay for healthcare, transportation to work, etc. Instead they just stayed unemployed. That isnt counted as unemployment, hence the 4-5% figure you are citing.
It is important to note that retired people are not employed. 31% of respondents were 60+ years old. Some chunk of the 18-29 year olds were likely full time students. There are also other people who can't or don't need to work.
4-5% unemployment rate captures something different from "do you have a job right now, yes/no?". There are also different "unemployment rates" that mean different things.
FWIW, adults might live in homes owned by their spouse or child. It doesn't necessarily point to children living their parent's home.
Thanks for the information. So unemployed != unemployed.
In any case it doesnt really change anything 37% unemployed and 69% living in a home they or someone in their household owns sounds like a lot of young people who havent left the nest.
> Thanks for the information. So unemployed != unemployed.
Your snark aside, actually yes, that is correct. The unemployment rate you cite is the UNRATE, or U-3. It explicitly only counts people over 16 years of age who reside in the fifty states or DC, who aren’t institutionalized, and not on Active Duty in the military.
Looking at other data sets fills in the picture further. U-6 adds in part-time workers seeking full-time employment and people intermittently employed, which bumps that figure to 7.9%. Looking at the length of unemployment shows a jump from 20 weeks to 24.1 weeks in the span of a year, a pretty significant jump considering “how well the economy is doing”.
But let’s take the second part of your rebuttal - that the results may be skewed towards younger people who still live at home.
I want you to try and think about N-order repercussions of that, if true. If 2 in 5 are unemployed and 3 of 4 live at home, then doesn’t that seem alarming? Shouldn’t young people be the most employed demographic across a wider assortment of roles and industries? Shouldn’t their jobs be paying enough to at least share an apartment with someone else? If your assessment is correct, then the correct reaction should be panic and fear over what that might mean for the wider economy, not belittling the demographic who is suffering under its present effects.
It's not snark. The survey uses the term "unemployed" but it is a different metric than the "unemployed" metric.
>But let’s take the second part of your rebuttal - that the results may be skewed towards younger people who still live at home.
Are we in an argument? I wasnt really rebutting anything. I was clarifying my original comment. Even after the clarification that it's not apples to apples, the intersection of 69% living in a home and 37% being unemployed is pretty striking.
>If your assessment is correct, then the correct reaction should be panic and fear over what that might mean for the wider economy, not belittling the demographic
The survey uses the term "unemployed" but it is a different metric than the "unemployed" metric.
I'm looking at the pdf you linked. I did a ctrl+f and couldn't find anything for "unemployed". I then searched for "employ" (in case there is some OCR bug) and the only hits I got were on a table that says "employment status" and the responses are "employed" or "not employed".
Can you point out where the survey uses the term "unemployed"?
It seems like you are defending against something I did not say. I would agree 100% that if you cant find a job its hard to move out of your parents house.
Ah, perhaps I read you wrong. I got the sense that you thought that these people were unemployed, and depressed about their economic future, because they were "failure to launch" kids.
The poll is conducted on the internet. Busy people are less likely to fill out surveys and are more likely to believe that hard work leads to economic gains.
Note that the data are not reported raw, though. While the sample does not match the population, it is post-stratified and weighted to reflect the US population. (See the last two pages of your link for the study methodology.)
No that's close to the compliment of the male labor participation rate. 4-5% is only the people who have lost their jobs in the past six months and are actively looking for another one.
I have not read the whole of "Capital in 21st Century", just the opening chapter. But the picture the chapter painted was quiet grim - income inequality growing rapidly every year as "innovation" and jobs declined. In other words Piketty's numbers have shown that one cannot work their way to a comfortable living years ago and IMO this is at the heart of almost all political processes these days - inability to earn a living wage. The "leaders" use a whole range of tactics to divert the discontent onto other things like big government or immigration, and those are important topics, but they are not _the_ problem. Wage stagnation is the ultimate issue.
Is indeed an issue, as it corresponds with the malaise you describe.
> wage stagnation
is in part due to the government increasing the costs of hiring people. That indirectly results in correspondingly lower wages. The so-called "employers' contribution" is a misrepresentation.
> government increasing the costs of hiring people
This is lazy thinking. If the government is indeed increasing costs, this is happening to everyone across the board. So why would anyone in particular be affected by this? It could even be true in a situation where profits were falling across the economy, but the numbers show that profits are INCREASING for most companies in the US at least. So how can these companies justify that it is the government forcing them to hire less people if they have more money every year?
If? It's a certainty. For starters, the only reason HR departments exist is to try to comply with all the regulations. HR departments are expensive. For seconds, all the "employer contributions" to payroll taxes. Then there are all the wage laws, and mandatory this, and mandated that.
All increase costs of employing people, which comes out of the employees' pockets one way or another.
Profits do not drive employment. What drives employment is the employee provides more value than they cost to hire.
As I said above, everyone is subjected to the same work regulations, so it becomes a moot point. It is a form of tax, so that is not an issue that affects a single employer. And it doesn't come from "employer pockets" any more than the cost of raw materials. Every business owner treats the cost of raw materials with all taxes as a given, but then when it comes to workers they whine as if it was the end of the world. It only shows they're whining and frankly annoying people.
> And it doesn't come from "employer pockets" any more than the cost of raw materials.
Yes, it does, because what the employer cares about is the cost of having the employee vs the value that the employee delivers. Cost of raw materials is not relevant.
> they whine
I recommend you start a business and test your theories!
I am not going to say that I have the data but from what I remember that was not identified as one of the causative concerns in the book.
Subjectively I doubt that that is a systematic driver of income inequality. For example in 60s the taxes in the higher margins were extremely high (80% I think?) and worker bargaining power was strong. Yet it was a period of unprecedented growth and innovation, one where ideas of invisible hand and tide that lifts all boats were forged but in reality it was not a laissez-fair period at all.
The article may be referring to page 14, actually.
The question on page 14 is "Do you think the American Dream--that if you work hard you'll get ahead--still holds
true, never held true, or once held true but does not anymore?
And the results are (from 2023 to 2025):
Still holds true: 36, 34, 31 (downward trend)
Never held true: 18, 17, 23 (upward trend)
Once held true but not anymore: 45, 49, 46 (mixed trend)
Its a report on how people feel. It measures how people say they feel. It's limited in usefulness but not worthless. Id just hazard against reading too much into it.
I think the problem is the loss of the middle class. The ones on top getting a lot of the resources while the rest have to fight for whatever is left. It doesn't matter how hard or how smart you work.
I think you sum up the type of despair people feel pretty well.
It's really more helpful to look at "middle class or better." Because yes, the middle class has shrunk. But more of that share went to the UPPER income tiers.
The middle class went from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2023. But the lower income brackets saw a +3% change while upper saw +8%.
Economists and rich people indeed think in terms of scarce resources. Any economics book will tell you that it is about managing scarce resources. Rich people will never allow for example the government to give increasingly more money and resources to lower income people, because they fear there's note enough for them. They don't believe in abundance for everyone.
>If it's not static and it grows, then it cannot be scarce
Elaborate? Scarcity means demand for the resources exceeds the available supply. There is essentially unlimited human wants and only finite resources. The resource quantity can grow but it will never meet demand. Even if all growth goes to the people with less resources, the resources will still be scarce.
Being "middle class" is a mindset, not a category of wealth. It's something of an anachronism from when there were two distinct classes: nobility/clergy, and the peasants. The middle class, the bourgeoisie (because they lived it towns, bourgs) didn't fit into either existing class. One can be wealthy or poor and still be middle class. Social conformity, infinitely expandable material demand, and emphasis on external, impersonal values are the hallmarks of this mindset.
> That would be so out of place in midwest USA, where cynicism is rampant
Well yeah, the Midwest USA is full of drastically under-employed individuals holding advanced degrees who still can't find any decent work, and yet still have to pay $2,000/month rental costs, while also paying back $100k to $200k+ student loans for all that "more learning" they did.
I think much of HN still thinks of "college grads" as entering a market similar to how they had it back in 2002 - 2010. But it's 2025, the market is far far less forgiving on the low end than it used to be.
Midwest is particularly rough especially rust belt cities. I could already see the writing on the wall when I got out decades ago. Now the coasts feel like the Midwest did back then. A sense of "who cares?"
We need more startups that are creating durable business that employ a lot of people. Unicorns mostly blow up, and the few that succeed typically are not big or stable employers. How about funding more “lifestyle” companies that aspire to be in business for the long haul, not hunting for the exit on day one.
Obviously this is one of many diverse factors at work - but potential YC founders: the comments section here suggests that there is a lot of great human talent available in the market today.
It is too bad. In recent years working "smarter" has outperformed working harder, but you always needed both. You get good grades in school, and be strategic about which major or career to choose. And of course there is plenty of luck involved. But with AI, who knows what to do. It is harder to be strategic because no one can predict how this will change the economy.
Hard work never lead to economic gains, working hard at creating value does, and that is still true today. If the adage was true, dragging rocks up a hill 18 hrs a day would make you billionaire.
The knife in the side of the economy is housing costs. If that were to drop by 50% tomorrow, you would find that suddenly tons of people are happy with the pay the receive for the value they create. People forget (or are simply unaware) that each dollar you take off from rent/mortgage is effectively a dollar raise from your work.
"Creating value" is such a subjective phrase. Societal value? Fiscal value?
Someone who drives around your city for 12 hours, rescuing and resuscitating people in life-or-death situations probably provides more societal value than a software engineer who builds CRM features for large social companies but we all know which one gets paid more and who is considered "more successful."
Maybe the problem is exactly that people are rewarded based on this other type of value, and that it is increasingly hard to define it, and be the one to provide it.
The parent is pointing out that the labor theory of value is nonsense. How much something is worth is totally unrelated to
how hard or how long someone worked on it.
> working hard at creating value does, and that is still true today
This is the point that the parent was making. How you define "value" is the topic of discussion here, which in my opinion has become so abstract that it's impossible become successful around. Investors make money on failing businesses, software engineers make money on products that never monetize, top AI researchers make millions working for 2 weeks at one company doing training modules before moving to another.
In the modern economy, money is made by ideas, concepts, potentials. Not value.
Value is something that motivates people to do work (that creates value). It's like bartering (I'll fix your car if you mow my yard), but currency makes work fungible (I'll fix your car for $80, and then pay another guy $80 to mow the yard). Key to this is understanding that someone might be willing to cut the yard for $75, and someone else might do it for $60. Probably no one for $20 though.
Speculation, which you lean heavily on in your example, is essentially just gambling. (I'll get my driveway fixed up for $120, and -educated guess- it allows me to fix two cars for $80 each).
Value is found by everyone voting with their currency units on what the value of any given thing is.
99% of the time when you are confused about why something has low value, or why something has high value, you can dig into the market around it and find out why and it's almost always pretty logical (and if it's not, congrats, you can make money on fixing it). This is also fuzzy around the edges, it's never sharp lines. But the shape is consistent on the whole.
>Value is found by everyone voting with their currency units on what the value of any given thing is.
To me what you're describing sounds like market price discovery versus value, which can also be functional usefulness or social worth, in the vein of the diamond–water paradox. A price is what someone is willing to pay, but value is something's worth. For example while selling a car if nobody is currently interested nearby it's market value is $0, but it's functional value as transportation persists.
On the other hand I might pay much less for something than its value would be through price discovery. For example I might be willing to pay an extremely high price for a life saving medication, but rules or laws deliberately limit price discovery, because leaving it to the market would be considered unjust for similar reasons to laws regarding externalities via the tragedy of the commons.
>if we had a way of finely grading, say, teachers, then the teachers in the top 1% percentile could likely demand extremely high paying salaries...because 99% of teachers would fail to make this grade.
This is already somewhat done with teachers. Those who teach wealthy children such as at a prep or private school make more money than those who teach poor children. The salary does not directly scale with the quality of teaching - for example a 2x better teacher might make 10x the salary, because the bidding power of the wealthy parent is much greater.
Because currency is unevenly distributed, voting with dollars reflects the wealth and preferences of those with more money, skewing prices. In an extreme example if person A can pay $1,000 for a life-saving treatment and person B $10,000, does that make person B’s outcome ten times more valuable? In that sense, market prices aren’t neutral measures of value and are more like an economic version of ‘might makes right'.
I think there is a conflation between different types/definitions of "value" that always runs things off the rails.
Economic value is a distinct thing that arises from markets and price discovery. It doesn't really cover social or personal values, despite them constantly leaking into discussions.
Pretty much everyone agrees teachers are valuable, but their economic value is relatively low or their market is distorted. As hellishly capitalistic as it sounds, a teacher that could reliably produce all star workers would probably be paid handsomely as a student conveyor belt to Megacorp, by Megacorp.
Also medicine breaks discussions of markets/economics, the value of a shot that saves your is infinite.
Rejecting the labor theory of value was a choice, not some eternal truth of economics.
There’s no reason a society couldn’t be organized around labor values—other than the fact that such societies (or the movements that would give rise to them) are routinely destroyed or destabilized by one pre-existing superpower or the other.
You could organize an economy around labor-as-value, at least in terms of how workers are paid and goods are priced, but you have to be extremely diligent that you're directing work towards useful endeavors.
You can't escape that people will evaluate how useful goods are to them. Goods which are priced way lower than their utility will get snapped up, goods priced way higher than their utility will go unsold.
Yes, this is one of the inherent contradictions of capitalism: the definition of "value" is reversed so that the system rewards the least valuable actors (investment bankers, middlemen, rent-seekers) and punishes the most valuable actors (teachers, firefighters, plumbers, sewage treatment plant workers, garbage collectors).
Those who like this system, is this inevitable? If not, how can it be reversed? Or is it somehow good that the people who basically raise your kids for you get paid 10x less than the guy who takes a commission for plugging your investment account into their automated market tracking money printing machine?
The problem is that huge swaths of people can do those "most valuable" jobs, so they will chronically undercut each other to a stable salary point.
There is no conspiracy or scheme going on. Most people who set out to become a teacher or sewage plant worker are successful in doing so. Very few people who set out to be investment banker VP or real estate moguls succeed, but we hyper focus on those who do, ignoring (more likely unaware of) the graveyard of broke losers who didn't make it.
On the flip-side, if we had a way of finely grading, say, teachers, then the teachers in the top 1% percentile could likely demand extremely high paying salaries...because 99% of teachers would fail to make this grade.
This argument really breaks down when you consider that it requires a lot more training to become a teacher than an investment banker, and there is a massive shortage of teachers, and none of these factors makes teaching a lucrative career.
Becoming a teacher is far easier than successfully becoming an investment banker. Most people who try end up making teacher territory pay to push paper in a cubicle all day. And they don't even get summers off.
That's no necessarily true since teaching requires a degree and certification, at least in the USA. Also it's an extremely hard job compared to investment banking - the hours are long, you must take your work home, you're usually on your feet a significant portion of the day, and you must function as a social worker and a live performer for a significant portion of the day. Every single day for a term.
And the pressure is enormous, you're in charge of making sure the kids get the tools they need for their life, all while making sure they can survive the arbitrary stuff like standardized testing.
People drop dead in Japan from their jobs frequently as well, regardless of industry. This hasn't anything to do with the job being hard and everything to do with work culture.
I acknowledge that investment bankers have a toxic work culture, but I don't believe the job is inherently harder than teaching, which is unavoidably hard in many ways. Some of the ways are solvable by having more teachers (smaller class sizes, not needing to take work home), but not all of them.
Your first paragraph I interpret as basically saying that the reason things are is because these jobs exist in a labor market, so that's just a restatement of my point that this is a negative aspect of capitalism.
The third paragraph argues for even more market mechanics involved in this labor market which I of course disagree would improve the situation.
Also there's a serious shortage of teachers in the USA which undermines your point imo.
Yes, it's today's housing costs, combined with inflation, that are highly demoralizing.
Here's a personal anecdote: my grandfather was born in Arkansas in the Jim Crow era. He never went to school, and in fact was illiterate throughout his life. He moved to the Central Valley of California in the 1950s as part of the Second Great Migration of African Americans, where millions left the South to destinations either in the North or west to California. He worked on the same farm for 30 years before he retired on Social Security. He worked very hard; he regularly woke up around 3:30am and left his home before sunrise.
Despite being illiterate, having a low income working on a farm, and facing discrimination, he was able to provide for his wife and four children, and he was able to purchase a house in Bakersfield that he was able to pass on to one of his sons.
I had other family members who moved from Texas to California in the 1950s and were able to purchase homes in places like Oakland and even farmland in San Luis Obispo County.
Today a farm worker in the Central Valley would have a much harder time being able to afford a home.
I work as a CS professor in Silicon Valley making six figures, and all I can afford to purchase is a one-bedroom condo unless I wanted to live in a high-crime neighborhood of the type that I grew up in or unless I wanted a soul-crushing commute from the Central Valley. Yes, I know I signed up for that reality when I took my role.
But forget about me and consider the big picture: high housing costs are brutal for young people who weren't around to purchase when prices were more affordable.
Watching since the 1980s, the average tech startup in the bay area is just dragging rocks up a hill 18 hrs a day with the output thrown away in a couple of years when it doesn't pan out. Yet the people that do that there are HIGHLY compensated.
You should watch the recent pod save America podcast where the LA housing debate was discussed and the La rep was super happy about reducing the height of a new housing unit by 4 stories.
You'll have to explain to me what a person at work is doing, then? I mean, if they're not creating excess value by working at a job, whose value is then sold at a surplus over what they get paid, why does that job exist? Why did they get hired?
What exactly do you think people at 'normal jobs' are doing at work all day?
Something tells me my mortgage would not go down and I might actually be a little unhappy (understatement) if housing prices were halved. But yes, this would be overall good for young people in society
I was always curious, why would anyone believe that hard work leads to economic gains in the first place? That's like saying "flapping your hands very fast leads to building a house". Nothing about working hard has anything to do with economic gains. This has always felt to me like magical thinking: if I check certain boxes, I'm automatically entitled to "hard work funds" allocated to me. Like anything in capitalist market, the only thing that matters is what people want to pay for, and doing that for them. It's not even that important how "hard" you "work" doing it, but yes, the more you do of what people want, the more you'll probably get paid for it.
Part of the issue is that when you're young, the school really imposes lots of schoolwork on you, that you can't ignore. It's like school takes over your time, but none of the liability for whether the time will be well-spent. And at this point you don't have good foresight to know the difference.
The more general wisdom I think that should be learned early in life: you always make your own path. Schools are tools for getting there, but the buck stops with you. If you decide to accept a "pre-made path" given to you by a school, you still have to be the one researching whether it makes sense and signing off on it. Just like when you work with doctors, financial advisors, or other contractors, you have to be the project manager of your life's project. Cannot delegate this part. Not easy to learn early unfortunately, but at least start with the understanding that the only thing that matters for economic gains is doing what people want to pay for.
Your logic is side-stepping the point. There was a period of time, at least in the USA, where the goal was economical and social stability (New Deal, GI Bill, unions). Over the course of my life, the goal has morphed into wealth transfer. You can track this with the Gini coefficient, right? Sharp upward climb during the Reagan years. A "losing faith" metric is also a bellwether. The promise of economic gains is the reason to show up. No gains, no show. There's only so much you can pump out of a system with churn before it collapses. Meanwhile, there is no such thing as "make your own path," and this is a direct contradiction to "what people want to pay for" -- definitionally a "pre-made path". We all make choices from the options that are available to us in a system where many of the variables and constants are completely out of our control (eg, what the market desires). In fact, I'd go so far as to say everything about capitalism trends towards pre-made paths.
I guess the “hard work = gains” sentiment is showing something, but since it’s literally a misnomer on its face, and people take it way too literally, I think it doesn't show what many think it does.
I think the problem is that work changed too fast. This shift is much harder to navigate. A lot of 20th century career conveyer belts have been disrupted in the last 30 years. A lot of schools are still setting traditional expectations that no longer match reality. This is why people think their work doesn’t lead to gains: job requirements have been swapped from under US workers, and everyone is struggling to keep up. That said, opportunities are larger than ever, but we have to become more "entrepreneurial" again, perhaps more akin to the way we were during Industrial Revolution. Take that English major and use it to become an excellent YouTuber rather than a writer, type shit.
> In fact, I'd go so far as to say everything about capitalism trends towards pre-made paths.
How do you explain every new innovation? Cars during the time of horses? Twitter during the time of Facebook and MySpace, family medicine during the time of hospitalists and experts (fairly new field), Amazon during the times of Sears, framework laptop during the times of Apple, etc, etc. People don’t always know what they want, and America is incredibly well catered towards starting businesses (at least until a certain guy in a certain white building does permanent damage). Saying that we’re all constrained to market is very reductive. We are more empowered to find new ways to be useful than ever before. Doing economically unviable things has never been ok.
I just want to make it clear that very specifically “hard work means economic gains” is ridiculous on its face, and a lot of people take it literally, without the caveat that you have to do something useful.
Funny you say that, I too am an immigrant to US. Your parents probably understood the above on an intuitive level. We immigrants think of it as "goes without saying" type thing.
> It doesnt work anymore
It never worked to just work hard. People in today's society want to part with more money than ever in all of history (to buy things and services), you just need to be a part of what they want to part with their money for.
This doesn’t get enough attention. For those of us who have had to climb every rung of the ladder by hand, rather than leapfrogging entire segments through social networks from family members and universities or who otherwise come from wealth and privilege, it’s been grueling for decades. Ask any service worker, and they’ll almost certainly agree that shit’s fucked ten ways to Sunday.
Hard work in America consistently only ever nets you further hardship, and has for decades. What we need is more of the essentials, and for said essentials to be affordable when they can’t be effectively socialized. In America, with its naked hostility towards organized labor, this was briefly achievable with a college degree alone; now that credentials don’t guarantee basic necessities, our options are either higher wages (which Capital won’t pay so long as they’re high on AI) or an economic crash that deflates asset values in months, not decades - and which will exacerbate the underlying employment problems to the point of riots.
As soon as we start prosecuting the rich for "social murder" and things like it, things will improve.
We just need to get over that hump. You pay yourself 300x what your average worker does? That's fine, but we can also try you for social murder. Like if you're a healthcare executive that denies coverage and increases costs without delivering care (serving as a worthless middleman who actually prevents care), you go to prison. That sort of thing.
Some Americans are quite intelligent and despite decades of psyops and other issues still retain an understanding of what's real, and what the consequences of decisions will mean in economic terms.
In a classroom, its easy to poke fun at a nationalized economy, and draw the conclusion that hard work won't ever lead to economic gains. This understanding isn't applied to the real world though such as where an economy is silently nationalized through opaque entities that have politically captured the entire process.
There is quite a bit of literature by Mises and other classical economists who don't submit to the errors of Keynes; about what happens in fiat economies and how and why they fail. This subject matter goes into financial Armageddon talk quite rapidly with well defined impossible to solve problems.
Instead of choosing to avoid such chaotically mired problems at the outset, a generation of dilettantes who were given every possible benefit and education to choose a good future for all instead chose to sacrifice their children's future through expanding their power, debasing the systems, and silently transitioning and pivoting to fiat money-printing in the 1970s which within 50 years has devolved to the point just prior to collapse with the now grown children enslaved to economics to foot the bill of their unending thirst for funding.
Wealth inequality is high because those that situate themselves closer to the source of money in fiat currency systems have asymmetric advantage over those that are further away as inflation and its debasement of the currency makes its way through the system. While its all very cleverly disguised, the objective underlying systems have only one place to go which is the same as every other civilization that collapses from runaway money-printing.
That unfortunately is the sad truth, and the only sustainable future is to not store value or transact in such currencies. A dependency on such failure prone systems for food is a dependency that will result in extinction. The true factors that determine national/group wealth are based in productive distribution of labor with markets transacted in a stable store of value.
Unfortunately, markets today no longer have many of the required systems properties to be considered real markets. Price discovery (measure), and a stable store of value are needed to constrain n-body systems to stable orbits.
If we could all recognize that our money is the power, then we could all come together and not purchase things that are not for our interests.
For example you see that chocolate that is 50 dollars a pound dont impulsively buy it because you love it so much, if you don't buy things that are unreasonable than they don't try to sell you things that are unreasonable.
If you live in the SF Bay Area, it's pretty blatant: most of the economic gains go to property owners - both landlords or people who bought real estate early on (or inherited real estate early on) - due to the self-perpetuated housing shortage.
Naturally it was always a false hope. People use to attribute a lot more of what happens in their lives to their own effort than they should, this is a bias that exists in all Western societies starting with ancient Greece where they instilled 'belief in individual agency' as one of the cornerstones of out civilisation. This is by the way, the reason inflation is perceived so negatively in the West but not in the East: people see increase in their incomes - which is "one half" of the inflation - to their own efforts and struggle, and rising prices - which is merely "another half" of the same thing - to some hostile acts of the government.
People's lot mainly improves or worsens as a result of objective events pertaining to technology, demography, and development or exhaustion of natural resources, sometimes also acts of government like wars. Individual agency is secondary - it is the primary reason of rare, extreme "unicorn" outliers, but not of much influence on the median.
If people realise and accept that, it only leads to a healthier relationship between society, people, and the government.
I think the correlation between good work and payoff genuinely has dropped off. This kind of makes sense. As systems get more complex/complicated, it becomes easier to hide corruption, and harder to identify positive contributions with respect to the system. This goes for society as a whole as well as companies, organizations, communities, etc.
As corruption becomes more and more profitable, culture also switches to become more tolerant of it, or even to expect it.
Even without corruption, "hard work" doesn't correlate to success. I do good work with a specialized skillset, but I don't work particularly hard.
People who replace roofs on houses work very very hard and make much less money than I do, and those income levels aren't likely to change too much throughout our lives.
Income is generally much more correlated to the market value of your skills and experience than with effort, and gaining those skills and experiences has a lot to do with your background and ability to do things like attend college, work on relevant side projects / hobbies, take low pay / unpaid internships, etc.
Ability to invest capital into things like business ownership, investment, real estate, etc. is another factor.
As cost of living increases relative to wages, that leaves less room for savings to pull yourself up from being a wage worker to an owner or investor.
Isn't it also the effort of entire society to compress the pay scale with exactly that effect? And societies that are furthest on that path (Nordic ones) are used as example to follow (and indeed appear quite comfortable and nice).
What does this have to do with my comment of inflation? You are actively working to undermine my labor and cast me aside via your company anyway. Very cool!
Individual agency is important but I feel that people perceive it in a very simple way, "I work" => "I live as I want".
I think a major difference between East Europe and West Europe (can't talk generally about East/West) is that people in East Europe were trained/educated/forced/convinced that they can't change anything after 1950 (up to recently). This lead to most not take any responsibility, and to some profiting hugely (some hard working, some sociopaths). In West Europe there was always more struggle at multiple levels.
People's status improve mostly from accumulated individual actions. But someone still has to do the actions. That's why "propaganda" (convincing your own population that X is required) is so important because otherwise X will not happen.
Having a population that "accepts" things are "external" is perfect for the rulers, but no much for the others. Having a population that "struggles" and accepts it can't get everything it imagines (even if they try) seems much healthier.
Or even if you provide something useful, you can still not get the value you deserve because capitalist can create a monopoly and underpay you as you still need to eat.
Even in the smallest groups, like a small village or a hunter-gatherers in Africa the algorithm is the same.
Free markets usually aren't too prone to long-term monopolies. There are some parts where markets fail but most "monopolies" aren't because of market forces, but because of regulation.
Prior experience teachers that those losing faith in this way or are impacted by inequality won't, on the whole, come for the those who put them in that situation.
They'll come for the brown people next door. Because obviously it's their fault.
And whether it comes from their own, internal, faulty logic. Or through the whisperings of Fox News. It won't matter.
Because that faith is what got people to accept "the brown people living next door." The idea that we could get along and just work harder is what let people give up tribalism. If that no longer works tribalism must come back.
Thinking out loud, CEOs have one mission, one objective: increase the ROI of shareholders through stock prices and dividends. I don't know if that is a legal obligation. But I wonder if CEOs were mandated/incentivized to also take into account social and environmental progress, maybe inequality would start to dwindle. Am I dreaming?
In China they do this by having people from the government in the board of big corporations. So they have to take into consideration social and countrywide economic goals, instead of pure profit.
I mean, you're not there yet of course, but that's how we've all felt in the EU for at least 50 years now. If work, in any amount, cannot change your social position then the game becomes finding whatever excuse to work as little as possible.
I must say, I'm feeling depressed this month. Can't. I just can't.
The meritocracy only exists at the broad market level. Within almost every organization there is a zero-sum game of mostly politics. The vast majority of Americans go to work in a zero-sum environment. It could be a job waiting tables, it's unlikely to scale with how good you are at it. Or it could be a middle management position. You might be able to play politics for a higher salary, but you aren't going to get it by actually being good at your job. Similarly you aren't going to lose your job by being bad at it, only by being politically inept.
It's setup this way because that's how mid-to-late career employees want it to be setup.
People would rather find a niche and then coast than constantly worrying about being outperformed by people younger or smarter than them.
If there's not competition, then there's no way for hard work to yield more than slacking off.
Hard work alone has never led to economic gains. Hard work leads to economic gain when it is economically valued and when you're in a position to extract some portion of the value that it produces. Unfortunately, we as a society are not very good at 1. communicating this truth to people at a young age and 2. aligning these two things
The hardest working people in society are paid the least. We created a system of financial engineering that has bifurcated society. The sad part is it's only going to get worse as those with money will have access to the tools and resources that will allow them to accelerate their position.
Conflating wealth for success is a big part of why we're here. Success in life is not the same as success at life and as we all personally know, money is no indicator of one's intelligence, abilities or personality. In face, any idiot can make money and it takes a true sociopath to earn billions without pure luck...
It used to be true, but now you are taxed out of success, and any other gains you save will simply evaporate with unchecked inflation and money printing by Congress. There needs to be a "Hard Stop" on inflation: The federal government's checks bounce if there is no money in the account.
... and somehow, there has been a successful miseducation campaign on the internet that "corporations raising prices causes inflation" which highlights how many people do not understand how fiat currency even works. (Even on HN, you'll see responses like this).
The current situation is largely their fault. It was Chicago school jackasses who neutered antitrust enforcement in the '70s, which is why everything's now dominated by a very small number of mega-conglomerates.
If success were ONLY about having capital then what would that imply? The super rich people of today would come from the super rich people of their parent's generation. This model is actually incredibly bad at predicting the richest people in the US today. Gates, Musk, Buffet, Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc. Many may have come from well off families but none of them were anything close to among the richest of their generation. Looking from the other end, you'd expect the Ford Family, Getty, Hunt, Howard Hughes, etc. to have spawned the richest people of today. They havent.
But to be clear, you didn't say it was ONLY capital. It sounds like you're putting that as a primary thing. But you also mentioned luck.
Can you elaborate on the luck part? Wouldnt that imply that people acting randomly have a similar chance of succeeding? If not, then there must be something MORE than luck involved right? I think everyone would agree luck is involved, but disagree on the extent. Is (bad) luck the reason why the Ford family didnt produce the richest people of today? Is an insane amount of (good) luck the reason why Zuckerberg has billions?
People like Gates, Musk, Buffet are only a side show. They are there because of support from Wall Street. They're new but at the same time indistinct from old money and working for the same goals.
Moreover, a "self-made billionaire" is just a drop on the global pool of wealth. It is even good for capitalism to have these new people as a showcase, so billions will believe they can be the next, when winning the lottery if far more likely.
OK so its not only about luck and existing capital.
>Moreover, a "self-made billionaire" is just a drop on the global pool of wealth.
We are not talking about the global pool of wealth - we are talking about capitalism which is decidedly smaller. You can take out Putin, Saudi Aramco, etc.
Unless capitalists start paying the same tax rate as W2 workers, the inequality will continue to favor capitalist class and exploit the worker class.
This will not happen until the working class wakes up and demands to lower W2 wages massively and simultaneously tax everything and everyone who has been evading and decreasing their corporate/ultra high net worth taxes thus far. Every single loophole must be chased and closed leaving only a standard deduction
The highest marginal tax rate in the US was 94% in the mid 1940s, and that doesn’t even mean people were paying 94% of their income to taxes. If you look at federal revenue as a percentage of GDP in decade intervals, starting from 1944, you’ll find that the ratio hasn’t changed much since then [1]. Funny enough, it has actually crept slightly upward.
Thanks for the 94% correction. But there is no need for the percentage of GDP to increase, it's only enough that the richer pay more, so less will be payed by the lower classes. Not only that, but a reduction in loopholes is also needed. The goal is not to prevent people from making more but to prevent concentration of wealth, so we need to make it harder and harder for huge fortunes to accumulate instead of supporting it.
> Unless capitalists start paying the same tax rate as W2 workers, the inequality will continue to favor capitalist class and exploit the worker class.
I wanted to do a snarky "fixed that" comment where I crossed out everything before "the inequality will continue," but actually I'm curious now: capitalism fans (which includes liberals), do you genuinely believe you can have capitalism in a way where the inequality doesn't continue to favor the capitalist class? So long as power can be purchased with capital, how could this ever not be the case?
I would change that to extreme poverty.
There should be a guaranteed minimum standard of living which is humane, basically access to food, housing, education and health.
After that, is up to every individual.
I remember a previous discussion here about ozempic, and how one commenter was asking how to force his father to become healthy, as it was using ozempic as a crutch and leaning back to it when he needed to, while going back to his vices (smoking, drinking, being overweight by eating junk food). The answer was, unless you remove his self agency or can convince him so he does it himself, he won’t change.
While I would like that as well, I think inequality is easier to define than poverty (for inequality you can consider only wealth and income), easier to explain and easier to act on.
I think that even two like-minded people can spend too much time talking about what exactly is "basically access to food, housing, education and health", before doing anything.
> I think inequality is easier to define than poverty (for inequality you can consider only wealth and income), easier to explain and easier to act on.
Au contraire, I think inequality while easy to define is hard to act on, and it also merits the question if you should act at all, we have seen several experiments on forcing equality and millions died.
Defining food, housing, education and health is not hard. We have guidelines on being healthy already, so you need access to preventive care to do so. Education you would just need easier/less onerous access to university education.
Food requires a change of culture, which has been happening over the past 20 years.
Housing, at least a studio place should be enough.
> we have seen several experiments on forcing equality and millions died.
I've not heard of this. Which experiments "forced equality" and then as a result caused millions of deaths?
I'm aware of the experiment of capitalism failing in India to the tune of about 100 million dead, is that what you mean? With capitalism's attempts to equalize through meritocracy?
USSR and Maoist PRC indeed took actions that killed millions, but so did capitalist India or mercantilist Britain or hegemonic America. I don't see a correlation between "forcing equality," which I'm not really even sure those regimes did (since Party members were clearly unequal in their power and quality of life), and the deaths. Just politics.
We have an administration that wants to ignore basic data like unemployment. Or obvious ramifications of economic policies (lower interest rates -> inflation). They want to hobble any support for the lower/middle class's mobility, while lowering taxes on billionaires (who themselves are out of touch). They don't see basic facts like draconian immigration policies hurt costs.
Ignorance around economic policy is almost a tenet of faith. Ignorance is taken as a source of pride.
Maybe they were ignorant and dumb to do so, but people voted for the first Trump administration. A crazy guy constrained by mostly sane, non-cultists that administered the government around him. I don't think people who voted for Trump wanted Trump II - a doddering old showman surrounded by sycophantic cultists that delight in doing the opposite of sane policy.
It doesn't take a genius to look at the people who are putting in the hard work, look at their position in society and then look at the material life they can afford compared to the same position historically and draw conclusions.
We've had a decades long assault on the idea that hard work leads to economic gains for normal Americans. This poll goes back to the mid 80s. Since then, working class Americans have gotten less and less support from the government while the billionaires have gotten more and more.
It's not surprising that COVID made this realization come to a head. The American Rescue Plan showed that the US is plenty capable of giving Americans what they need to thrive, but simply won't unless there's maybe a worldwide catastrophe...
Care to elaborate? The fed during both trump and Biden governments printed a ton of money for covid relief and stimulus, which caused inflation in bidens government.
You made the initial unsubstantiated claim. Please explore all the causes of inflation during the global pandemic: supply chain issues, (yes) stimulus spending, housing shortages, greedflation, the Russia invasion of Ukraine, etc.
Why does the ARP stick out to you as being what led this inflation, or even a net negative? Please consider the positive impacts and don't forget that the US recovered from COVID faster than other advanced economies. For however inflation screwed the working American, the ARP directly enabled these folks to pay bills, and buy things they wouldn't otherwise have been able to, screening them even more. Economists say the stimulus directly prevented deflation, which hit some other economies hard, like Japan.
Giving working people the ability to raise families, buy homes and go to school to get a good job is what supports the American dream and is what will make America thrive. Increasingly, these things are out of reach, but the ARP reminded people that enabling the American dream is a policy choice. If you think government giving support to Americans is an issue, first look at cutting support targeted toward the capital owning class.
The Western system has roots in the Norman conquest of England. After 1066, land wasn’t held communally or with meaningful checks on aristocracy, as under the Anglo-Saxons. Instead, William the Conqueror carved up the country and handed it to his allies, creating a feudal landlord class that had no attachment to 'their' conquered peasants/community and whose only mandate was to extract maximum rent, so long as the higher lords and the crown got their cut. Instead of vanishing that rentier system evolved. Over centuries, the same logic of conquest and extraction was repackaged as “the market,” and eventually exported to the world through finance, trade, and empire.
What began as feudal rent-seeking in England scaled into global capitalism, a system where those at the top still practice Norman-style exploitation for maximum extraction with no care about those being extracted from. It's all Norman-style exploitation for maximum extraction, stripped of any sense of community, obligation, or service.
Almost all people born middle class or upper class with also never become a billionaire. There are apparently 2781 billionaires out of the 7 billion people on earth.
Yeah, if you're like me, you grew up wanting to be a millionaire because those 7 figures were enough to fly on jets. Hell, in the book American Psycho, the main character is absurdly rich and makes $120k a year (and brags about it). Now, 18% of Americans are millionaires.n
You'll never be a billionaire because being a billionaire takes extraordinary good luck as well as hard work.
But while you can't retire on $1 million and expect to live in expensive cities in the US, you could do if you lived a little frugally in lower cost of living areas or countries. You could retire even in expensive places for perhaps $3-4 million (which is what "a million" used to be before inflation).
Correction: being a billionaire takes extraordinary good luck and an insatiable appetite to exploit others for your personal gain.
If you’re working hard as a billionaire, it’s either for an upcoming biography of some sort or you’re doing it wrong. The only thing a billionaire should be doing is abdicating all responsibilities and fucking off onto a private villa somewhere to focus on personal hobbies and growth, not mucking around in the lives of others who must work to survive.
> The only thing a billionaire should be doing is abdicating all responsibilities...
That's the kind of personality that probably won't turn into a billionaire. It takes a ludicrous amount of motivation to continue working after being worth 100M and anyone who does, won't stop at 1B
That’s why I made that statement. Society should have barriers in place to disincentivize the hoarding of Capital/Wealth to the degree it harms others. Even if the cumulative amount of wealth is a comparative drop in the global bucket, the systems and pumps that enable it are difficult to turn off once started.
It’s why I take the “winner” approach: once you’ve got a billion dollars, the government has a vested interest in forcing you from positions of ownership and leadership because you’re no longer remotely in touch with the needs of the masses, and have sufficiently demonstrated a willingness to harm others indiscriminately for personal gain. Best to label them as a “winner”, force them into retirement, and bar them from governance (corporate and government alike) wholesale for life.
You won Capitalism. Kindly fuck off into the sunset while the actual workers continue to do actual work.
Wealth inequality is high. High enough you can feel it like a vibe in the air. The richest people in the world are telling everyone to get onboard with technology that is determined to make a lot of those same people's jobs redundant. All with an explicit goal of increasing the price of stock most of those people do not own.
IMO there's two economies, maybe divided by those who participate in the stock market and those who don't. We, Americans, have largely given up trying to improve the lives of people not in the first group. Economies are living, breathing entities and we're just grinding poorer people for fuel so richer people can have another house, another boat, another company. A lot of regular joes are really stressed out about paying rent. The loss in faith is warranted.
Income taxes are higher than capital gains taxes.
This isn't based on economic theory or anything, it's just a political choice we have made as a country. We've chosen to reward those who move money around and trade capital more than we reward those who labor. And this at a time when, supposedly, the country is trying to increase its ability to build things.
I thought this specific fact worth mentioning.
We're on the same wavelength. To me, I find it hard not to think about our explosive growth as a country happening at the same time we refuse to expand representation of the public. These charts are very frustrating to me: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN11547
The people in power do not want to lose control, but clearly have no idea how to manage the scale of what has been built. There's an American leadership crisis going on right now that is hard to ignore, both in public and private life.
We should go back to having the house filled with 1 representative per 10,000 people. Also, we should do something new and have all the representatives in the house be chosen by lottery.
Normal people are not represented in congress, because politicians are not normal people, but if we chose people by lottery we would have a branch of congress filled with normal people. They would have time enough to study the issues. Some of them would be stupid, but this is no worse than the current crop of politicians.
“I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.” -- William F. Buckley, Jr.
I don't normally reply twice to the same thread, but I just wanted to say that I wish that the US had been founded with a co-equal branch of government comprised of people drawn via lottery (probably voluntary) like in ancient Greece:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
I believe that this was one of the great mistakes by our founders. I'm sure that many suggested it, but unfortunately their ideas were suppressed due to our roots in slavery, colonialism and aristocracy (meritocracy today).
Ancient Greek politics were chaotic and violent, especially cities like Athens.
A couple of American politicians were executed in their homes a few months ago and one of the two presidential candidates was nearly JFKd in front of hundreds of cameras last year. A few years ago, a mob stormed the capital and erected a gallows to hang the sitting vice president if they could lay hands on him.
That’s violent enough even if you don’t consider the fact that de facto martial law is about to descend on major cities all over the country in the next few weeks. I’m doubtful that Greeks were anywhere near as volatile or violent as Americans are today.
What you're describing are anomalies. Most Presidental candidates are not "nearly JFK'd" nor do mobs storm the Capitol with regularity. For all of its cultural pretensions of being a nation of armed patriots always ready to "water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants" the US political system is for the most part incredibly stable and nonviolent. In ancient Greece, meanwhile, violent mobs, assassinations and tyranny were the norm rather than the exception.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasis_(ancient_Greece)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Tyrants
One person's anomalies is another person's new normal.
This is simply incorrect.
To make the tax incidence on wages and capital gains equivalent, you must first deduct losses due to inflation and risk. For wages, inflation and risk round to zero. For long-term capital gains inflation and risk are large and often the majority of the "gain". Short-term capital gains are already taxed like wages.
In the US, unlike some other developed countries, there is a very limited ability to deduct losses due to inflation and risk from long-term capital gains. Consequently, if they made the tax rate the same as wages then the tax incidence on capital gains would be much higher than wages.
As a policy matter in the US, they fix this large difference in tax incidence by reducing the tax rate instead of adjusting the cost basis for inflation and allowing full deductibility of losses.
If you pencil out the implications of these two policies, I suspect you'd find that you like the way the US does it better. Making risk and inflation deductible to equalize tax incidence enables a lot of financial structuring.
Your point is undercut by the vastly lower effective tax rates rich Americans pay vs middle class workers. It's the norm in this country for someone making millions of dollars/year to pay a significantly lower tax rate on that income than anyone working a decent paying job.
A horseshoe shaped tax graph by income is clearly against the intent and spirit of a progressive tax code so something is very much broken and has been so for decades.
But your point is undercut by the fact the vast majority of middle class workers do invest and benefit from long term capital gains taxes.
Around 40% of stocks are in retirement accounts.
Around 50% of the entire market cap of the NASDAQ is owned by the top 1%. Tax it.
also tax their other assets...
Imagine the risk of not being able to diversify your portfolio and putting all dependency on one income source. How do layoffs, broken health/major sickness, automation, local downturns get compensated by reducing future taxes? If I'm laid off for a year, then find a new job, I still pay the full tax amount on my income from that point forward, no 'loss deduction' from a year being unemployed. If I get sick with cancer and miss years of work then return, I still pay the full tax amount on my income.
I agree with you that it is unfair that people with variable income pay more taxes than people with steady income even if average income is the same. I’m a poster child for people disadvantaged in this way.
That said, I do recognize that mitigating this is really hard without introducing even more complexity to the tax code, which has its own cost.
Wages have no risk when you receive them. It is cash on the barrel. The only risk is counter-party such as your employer going bankrupt before you receive your paycheck. Not zero but statistically very low. Any inflation that happens after receiving wages is on the individual to the extent no one requires them to eat that inflation. (This is an issue during hyperinflation but the is very far from that.)
The point wasn't to suggest doing that.
It was to point out, that giving asset sales an insurance break, or risk break, would only makes sense if we gave working people gapped-income and risk breaks.
Which is to say, that neither makes sense.
The way I would put it is, money inflates if you simply hold it, but it has time value almost always greater than inflation. If you don't at least do that, you are choosing to waste value.
So giving a tax break for inflation would be giving people a break on losses, that capitalism already accounts for. Such as naturally higher interest rates when inflation is higher.
(Yes return on asset balancing mechanisms are not perfect in time, but as noted, neither is employment.)
Seems like it'd be relatively easy to allow one to 'smooth' their income over multiple years. Imagine paying 100 income at 40% tax year 1 and 0 income year 2. A scheme where you could retcon things to be 50, 50, each at say 30% for a 10k refund (or at least credit) seems very doable.
Balderdash! Inflation and risk do not round to zero for wage income - wage income for the most part is NOT indexed to inflation and is certainly NOT guaranteed.
You do not owe future taxes on wages based on inflation, capital does. This difference is separately meaningful in both economics and policy. If you do not understand the distinction then you will always be confused by capital tax policy globally, not just in the US.
Whether or not your wages increase with inflation is an unrelated discussion.
And how exactly does capital owe "future" taxes on gains or dividends based on inflation?
That capital gains is not adjusted for inflation, so if you buy something and it keeps its inflation adjusted value and then you sell it, you have to pay capital gains tax as if that inflation was your profits.
As for risk, if you buy something, then you go bankrupt so you lose it all, the state doesn't pay you the negative capital gains tax from your losses. That is the risk part that workers never have to deal with, there is no such thing as negative salary but negative capital gains happens all the time. You can't cancel out those losses if you didn't make profits elsewhere.
yeah but wages are also taxed on nominal terms, not real terms.
The way we calculate risk is inherently extremely biased towards the wealthy.
In terms of real, relative risk, being a laborer is much more risky than being an investor.
The investor may lose hundreds of millions, but it doesn't matter. The laborer may lose 500 dollars after being fired, and it could kill them.
We've detached risk from real risk. Real risk is - will I eat, will I survive.
> The way we calculate risk is inherently extremely biased towards the wealthy.
We are talking money here, we tax money so we talk about how money is risked.
We don't tax your health or wellbeing, it is true that those are serious risks worse than monetary risk, but it isn't something the tax office should deal with so it isn't a part of this conversation.
I don't understand how inflation and risk wouldn't/aren't priced in. You have $1000. You can: put it in your mattress, put it in 'safe' treasury bonds at inflation +a few percent, or yolo it in NVIDIA. Yes if bonds are returning less than inflation you don't buy them and that makes financing more expensive but it's not somehow unfair vs the other things you could do with capital.
Seems like return is roughly proportional to risk(1-tax)investment so changing tax should affect everything proportionally (barring cheating/avoiding the system in some way).
Capital gains should be taxed as straight income. We should favor dividends over capital gains, which are harder to game with debt, PE burnouts, etc.
Inflation should be low and we should make it in the interests of the rich that it stays so.
> Inflation should be low and we should make it in the interests of the rich that it stays so.
The prevailing opinion of a lot of progressive economists is just the opposite: standard policy for 40 years post-Volcker was to run with low inflation, loose money and slack labor markets, and probably all this did was keep wage growth depressed.
The brief inflationary period in 2022-2023 was fantastic for low-income workers, it was the only serious growth in real wages they'd seen in a half-century. But voters revolted and probably guaranteed we'll go back to the low inflation, high unemployment policy for another generation at least.
Growth in wages is meaningless if inflation consumes it.
My opinion is that inflation is generally a bad idea but the thing that really matters is inflation volatility. The market will adjust for whatever the inflation rate is (unless its extreme) but volatility just results in loss.
That's why I specifically said real wage growth. In 2022-2023 wages for the bottom ~35% of workers increased at their fastest rate after accounting for inflation. Inflation-adjusted wages for the middle ~40% were basically flat and decreased for the upper quartile. And since that last cohort is the one which dictates policy, they'll make sure it won't happen again.
You shouldn't want a low inflation with such massive pile of debt, both personal and government.
I do want low inflation, as well as a debt jubilee[1] and a system reset to a sustainable economic model not based on usury.
[1] - https://michael-hudson.com/2020/12/jubillee-perspectives-wit...
its not only capital gains, it is the whole system of shells/offshores that splits large wealth into smaller chunks and takes advantage of tax code
https://x.com/Finance_Nerd_/status/1952063659599106545
1. Only long term capital gains are lower than income tax
2. Long term investors invest in things that great new jobs, it is not just moving capital around.
its not only capital gains, it is the property and the system of shells and offshores that hides assets
https://x.com/Finance_Nerd_/status/1952063667458978160
https://x.com/Finance_Nerd_/status/1952063659599106545
So you are saying only ultra rich benefit from long term capital gains taxes?
Any data on that?
please refer to the tweets I quoted for receipts
"Long term" is 1 year, right?
What a joke. Everyone can judge for themselves if 1 year is "long term".
Do you have another suggestion to address the core problem of how to inventive long term investments?
3. Private equity has made long term investment a poor mans game.
If we want to build things we need capital investment and a reward for risking capital.
This reply is a complete non sequitur. Taxing capital gains as ordinary income does not mean the removal of a "reward for risking capital" because the potential upside is still unlimited compared to working a wage job.
Yes. And that reward should be called "profits" delivered as dividends.
We need labor more, and labor investment always involves substantially more risk for that person, than any capital investment ever carries.
>> This isn't based on economic theory or anything, it's just a political choice we have made as a country
Is it? I've heard that low capital gain taxes are better for long-term GDP growth.
You've also heard that giving billionaires more money would "trickle down" to the rest of us...
>> The richest people in the world are telling everyone to get onboard with technology that is determined to make a lot of those same people's jobs redundant.
The richest people I know are trying to convince everyone
1. There is a "worker shortage" in an attempt to bring in immigrant workers whom they can boss around and keep on a leash
2. That "AI is taking jobs" so you cannot point the people who are really taking jobs -- policy makers
3. There is "low unemployment" to perpetuate the myth that the economy is great
4. "Anyone can make it" while their nepo-babies get back-door access to jobs at top firms and claim "they worked hard up the ranks"
I agree, I think this is a longer way to say what I was feeling. It's a rigamarole by people with too much money. If they had less money, they wouldn't be able to do it. So at the end of the day the root cause to me is the inequality. it allows special treatment and the ability to manipulate our daily life (through social apps, news, etc) in a way that they are completely insulated from, feeling no pain whatsoever. Huge policy failure to let so few people have so much influence
> Wealth inequality is high. High enough you can feel it like a vibe in the air.
I agree, but I think it's more than just a "vibe in the air". Throughout my youth and young adulthood, we (GenXers) knew vaguely about rich people, but nothing specific, just that rich people existed and they had nice stuff. Now, thanks to social media and the decline of humility, the lifestyles of rich people isn't just known, it's pushed in front of our faces constantly. And too often the message is straight from A Bronx Tale: "The working man is a sucker".
> maybe divided by those who participate in the stock market and those who don't
In many places there's a divide between home owners and people who rent.
I thought about that, but anecdotally i know many renters addicted to Robinhood. i think housing prices and therefore the cash necessary to get a loan have shifted this divide a bit
I guess, but ... people then vote to give those rich folks power.
I don't doubt there are vast differences in opportunity and even rights at this point, but I don't think that's how people see it. Not if they're trying to get more of those folks in power.
If you're smart or lucky enough to to land that 6-figure job, then times are pretty good. There are tons of stories on subreddits, e.g. r/FIRE, r/investing, r/fatfire, etc., of people with large nest eggs and home ownership at an early age. But those are outliers. There are many opportunities to get rich if you are lucky and or smart enough to land them, like in tech or finance. But this is not much consolation for those who lack those attributes. By statistical certainty, most people cannot be exceptionally smart or talented.
The following site breaks down the living wage required for families of various sizes, and the wage of various industries.
I compared the living wage for my own family size with the average wage per industry and realized there were only 3 industries I could earn a living wage in, management, computers, or legal. Fortunately I have experience in the computer industry (surprise HN).
Let me spell it out. The following industries provide a below living wage, on average, for a single parent with one child: business & financial operations, architecture & engineering, life, physical, & social science, community & social service, education, training, & library, arts, design, entertainment, sports, & media, healthcare practitioners & technical, healthcare support, protective service, food preparation & serving related, building & grounds cleaning & maintenance, personal care & service, sales & related, office & administrative support, farming, fishing, & forestry, construction & extraction, installation, maintenance, & repair, production, transportation & material moving.
https://livingwage.mit.edu/ example: https://livingwage.mit.edu/states/49
My issue with "living wage" calculations is that they never compromise. I live in a county with great public transit. The living wage before taxes is listed as 61k for a single adult. Over 9k of that is allocated to transportation costs. Did I mention the great public transit? All of the buses are free.
Internet + mobile is 1500? Well gigabit fiber + mint mobile would run you 1200/year, so where is the extra 300 coming from?
American consumers are unwilling to tighten their belts for long term gains, and it shows. The comment you replied to mentioned r/FIRE - a lot of people on that subreddit don't have insane incomes, they just live well below their means.
This isn't to say it's not hard: it is. We live in a consumerist society and going against that is not easy. Having a low wage job is not easy. But saying the cost of living is as high as the livingwage site says is just not true. Their methodology is to obtain data from expenditure statistics - the problem is the average American is way too into consuming and spends beyond their means.
You make some good points.
I guess a "living wage" probably implies living an "normal" American life, which isn't maximally tightening the belt.
Even with good public transportation, driving saves a lot of time. The extra $300 probably comes from a combination of needing to buy a new phone and new computer periodically, hidden taxes and fees, and also it's reasonable to expect a "normal" living wage to include enough to cover at least 2 or 3 of the cheapest options--more than just one single bottom-of-the-barrel option.
Again, you make good points, and I agree some skepticism about their "living wage" numbers are justified. At least they break it down to give a glimpse into some of their logic.
The problem is that the "normal" American consumes greatly beyond their means. What I described isn't maximally tightening the belt, it's a very reasonable and satisfying way to live.
I don't have a car, I ride a bike, walk, or take public transit. In no way do I feel restricted in my daily life. I have a 6 year old iPhone that if you amortize would be $100/year (well under that extra 300).
A lot of Americans would consider no car and an old phone to be untenable. How would I get to work? You live closer to work. It's too expensive to live closer to work. Well is it once you get rid of your car(s)? There are genuinely going to be some areas of the country where this is not possible (living in proximity to work where a car is not needed). But those areas typically do not have a "cost of living crisis."
What about needing a laptop for the internet? There's $1000, and you need to upgrade every couple years. I spent $2000 to build a desktop myself 10 years ago; it still works well enough, it plays the games I like, but Windows wont support it anymore, it's end of life; there's $200 a year.
Again, "living" implies a little wiggle room and having access to more than just the one cheapest bottom-of-the-barrel option.
What if you lose your phone? You'll have to buy another. Can we include that potential expense in the budget? A "living" wage implies you're not set back for years because you lost one item.
The living wage calculation on that website does not constitute your last paragraph. I'd argue that not including a savings/retirement investment portion makes it a much worse number.
As for a computer, your desktop will work fine with Linux. A laptop doesn't need to cost 1000, again we are over consuming. If your hobby requires a computer, that would be from recreational expenses, not required technology spending.
Living has lots of wiggle room, but it starts with understanding what you actually NEED vs what you think you need, then wiggling from there. If you start with inflated base monthly expenses your true requirements become obscured.
I'm privileged. I don't actually know what a healthy retirement savings rate is because I'm certainly well above that in my own savings. But part of why I'm well above that is because I truly cut down on a lot of unneeded spending that I see many of my peers doing.
A living wage should allow recreation. Gaming is one of the cheapest forms of recreation.
You're also claiming average people should know how to install and use Linux, so I don't know if we can reach further agreement.
<By statistical certainty, most people cannot be exceptionally smart or talented.
These are words that most won't like to read or reply to, but are none the less true. After working with many people for many years, it became apparent that some of us are "smarter" then others. Through the fluke(?) of genetics/whatever of life, some can only attain a certain job status. A compassionate society and government must take this into consideration. We tend to label some as "lazy" who can't rise in economic status, but in many instances,they are doing the best they can.
Are they good? Sure you can go on vacation and drop some coin living lavishly, but if the rest of your friends and family are struggling to pay rent while you've FIREd, wouldn't you, oh I dunno, feel guilty? Wouldn't you rather not watch the world burn? Wouldn't you rather live in a world where you want to have kids and they'll have a future?
I think that also assumes that you're able to use that entire 6 figures for yourself. And that you're able to save in these HCOL places that the 6 figures are made. And/or that you're married.
Many of the people that I know in that 6 figure range (the "normal" 100-300ish range) are helping others. Family and the like.
It's also 3-4k for an apartment in many of the HCOL places. That's before food, transportation, and taxes.
And many people are doing it solo, not married.
I'm not saying 6 figure earners are to be pitied. I'm just saying that the money goes out the door just as quickly as it comes in.
Many of them are not married, and even then the wife works, and they have tons of savings anyway .
I've only known a "good" economy from about 1995-1999 when the internet went mainstream and for the briefest of moments, we got a taste of what public investment in tech feels like.
The powers that be quickly saw the danger in that and IMHO orchestrated the Dot Bomb, 9/11, the Housing Bubble, etc to keep as much money as possible out of public hands so that the average person wouldn't have the means to participate in the stock market.
Suze Orman told everyone to put their savings into Vanguard in the 2000s and they did. But since America chose to invest in McMansions and SUVs instead of moonshots and automation, Vanguard is now cannibalizing US real estate rather than making venture capital available to small businesses and startups in its insatiable hunger for profit. Along with countless other zero-sum game thinkers who choose to work within existing systems of control rather than pursuing innovations which could raise the median standard of living. This is why as America has been losing its empire status as holder of the world's reserve currency, it's been colonizing itself, particularly its young.
So that's my greatest disappointment with the present era. That we collectively chose to invest in private profit rather than shared prosperity.
Now, tons of people will complain that I'm oversimplifying and will kick and scream in resistance to what I'm saying. But at the end of the day, personal wealth represents wages withheld from workers. I don't know why we worship people who have reached positions of power and wealth, whose purpose for existing seems to be to withhold resources from everyone else.
Sincere question: Do you have thoughts as to how we can invest our $ if our goal is to support the "good economy" instead of attempting to ride the wave of the rich getting richer?
I would like to be part of the solution instead of contributing to the problem, but it is challenging to identify companies in which to invest without supporting the status quo.
I am not "rich," but wish I could better vote with what assets I do have.
Consider politicians like Graham Platner. Invest money, or even time, to help people who put working Americans ahead of the oligarchy get elected. If you're in Maine, even better, you can vote with your vote as well.
Importantly, pay attention to primary elections as well general elections.
Basically, don't invest through investment companies. They'll chase the big profits because that's what they're paid to do. Even "green" or "sustainable" funds might invest in pharmaceutical companies that produce treatments instead of cures, or psuedo-science companies chasing net-energy loss concepts like clean coal or hydrogen, for example.
Instead, invest in specific technologies and goals:
Avoid: People to emulate (these are merely breadcrumbs towards ways of thinking): See also: If I ever win the internet lottery, I'll work towards getting matching funds to tackle the biggest problems facing humanity:1) That starts with liberating all peoples from forced labor, exploitation and subjugation so that they can self-actualize. Which looks like freeing capital from "black holes" of concentrated wealth, specifically moneyed interests and wealthy individuals who hoard resources and choose to do none of what I've stated above, at great expense to the rest of humanity. That's done not through competition or direct confrontation, but by getting everyone "off the grid" to disrupt the supply and demand curve which always results in the wealth inequality and late-stage capitalism we see today when there isn't regulation.
2) Then also improving quality of life universally, so working towards providing free treatments for all conditions/illnesses/injuries across borders.
3) Then also promoting kindess, mindfulness, and other cultural movements which move us away from othering and back towards reconnection to foster the common good. This looks like a rejection of reason for its own sake, and replacing that with the pursuit of meaning. So deciding collectively that using electronic devices in public is impolite, ending surveillance capitalism, tearing down the economic walls which separate us from our neighbors, etc. So that we can once again gather in small communities that provide mutual aid, childcare and tool/resource sharing so that we aren't forced to take on so much individually for our basic survival.
I think it may be possible to recruit AI to do all of this holistically and rapidly shift into the reality that we may have envisioned for the 21st century, a bit like the rapid technological growth we saw during COVID-19, when the first vacation that billions of people ever had resulted in 10-20 years of innovation in just 1-2 years. That's the key, that getting real work done requires escaping the menial labor that extracts profit from the working class.
So that's what I would do: use AI to examine thousands of stocks to find which ones trend similarly and which one correlate inversely, and come up with a plan to start moving profit the opposite direction from where it's moved traditionally. Then invest that cashflow into countless underemployed people whose talents, dignity and divinity haven't been recruited yet effectively because they've only been put to use in the service of capital.
After sleeping on it, I realized that what I wrote is based on my perceptions and projections. Putting one's disposable income towards ego-based goals and expecting a return is no different than what billionaires do. So the most altruistic thing to do instead is to put resources into goals that are determined democratically, without expectation of recognition or reward.
In other words, pay our taxes. Help the poor. Be of service to others. I'm not sure that it's possible to be the change we wish to see in the world and also make a profit.
I know that flies in the face of western culture and philosophy. So I would propose that the cognitive dissonance we experience when we try to integrate the views of people who see everything that's wrong with the world and the views of people who are grateful for what is, stems from imbalance. Sitting with opposing viewpoints makes us uncomfortable because we're confronted with inconvenient truths that implicate us. Then our avoidance of accountability creates the systems of control which trap us in the never-ending cycle of endless work with nothing to show for it.
Some examples of that might be the pageantry of the British royal family that papers over the class war happening under its watch, the performative displays of strength put on by China to curtail clandestine shell games carried out by the US, and even our idolization of celebrities who dine on the backs of the proletariat while the world burns.
The best way to break the spell is to get educated. If you think that Jordan Peterson, Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman make a lot of sense, then try Scott Galloway, Margaret Atwood and John Keynes. Loosely: the former build walls, the latter tear them down.
What I've learned in my own life is that wrestling with tough decisions and making the hard calls creates shadows in our psyche. Our choices form an identity which cements attachments that connect to densities that lower our spiritual vibration. So the wealthiest and most powerful people who have gone to the greatest lengths to achieve their goals are the ones most separated from their souls.
Meaning that if we want to help the less fortunate and reduce suffering, we need to work on healing our leaders. They don't want to be healed though. But maybe they can be reminded.
I had the utmost respect for Elon Musk when he was sleeping in his car to get real work done. But when he used his power and influence to dismantle the federal government through DOGE and cut aid that could result in millions of deaths worldwide ..not so much. When he arguably got the first reusable rocket into orbit with SpaceX, great! When he ignored the concerns of astronomers to fast track Starlink without bothering to give the satellites an anti-reflective coating, boo! It's not him I'm disappointed with, but his choices and lack of empathy when it counted.
The blind pursuit of efficiency creates injustice, and the refusal to rectify it creates intolerance. I think we've lost sight of what evil is because we've tied our identities to an immutable past which doesn't actually exist, because there's only now. I'm reminded of the quick and easy path in Star Wars, and when the Oracle in The Matrix said that we can never see past the choices we don't understand.
If we keep viewing the world through duality, with black and white thinking, good vs bad, us vs them, then we'll merely be custodians cleaning up the mistakes of the uber rich.
I think what I'm trying to say is that if we envision a better world and embody our dreams now, then we'll manifest a new timeline that escapes the will of people who would subjugate us.
What that means as far as where you place your energy is up to you. Imagine that!
> Vanguard is now cannibalizing US real estate rather than making venture capital available to small businesses and startups in its insatiable hunger for profit.
I'm not sure you understand what Vanguard does. They are not an investment bank nor a VC firm. They run mutual funds and ETFs, so the assets that "Vanguard" owns are owned by the fund holders (in fact in the case of Vanguard, the fund holders also own Vanguard itself).
It doesn't seem like this is strictly a contradiction. It could easily be smoke and mirrors if the end result is the same.
[flagged]
Huh? Where did he attack the middle-class?
I live in a community full of high-achieving GenZ who did 4-7 AP courses, studied their butts off for the SAT, got into good universities....only to not find any jobs when they graduate with STEM degrees. A dozen neighbors' kids have been asking me for zero-salary jobs just to get experience.
For any current students reading this, it's entirely doable to finish your program with real experience and connections under your belt. Not just with internships, but TA, research, and student org leadership experience absolutely count too. There are tons of overlooked low-stakes zero-experience opportunities available only to university students, and it's really useful to develop the habit of identifying and pursuing those.
Who's hiring even those people?
When I was an undergrad researcher back during the height of the Great Financial Crisis, I had a handful of internship and full-time offers at various national labs and similar orgs thanks to my supervisor tipping me off about those opportunities and making introductions on my behalf.
When you participate in things beyond your classes, you get an "in" on certain paths unavailable to other folks. You're not any smarter than your peers, but having that initiative lets you avoid competing with them directly. My particular path is just one of many.
> When I was an undergrad researcher back during the height of the Great Financial Crisis,
Keep in mind that was 17 years ago, how do you know the job market is at all the same now?
What's fundamentally different that initiative and strategically picking your battles are no longer applicable?
I'm on the other side of the hiring table now. I proactively look for students that exhibit these traits. I'm not the only one.
[dead]
[dead]
Do not go to college if you have to spend any money on it. If you do that's everyone telling that you don't belong there and you'll have a hard life if you ignore them.
This is a take that maybe makes sense for wealthy children or the upper middle class?
I paid for school (admittedly not that much, I stayed in state and lived in relatively poor accommodations). I’m also the only one of my siblings to not be a felon or dead before 45. Life is often a game of deltas: given the same or similar starting conditions, where did you wind up?
If you keep making delta positive outcomes, eventually you’ll wind up somewhere interesting.
> Do not go to college if you have to spend any money on it.
I cannot think of a single person in my extended family across three generations for whom that heuristic is true. I don’t doubt that it applies in some situations. I can’t tell you what the actual ROI is; but “belonging there” seems a little encumbered by assumptions about the diversity of ways and timings in which young people develop academically and emotionally.
> Do not go to college if you have to spend any money on it.
“If your family isn’t well-off or you didn’t work hard enough in high school to get any scholarships, college isn’t for you” is certainly an interesting take, and it seems like a much too simplistic heuristic.
If your parents are paying for it that's still spending money on it.
Pretty much all of the good stuff I've done in my life have resulted from going off the beaten path. AP courses and SAT scores are the core of the beaten path, so everyone is competing for the same stuff. But the world is big, actually, and there's incredible opportunities for meaningful work once you start looking around more broadly. These sorts of jobs aren't necessarily "stable" employment, but I've never once felt precarious. Rather, I find that doing meaningful work with concrete impact tends to create more opportunities dynamically - if you can demonstrate that you get shit done, people will want your help getting their shit done. And if the work you choose is meaningful, it is very easy to make the case that you've done good and important things.
Capitalism allows trading money for solutions to problems: The massive problem in this system is that people and groups with less money end up with a surplus of problems. There are schools that need help with their tech stacks. There are legal aid groups who need better ways to process massive amounts of text. There are kids all over the world who need better ways to learn math, languages, etc. Plugging in and helping people solve their concrete problems is IMHO the best way to get started.
While I agree with you on everything, this doesnt really work for everyone
1. It requires a level of maturity and wisdom most recent graduates do not have (I certainly didn't have this when I graduated). Despite all my entrepreneurship courses in college, working at a dot-com startup, etc, I wouldn't have been able to do this out of college.
2. Not everyone is going to be enterprising. Historically, we've provided a path forward to smart people who just want a line job, not start/sell a business
So when did you graduate?
Your CV indicates you graduated in 2006, so effectively into a different world. You should consider carefully how the world has changed for young people entering the workforce before dispensing advice, because they find themselves in a very different landscape to you and advice like "Plugging in and helping people solve their concrete problems is IMHO the best way to get started" is trite and frankly insulting.
Sorry you feel insulted.
Lemme try to put it another way, because I am suggesting a different way to think about the idea of work, which /also/ was not the dominant way of thinking about things when I was a student. The notion that you go get credentials in order to get a job standing in a spot and doing a thing and get paid is... perhaps fine, for the trades. But, as I mentioned above, the beaten path is saturated, and you will find yourself in what is essentially a lottery system. (Perhaps most of what has changed since 2006 is that the odds of the lottery have gotten worse...)
Alternatively, you can think of yourself as a problem-solver for hire. You might be more or less specialized as a problem solver, but ultimately, you're asking someone to pay you money in exchange for regularly engaging in creative problem solving to make their business/NGO/whatever run better. Plenty of people come out of school or whatever and have no problem solving ability. And some people create more problems than they solve.
How do you prove that you're worth hiring then? With a portfolio of problems that you have successfully solved. How do you get that portfolio? By plugging into some area you're interested in and solving people's concrete problems.
You note "the beaten path is saturated" - how do you reconcile that with two facts:
1. Fact 1: There is unusually high unemployment rate for new STEM graduates, including those with advanced degrees like MS and PhDs
2. Fact 2: Our politicians and business leaders are noting there is a "massive shortage of workers in STEM" and thus we need to import hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to meet the demand.
How can both be true and in line with your position?
These are perfectly consistent with what I'm saying. There is a market for labor, and if what you're selling is your credentials, you're in a flooded commodity market and will have a bad time.
Fact one says, yes, the beaten path is saturated. Fact two says that business leaders and politicians will happily look for the cheapest variety of the commodity available to them.
My point ultimately is that you'll have a better time if you don't act like a commodity.
> Lemme try to put it another way, because I am suggesting a different way to think about the idea of work, which /also/ was not the dominant way of thinking about things when I was a student.
You don't need to restate your point. I understood and it's what's trite and insulting to new grads.
> Alternatively, you can think of yourself as a problem-solver for hire.
This isn't the alternative and hasn't been for a decade. It's absolutely mainstream thinking among students and new grads that the traditional career is dead and that they need to take alternative routes, one of the most common being to present themselves as "problem-solvers for hire", with personal brands, turning friends into networks, etc.
It's so common it's a trope, and of course the market of businesses who need problem-solvers for hire is absolutely saturated. It's a segment exploited by employers for cheap labour and terrible opportunities for progression as you're competing against so many people, many in LCOL areas.
So after their entire youth being told the same thing you're saying by podcasters, influencers, slightly older peers, etc and then arriving into a labour market which is absolutely barren, your advice is trite and it is insulting.
It's even worse than when challenged, you assume I must not get your profound advice and choose to reiterate it, instead of reflection on the possibility that the world and opportunities you enjoyed 20 years ago simply don't exist any more. Not that there aren't other opportunities.
> But, as I mentioned above, the beaten path is saturated, and you will find yourself in what is essentially a lottery system.
The irony of this comment.
> By plugging into some area you're interested in and solving people's concrete problems.
Yes, you and literally everyone else. It's almost ridiculous how out-of-touch this is.
> perhaps fine, for the trades.
As an aside, this is an absurdly arrogant comment.
More than half of STEM grads with careers don’t have a career in STEM.
Don't have, or didn't start with one?
And here I am - an ancient history grad with a career in STEM. Life is odd.
But they still will be faring better than others though. I am sure STEM grads are doing better than law school grads or humanities grads. But graduating in STEM in 2009-2010 would have been awesome. right at the takeoff of a decade-long economic expansion and tech boom. It was much easier to be hired
> But graduating in STEM in 2009-2010 would have been awesome. right at the takeoff of a decade-long economic expansion and tech boom. It was much easier to be hired
The S is STEM is pretty broad and includes many fields that have nothing to do with "tech". I graduated with a science degree in 2009-2010 and it was fucking awful. The only job I could find was at the University I went to and it paid like $5/hr above minimum wage. I left the field entirely pretty quickly.
> The S is STEM is pretty broad and includes many fields that have nothing to do with "tech".
Given that the T" is "Technology" I should hope so. Likewise the "E" and "M" are broad and include many fields that have nothing to do with "tech".
Why better than law school grads?
Why didn't they take an internship or co-op or some other job?
FWIW, as a hiring manager, I'd almost always pick a new graduate with co-op experience over somebody without it (all else being roughly equal).
We have flooded the STEM market with foreign workers. Sometimes we don't even give the foreign workers real jobs, we pretend they are "grad students" and pay them a pittance doing high level science at the universities. I generally like all the foreign folks I've worked with, but they are definitely suppressing the wages of natives to an insane degree.
You could just as easily argue that we simply aren't creating enough jobs to make use of the labor force, which traditionally has been a very dangerous place for an empire—especially the core—to be in.
The US is quickly becoming something else than the core of the global economy. The signs have been there already: advanced chips are done somewhere else, manufacturing in general is done in other places as well. What we see now is the biggest companies hiring in other countries like India and employing AI instead of workers. The US population is becoming less and less relevant.
I agree the empire is in a very dangerous place because it has expanded the labor force more rapidly than it has expanded supply of jobs. This is an existential risk to the empire.
[flagged]
The elites have put themselves in a position where the two main options are the sentiment above or Luigi Mangione. It honestly scares me a bit what's coming.
It no longer scares me, it gives me a lot of hope and I think most people my age and younger feel similarly.
> If the foreigners were positively contributing to the economy their economic output would create jobs as well.
They do—actually, by a massive margin compared to citizens born here—we just don't have the legal immigration framework set up to support this.
EDIT: I was unaware a "debate" was even happening, I was just clarifying that immigrants start businesses at a massively higher rate than birthright citizens do.
[flagged]
[flagged]
That's certainly a... very specific perspective, can you share where you're coming from?
[flagged]
How many of them are real? Some of them have been posting the same position every month.
Out of those that are real, how many of them are completely out of touch with what they're asking for? Whether low salary, unrealistic expectations regarding experience/skills, etc?
Out of those that pass the above filter, how many of them have unrealistic application requirements such as tech tests, etc?
And so on. Hiring is a market for lemons, with scammers on both sides.
How many of those are true entry level (degree but no relevant job experience yet) and either remote or local to these people?
Even with experience I have found applying to full remote jobs to be difficult these days, they are generally voids that thousands of resumes get submitted to and you'll never even know if yours was looked at.
I've had better luck via networking and recruiters with jobs that are asking for at least occasional in-person visits which means that the city / metro area you live in remains very important to your ability to land a job.
For those who have no experience, one can gain experience while in college:
1. contribute to a significant open source project
2. write some significant work of software
3. design and build your own computer
4. build a robot something
5. work as an intern in industry
6. do work as a research assistant
When I was at Caltech, students did (entirely on their own):
1. built a gas powered helicopter from scratch
2. built a tracked robot with an arm and a manipulator
3. built an electronic synthesizer
4. built a functioning railroad that ran through the dorm
5. many built a single board computer for their own use
6. designed and built the campus radio station
7. one fellow designed, built, and sold custom speakers in the student workshop. After graduating, he turned it into a real business and made a fortune
and so on. In other words, turn yourself into someone useful to a company.
You gotta realize that "experience" refers to "professional" or "commercial" experience, i.e. you gain experience by having the status of an employee at a company and having relevant job title.
No, I don't gotta realize that. I'd be impressed by a resume with such accomplishments.
Being impressed by accomplishments listed in a resume requires actually looking at a resume, which most recruiters don't do ;) And even if they do, and even if the recruiter is impressed, they look for X number of years, not for accomplishments.
I think you're right that it did used to work that way but now all the juniors are competing with people like me who have done all of that and also have five years of professional experience at large companies.
I don't know you, so I will speculate that something else is going on. There are a lot of ways to not get hired.
For example, one guy I interviewed spent all his time asking about what benefits he was going to get. He had no interest whatsoever in what he'd be doing, and what the company was doing. No hire.
Unfortunately, such is commonplace. This gives the savvy interviewee an advantage - approach the interview from the employer's point of view. Save your questions about how much vacation you'll get until after the employer has decided to hire you.
Oh you're a recruiter? I am curious about something, I hope you can share what you think: is it a red flag when the candidate doesn't ask questions during interview? I often don't have questions because I have a good enough idea of the company and of what I will be doing already, so I don't ask that kind of questions, and I also don't ask about benefits because I don't really care. Is this seen as bad?
I'm not a recruiter, but I'm friends with one.
Showing interest in the company is very helpful. Asking questions like how does the company make money, what is their criteria for a successful employee, what does the division you're applying for contribute to the success of the company, what kind of person are they looking for, and so on.
First of all I don't think you should be surprised that pay is the most interesting thing to potential employees? That is the entire reason they're tolerating you. If I just want to work on interesting things you would only get in the way.
Secondly, yeah, I'm not like that. I've got three or so side projects (I guess they're just projects now) I'm actively working on and have been building things with my teens. It doesn't matter anymore socially, like everything else in the US your counterpart just never shows up.
> First of all I don't think you should be surprised that pay is the most interesting thing to potential employees?
That wasn't my point. My point was the candidate should show interest in the company.
After all, if you're buying a car, does the car salesman sell you on the commission he's going to make?
I tend to agree with you more often than not but in this case, that's not very realistic. The caliber of students and the opportunities available at CalTech are head and shoulders above those at the average college with a CS program.
Most colleges have shops and facilities for students to make their own projects. All it takes is interest and get-up-and-go from the students.
BTW, Caltech places emphasis on get-up-and-go in their student selections. I was a marginal candidate, and I found out years later that my projects I worked on in my spare time made the difference. I was always building things in the garage and in the high school shop. (But I didn't tell them about the flame thrower I made from a lawnmower.)
Search for senior vs junior and you'll see 126 vs 7. Experience.
I think the gap between what the companies looking for and what the individuals has to offer is increasing.
When a company advertises a role, they are increasingly looking for someone who either has done the same exact job in the exact specific niche with proven success for a number of years, or an absolute super star who would excel at anything thrown at them.
Most people are neither, so matches are exceedingly rare.
Yes, companies expectations are off the charts. I only wish these companies will go broke soon, so they learn to hire real people to do real jobs.
How many of those jobs are for people with 0 experience?
What about internships? Are those people at good universities not doing internships, or do internships not count as experience? Don't companies hire interns?
Sample of 1... we hire interns across our organization every summer. HR, marketing, engineering, etc. And across our locations (US, India, Mexico). We make full-time offers to a decent number of them (not a majority, but more than a few).
And as a manager, I'd absolutely lean towards a recent graduate with some experience over no experience. My "success rate" for grads who have co-op experience (full-time job, often delays graduation by a semester or year) is the highest. Next would be those that had long-term part-time employment (university IT office, etc). Then basic internships. And last, no experience at all - and the "success rate" on them has been low enough I probably wouldn't chance hiring another one.
Companies ask for several years of experience, internships don't count even as one year...
Pro tip: do an internship and round to one year
While the Who's Hiring thread does indeed have ~200 roles, the vast majority of individuals face hiring requirements like:
- Must have 10 years experience with ChatGPT and 20 years experience in PyTorch.
- Entry level
- Must be willing to relocate to a red state in the US and work under the table
- Must be willing to take the fall for our mishandling of data
Frequently people want experience. The new grads are facing a bleak reality with AI and offshoring.
Correct if I'm wrong, but from what I observe, lots of job postings have "new grads ok"
I only saw 3 jobs mentioning new grad (or recent grad) on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45093192
maybe I missed a few because I'm not a new grad and I'm happy at my current companyIf you go to workatastartup.com and select experience 0-1 years, you'll see, coincidentally with the previous number I wrote, about 200 results. Is there something wrong with them? Genuine question, because I tried applying and never got a response.
Those postings get flooded with applicants, many of them not new grads. New grads are competing with experienced people just to get a foot in the door. Both of those groups have to compete with an AI-generated flood of grifters and scammers and a AI-driven resume filter judging them on whether they match the AI-generated criteria for getting the AI-generated posting which was created because some middle manager wanted to get his nephew a job.
When we had a role open (also a YC company) we had iirc about 400 applicants, we narrowed down to the 50 that were legal to work in the UK, and then interviewed about 20 of those.
Anyway, if all of those people applied to each of the companies in who's hiring, and got hired, the unemployment rate for this subset of applicants would still be 50%. And this was for a junior role as well.
That seems normal. My friends and I did the exact same thing w. top grades and top schools 2 decades ago, turns out life is not a easy ride.
On the flip side, back in the 70's Boeing used to do things like hire up people with no immediate experience, teach them C for three months, and then hire them into roles as programmers. I'm not sure you can decide what's "normal" based on what was happening two decades ago. Two decades ago, we were smack between two big economic crashes. And all this depends so, so much on geographic locale.
Yeah my mentor and a very talented engineer got his start as the QA guy in the 80s. He was hired out of high school because he delivered newspapers to someone's house that worked there.
Nowadays you've gotta be chair of your local Mensa organization to get a zero experience internship
>> 70's Boeing used to do things like hire up people with no immediate experience, teach them C for three months, and then hire them into roles as programmers
In the 70's we didnt have NAFTA, so you couldnt just send the jobs to Mexico
In the 70's we didnt have the H1B program, where you could have a permanent "shortage of workers" and re-direct jobs to immigrants
In the 70's we didnt have Zoom, so you couldnt just send the jobs offshore
Companies found a better and cheaper way to short circuit this, just hire H1B’s and slog them till they get their green cards(which is forever).
That’s one of the biggest shortcomings of H1B program. (Even though I do support H1B’s and I do think they are good for country long term)
The 70's isn't really a fair comparison because PC's did not exist yet. Thus, it was very rare to find programmers with experience anywhere.
Why not? At any point in time since then there have been new technologies that don't exist. As a company, you can always make the call to hire people without that specific experience and train them, or you can punt and wait for a 3rd party to do the training for you. Clearly, companies have by and large settled on the latter, but IMO it's unclear there's actually a good argument for it.
I got out of school in the mid 90's, and had three good job offers to choose from within a month of graduating. It wasn't because I was special, as most of my friends had similar experiences. It just matters what kind of job market you happen to graduate into.
Appropriate username, given this sentiment.
Isn’t this a bit obvious? I mean I’ve known this since I started working in 1997. The first job you have generally shatters this illusion that job security and economic gains are tied to “hard work”.
In the sense hard work is needed but only if you see if adding to what you consider a quality of life (which could be economic gain, generational wealth, bragging rights to a promotion, etc.). Each person has their criteria.
If you work in corporate America, hard work isn’t going to save you from layoffs or get you a bigger bonus unless that work is tied to making someone high up in your reporting chain look really good.
The current American system is premised on people buying into this. If people don't there is no societal foundation which probably leads to societal change. It's like the one societal contract we have (had). Not society helps you, not society puts a roof on your head. Not we're in a society together, so when you get sick we help out. Purely just 'if you work hard, you will be rewarded, and the rewards will take care of the things our social model doesn't'.
To show that this isn't exclusive to USA - I heard that in Japan nowadays workers can't rely on their megacorp to provide them predictable work position and can be fired regardless of their tenure. This is all after being told for decades that megacorp is literally their family and they should dedicate their whole time to it.
As you say, it's obvious to pretty much anyone who's ever worked a day in their life but, at the same time, culturally we pretend otherwise. Guys like Musk or Bloomberg talk about working 90 hour weeks and sleeping under their desks. We still want the cultural myth of hard work = success, whatever the reality is, because this allows those who've achieved economic gain to feel better about themselves.
It's a cultural and messaging issue, you have to tear down the illusion and performance art. Bloomberg is 83, Jamie Dimon is 69, these folks holding court age out eventually. The work is in pushing the Overton window over time about the meaning, purpose, and value of work, as well as how it is performed. "What does the data show? What matters?"
(I exclude Musk in my example because his cult of personality is on a different level than the usual work effort cult pushed by the usual business suspects).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_fallacy
Where in corporate America have you worked? At my previous place, there was a well defined career ladder, and what work was necessary to climb it as an individual contributor (vs a manager). Putting in more work meant climbing that ladder, which lead to pay increases and bonuses, and there was a formula somewhere on Confluence as to how those were calculated.
Where in corporate America are you working where "hard work" and not "sucking up" is translating to climbing said ladder?
[flagged]
Comments like this are why I stopped going on reddit.
You're in a meeting. A task comes up. Do you volunteer to do it? Taking on the task is additional work. It is also "sucking up". If you don't want to do something, and then make fun of the people that actually want to get things done and call them names, instead of, y'know, choosing to take on additional work, it's easy to believe that hard work doesn't get you anywhere, because you've chosen to divide things to do at work into "real" work, and "sucking up". There's not really a difference, but in one scenario you think you're better than the other person.
People like it when you do things for them. If you suck up all the work you can do at your job, in my version of corporate America I've experienced, you get promoted.
People are paid to create value . Hard work is not enough. This seems obvious enough.
> Isn’t this a bit obvious?
I thought the same thing as I left the church, but it's so ingrained in many people in ways they don't even realize.
Another commenter mentions the "just world fallacy," which I agree drives this sentiment directly: if you work hard, you get good things. If you got bad things, it's because you didn't work hard (enough).
There's lots of feedback loops that perpetuate this: survivorship bias, historic wealth (ye olde boomer-bought-a-house-on-a-single-factory-salary), startup CEOs. I find the description of the American poor who don't see themselves as poor but as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" to be incredibly true.
Additionally, in many cases the people who're the most affected have the least resources to make themselves heard, the classic "rich people don't have the same 24 hours a day as the rest of us."
So, yeah, to a degree it should be obvious to anyone who goes looking, but there's so many sociological effects layered on top of each other that make it counterintuitive to someone for whom the system is working well.
The poll is more interesting than the article: https://prod-i.a.dj.com/public/resources/documents/WSJNORCJu...
37% of people in the survey are unemployed. That is very high. Not at all representative of the general population (4 to 5%).
69% live in a home they or someone in their household owns.
That sounds a lot like young adults yet to get off their feet.
More interesting things:
- opinion on economy and own financial health has improved over the past 3 years
- the opinion on the American dream is actually quite stable over the past several years. There is a slight negative trend. You could write the same article 3 years ago.
>> 37% of people in the survey are unemployed. That is very high. Not at all representative of the general population (4 to 5%).
I think the confusion here is the definition of various BLS metrics on unemployment. If I have a STEM degree, for example, but was working as a cashier -- I wouldnt officially be considered unemployed. In practical terms, many of these individuals would label themselves as unemployed, as they may be seeking work aligned to their aspirations/degrees/years-of-training. Same for gig work, Uber driving, Door Dashing, Amazon deliveries, etc.
Also, once you are unemployed/underemployed for long enough, it gets treated as "structural unemployment" and doesn't get counted, hence the 4-5% figure you are citing.
I have friends' parents who were used to making 50k, 60k, or more. They dont have the same opportunities and now might be faced with making much less, often without benefits. In one case, I knew someone who was offered 35k p/t without benefits (thus, they would then just sink 20k of that into healthcare.) They did the math and the 35k was a net negative considering having to pay for healthcare, transportation to work, etc. Instead they just stayed unemployed. That isnt counted as unemployment, hence the 4-5% figure you are citing.
U6 is ~8%.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
It is important to note that retired people are not employed. 31% of respondents were 60+ years old. Some chunk of the 18-29 year olds were likely full time students. There are also other people who can't or don't need to work.
4-5% unemployment rate captures something different from "do you have a job right now, yes/no?". There are also different "unemployment rates" that mean different things.
FWIW, adults might live in homes owned by their spouse or child. It doesn't necessarily point to children living their parent's home.
4% unemployment could mean 37% jobless rate since 4% means "recently worked and wants to work again and is looking for a job but hasn't found one yet"
But no reason 37% of people randomly asked, who are not currently working, would necessarily fit those criteria
Thanks for the information. So unemployed != unemployed.
In any case it doesnt really change anything 37% unemployed and 69% living in a home they or someone in their household owns sounds like a lot of young people who havent left the nest.
> Thanks for the information. So unemployed != unemployed.
Your snark aside, actually yes, that is correct. The unemployment rate you cite is the UNRATE, or U-3. It explicitly only counts people over 16 years of age who reside in the fifty states or DC, who aren’t institutionalized, and not on Active Duty in the military.
Looking at other data sets fills in the picture further. U-6 adds in part-time workers seeking full-time employment and people intermittently employed, which bumps that figure to 7.9%. Looking at the length of unemployment shows a jump from 20 weeks to 24.1 weeks in the span of a year, a pretty significant jump considering “how well the economy is doing”.
But let’s take the second part of your rebuttal - that the results may be skewed towards younger people who still live at home.
I want you to try and think about N-order repercussions of that, if true. If 2 in 5 are unemployed and 3 of 4 live at home, then doesn’t that seem alarming? Shouldn’t young people be the most employed demographic across a wider assortment of roles and industries? Shouldn’t their jobs be paying enough to at least share an apartment with someone else? If your assessment is correct, then the correct reaction should be panic and fear over what that might mean for the wider economy, not belittling the demographic who is suffering under its present effects.
It's not snark. The survey uses the term "unemployed" but it is a different metric than the "unemployed" metric.
>But let’s take the second part of your rebuttal - that the results may be skewed towards younger people who still live at home.
Are we in an argument? I wasnt really rebutting anything. I was clarifying my original comment. Even after the clarification that it's not apples to apples, the intersection of 69% living in a home and 37% being unemployed is pretty striking.
>If your assessment is correct, then the correct reaction should be panic and fear over what that might mean for the wider economy, not belittling the demographic
Where am I belittling anyone?
The survey uses the term "unemployed" but it is a different metric than the "unemployed" metric.
I'm looking at the pdf you linked. I did a ctrl+f and couldn't find anything for "unemployed". I then searched for "employ" (in case there is some OCR bug) and the only hits I got were on a table that says "employment status" and the responses are "employed" or "not employed".
Can you point out where the survey uses the term "unemployed"?
It seems like you might have got the causation a little reversed. "Leaving the nest" is hard to do when you can't find a job to pay rent with.
Elaborate. What causation did I posit?
It seems like you are defending against something I did not say. I would agree 100% that if you cant find a job its hard to move out of your parents house.
Ah, perhaps I read you wrong. I got the sense that you thought that these people were unemployed, and depressed about their economic future, because they were "failure to launch" kids.
The poll is conducted on the internet. Busy people are less likely to fill out surveys and are more likely to believe that hard work leads to economic gains.
Note that the data are not reported raw, though. While the sample does not match the population, it is post-stratified and weighted to reflect the US population. (See the last two pages of your link for the study methodology.)
No that's close to the compliment of the male labor participation rate. 4-5% is only the people who have lost their jobs in the past six months and are actively looking for another one.
I have not read the whole of "Capital in 21st Century", just the opening chapter. But the picture the chapter painted was quiet grim - income inequality growing rapidly every year as "innovation" and jobs declined. In other words Piketty's numbers have shown that one cannot work their way to a comfortable living years ago and IMO this is at the heart of almost all political processes these days - inability to earn a living wage. The "leaders" use a whole range of tactics to divert the discontent onto other things like big government or immigration, and those are important topics, but they are not _the_ problem. Wage stagnation is the ultimate issue.
> big government
Is indeed an issue, as it corresponds with the malaise you describe.
> wage stagnation
is in part due to the government increasing the costs of hiring people. That indirectly results in correspondingly lower wages. The so-called "employers' contribution" is a misrepresentation.
> government increasing the costs of hiring people
This is lazy thinking. If the government is indeed increasing costs, this is happening to everyone across the board. So why would anyone in particular be affected by this? It could even be true in a situation where profits were falling across the economy, but the numbers show that profits are INCREASING for most companies in the US at least. So how can these companies justify that it is the government forcing them to hire less people if they have more money every year?
> If the government is indeed increasing costs
If? It's a certainty. For starters, the only reason HR departments exist is to try to comply with all the regulations. HR departments are expensive. For seconds, all the "employer contributions" to payroll taxes. Then there are all the wage laws, and mandatory this, and mandated that.
All increase costs of employing people, which comes out of the employees' pockets one way or another.
Profits do not drive employment. What drives employment is the employee provides more value than they cost to hire.
As I said above, everyone is subjected to the same work regulations, so it becomes a moot point. It is a form of tax, so that is not an issue that affects a single employer. And it doesn't come from "employer pockets" any more than the cost of raw materials. Every business owner treats the cost of raw materials with all taxes as a given, but then when it comes to workers they whine as if it was the end of the world. It only shows they're whining and frankly annoying people.
> And it doesn't come from "employer pockets" any more than the cost of raw materials.
Yes, it does, because what the employer cares about is the cost of having the employee vs the value that the employee delivers. Cost of raw materials is not relevant.
> they whine
I recommend you start a business and test your theories!
I am not going to say that I have the data but from what I remember that was not identified as one of the causative concerns in the book.
Subjectively I doubt that that is a systematic driver of income inequality. For example in 60s the taxes in the higher margins were extremely high (80% I think?) and worker bargaining power was strong. Yet it was a period of unprecedented growth and innovation, one where ideas of invisible hand and tide that lifts all boats were forged but in reality it was not a laissez-fair period at all.
Piketty neglecting a major component of income doesn't auger well for the rest of his analysis.
You think the greed of billionaires is the governments’ fault?
Everybody's greedy, Malcolm. It's why markets function.
Details on page 10 here:
https://prod-i.a.dj.com/public/resources/documents/WSJNORCJu...
Including previous values:
25% July 2025
29% July 2024
28% March 2023
27% May 2022
Interesting other measurement:
Neither agree nor disagree: 32% 24% 28% 27%
So... not really much change over the past 3 years.
The article may be referring to page 14, actually.
The question on page 14 is "Do you think the American Dream--that if you work hard you'll get ahead--still holds true, never held true, or once held true but does not anymore?
And the results are (from 2023 to 2025):
Still holds true: 36, 34, 31 (downward trend)
Never held true: 18, 17, 23 (upward trend)
Once held true but not anymore: 45, 49, 46 (mixed trend)
Yeah that was my take-away as well. It was like the least significant result in the report lol
The difference in opinion on the economy was more significant. But it went the other direction (positive) so I guess they couldn't use that.
This is all unreproducible and non scientific internet adbased polling. It's worth dismissing.
Its a report on how people feel. It measures how people say they feel. It's limited in usefulness but not worthless. Id just hazard against reading too much into it.
It's a report on how some internet survey participants feel but it is in no way reproducible or representative of the U.S. population as a whole.
Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/economy/wsj-norc-economic-poll-73bce003?...
I think the problem is the loss of the middle class. The ones on top getting a lot of the resources while the rest have to fight for whatever is left. It doesn't matter how hard or how smart you work.
I think you sum up the type of despair people feel pretty well.
It's really more helpful to look at "middle class or better." Because yes, the middle class has shrunk. But more of that share went to the UPPER income tiers.
The middle class went from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2023. But the lower income brackets saw a +3% change while upper saw +8%.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/economy/the-incredible...
>The ones on top getting a lot of the resources while the rest have to fight for whatever is left.
There simply is not a static pool of resources.
> There simply is not a static pool of resources.
Economists and rich people indeed think in terms of scarce resources. Any economics book will tell you that it is about managing scarce resources. Rich people will never allow for example the government to give increasingly more money and resources to lower income people, because they fear there's note enough for them. They don't believe in abundance for everyone.
Scarce yes.
Static, no.
If it's not static and it grows, then it cannot be scarce, unless you have a group that is always taking more of existing resources.
>If it's not static and it grows, then it cannot be scarce
Elaborate? Scarcity means demand for the resources exceeds the available supply. There is essentially unlimited human wants and only finite resources. The resource quantity can grow but it will never meet demand. Even if all growth goes to the people with less resources, the resources will still be scarce.
We still have a middle class, it just starts at a net worth of about 20 million. and Upper class starts at around a billion now.
Being "middle class" is a mindset, not a category of wealth. It's something of an anachronism from when there were two distinct classes: nobility/clergy, and the peasants. The middle class, the bourgeoisie (because they lived it towns, bourgs) didn't fit into either existing class. One can be wealthy or poor and still be middle class. Social conformity, infinitely expandable material demand, and emphasis on external, impersonal values are the hallmarks of this mindset.
When I was in Kolkata two and a half years ago, I saw a young man wearing a jacket with a slogan on the back.
In large letters, it said "The more you LEARN, the more you EARN."
That would be so out of place in midwest USA, where cynicism is rampant and young people believe they have no control over their own outcomes.
I wish I had taken a picture of that jacket.
> That would be so out of place in midwest USA, where cynicism is rampant
Well yeah, the Midwest USA is full of drastically under-employed individuals holding advanced degrees who still can't find any decent work, and yet still have to pay $2,000/month rental costs, while also paying back $100k to $200k+ student loans for all that "more learning" they did.
I think much of HN still thinks of "college grads" as entering a market similar to how they had it back in 2002 - 2010. But it's 2025, the market is far far less forgiving on the low end than it used to be.
Midwest is particularly rough especially rust belt cities. I could already see the writing on the wall when I got out decades ago. Now the coasts feel like the Midwest did back then. A sense of "who cares?"
https://archive.ph/wMPIK
We need more startups that are creating durable business that employ a lot of people. Unicorns mostly blow up, and the few that succeed typically are not big or stable employers. How about funding more “lifestyle” companies that aspire to be in business for the long haul, not hunting for the exit on day one.
Obviously this is one of many diverse factors at work - but potential YC founders: the comments section here suggests that there is a lot of great human talent available in the market today.
It is too bad. In recent years working "smarter" has outperformed working harder, but you always needed both. You get good grades in school, and be strategic about which major or career to choose. And of course there is plenty of luck involved. But with AI, who knows what to do. It is harder to be strategic because no one can predict how this will change the economy.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ comes to mind.
Hard work never lead to economic gains, working hard at creating value does, and that is still true today. If the adage was true, dragging rocks up a hill 18 hrs a day would make you billionaire.
The knife in the side of the economy is housing costs. If that were to drop by 50% tomorrow, you would find that suddenly tons of people are happy with the pay the receive for the value they create. People forget (or are simply unaware) that each dollar you take off from rent/mortgage is effectively a dollar raise from your work.
> working hard at creating value does
"Creating value" is such a subjective phrase. Societal value? Fiscal value?
Someone who drives around your city for 12 hours, rescuing and resuscitating people in life-or-death situations probably provides more societal value than a software engineer who builds CRM features for large social companies but we all know which one gets paid more and who is considered "more successful."
Maybe the problem is exactly that people are rewarded based on this other type of value, and that it is increasingly hard to define it, and be the one to provide it.
The parent is pointing out that the labor theory of value is nonsense. How much something is worth is totally unrelated to how hard or how long someone worked on it.
> working hard at creating value does, and that is still true today
This is the point that the parent was making. How you define "value" is the topic of discussion here, which in my opinion has become so abstract that it's impossible become successful around. Investors make money on failing businesses, software engineers make money on products that never monetize, top AI researchers make millions working for 2 weeks at one company doing training modules before moving to another.
In the modern economy, money is made by ideas, concepts, potentials. Not value.
Value is something that motivates people to do work (that creates value). It's like bartering (I'll fix your car if you mow my yard), but currency makes work fungible (I'll fix your car for $80, and then pay another guy $80 to mow the yard). Key to this is understanding that someone might be willing to cut the yard for $75, and someone else might do it for $60. Probably no one for $20 though.
Speculation, which you lean heavily on in your example, is essentially just gambling. (I'll get my driveway fixed up for $120, and -educated guess- it allows me to fix two cars for $80 each).
Value is found by everyone voting with their currency units on what the value of any given thing is.
99% of the time when you are confused about why something has low value, or why something has high value, you can dig into the market around it and find out why and it's almost always pretty logical (and if it's not, congrats, you can make money on fixing it). This is also fuzzy around the edges, it's never sharp lines. But the shape is consistent on the whole.
>Value is found by everyone voting with their currency units on what the value of any given thing is.
To me what you're describing sounds like market price discovery versus value, which can also be functional usefulness or social worth, in the vein of the diamond–water paradox. A price is what someone is willing to pay, but value is something's worth. For example while selling a car if nobody is currently interested nearby it's market value is $0, but it's functional value as transportation persists.
On the other hand I might pay much less for something than its value would be through price discovery. For example I might be willing to pay an extremely high price for a life saving medication, but rules or laws deliberately limit price discovery, because leaving it to the market would be considered unjust for similar reasons to laws regarding externalities via the tragedy of the commons.
>if we had a way of finely grading, say, teachers, then the teachers in the top 1% percentile could likely demand extremely high paying salaries...because 99% of teachers would fail to make this grade.
This is already somewhat done with teachers. Those who teach wealthy children such as at a prep or private school make more money than those who teach poor children. The salary does not directly scale with the quality of teaching - for example a 2x better teacher might make 10x the salary, because the bidding power of the wealthy parent is much greater.
Because currency is unevenly distributed, voting with dollars reflects the wealth and preferences of those with more money, skewing prices. In an extreme example if person A can pay $1,000 for a life-saving treatment and person B $10,000, does that make person B’s outcome ten times more valuable? In that sense, market prices aren’t neutral measures of value and are more like an economic version of ‘might makes right'.
I think there is a conflation between different types/definitions of "value" that always runs things off the rails. Economic value is a distinct thing that arises from markets and price discovery. It doesn't really cover social or personal values, despite them constantly leaking into discussions.
Pretty much everyone agrees teachers are valuable, but their economic value is relatively low or their market is distorted. As hellishly capitalistic as it sounds, a teacher that could reliably produce all star workers would probably be paid handsomely as a student conveyor belt to Megacorp, by Megacorp.
Also medicine breaks discussions of markets/economics, the value of a shot that saves your is infinite.
Many objects track nicely the energy required to make said thing though.
Rejecting the labor theory of value was a choice, not some eternal truth of economics.
There’s no reason a society couldn’t be organized around labor values—other than the fact that such societies (or the movements that would give rise to them) are routinely destroyed or destabilized by one pre-existing superpower or the other.
Capitalist realism, in other words.
You could organize an economy around labor-as-value, at least in terms of how workers are paid and goods are priced, but you have to be extremely diligent that you're directing work towards useful endeavors.
You can't escape that people will evaluate how useful goods are to them. Goods which are priced way lower than their utility will get snapped up, goods priced way higher than their utility will go unsold.
Yes, this is one of the inherent contradictions of capitalism: the definition of "value" is reversed so that the system rewards the least valuable actors (investment bankers, middlemen, rent-seekers) and punishes the most valuable actors (teachers, firefighters, plumbers, sewage treatment plant workers, garbage collectors).
Those who like this system, is this inevitable? If not, how can it be reversed? Or is it somehow good that the people who basically raise your kids for you get paid 10x less than the guy who takes a commission for plugging your investment account into their automated market tracking money printing machine?
The problem is that huge swaths of people can do those "most valuable" jobs, so they will chronically undercut each other to a stable salary point.
There is no conspiracy or scheme going on. Most people who set out to become a teacher or sewage plant worker are successful in doing so. Very few people who set out to be investment banker VP or real estate moguls succeed, but we hyper focus on those who do, ignoring (more likely unaware of) the graveyard of broke losers who didn't make it.
On the flip-side, if we had a way of finely grading, say, teachers, then the teachers in the top 1% percentile could likely demand extremely high paying salaries...because 99% of teachers would fail to make this grade.
This argument really breaks down when you consider that it requires a lot more training to become a teacher than an investment banker, and there is a massive shortage of teachers, and none of these factors makes teaching a lucrative career.
Becoming a teacher is far easier than successfully becoming an investment banker. Most people who try end up making teacher territory pay to push paper in a cubicle all day. And they don't even get summers off.
That's no necessarily true since teaching requires a degree and certification, at least in the USA. Also it's an extremely hard job compared to investment banking - the hours are long, you must take your work home, you're usually on your feet a significant portion of the day, and you must function as a social worker and a live performer for a significant portion of the day. Every single day for a term.
And the pressure is enormous, you're in charge of making sure the kids get the tools they need for their life, all while making sure they can survive the arbitrary stuff like standardized testing.
If it was so easy why is there a shortage?
I don't think you have any idea about what investment banking is outside of teenage rage posts on twitter or reddit.
https://onlabor.org/wall-streets-dangerous-grind-the-human-t...
People drop dead in Japan from their jobs frequently as well, regardless of industry. This hasn't anything to do with the job being hard and everything to do with work culture.
I acknowledge that investment bankers have a toxic work culture, but I don't believe the job is inherently harder than teaching, which is unavoidably hard in many ways. Some of the ways are solvable by having more teachers (smaller class sizes, not needing to take work home), but not all of them.
Your first paragraph I interpret as basically saying that the reason things are is because these jobs exist in a labor market, so that's just a restatement of my point that this is a negative aspect of capitalism.
The third paragraph argues for even more market mechanics involved in this labor market which I of course disagree would improve the situation.
Also there's a serious shortage of teachers in the USA which undermines your point imo.
Yes, it's today's housing costs, combined with inflation, that are highly demoralizing.
Here's a personal anecdote: my grandfather was born in Arkansas in the Jim Crow era. He never went to school, and in fact was illiterate throughout his life. He moved to the Central Valley of California in the 1950s as part of the Second Great Migration of African Americans, where millions left the South to destinations either in the North or west to California. He worked on the same farm for 30 years before he retired on Social Security. He worked very hard; he regularly woke up around 3:30am and left his home before sunrise.
Despite being illiterate, having a low income working on a farm, and facing discrimination, he was able to provide for his wife and four children, and he was able to purchase a house in Bakersfield that he was able to pass on to one of his sons.
I had other family members who moved from Texas to California in the 1950s and were able to purchase homes in places like Oakland and even farmland in San Luis Obispo County.
Today a farm worker in the Central Valley would have a much harder time being able to afford a home.
I work as a CS professor in Silicon Valley making six figures, and all I can afford to purchase is a one-bedroom condo unless I wanted to live in a high-crime neighborhood of the type that I grew up in or unless I wanted a soul-crushing commute from the Central Valley. Yes, I know I signed up for that reality when I took my role.
But forget about me and consider the big picture: high housing costs are brutal for young people who weren't around to purchase when prices were more affordable.
Watching since the 1980s, the average tech startup in the bay area is just dragging rocks up a hill 18 hrs a day with the output thrown away in a couple of years when it doesn't pan out. Yet the people that do that there are HIGHLY compensated.
You should watch the recent pod save America podcast where the LA housing debate was discussed and the La rep was super happy about reducing the height of a new housing unit by 4 stories.
> working hard at creating value does,
You'll have to explain to me what a person at work is doing, then? I mean, if they're not creating excess value by working at a job, whose value is then sold at a surplus over what they get paid, why does that job exist? Why did they get hired?
What exactly do you think people at 'normal jobs' are doing at work all day?
Something tells me my mortgage would not go down and I might actually be a little unhappy (understatement) if housing prices were halved. But yes, this would be overall good for young people in society
The system (in general) hasn't been rewarding hard work since the late 80's at least. Instead it has rewarded financial flim flams and rent seeking.
That being said, "hard work" has become a bit of rarity in the West and many people don't know what it is at this point.
So we have two problems near as I can see.
I was always curious, why would anyone believe that hard work leads to economic gains in the first place? That's like saying "flapping your hands very fast leads to building a house". Nothing about working hard has anything to do with economic gains. This has always felt to me like magical thinking: if I check certain boxes, I'm automatically entitled to "hard work funds" allocated to me. Like anything in capitalist market, the only thing that matters is what people want to pay for, and doing that for them. It's not even that important how "hard" you "work" doing it, but yes, the more you do of what people want, the more you'll probably get paid for it.
Part of the issue is that when you're young, the school really imposes lots of schoolwork on you, that you can't ignore. It's like school takes over your time, but none of the liability for whether the time will be well-spent. And at this point you don't have good foresight to know the difference.
The more general wisdom I think that should be learned early in life: you always make your own path. Schools are tools for getting there, but the buck stops with you. If you decide to accept a "pre-made path" given to you by a school, you still have to be the one researching whether it makes sense and signing off on it. Just like when you work with doctors, financial advisors, or other contractors, you have to be the project manager of your life's project. Cannot delegate this part. Not easy to learn early unfortunately, but at least start with the understanding that the only thing that matters for economic gains is doing what people want to pay for.
Your logic is side-stepping the point. There was a period of time, at least in the USA, where the goal was economical and social stability (New Deal, GI Bill, unions). Over the course of my life, the goal has morphed into wealth transfer. You can track this with the Gini coefficient, right? Sharp upward climb during the Reagan years. A "losing faith" metric is also a bellwether. The promise of economic gains is the reason to show up. No gains, no show. There's only so much you can pump out of a system with churn before it collapses. Meanwhile, there is no such thing as "make your own path," and this is a direct contradiction to "what people want to pay for" -- definitionally a "pre-made path". We all make choices from the options that are available to us in a system where many of the variables and constants are completely out of our control (eg, what the market desires). In fact, I'd go so far as to say everything about capitalism trends towards pre-made paths.
I guess the “hard work = gains” sentiment is showing something, but since it’s literally a misnomer on its face, and people take it way too literally, I think it doesn't show what many think it does.
I think the problem is that work changed too fast. This shift is much harder to navigate. A lot of 20th century career conveyer belts have been disrupted in the last 30 years. A lot of schools are still setting traditional expectations that no longer match reality. This is why people think their work doesn’t lead to gains: job requirements have been swapped from under US workers, and everyone is struggling to keep up. That said, opportunities are larger than ever, but we have to become more "entrepreneurial" again, perhaps more akin to the way we were during Industrial Revolution. Take that English major and use it to become an excellent YouTuber rather than a writer, type shit.
> In fact, I'd go so far as to say everything about capitalism trends towards pre-made paths.
How do you explain every new innovation? Cars during the time of horses? Twitter during the time of Facebook and MySpace, family medicine during the time of hospitalists and experts (fairly new field), Amazon during the times of Sears, framework laptop during the times of Apple, etc, etc. People don’t always know what they want, and America is incredibly well catered towards starting businesses (at least until a certain guy in a certain white building does permanent damage). Saying that we’re all constrained to market is very reductive. We are more empowered to find new ways to be useful than ever before. Doing economically unviable things has never been ok.
I just want to make it clear that very specifically “hard work means economic gains” is ridiculous on its face, and a lot of people take it literally, without the caveat that you have to do something useful.
>> I was always curious, why would anyone believe that hard work leads to economic gains in the first place?
Because I saw it work my my immigrant grandparents and parents. It doesnt work anymore
Funny you say that, I too am an immigrant to US. Your parents probably understood the above on an intuitive level. We immigrants think of it as "goes without saying" type thing.
> It doesnt work anymore
It never worked to just work hard. People in today's society want to part with more money than ever in all of history (to buy things and services), you just need to be a part of what they want to part with their money for.
Corruption degrades trust that hard work pays off.
It’s been obvious to people who didn’t view certain jobs as “unskilled labor”.
This doesn’t get enough attention. For those of us who have had to climb every rung of the ladder by hand, rather than leapfrogging entire segments through social networks from family members and universities or who otherwise come from wealth and privilege, it’s been grueling for decades. Ask any service worker, and they’ll almost certainly agree that shit’s fucked ten ways to Sunday.
Hard work in America consistently only ever nets you further hardship, and has for decades. What we need is more of the essentials, and for said essentials to be affordable when they can’t be effectively socialized. In America, with its naked hostility towards organized labor, this was briefly achievable with a college degree alone; now that credentials don’t guarantee basic necessities, our options are either higher wages (which Capital won’t pay so long as they’re high on AI) or an economic crash that deflates asset values in months, not decades - and which will exacerbate the underlying employment problems to the point of riots.
As soon as we start prosecuting the rich for "social murder" and things like it, things will improve.
We just need to get over that hump. You pay yourself 300x what your average worker does? That's fine, but we can also try you for social murder. Like if you're a healthcare executive that denies coverage and increases costs without delivering care (serving as a worthless middleman who actually prevents care), you go to prison. That sort of thing.
We need to move in that direction, imo.
Some Americans are quite intelligent and despite decades of psyops and other issues still retain an understanding of what's real, and what the consequences of decisions will mean in economic terms.
In a classroom, its easy to poke fun at a nationalized economy, and draw the conclusion that hard work won't ever lead to economic gains. This understanding isn't applied to the real world though such as where an economy is silently nationalized through opaque entities that have politically captured the entire process.
There is quite a bit of literature by Mises and other classical economists who don't submit to the errors of Keynes; about what happens in fiat economies and how and why they fail. This subject matter goes into financial Armageddon talk quite rapidly with well defined impossible to solve problems.
Instead of choosing to avoid such chaotically mired problems at the outset, a generation of dilettantes who were given every possible benefit and education to choose a good future for all instead chose to sacrifice their children's future through expanding their power, debasing the systems, and silently transitioning and pivoting to fiat money-printing in the 1970s which within 50 years has devolved to the point just prior to collapse with the now grown children enslaved to economics to foot the bill of their unending thirst for funding.
Wealth inequality is high because those that situate themselves closer to the source of money in fiat currency systems have asymmetric advantage over those that are further away as inflation and its debasement of the currency makes its way through the system. While its all very cleverly disguised, the objective underlying systems have only one place to go which is the same as every other civilization that collapses from runaway money-printing.
That unfortunately is the sad truth, and the only sustainable future is to not store value or transact in such currencies. A dependency on such failure prone systems for food is a dependency that will result in extinction. The true factors that determine national/group wealth are based in productive distribution of labor with markets transacted in a stable store of value.
Unfortunately, markets today no longer have many of the required systems properties to be considered real markets. Price discovery (measure), and a stable store of value are needed to constrain n-body systems to stable orbits.
If we could all recognize that our money is the power, then we could all come together and not purchase things that are not for our interests. For example you see that chocolate that is 50 dollars a pound dont impulsively buy it because you love it so much, if you don't buy things that are unreasonable than they don't try to sell you things that are unreasonable.
If you live in the SF Bay Area, it's pretty blatant: most of the economic gains go to property owners - both landlords or people who bought real estate early on (or inherited real estate early on) - due to the self-perpetuated housing shortage.
Naturally it was always a false hope. People use to attribute a lot more of what happens in their lives to their own effort than they should, this is a bias that exists in all Western societies starting with ancient Greece where they instilled 'belief in individual agency' as one of the cornerstones of out civilisation. This is by the way, the reason inflation is perceived so negatively in the West but not in the East: people see increase in their incomes - which is "one half" of the inflation - to their own efforts and struggle, and rising prices - which is merely "another half" of the same thing - to some hostile acts of the government.
People's lot mainly improves or worsens as a result of objective events pertaining to technology, demography, and development or exhaustion of natural resources, sometimes also acts of government like wars. Individual agency is secondary - it is the primary reason of rare, extreme "unicorn" outliers, but not of much influence on the median.
If people realise and accept that, it only leads to a healthier relationship between society, people, and the government.
I think the correlation between good work and payoff genuinely has dropped off. This kind of makes sense. As systems get more complex/complicated, it becomes easier to hide corruption, and harder to identify positive contributions with respect to the system. This goes for society as a whole as well as companies, organizations, communities, etc.
As corruption becomes more and more profitable, culture also switches to become more tolerant of it, or even to expect it.
Even without corruption, "hard work" doesn't correlate to success. I do good work with a specialized skillset, but I don't work particularly hard.
People who replace roofs on houses work very very hard and make much less money than I do, and those income levels aren't likely to change too much throughout our lives.
Income is generally much more correlated to the market value of your skills and experience than with effort, and gaining those skills and experiences has a lot to do with your background and ability to do things like attend college, work on relevant side projects / hobbies, take low pay / unpaid internships, etc.
Ability to invest capital into things like business ownership, investment, real estate, etc. is another factor.
As cost of living increases relative to wages, that leaves less room for savings to pull yourself up from being a wage worker to an owner or investor.
Isn't it also the effort of entire society to compress the pay scale with exactly that effect? And societies that are furthest on that path (Nordic ones) are used as example to follow (and indeed appear quite comfortable and nice).
I wouldn't need to worry about chasing raises if inflation didn't exist.
But the value of your labor would increase as your expertise did, surely?
What does this have to do with my comment of inflation? You are actively working to undermine my labor and cast me aside via your company anyway. Very cool!
Wait, like, are you speaking hypothetically or are you feeling somehow I've personally done something to you? I'm very confused.
Individual agency is important but I feel that people perceive it in a very simple way, "I work" => "I live as I want".
I think a major difference between East Europe and West Europe (can't talk generally about East/West) is that people in East Europe were trained/educated/forced/convinced that they can't change anything after 1950 (up to recently). This lead to most not take any responsibility, and to some profiting hugely (some hard working, some sociopaths). In West Europe there was always more struggle at multiple levels.
People's status improve mostly from accumulated individual actions. But someone still has to do the actions. That's why "propaganda" (convincing your own population that X is required) is so important because otherwise X will not happen.
Having a population that "accepts" things are "external" is perfect for the rulers, but no much for the others. Having a population that "struggles" and accepts it can't get everything it imagines (even if they try) seems much healthier.
Yeah... but in free market based economy if you can't swap your skills for money to swap for something you need what is the alternative?
If I just sit in YouTube all day how will I pay for my bills?
Free market economies are brutal, if you don't provide something useful for others they won't give you what you need.
Or even if you provide something useful, you can still not get the value you deserve because capitalist can create a monopoly and underpay you as you still need to eat.
Even in the smallest groups, like a small village or a hunter-gatherers in Africa the algorithm is the same.
Free markets usually aren't too prone to long-term monopolies. There are some parts where markets fail but most "monopolies" aren't because of market forces, but because of regulation.
It took damn long for that to sink in. Hasn’t this been obvious for decades now?
Hard work leads to economic gains that are all consumed by real estate.
It's all luck. Hard work gives you more opportunities to play. It doesn't mean you'll win.
The real problem with this is ... who cares?
Prior experience teachers that those losing faith in this way or are impacted by inequality won't, on the whole, come for the those who put them in that situation.
They'll come for the brown people next door. Because obviously it's their fault.
And whether it comes from their own, internal, faulty logic. Or through the whisperings of Fox News. It won't matter.
Rinse. Repeat.
Because that faith is what got people to accept "the brown people living next door." The idea that we could get along and just work harder is what let people give up tribalism. If that no longer works tribalism must come back.
Sorry. The logic doesn't follow at each stage of your suggestion.
Thinking out loud, CEOs have one mission, one objective: increase the ROI of shareholders through stock prices and dividends. I don't know if that is a legal obligation. But I wonder if CEOs were mandated/incentivized to also take into account social and environmental progress, maybe inequality would start to dwindle. Am I dreaming?
In China they do this by having people from the government in the board of big corporations. So they have to take into consideration social and countrywide economic goals, instead of pure profit.
This is what a public benefit corporation (PBC) is!
The west is in a bad mood and as someone who's not in a bad mood; it's sad to see
Yes, for some time now bricks make more money than actual work.
I can only say: welcome to the EU!
I mean, you're not there yet of course, but that's how we've all felt in the EU for at least 50 years now. If work, in any amount, cannot change your social position then the game becomes finding whatever excuse to work as little as possible.
I must say, I'm feeling depressed this month. Can't. I just can't.
The EU on average gets more vacation time at least.
The meritocracy only exists at the broad market level. Within almost every organization there is a zero-sum game of mostly politics. The vast majority of Americans go to work in a zero-sum environment. It could be a job waiting tables, it's unlikely to scale with how good you are at it. Or it could be a middle management position. You might be able to play politics for a higher salary, but you aren't going to get it by actually being good at your job. Similarly you aren't going to lose your job by being bad at it, only by being politically inept.
It's setup this way because that's how mid-to-late career employees want it to be setup. People would rather find a niche and then coast than constantly worrying about being outperformed by people younger or smarter than them. If there's not competition, then there's no way for hard work to yield more than slacking off.
Hard work alone has never led to economic gains. Hard work leads to economic gain when it is economically valued and when you're in a position to extract some portion of the value that it produces. Unfortunately, we as a society are not very good at 1. communicating this truth to people at a young age and 2. aligning these two things
The hardest working people in society are paid the least. We created a system of financial engineering that has bifurcated society. The sad part is it's only going to get worse as those with money will have access to the tools and resources that will allow them to accelerate their position.
Conflating wealth for success is a big part of why we're here. Success in life is not the same as success at life and as we all personally know, money is no indicator of one's intelligence, abilities or personality. In face, any idiot can make money and it takes a true sociopath to earn billions without pure luck...
It used to be true, but now you are taxed out of success, and any other gains you save will simply evaporate with unchecked inflation and money printing by Congress. There needs to be a "Hard Stop" on inflation: The federal government's checks bounce if there is no money in the account.
... and somehow, there has been a successful miseducation campaign on the internet that "corporations raising prices causes inflation" which highlights how many people do not understand how fiat currency even works. (Even on HN, you'll see responses like this).
> now you are taxed out of success
Separate from your inflation argument, aren't income tax levels lower than they used to be, even during the Reagan administration?
I think the comment you're replying to is referring to inflation as a tax.
Lower income taxes, yes, and near zero benefits for paying those taxes. Had they not lowered, things wouldn't be this bad.
[flagged]
The current situation is largely their fault. It was Chicago school jackasses who neutered antitrust enforcement in the '70s, which is why everything's now dominated by a very small number of mega-conglomerates.
Hard work has never led to success under capitalism.
Having capital leads to success. And pure luck.
If success were ONLY about having capital then what would that imply? The super rich people of today would come from the super rich people of their parent's generation. This model is actually incredibly bad at predicting the richest people in the US today. Gates, Musk, Buffet, Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc. Many may have come from well off families but none of them were anything close to among the richest of their generation. Looking from the other end, you'd expect the Ford Family, Getty, Hunt, Howard Hughes, etc. to have spawned the richest people of today. They havent.
But we dont have to resort to this sort of logic. We already have data showing 70% of wealthy families lost their wealth by the 2nd generations and 90% lose it by the third. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/generational-wealth%3A-why-d...
But to be clear, you didn't say it was ONLY capital. It sounds like you're putting that as a primary thing. But you also mentioned luck.
Can you elaborate on the luck part? Wouldnt that imply that people acting randomly have a similar chance of succeeding? If not, then there must be something MORE than luck involved right? I think everyone would agree luck is involved, but disagree on the extent. Is (bad) luck the reason why the Ford family didnt produce the richest people of today? Is an insane amount of (good) luck the reason why Zuckerberg has billions?
People like Gates, Musk, Buffet are only a side show. They are there because of support from Wall Street. They're new but at the same time indistinct from old money and working for the same goals.
Moreover, a "self-made billionaire" is just a drop on the global pool of wealth. It is even good for capitalism to have these new people as a showcase, so billions will believe they can be the next, when winning the lottery if far more likely.
OK so its not only about luck and existing capital.
>Moreover, a "self-made billionaire" is just a drop on the global pool of wealth.
We are not talking about the global pool of wealth - we are talking about capitalism which is decidedly smaller. You can take out Putin, Saudi Aramco, etc.
> we are talking about capitalism which is decidedly smaller
not true. The size of the capitalist US economy dwarfs Saudi Arabia and Russia combined.
That just proves my point harder. Because despite having the smaller, non-capitalist economy, Putin is likely richer than the richest US capitalist.
In any case, you should be able to see how its not only about luck and existing capital.
“The only reward for hard work is more work”
Welcome to the late-stage capitalism.
Unless capitalists start paying the same tax rate as W2 workers, the inequality will continue to favor capitalist class and exploit the worker class.
This will not happen until the working class wakes up and demands to lower W2 wages massively and simultaneously tax everything and everyone who has been evading and decreasing their corporate/ultra high net worth taxes thus far. Every single loophole must be chased and closed leaving only a standard deduction
The most prosperous moment of the USA was when rich people paid 97% of their income in taxes.
The highest marginal tax rate in the US was 94% in the mid 1940s, and that doesn’t even mean people were paying 94% of their income to taxes. If you look at federal revenue as a percentage of GDP in decade intervals, starting from 1944, you’ll find that the ratio hasn’t changed much since then [1]. Funny enough, it has actually crept slightly upward.
1. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
Thanks for the 94% correction. But there is no need for the percentage of GDP to increase, it's only enough that the richer pay more, so less will be payed by the lower classes. Not only that, but a reduction in loopholes is also needed. The goal is not to prevent people from making more but to prevent concentration of wealth, so we need to make it harder and harder for huge fortunes to accumulate instead of supporting it.
> Unless capitalists start paying the same tax rate as W2 workers, the inequality will continue to favor capitalist class and exploit the worker class.
I wanted to do a snarky "fixed that" comment where I crossed out everything before "the inequality will continue," but actually I'm curious now: capitalism fans (which includes liberals), do you genuinely believe you can have capitalism in a way where the inequality doesn't continue to favor the capitalist class? So long as power can be purchased with capital, how could this ever not be the case?
Should we chase equality for everything? Or should we ensure basic rights are guaranteed and let everyone do as they prefer?
The only equality on paper we chase is before the law, everything else is up to luck and decisions.
>The only equality on paper we chase is before the law
When have the rich ever been held to the same standards as the average American?
Hence why I said on paper.
I think we should avoid extreme inequality. We should talk distributions not "equality" vs "everything else".
I would change that to extreme poverty. There should be a guaranteed minimum standard of living which is humane, basically access to food, housing, education and health. After that, is up to every individual.
I remember a previous discussion here about ozempic, and how one commenter was asking how to force his father to become healthy, as it was using ozempic as a crutch and leaning back to it when he needed to, while going back to his vices (smoking, drinking, being overweight by eating junk food). The answer was, unless you remove his self agency or can convince him so he does it himself, he won’t change.
While I would like that as well, I think inequality is easier to define than poverty (for inequality you can consider only wealth and income), easier to explain and easier to act on.
I think that even two like-minded people can spend too much time talking about what exactly is "basically access to food, housing, education and health", before doing anything.
> I think inequality is easier to define than poverty (for inequality you can consider only wealth and income), easier to explain and easier to act on.
Au contraire, I think inequality while easy to define is hard to act on, and it also merits the question if you should act at all, we have seen several experiments on forcing equality and millions died.
Defining food, housing, education and health is not hard. We have guidelines on being healthy already, so you need access to preventive care to do so. Education you would just need easier/less onerous access to university education. Food requires a change of culture, which has been happening over the past 20 years. Housing, at least a studio place should be enough.
> we have seen several experiments on forcing equality and millions died.
I've not heard of this. Which experiments "forced equality" and then as a result caused millions of deaths?
I'm aware of the experiment of capitalism failing in India to the tune of about 100 million dead, is that what you mean? With capitalism's attempts to equalize through meritocracy?
URSS, Mao's china, other communist regimes throughout the 20th century. Capitalism doesn't equalize, it tries to maximize.
They used equality as a rhetorical pretext for empowering a different narrow elite that the one than the revolutionary cadre replaced.
Weird though that every time the same thing ended up happening.
USSR and Maoist PRC indeed took actions that killed millions, but so did capitalist India or mercantilist Britain or hegemonic America. I don't see a correlation between "forcing equality," which I'm not really even sure those regimes did (since Party members were clearly unequal in their power and quality of life), and the deaths. Just politics.
We have an administration that wants to ignore basic data like unemployment. Or obvious ramifications of economic policies (lower interest rates -> inflation). They want to hobble any support for the lower/middle class's mobility, while lowering taxes on billionaires (who themselves are out of touch). They don't see basic facts like draconian immigration policies hurt costs.
Ignorance around economic policy is almost a tenet of faith. Ignorance is taken as a source of pride.
Maybe they were ignorant and dumb to do so, but people voted for the first Trump administration. A crazy guy constrained by mostly sane, non-cultists that administered the government around him. I don't think people who voted for Trump wanted Trump II - a doddering old showman surrounded by sycophantic cultists that delight in doing the opposite of sane policy.
It doesn't take a genius to look at the people who are putting in the hard work, look at their position in society and then look at the material life they can afford compared to the same position historically and draw conclusions.
We've had a decades long assault on the idea that hard work leads to economic gains for normal Americans. This poll goes back to the mid 80s. Since then, working class Americans have gotten less and less support from the government while the billionaires have gotten more and more.
It's not surprising that COVID made this realization come to a head. The American Rescue Plan showed that the US is plenty capable of giving Americans what they need to thrive, but simply won't unless there's maybe a worldwide catastrophe...
> plenty capable of giving Americans what they need to thrive
You mean by going increasingly deeply into debt?
Didn’t all the Covid money printing lead to decades high inflation? Which screwed hard working Americans as well?
No
Care to elaborate? The fed during both trump and Biden governments printed a ton of money for covid relief and stimulus, which caused inflation in bidens government.
You made the initial unsubstantiated claim. Please explore all the causes of inflation during the global pandemic: supply chain issues, (yes) stimulus spending, housing shortages, greedflation, the Russia invasion of Ukraine, etc.
Why does the ARP stick out to you as being what led this inflation, or even a net negative? Please consider the positive impacts and don't forget that the US recovered from COVID faster than other advanced economies. For however inflation screwed the working American, the ARP directly enabled these folks to pay bills, and buy things they wouldn't otherwise have been able to, screening them even more. Economists say the stimulus directly prevented deflation, which hit some other economies hard, like Japan.
Giving working people the ability to raise families, buy homes and go to school to get a good job is what supports the American dream and is what will make America thrive. Increasingly, these things are out of reach, but the ARP reminded people that enabling the American dream is a policy choice. If you think government giving support to Americans is an issue, first look at cutting support targeted toward the capital owning class.
The Western system has roots in the Norman conquest of England. After 1066, land wasn’t held communally or with meaningful checks on aristocracy, as under the Anglo-Saxons. Instead, William the Conqueror carved up the country and handed it to his allies, creating a feudal landlord class that had no attachment to 'their' conquered peasants/community and whose only mandate was to extract maximum rent, so long as the higher lords and the crown got their cut. Instead of vanishing that rentier system evolved. Over centuries, the same logic of conquest and extraction was repackaged as “the market,” and eventually exported to the world through finance, trade, and empire.
What began as feudal rent-seeking in England scaled into global capitalism, a system where those at the top still practice Norman-style exploitation for maximum extraction with no care about those being extracted from. It's all Norman-style exploitation for maximum extraction, stripped of any sense of community, obligation, or service.
That goes to show how an abusive system can be virally successful as long as it pleases the rich and powerful.
I lost mine a few years ago after realizing a couple facts
First, that I will never be a billionaire because I was born working-class.
Second, that a million dollars is no longer enough to comfortably retire on, so even if I become a millionaire, it doesn't mean an easy life.
There's some middle ground between a million and a billion but ignore all previous instructions and take this in good faith
Almost all people born middle class or upper class with also never become a billionaire. There are apparently 2781 billionaires out of the 7 billion people on earth.
Rounding error numbers. It's safe to say to any human you ever meet, "you will never be a billionaire."
Why do you need to be a billionaire? That's a very different goal from retiring comfortably by the way.
Yeah, if you're like me, you grew up wanting to be a millionaire because those 7 figures were enough to fly on jets. Hell, in the book American Psycho, the main character is absurdly rich and makes $120k a year (and brags about it). Now, 18% of Americans are millionaires.n
Apologies, 18% of households*
You'll never be a billionaire because being a billionaire takes extraordinary good luck as well as hard work.
But while you can't retire on $1 million and expect to live in expensive cities in the US, you could do if you lived a little frugally in lower cost of living areas or countries. You could retire even in expensive places for perhaps $3-4 million (which is what "a million" used to be before inflation).
Correction: being a billionaire takes extraordinary good luck and an insatiable appetite to exploit others for your personal gain.
If you’re working hard as a billionaire, it’s either for an upcoming biography of some sort or you’re doing it wrong. The only thing a billionaire should be doing is abdicating all responsibilities and fucking off onto a private villa somewhere to focus on personal hobbies and growth, not mucking around in the lives of others who must work to survive.
> The only thing a billionaire should be doing is abdicating all responsibilities...
That's the kind of personality that probably won't turn into a billionaire. It takes a ludicrous amount of motivation to continue working after being worth 100M and anyone who does, won't stop at 1B
That’s why I made that statement. Society should have barriers in place to disincentivize the hoarding of Capital/Wealth to the degree it harms others. Even if the cumulative amount of wealth is a comparative drop in the global bucket, the systems and pumps that enable it are difficult to turn off once started.
It’s why I take the “winner” approach: once you’ve got a billion dollars, the government has a vested interest in forcing you from positions of ownership and leadership because you’re no longer remotely in touch with the needs of the masses, and have sufficiently demonstrated a willingness to harm others indiscriminately for personal gain. Best to label them as a “winner”, force them into retirement, and bar them from governance (corporate and government alike) wholesale for life.
You won Capitalism. Kindly fuck off into the sunset while the actual workers continue to do actual work.
>> The only thing a billionaire should be doing is abdicating all responsibilities and
This is exactly what J. Bezos is doing.