Some people are rich because their family was rich, some people are rich because of timing, some people are rich because of hard work and talent, some people are rich because they were ruthless, some people are rich because they had an idea that worked out, etc. As the story line goes, there are a million stories in the naked city and this is just one of them. Impossible to stereotype regardless of what our leadership says. Some did it on their own and some had help-lots of help. Then there are the skip generations where wealthy families turn out spend thrift kids who become broke and then turn out wealthy kids who don’t want to be broke.
All in all, don’t ever kid yourself, this is the land of opportunity. The best it gets so take care of it.
“All in all, don’t ever kid yourself, this is the land of opportunity. The best it gets so take care of it.”
Who’s kidding whom?
"The notion that anyone in America who is willing and able to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” can achieve significant upward mobility is deeply embedded in U.S. society. Conventional wisdom holds that class barriers in the United States are the lowest among the world’s advanced economies. Motivating this belief is the notion that there is a tradeoff between market regulation and mobility; advanced European economies are characterized by higher taxes, greater regulation, more union coverage, universal health care, a more comprehensive social contract, etc. Because some see these policies and institutions as impediments to mobility, mobility is believed to be greater in the United States.
"While faith in the American Dream is deep, evidence suggests that the United States lacks policies to ensure the opportunities that the dream envisions. According to the data, there is considerably more mobility in most other developed economies. The figure below, from The State of Working America, 12th Edition, measures the relationship between earnings of fathers and sons in member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) with similar incomes to the United States and for which data are available.
“The relationship between father-son earnings is tighter in the United States than in most peer OECD countries, meaning U.S. mobility is among the lowest of major industrialized economies. The relatively low correlations between father-son earnings in Scandinavian countries provide a stark contradiction to the conventional wisdom. An elasticity of 0.47 found in the United States offers much less likelihood of moving up than an elasticity of 0.18 or less, as characterizes Finland, Norway, and Denmark.”
What’s the point of that article? Is it easy for the poor in Denmark and Norway to become wealthy or is it impossible for the wealthy to become significantly more wealthy than the poor?
I have always felt that socialism is the politics of class envy, appealing to those who would rather live in squalor among equally poor neighbors than live a middle class lifestyle next to wealthy neighbors.
Tell your message to the millions of working poor in the USA, the ones that work their butts off, just to spin their wheels and not get anywhere. The ones that have very little benefits. And if something happens, the whole house of cards collapses
Tell your message to the millions of working poor in the USA, the ones that work their butts off, just to spin their wheels and not get anywhere. The ones that live in houses with indoor plumbing and who drive cars, who have mechanical refrigerators and indoor ranges to cook on and even televisions to watch. The ones who have mobile cell phones to communicate with.
We live in a country where the biggest health problem of the poor is obesity.
Tell your message of how miserable the poor here are to the thousands of boat people who risked their lives to flee from Cuba or the East Germans who risked their lives crossing a border where the machine guns were pointed inwards, not outwards, to the Brazilians where being poor means living in a shanty town in absolute squalor.
Morning, everyone…at 37 pages it’s possible everything’s been said about the subject to date, but could you please redirect the discussion back to EVs/Tesla/Elon? Thank you.
Back to EVs - the utilities are experiencing decreased electrical demand, so they’re looking for increasing use, such as EVs. Fine, except how they’re doing it. In San Diego they’re installing 5,500 charging stations, and asking the CA utility board to approve an additional $0.40/month fee on ALL electricity customers to pay for it.
I think the future lies in collecting solar power by day and charging the car with it at night and only using the grid when necessary. another benefit that elon musk s battery work may provide