[buoyantair]

Trust me no matter how smart you play, if you are born in this world at a very vulnerable position, like say a marginal group like lgbtq communities in third world or in a war torn area or with disabilities, no matter how smart and hard you work, you are always a few clicks behind those who have the "luck" and everything else on their side.

The world is super unfair place and sometimes even if you work really smart and hard, you won't get the results you worked for.

[WalterBright]

I'm talking about the US and being an able-bodied adult.

[luckydata]

If after all that happened in the last couple years you still think this country rewards effort and smarts fairly then you live in Lala land, not in the USA.

[perfmode]

The US is one of the least egalitarian of developed nations.

[WalterBright]

Where else can you go from pauper to billionaire in your twenties?

[perfmode]

one crab escapes the barrel.

[im3w1l]

Maybe it's because the intelligent families have already risen to the top in the US but not in the other countries.

[perfmode]

I wish more people on this site would refrain from chucking crap arguments against a wall hoping they’ll stick. It’s exhausting to have to constantly point out invalid arguments to people who can’t be bothered to take responsibility for their intellectual pollution.

> the doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities.

If we accept this definition, and the United States scores poorly, then it means that either:

* not all people are treated as equal * or not all people have equal rights * or not all people have equal opportunities

Could you please clarify how your comment is relevant as a response to a comment about egalitarianism?

Stated differently: if your comment is true, what is the implication?

[im3w1l]

I meant to reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18789008 , agree my comment makes little sense when read as a reply to you.

[vinceguidry]

Despite a distinct lack of egalatarianism, the US remains the place where someone born at the bottom can still climb the social ladder. Billionaire-hood may escape them, but they're not doomed.

[danohuiginn]

Possible, but decreasingly likely.

The US is now one of the countries where your success in life is most fully determined by your family background.

e.g. it's in the bottom third of the OECD for income mobility, and the absolute worst in the OECD for how much your family background determines your educational success

https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi...

https://www.oecd.org/centrodemexico/medios/44582910.pdf

[vinceguidry]

These statistics all measure the wrong things.

Let me tell you a story of two families. My step-dad was thrust into a parenting role over his siblings, a sister and a brother at an early age. The brother died early, in a train accident. My step-dad married my mother and they're still together, over 20 years later. His sister is on her second marriage.

My aunt's family is constantly teetering on the edge of poverty, having obliterated their family's nest egg over decades of stupid decisions. Our family clawed our way out of low class through pragmatic saving.

Stupid decisions are what make the difference between affluence and poverty in the US. You can have all the money in the world and still be broke. The capacity to make stupid decisions largely comes from childhood. It's the emotional makeup of a household that mostly determines what children are like when they get older. If you grow up in America feeling neglected and abused, you're going to go through strings of bad relationships and that's just going to be your life.

I call America's brand of poverty "emotional poverty." Food on the table, roof over your head, cable TV and video games for entertainment, all things people in other parts of the world can't reliably have, in the US pretty much come out of the tap like water. Even homeless people here have cell phones.

No, what's missing here is emotional warmth. People in the US just can't figure out for some reason how to treat each other well. They eat, but they don't live.

If you're lucky enough to avoid emotional poverty, then you can join America's middle class. If not, you'll fritter away all the money you ever make. It's got nothing to do with how much money your family has and everything to do with how they treat each other.

No statistic could possibly capture this reality.

[dannypgh]

1. This reply seems like "forget hard data, here are two anecdotes" which seems like a poor approach if you're trying to convince [good] engineers.

2. 62.9% of the world has cell phones. The global median income is likely less than $5,000 and it seems difficult to reconcile the two without many poor people - and not just in the US- owning cell phones. More to the point, do you know how hard it is to get a job or a house without a phone? Cell phones are very hard to do without in this age, especially if you're homeless.

3. Education should help to ensure people can make better decisions, but access to decent education is terribly unequal in the US, so kids attending schools in poor districts are even less likely to learn what they need to get ahead. You're ignoring structural issues if you think people are just making "stupid decisions" and ignore the facts about inequality of education.

[UncleMeat]

At scale, these differences even out. The statistics don't capture individual behavior. They capture large trends. That's a feature not a bug.

[pdimitar]

A very strange aside in my eyes. You almost don't touch the topic at hand.

Sure you can claw your way out by being financially wise. I just did that this year after life hit me really hard, several times, at my weakest hours. Took me 7 months to recover and I am pretty sure I know exactly what you mean by it.

Still, this piques. Yes you can have a decent way of life -- food, own home (increasingly rare), internet, a few vacations a year perhaps. But outside of that? Real middle class? Call me biased but I am not seeing it anywhere. Even the people who believe to live a middle-class life cannot afford more than 2-3 months of unpaid vacation (or a hiatus).

I absolutely positively cannot spend 2-3 years doing only the hobby projects I have in mind without caring about money. I simply am not at the level of a CEO pay + bonuses that enable such a lifestyle, and won't ever be if I continue to be a programmer for hire.

To me "middle class" means "able to freely switch jobs or professions without any financial pressure", combined with "able to enjoy leisure time as much as they like". But again, maybe I am describing the "rich life" and not the middle class. Perhaps we use different terms?

(Eating but also living the life is something money can enable -- but I agree that money alone cannot teach you that.)

[bontaq]

This is a pretty bizarre response to actual data.

[perfmode]

remains "the" place?

the number one determinant of future success in the US is the zip code in which you're born.

[earhart]

Causation isn’t correlation; zip code is easy to measure, but I’d bet it’s not what actually matters.

[mcguire]

Zip code is a darn good proxy for race, family wealth, social standing, network prospects....

[justaaron]

yeah, I got the part about the American mythological construct of the Meritocracy being deeply ingrained in your brain.

[WalterBright]

I wake up every morning full of ideas on things to create. Deciding which to do is the problem.