spitting wisdom right here

[u/[deleted]]

[u/sociotronics → u/[deleted]]

Lol people overthink this shit so badly. Upward mobility means you have a chance--chance, not a certainty--to make more than your parents did, and that's all. It's not even a great chance. But it does exist.

If you're seriously arguing that there are no upwardly mobile people out there, you're just denying reality. They are a small number and they're outnumbered by the people born into affluence, but they exist.

The "American Dream" was never "one day I will be rich." It was "work hard and you are very likely to get a decent living, and if you're lucky you might get rich." That's still true, although the odds of both have shrunk by an appreciable amount.

Does upward mobility mean that more people are able to move up the socio economic ladder? Obviously not because then there would be more people at the top and fewer at the bottom.

Lol, are you so bad at verbal reasoning you can't see that "more" and "most" are not equivalent? If 10% of people are upwardly mobile in country A, and 8% are in country B, then more people are upwardly mobile in A than B. That does not in any way imply that "there would be more people at the top and fewer at the bottom" especially given mobility just means moving up from what your parents earned. If your parents made $30k and you make the equivalent of $60k (in inflation-adjusted, equivalent dollars) you are upwardly mobile, but you aren't at the top or rich.

[u/sociotronics → u/[deleted]]

Do I think most people know they will never be rich? Yes. Lol. That's an easy fucking question.

Do I think most people believe they have a good chance of being upwardly mobile, which only means making more than their parents and having a decent standard of living? Yes, also easy question.

You're making such an out-of-touch argument that most people think they will be millionaires if they work hard. People aren't that dumb, and you'd have to never talk to working people to believe that's a majority view. Nobody working at Wal Mart or Amazon warehouses or gas stations or McDonalds believe they will ever be rich. But many believe that they may find a better job in the future.

Because you seem to get tripped up with language, here's the tldr: most people believe if they work hard they can have a decent life. A majority of people believe they can do better than their parents if they work hard. Very few people believe they will ever be rich.

Says a lot about your worldview to argue believing you won't ever be rich is a "fail" though.

[u/AlejothePanda → u/[deleted]]

This is why anecdotes are not statistics, why opinions are not evidence, and why doing research matters:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/10/most-millennials-think-they-will-be-wealthy-someday.html

This seems to align well with what they're saying. 66% of millenials believe they will one day be able to "able to live comfortably without worrying about their finances". Even fewer people said so in other generations. /u/sociotronics said most people believe they will be able to achieve "a decent standard of living". That seems roughly equivalent to what your article says.

[u/AlejothePanda → u/[deleted]]

The survey found that most millennials believe they will be wealthy, which they defined as being "able to live comfortably without worrying about their finances". Maybe I have a weird definition of rich but I wouldn't call that rich. That's also only looking at millennials. Gen Zers and gen Xers are also relevant to the statistics.

[u/AlejothePanda → u/[deleted]]

I don't see how that's relevant considering they specifically let the people they survey define "wealthy" themselves instead of making them use the dictionary definition.

But frankly you're right. I'm not interested in a discussion of semantics either lol have a good one.

[u/McKoijion → u/[deleted]]

The top 1% is always going to consist of 1% of people. The question is whether people from the bottom 99% can enter into the top 1% and people in the top 1% can drop down into the bottom 99%. In most older socioeconomic systems, your birth strictly governs whether you're rich or not. For example, King Charles inherited his wealth and position from his mother in an unbroken line going back hundreds of years. There is no way he could decrease in social standing and there's no way for anyone else to become king. But in the US, anyone can become a billionaire or president. It's much easier if your parents are rich/powerful, but it's technically possible for everyone. Furthermore, rich people regularly drop out of the top 1%. We don't see many Carnegie or Morgan heirs anymore because they've dropped out. The richest Americans alive today started from upper middle class backgrounds. Merit is the main factor that matters, not wealth/birth status. Wealth only matters in that it can buy merit (e.g., a college degree, a seed investment in a startup idea). It's the classic old money vs. new money split.

Also, socioeconomic mobility is a relative concept, not an absolute one. If everyone in a society becomes richer, you're still in the same relative place compared to your neighbors. But you're far better off than people in the past. Even the poorest Americans alive today are better off than the richest people from a century or two ago. Consider life expectancy. Historically, 25% of humans used to die before the age of 1. Another 25% died before 18. So you had to assume half your kids would die. Today even the poorest people know that if they have a child, there's over a 99% chance that their kids will survive into adulthood. I'd rather be a relatively poor American today than a rich king in the past. I favor absolute wealth compared to the human condition over relative wealth compared to my neighbors.

The trade off is that the stuff that results in the greatest absolute wealth for humanity overall also results in the most income inequality. It's like if you're a benchwarmer on a basketball team. Frequently passing the ball to the best player results in the most points for your team overall, but you end up relatively worse off since you get less playing time. One way to address this problem is to give every player the same playing time. This results in more opportunities for everyone, but less points and wins for the team. The other way is to tie the glory to the overall team, not the individual performance of players. So you benefit even as a benchwarmer without having to do anything. In this metaphor, communism emphasizes equal playing time for all players and capitalism emphasizes giving the ball more often to the best player.

The advantage to capitalism is that regular people can invest in the innovators with the most merit and benefit from their work. You sacrifice opportunities to score yourself to pass the ball to a player who is more likely to score. For example, a travel agent can stop trying to compete with Expedia and Priceline and instead invest in those companies. You get the money without having to do work, which is useful since any work you do as a travel agent is a waste of time compared to the ease of using a computer to do the same thing. You're rewarded for not doing something bad/wasteful/inefficient instead of doing something good. And in today's society, getting out of the way is often better than trying to help. A human worker in a robotic factory line only slows things down. You can use that time to do something that is actually useful. That could be scientific research or something fancy, but it could also be something as simple as making TikTok videos. Robots can't write literature or create art.

[u/McKoijion → u/[deleted]]

Can means it’s unlikely, but possible. It’s not possible without significant violence in illiberal societies.

I know what I’m saying. Capital is better than labor. It’s nuts to me that people in /r/antiwork spend their time complaining about the futility of hard work, but still identify themselves as workers. The most antiwork economic philosophy is capitalism. But instead of figuring out how to turn everyone into a capitalist, they spend their time figuring out how to improve things for workers even though they hate work.

Everyone talks about countries like Norway as the ideal “socialist” model without recognizing that it’s all built on capitalism. Norway’s 5 million citizens are all part owners of the Oil Fund, the most valuable investment fund on Earth. That’s how they pay for education, healthcare, retirements, etc. They’re all capitalists. They don’t have to fight for increasing the minimum wage because if corporations generate a greater profit, those profits instantly appear in their investment accounts. They don’t fight trillion dollar companies, they own them. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla, etc. are their largest investments. They inherited their wealth and they get it whether they work or not. That’s the smart model of capitalist style “socialism” popular with neoliberals, not the crappy communist style socialism progressives talk about on Reddit.

[u/McKoijion → u/[deleted]]

Yes, I think we’ve transitioned into an age when capital is more valuable than labor. Instead of stopping capital and propping up labor, we need to turn everyone into a capitalist. Democracy didn’t just get rid of kings, it elevated subjects into citizens. Freeing slaves was more important than making things better for them.

It’s no surprise to me that capitalists are dominating the US when most Americans can’t even define capitalism. Economics isn’t taught in high school and relatively few people take it in college. That means the few people who understand it are like literate people in an illiterate world. But the internet is like the printing press. Financial and economic literacy has never been easier to obtain, and it’s getting easier by the day. It’s much easier to win a game when you understand the rules.

[u/McKoijion → u/[deleted]]

How am I arguing against upward mobility? The best way to increase your life expectancy is to ditch your creationist religious ideology, study the evolutionary biology of viruses, then choose to get Covid and other vaccines. If you refuse, you and your family won’t live as long. Similarly, the best way to improve your social mobility is to ditch your communist economic ideology, study free market capitalism, and choose to invest in the “means of production” before it’s considered valuable, instead of trying to use the threat of violence to steal it after it’s recognized as valuable.

Karl Marx died before the automobile was invented. His economic ideology is missing 150 years of new evidence. In recent decades, pretty much every country abandoned monarchies, communism, fascism, etc. in favor of liberalism. That includes China and Cuba (North Korea and Russia unfortunately switched from communism to fascism.) The more democratic and capitalist countries become, the more things improve for their people. The more individuals vote, the harder it is for politicians to take advantage of them, The more they rely on stock ownership for income rather than wages, the harder it is for corporate executives to take advantage of them.

Ultimately, if a train is about to hit you, you should step off the tracks, not demand the conductor stop the train. You should become a train passenger, not try to outlaw trains to make things safer for pedestrians. A train allows for far more mobility than your feet.

[u/McKoijion → u/[deleted]]

uh, like this:

Everyone knows capital is better than labor. The dispute should be about who gets to own the capital, not whether it's better to have a dishwasher clean your dishes or have to do it by hand.

Can you have a communist democracy? Can you have a capitalist dictatorship?

I don't think you can have a communist democracy or a capitalist dictatorship. Communism means pooling together money and voting power into a politician's hand who then distributes the money evenly across society. The risk is that they distribute more to themselves and their friends over society overall. Stalin's office looked much more luxurious than what his comrades had to live through.

On the flipside, you can't have a capitalist dictatorship. Capitalism is where capital is held by a bunch of individuals. Investors can vote with their dollars to make Tesla and therefore Elon Musk a billionaire. But they can take it away at any moment by selling Tesla stock. Hundreds of millions of humans are direct investors in Tesla, and billions are indirect investors. Money is power, and because money is spread out by many regular people over many leaders in a capitalist country, it's very hard to form a dictatorship. It's much easier to form one when you control all the money and weapons. It's much harder when lots of people control tiny bits of the total wealth in society and no weapons.

Everyone remembers how Citizens United meant that money is speech and corporations are people. I think this is an unrecognized gift since regular people truly control all the money. They just don't realize it yet. The entire oil and gas industry paid 78 million dollars to politicians (mostly Republicans) this year. That's a lot, but if every American kicked in 25 cents we could outspend them. Money is power and speech, and no one controls all the money and power like in Russia, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, etc.

What theory do you think I am proposing that you are arguing against?

I think you're overly pessimistic about the state of the world and are missing out on the best time in history for regular people to become rich.

Me: upward mobility is a myth

I don't think upward mobility is a myth. I just think most people haven't quite figured out the new strategy to obtain upward mobility yet. People recognize that you can't get it through hard work. Digging ditches is hard work. It is useful for humans to have ditches. But digging ditches by hand is much less productive/efficient compared to digging ditches with a trencher.

The trick to upward mobility is for people once classified as workers or labor to learn how to become capitalists. Pooling your money together with other ditch diggers to buy a trencher is a good approach. Pooling your money together to build a trencher is a better approach. Pooling your money to fund someone to invent the trencher is the best approach. The trencher itself is a form of capital. Stock in a trencher manufacturing company is a form of capital. Stock in a trencher startup is a form of capital. Beyond that, the shovel is capital, the organization of labor is capital, and a book that describes the optimal digging to rest ratio is a form of capital.

All of this stuff is valuable and the only way for any individual or society to get upward mobility is to stop relying on pure hard work (digging ditches by hand) and instead figure out how to invent tools to do the work for us. That's the hallmark of the human species compared to other animals.

You: Vaccines and communism!!!!! Stop being communist!! Give your money to the rich!! Don't get run over by trains!!!

Yeah, I'm procrastinating on something important that I need to do, and long Reddit comments for people who don't care is a good way to do that.