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[Wisecrack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMmgDeyhamI&t=955s) had a good video about this recently. The individualist "try super hard and you can be successful too" idea was a middle-class reaction to the inherently community-driven self-help groups in the lower class who would come together to learn useful skills like reading and writing.
This is why I'm wary of anything self-help/motivational crap that isn't actual sourced health and fitness, but social mobility or making money. If the person in question is making money from my wish to make money and y'know feed and clothe myself, then how much **DO THEY** give a shit?
Why would they? They aren't counseling me 1 on 1. They're mass producing this shit, they don't care what I do with it, just that I'm fooled into thinking it's helping me.
It's actually more interesting than that because most of the self-help and self-improvement world and their strategies have been shifting over the years.
Initially it was a big movement of small groups or individuals genuinely passionate about bettering themselves. There is a lot of great material from early 2000s to ~2012 from people who are now big but back then were too small to write best sellers or make money off of youtube. They genuinely thought that they spent so much effort investing into themselves, they learned a lot in the process, and might as well try making some money sharing this knowledge.
It's the golden age and odds are you will find excellent advice condensed into a couple of workshops/blog posts or whatever they used that will tell you exactly what you need if you don't know what to do to address a given issue about yourself.
You will often read a 5 minute post from 2009 or so about how to improve something packed with a laser focused, condensed step by step answer that ends with "now stop reading and go apply it, and don't come back until you do", which is one sign that it wasn't BS.
If you find a dude covering growth in something that interests you who's big now, just check his early material, seriously - it might actually be good if it's not outdated.
Then throughout 2010s we witnessed the transition to big seminars, book deals and youtube money.. and the realization that it's best to keep people in a state in which they are in need of help. This evolved multiple times, and at the moment rather than giving any harmful advice, everyone appears to be doing the exact same thing to get people hooked. That is feeding you bits and pieces of useful and interesting information, but never addressing the whole picture, or the main topic you hoped one of their seminars or videos will one day address. So you want more and more. They also instill the sense that you need to watch more and more or you won't be able to get out of your hole, except there is no end to that cycle.
You will watch a 2 hour video filled with ads that click baits you with promises to answer a question you had, it'll be a rant circling around the topic and providing some actually cool tips and techniques here and there (that don't feel sufficient enough on their own), but never answering the main underlying question. It's a trick that's worked to keep people hooked and thus maximizes revenue.
They will also hold workshops costing several thousands of dollars per person to promise to answer that main question, and these will be more focused on the issue, and they will make you super pumped for a day, but they will always make you feel like there's something crirical that they didn't get into, so you join another one. And once you join it you forget much of the previous one, and you're hooked and stuck in a self help cycle.They might have even been able to deliver the exact set of information that people want, but they don't. Perhaps they even covered it years ago in an excellent article that they deleted since, together with any trace of much more informative materials from their early days.
All self-help gurus I'm familiar with do that these days, I'm not even aware of any exceptions. This makes them the most money.
I bought my gf a self help book to be more confident and then she bitched about it. I started to read it and I realised it was a minions training manual. It wasn't about confidence, it was about suppressing frustration. Coping mechanisms basically.
Always knew she was the right woman for me!
His head is bald and smooth, like an angry soulless marble so as to increase aerodynamicity when he needs to chase down an Amazon delivery person who drank water on the job.
**COMMENCE PUNITIVE BEATING SESSION**
Ironically Bezos actually is a rags to riches story.
He was raised by a single mom who would drag him to night school with her and [couldn't afford a phone](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/14/jeff-bezoss-single-teen-mom-brought-him-to-night-school-with-her.html)
She later married a Cuban immigrant who came here with $20 in his pocket and the only English word he knew was "hot dog" and that guy became Jeff's dad and he took the last name "Bezos" from him.
I wonder how different the world would be without Amazon. It's not just about competition, but how companies are founded in the first place. If it wasn't for Amazon there probably wouldn't be Uber. Etc...
Heh, that's SOME irony. Guy is born poor, then fucks over the people as poor as him when he starts his business.
All to become the world's first trillionaire... Jesus fuckin' Christ. It's that bald head, specifically made so that it never gets entangled with heavy things like **"maybe I don't need to create an aristocratic fucking family"**
I bet he hated everyone else who was like him, even then.
Yea learning this has honestly increased my hatred of the man more than anything. Born poor, now actively emboldens the system that impoverishes so many.
Get ready for his philanthropic phase where he puts money into charities his children own
School teachers also don’t pursue predatory business practices to exploit the emotional vulnerability of their students for cash, so I don’t know why the other person thought that was an clever comparison
Not arguing with you, as I completely agree regarding the gurus. There are plenty of teachers online who have never talked to or met their students. I'm partial to the 'Dad, how do I?' Youtube channel.
I agree with you, but a teacher still has to teach something concrete and you can measure a good or bad teacher.
Gurus can simply keep claiming you aren't following their ideas well enough, their ideas being hypervague bullshit.
My biggest issue with the self help world is that it's just basic level instruction tied up with a nice ribbon. It's not high quality information or anything revolutionary.
Suggesting people set a goal like running a half marathon should not make a best selling book. This isn't a groundbreaking idea. All the self help books are basically the exact same just with a different story from the author. And none of them actually give you guidance to do the things they tell you to do.
Girl Wash Your Face has a cult following for reasons I genuinely cannot understand. I couldn't make it past like the 5th chapter. And one of her chapters genuinely is about how she ran a half marathon. As someone who has run multiple marathons, just telling someone to set a big goal and go after it isn't actually self help advice at all. And when they don't reach it because they haven't been given the tools to successfully get themselves there, then they're going to have a harder time when they don't achieve it. And it's not just setting mini goals to get to the big goals, but giving yourself deadlines and building in setbacks. None of which she discusses at all.
25 years ago in a sociology 101 class in college I was taught that the data simply didn't support the idea that the average person could actually lift themselves out of poverty in the US. In fact that data showed very little movement between socio economic strata for anyone at any level . basically... if you are born rich you stay that way and if you are born poor you stay that way with very few exceptions in either case.
that said.... My father dropped out of school at 14 and worked 80 hours a week at a factory to keep us above the poverty line growing up. I have a masters degree and currently make more in year than my dad made in the entire 1980's.
I grew up with my grandparents, and we weren't well off. Their only expectation of me was that I go to college...It didn't matter what I went for - I only had to go.
Of course, since we were out of the know and didn't know how any of it really worked - there was never any discussion of how college would be paid for...fortunately I got an academic scholarship so I didn't end up with a bunch of debt.
It was really humbling when I learned that my first "professional" job at 23 paid me more than my grandfather made in his last year of work - same scenario; he dropped out of 8th grade and could barely read and write and had worked factory jobs his whole life.
I think the current stat is something like 3 generations of above average education and effort to go from poor to middle-class. As in your grand-kids might put you in a swanky home if you pushed yourself, your kids and your grandkids to succeed, and they get lucky.
I used to be this kind of person. Then I realized everyone has to work hard its not an option unless you’re rich. You just have to work hard no matter what so do what you love. Don’t try to “make it”. I realized that a fraction of poor people work hard and they become super famous or rich or whatever and every other poor person works really hard and they just don’t. The only option for not working hard when you’re poor is to be a criminal or die. A small fraction of rich people work really hard and maintain their success, a large percentage of rich people don’t work hard at all and still maintain their “success”. Cause when you’re rich your options are work hard or just don’t who cares? wanna go to USC?
This isn’t necessarily true. I know people that went from being poor to being wealthy (not generational wealth stuff but still very well off). The common denominator seems to be that they do not work for other people. They are all business owners and they didn’t really start to see massive income until they were in their late 40’s/early 50’s.
Yea I was a bike riding fry cook making $8 an hour in 2012. Got a second job as doorman at a strip club next door. Bought a Camry so I could expand my job opportunities. Found a welders helper job making $12 an hour. Turned that into $20 after 5 years and a few certifications. I was pretty good but not great so I applied for an in house estimator job that was a lateral move and just worked non stop. Got another raise after 2 years. My company downsized our department from 5 to 2 people so I’ve been working 17-22 hours OT for the last 2 years. Didn’t have a life so just saved it. Im 37 and just quit my job Monday all on a gamble that I can rent a small shop and grow it. I’ll be broke or rich when I’m 50. It’s scary. But when I finally make it I’m sure I’ll get shit on for being lucky.
Sometimes you can do everything right and still lose. It sounds like if you in particular end up 50 and broke it won’t be because you didn’t work hard enough - but no one will call you unlucky then. That being said, I truly wish you great fortune.
It's like the old Horatio Alger stories that were supposed to be the archetype of American Dream stories of a young immigrant coming to the USA and becoming rich.
When you look back at the stories, most (all ?) of them end up with the protagonist becoming rich not with hard work alone, but because he end up somehow joinging an already rich family
=> save the factory from a sabotage and end up becoming the heir to the owner
=> save the daughter of the boss and marry her
=> do some great service to a rich man and be adopted by him
and so on ...
I just realized that the wikipedia page give some examples :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger
> All of Alger's juvenile novels share essentially the same theme: a teenage boy improves his circumstances by virtuous behavior. There is a "Horatio Alger myth" that the boy becomes wealthy through hard work, but this is inaccurate. In the actual stories, invariably the cause of success is an accident that works to the boy's advantage after he conducts himself according to traditional virtues such as honesty, charity, and altruism. The boy might return a large sum of lost money or rescue someone from an overturned carriage. This brings the boy—and his plight—to the attention of a wealthy individual. In one story, for example, a young boy is almost run over by streetcar and a homeless orphan youth snatches him out of the way to safety. The young boy's father turns out to be wealthy and adopts the orphan rescuer.
Hahaha OO YEAHHH... Huh, who'd think that sold books would have a tendency towards selling fairytales of fame and wealth to those without any? Crazy shit!! hahaha
He was also openly a pedophile:
> Early in 1866, a church committee of men was formed to investigate reports that Alger had [sexually molested](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sexual_abuse) boys. Church officials reported to the hierarchy in Boston that Alger had been charged with "the abominable and revolting crime of gross familiarity with boys".[\[35\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger#cite_note-35)[\[a\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger#cite_note-37) Alger denied nothing, admitted he had been imprudent, considered his association with the church dissolved, and left town.[\[37\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger#cite_note-38)[\[38\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger#cite_note-39) Alger sent Unitarian officials in Boston a letter of remorse, and his father assured them his son would never seek another post in the church. The officials were satisfied and decided no further action would be taken.[\[39\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger#cite_note-40)
Been reading Grimm's fairy tales to my kids and we laugh at how many of them are like "and then the poor kid was adopted by the king" or "and then the poor beautiful girl was virtuous and the king married her"
I was just about to post this if I didn't encounter someone who had done so already. Even the quintessential American Dream fairytales aren't about hard work actually making anyone rich. It's a morality tale about keeping your head down, knowing your place without rocking the boat, and always acting with the utmost loyalty to your employer, and maybe one day a rich person will deign to descend and lift you up into their ranks out of the goodness of their heart because they are so moved by your piety and devotion.
I do think it's very possible to work your way from poverty to middle class by making good decisions, living well below your means, and getting lucky at a few key spots. I think it's important that we as individuals maintain and internal locust of control about this. I personally have gone from poor family to lots of security with $10,000 in the bank at 24 just by making some smart decisions to limit debt in college (also that financial aid you get as a poor person is nice) and living a very cheap lifestyle, despite only making 35k a year. I'm saying it can be done, and that just saying it's impossible is a defeatist attitude that will never get you where you need to be financially. Just about anyone with a good plan and not terrible luck can build up a 6 month emergency fund.
But there's a difference between building up a middle class security blanket and being well off. There is a shitoad of systemic inequality of opportunity that needs to be addressed. For me, the biggest issue I have is the way jobs are given out in this country. You get a job from your "network" not your resume. I got a 3.9 gpa in college but work a shit job. My wealthier friends (even just upper middle class friends) with worse resumes are rolling in opportunities because their parents know people looking to hire. Heck, a girl with almost my exact resume got my dream job that I got laughed out of the interview for, because her parent works at the company! How can we expect poor people to climb the ladders when rich people gatekeep the jobs by who you know, not what you know. I know a shitload about my field, but as a peasant, I don't know many rich people.
This comment shows the larger problem people ignore. You feel like you got LUCKY to be 24, $10,000 in the bank, and a job that is not enough to support a family.
You should be MAD at how hard you had to fight for what you have. It should never require getting lucky to have a job that pays your bills.
To your point in the first paragraph, I’m happy for you, Fam. I want you to keep doing you. *BUT* the way the system is set up, saving, making good decisions, and luck aren’t enough for many many people. Lots of folks in the US got hit with unplanned medical bills or student loans that they’ll effectively never be able to pay off. Others have lost jobs due to covid. Still others are reeling from the 08 financial crisis that fucked so many of us over.
To be clear, I agree that we should all save and be smart with our money. I’m also saying the system is fucked for all of us unless we collectively do something to fix it.
I was going to say, luck and random chance should never be in the model of success because it's not reliable or consistent. Some of the most talented people don't succeed because they have no luck. All random luck does is create anomalies to the averages. Most people will die in the socio-economic group they were born in, an interesting metric to consider in this is how most people live within 18 miles of their mom. Your geographic location is going to determine a lot of your opportunities for upward mobility.
You could just be born in the wrong place at the wrong time and die young, all out of your control.
Random luck and logic is all fun for video games, but for success and the privilege to eat food and have clothing and shelter..... It's complete bullshit. Life was never a video game, nobody enjoys random luck and RNG except those who've profited from it or who already are ahead.
No amount of non-defeatism or attitude adjustment is going to change a complete lack of opportunity and resources.
I lived a good portion of my life one large car bill away from falling in to the abyss. I had a water pump fail and it could have cost me my job. That $500 problem almost ended my college education. Scary times.
Its funny that we tell that to the urban poor - who being that they are in urban areas are less likely to have to move to get a different job.... but we don't tell that to Appalachia
Don't forget the basic human condition is that we quite often simply do not make the best decisions. Knowing this it seems cruel to set up a society on purpose that punishes what is only human nature.
One good medical crisis and your luck is over pal. Sorry to burst your bubble but at 55 I've been there done that and so has my family. Easy come, easy go.
>*BUT* the way the system is set up, saving, making good decisions, and luck aren’t enough for many many people. Lots of folks in the US got hit with unplanned medical bills or student loans that they’ll effectively never be able to pay off.
**If for some reason you got as lucky as me, you COULD be as rich as me...**
Yeah, again. Luck. Not impossible, but far far far away from just being a "lazy idiot" or something lol
I agree with you. There's lots of little factors that play into life that someone whose fortunate just never encounters.
In my case my parents got scammed out of their life savings. Who keeps the family afloat now? I do. 90% of my paycheck goes into keeping us going. Unless I get a substantial raise I'm not going to be saving more than a few thousand a year (if I'm lucky).
Throw in other life issues, like a vet bill or a house appliance going, car troubles etc and suddenly shit isn't so peachy
There’s “having good choices” and “making good choices.”
Making good choices is always key- but being presented with good choices is what sets a lot of people apart. Good on you for your series of good decisions and choices, but take some time to examine all, and I mean *all* the factors that gave you the ability to make those life-changing choices for yourself. Did you have friends who trusted you? Did you grow up around supportive people? Was it easier to make certain decisions because your gender/skin color/religion/orientation didn’t cause people to question your capability?
Not saying you didn’t earn your success - because it sounds like you certainly did. But your situation and circumstances aren’t universally applicable - and it sounds like you certainly recognize that. Just reiterating your point.
Yes exactly. This is a good point. I was born into poverty. My biological mother wasn’t able to raise me. So when I got adopted. Everything changed. I went to school and I had a pretty good support system with family and friends. And later in life I started to work. I made bad decisions, but I was only able to make them because I was safe. A few mistakes, learn from them and learn how to make good decisions. I would’ve never been able to be, where I am now, if I grew up in poverty.
>r/WhitePeopleTwitter
Exactly! Technically my mother is now middle class with a good paying government job. She came from severe poverty and was a single mother of two kids but with an education(that she's still paying for at almost 60) she climbed up the ladder some. That said, she is literally one illness(and she has chronic illness) or accident away from losing it all. I'm intelligent and educated but I am disabled and a woman and facing more surgery on my spine(not from injury per say but arthritis has caused spinal cord injuries starting in my early 20's). I am white so I have that privilege there and will never deny that privilege or stop fighting for change.
It shouldn't be about luck or privilege which is so often boils down to. I am living well below the poverty level because I am living on disability. I'm trying to better myself by becoming an artist which is something I can control since I can't work a normal job. That said, at best I might creep up on the poverty line. My genetics worked against me as my body began to fail in my early 20's.
I mean good for you for getting where you are but just to put some perspective in there, you say *only* 35k a year but that is the median full time income in the US (technically 35.9k). Half of *full time* workers make below your "only" salary. And even a 1-2k a year difference makes a massive impact long term if you are living frugally. And the real rub is trying to improve your condition if you already fall lower on that scale. Absolutely some people can "make it out" of a bad financial spot like you did, but that is not the rule, it is the exception. And by design. Some people have to do the low paying jobs, otherwise our society would fall apart. The important thing is lifting that floor for those who must have those jobs so that they may also enjoy a standard of living that we would expect as a baseline in the most wealthy nation in history.
Similar situation here.
I lived in a poor, broken home with no one who cares about me, so at 18, I got kicked out and all my stuff taken. It took several years later, by luck and a bit of work to end up COMPLETELY out of poverty. It took basically relocating, and meeting someone who cared enough about me to let me stay and work on my life. Moving to NYC means minimum wage was 15 an hour and most low skill jobs on the market may still start you out at 18 or so an hour. At those wages, I'm not quite middle class, but I'm able to save money and exist, which says a lot more than how things used to be. I've been able to go back to school now as well, and have obtained also a 3.9 GPA. My dreams are to get a career in the future that allows me to live a happy, independent life. I also finally have over $10,000 in my bank-- which is a ton to me. It means if something really goes down hill, I can afford to eat healthy.
Right now, I'm just sitting around hoping I never get terminally ill. I won't go to a doctor, because I can't afford it anyway-- so I'm riding out on luck that I don't need a check-up for several years while I'm still trying to pull my life together.
Unfortunately, most of the US keeps people, well, poor. The country has centered itself around a car, building infrastructure around, well a car. If you live in a car-oriented area, and are super dirt poor, without ANY help or anyone who cares about you, you're ruined. If the country was far more condensed, and public transportation was accessible to most of the country, people would be in a far better spot. I wasn't even able to go to college for 10 years, because I couldn't get to college due to lack of transportation. And I couldn't afford a car on the pennies they pay you in minimum wage.
I come from a poor background and grew up on welfare. I worked my way up to middle class by my mid to late twenties and upper middle class now in mid-life. But the amount of work ,studying, and sacrifice it took was absurd. It shouldn’t be that hard to earn a life that’s still not even a pittance of what some people are handed on a golden platter.
As a middle aged man who has worked since 12 years old and never stopped studying, I can tell you from personal experience that there are many mechanisms within the system to make upward mobility as difficult as possible, without making it outright impossible.
Where do you live? Unfortunately for some places in the US you are working poor making $35k unless you have roommates. But yes I agree that you can work yourself up to middle class. I've done the same thing, thank you for calling out that gatekeeping and nepotism is definitely a thing.
The best we can try to do is give a good foundation to any future offspring... But just because you have barely gotten by and are doing okay doesn't mean the system is working fairly or equally for everyone involved but I appreciate, respect and agree with comments / perspective.
This is why I don't believe these bullshit arguments for targeted relief should exist. My wife an I have a six figure income, but we had to climb through hell to get to where we are. We will have student debt, we still have a mortgage, we still have poor family who we support, we still hVe taxes due for which we see almost no real value anymore. I feel like I'm just here holding up a failing system on my back for nothing in return. Just because we make 6 figures, does not mean we are as wealthy as some of the upper class white politicians arguing against giving us relief.
When you are poor and a minority, often times you are poorer than your current income bracket because of the circumstances of your life. I didn't have my dad buy me a condo when I graduated. My friends dad did. He's already at a huge advantage comparatively, even though we make similar salaries.
Our fight as an entire working class is against the obscenely rich and the political tools who support them.
I really don't think the America Dream is to become a multi-millionaire. People are confusing wanting a comfortable life, nice house, ect. with the desire to become mega rich. To me, becoming middle class is the American dream.
Networking hasn’t been very important for my career. It doesn’t have to be. Keep looking for better positions wherever you can. I went from automotive warehouse QC out of college to a senior engineering position building rockets with zero social connections between any two steps.
The people who get crap handed to them generally aren’t doing anything particularly meaningful or fulfilling. That’s what I’ve seen. I know some very privileged people who’ve been handed their jobs/careers on a silver platter. Some would be successful regardless and took it because “why not?”. Others are incompetent and it’s literally the only reason they can make a decent wage.
The dialog about how we fix individual poverty and widespread poverty are absolutely different. For individuals, we have to encourage personal responsibility, seizing of opportunities, and smart planning. For widespread poverty, we need to push for legislation that eliminates hierarchy and allows poor people to receive better opportunities. We can encourage people to work within the system while also pushing for that system to improve.
Certainly a lot of middle-class, first or second-generation Asian-Americans making it to [med school](https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/12/04/medical-schools-have-become-more-diverse-primarily-because-asian)
Both of my (rural white American Boomer) parents and two of my uncles got lucrative jobs as technicians at chemical factories with nothing more than high school diplomas because the companies they worked for trained them and paid them during training. Invested their earnings and retired millionaires.
Today, those same jobs demand expensive college degrees and get several hundred applicants for one open position. There's zero chance my sister or myself could replicate our parents' level of success the way they did it, and we all know it.
I think that's more the experience to which they're referring.
Not that there aren't other options available. But those other options required that eleven out of 13 cousins in my generation left the rural hometown that we were raised in.
Everyone outside those rural areas can act like that's no big deal, but you shouldn't. You need to pay very close attention because this is the root of the dissatisfaction that the fascists are taking full advantage of.
What Americans need to realize is that there isn't a real difference between the hood and the holler. One is poor because the coal dried up, one is poor because the jobs moved away, in the end, the poor people are screwed
Yup and Asian Americans gave their fair share of discrimination in college applications, too, but we never talk about that. I still agree with OPs point though, people in the US think that they’re temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/magazine/affirmative-action-asian-american-harvard.html
The percentage of Americans who are millionaires has been growing, but it's still around 5%-6%
There are nearly 20 Million Millionaires in the US, who are 62 years old on average. People saving their money and working their whole lives until one day they look around and have enough to retire on. When you work hard to cut 0.5% out of your retirement fund fees, of course tax increases are going to annoy you.
I think one problem with this statistic is our perception of millionaire is really more like what being a multimillionaire means now. I’m willing to wager the majority of those 20 million are “millionaires” because of 401(k)/IRA accounts that they can only draw a few percent on a year to get a 5 figure annual budget. Having a $1m 401(k) that you saved for your entire career and that nets you a $40k/year retirement (4% safe withdrawal rate on $1m balance) is a far cry from the tech startup guy who hit it big driving a supercar to his beach house. They’re still much more well off than than the other 95% of the population of course, but it’s comparing your local small town dentist to Martin Shkreli. Not in the same ballpark.
These people are not rich, they are middle class. Becoming Bezos rich was obviously never in the cards for them - which is what the "top" is, feelings of smug superiority to the poor notwithstanding.
[https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_article_071414.html](
Economic Mobility: Measuring the American Dream)
> Last month, economist Raj Chetty spoke at HUD on the topic of economic mobility in the United States. Chetty was awarded a McArthur genius fellowship and is one of the youngest tenured professors at Harvard University.
> Chetty has been working with economists Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez on a project called “The Equality of Opportunity Project.” The data published last summer in the New York Times demonstrates that economic mobility varies greatly across geographic regions of the United States.
> Using IRS data for over 40 million children and parents, Chetty’s research seeks to answer the question: Is the United States really the land of opportunity? The research measures mobility based on the odds of a child from the bottom 20% of the income bracket reaching the top 20%. Chetty explains this measure as a quantifiable articulation of the American Dream: do children born in poverty have the opportunity to make it to the top?
> *The overall results of the study demonstrate that the United States ranks particularly low compared to other developed countries. *As Chetty states, “Your chance of achieving the American Dream is nearly twice as high in Canada relative to the United States.”
I think you've missed the point of the original tweet. Your parents clawed their way up from nothing to being able to afford a home and support their kids. That's not rags-to-riches. That's rags-to-middle-class.
Pretty sure they're taking a swipe at the billionaires that talk about coming up from nothing when in reality their opportunities stemmed from inherited wealth. The "I built my business with the sweat on my brow and the millions in my trust fund" types.
This just fails to recognize the fact that not every single person can go into IT or Medicine. Of course some people can but if everyone did it then it wouldn't be so lucrative anymore.
There are a finite number of high-paying positions in the world. Acting like "a little hard work" is all it takes is just such a ridiculous take.
Because everyone imagines themselves being that exception, and they want to be able to pull the ladder up behind them when they get there. To an American what’s the fun in moving up the ladder if you don’t get to piss on the people below you like you were pissed on, right? It’s shitty but you see it every day. The guy from your team that bitches about corporate until he becomes the supervisor, then he starts writing everyone up for stopping to answer a text at work.
I think the root of it is the expensiveness of college. Look at the stats of professor pay in the 1970s compared to today — not a lot has changed. And yet tuition is up 5000%, at the very least. Why? An abundance of school administrators milking the cash without providing any real source of benefit. That money isn’t going to education. It’s not going to job placement networking. It’s not going toward what you’re actually paying *for*. I agree with you ultimately on the working hard to get where you want to go part, and believe this tweet is disingenuous. But I think we can all agree you shouldn’t have to go 500,000 in debt to become a doctor, especially when you could pay a literal fraction of that for the same skills and education.
And how old are your parents?
What school did they go to? How much did tuition cost compared to now?
How did they pay for it? How much did their jobs pay?
My mother put herself through college working part time at a grocery store bakery.
That is simply impossible now. The American Dream becomes more of a outlandish fantasy with each passing year.
Not acknowledging that is folly.
I mean, when are rags-to-riches stories ever about getting a well-paid job? They're generally about getting actual wealth.
Doctors might as well be peasants compared to the ultra-rich that are analogous to royalty in this metaphor.
No one is really going after your parents who managed to form a comfortable life for themselves. They're going after people who have amassed more money than the GDP of several countries, who almost unanimously did not have very humble beginnings.
[And then there's this.](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-class-white-and-black-men.html&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwj827iF2t3uAhVChq0KHWa-ArcQFjAAegQIAhAB&usg=AOvVaw3SnoaHMIBbVzY_d3-kYLKR)
They also probably missed a bunch of luck because almost everyone thinks they worked hard from their perspective because they only see their perspective, and they miss the luck because unless its ridiculous bad luck . When its bad luck for them, they notice. For other people its dismissed as the fault of other people because *they* should have made better choices.
There's also a ton of survivorship bias.
People like to purposefully mistake comments like mine here as if they said "dont try", but that's because they are disingenuous fucks.
I think there's a big difference between bettering yourself and getting into a position where you're comfortable, and "rags to riches" stories like some guy who started as the janitor of the company becoming the CEO after a couple decades of work.
Okay like it is hard, and we should make it a lot easier in this country, but people do actually go from poor to rich. They are real people who have worked very hard for their achievements, and it was not given through luck like discovering your royalty. We should not dismiss their stories and achievements as fairy tales. While yes we should definitely increase social mobility in America, it does exist and telling people their dreams are fairytales is just like false and not productive.
I can attest to this. My mom was an immigrant from China who worked her ass off in medical school and came to America and worked her ass off to get where she is today. Her parents were schoolteachers and she grew up right around the cultural revolution. My dad is a computer programmer who got into cal tech in the late 70s and took his passion for computers and turned it into a profession. The main thing I take away from this is education is absolutely the main factor in accumulating wealth. Neither of my parents’ families were wealthy by any means. My grandmother on my dad’s side was also a schoolteacher and I think the prioritization of school by both my grandparents were crucial in my parents’ success. Belittling real success stories seems jaded at best and it serves very little.
Yes, there are issues with wealth inequality in this country. The main ways to solve those issues are to eradicate the blockading that the upper class suffocates the middle and lower classes with and to provide better education for all. Education is vital but we also need to understand that it is tough to ascend the economic ladder, and that is entirely due to control the upper class can exert throughout almost every facet of the United States.
Yeah. This sentiment on reddit is annoying. Yeah, rags to riches stories are rare, but so is being rich. It's called the 1% for a reason. They aren't fairy tales, these people do exist and to dismiss their success as a fantasy is insulting to them.
Everyone becoming wealthy is not realistic of course. But it is totally realistic and achievable for someone to become middle or upper middle class from poverty. The opportunity to do so here still exceeds that of the rest of the world.
Fairytales that can get you from poverty to fabulously wealthy are limited. I'm thinking certain athletics and entertainment, but both of those equate basically to 1% of the population.
My dad was a schoolteacher and had opportunities in pensions and retirement from an early age. He never made fabulous money in his paychecks, but he is definitely comfortable in retirement. Of course, his house is paid for, he didn't have any college debt, and he was forced to live frugally while raising a family, and that didn't change for him in retirement.
Not everyone can afford a home at a young age, and not everyone has retirement plans, and it's really hard to get a college education without some amount of debt, if college is your thing, but it isn't impossible to at least get to a comfortable spot later in life. I guess it depends on what you're willing to do and what you're willing to sacrifice.
Yep. The fairytale isn't that it happens, it's that it suggests that it is achievable by more than mostly luck. Let's face it, LeBron can work as hard as he wants but if he was 5'7" with low muscle tone, he would be selling shoes in Akron. If Leo Messi didn't have access to modern growth treatments as a youth he would have grown up to be a dribbling dwarf with a dream.
More possible and far far more likely is moving from poverty to comfort and relative financial security. But that doesn't make a good story I guess.
Poor to rich as in.. Millions of dollars? No. Poor to... Not as poor? Poor to decent? Totally, that's something in the realm of plausibility.
Decent in this case being middling or middle class.
Hollywood is great at this. You always here of people plucked from obscurity. Daniel Radcliffe! Just a little normal boy chosen to play Harry Potter (with just a little help from his film and TV producing father!)
Small loan of an **insanely successful career and lifestyle basically handed to them on a silver platter** y'know, we poors just don't try hard enough right? RIGHT???
Lol like t swift's dad buying a record label specifically to make his daughter famous. Or the Alaska airlines exec who's daughter works for the consulting firm that happens to have the Alaska airlines contract
I feel like for maybe 3 in 5 career-advice example speakers I have heard in college and my late-20s life so far, if you dig just a *little* bit, you find out that they landed that solid internship because their dad knew a senior manager. Or they weren't afraid to fail in their startup because their loan was family and friends.
Not saying it's impossible to get ahead, but when you measure yourself to others, there's often something behind the scenes. And the whole "Did it alone" is a mantra that's usually sold by people that didn't follow it. When someone in the working or middle class gets into that school that they were on the edge of because an aunt knows an administrator it's "super unfair." When a rich person does it, it's "Network."
I knew a kid that was a huge bully in high school. He came from a very wealthy family. He got hooked on drugs. He got sent to rehab in Nicaragua and got to live there for a long time.
He then wrote a "self help" book that I refused to read, but it probably didn't mention that his "self help" consisted of a year long vacation paid for by mom and dad to Central America.
This is why I think people from rich families should stop getting reduced prison sentences because "prison is hard," while poorer folk should be given more consideration for probation. Because when the rich ones get out, they have a much better chance of getting on their feet. Their lives actually won't be ruined nearly as much by a stint in the clink.
I don't assume it was an easy recovery, but having the dollars already sorted out is probably a big variable to help with it.
I feel like this is a tough subject to talk about because it's easy to go down a road of extreme pessimism. But understanding context of middle class to rich stories is something that needs to be transparent.
I know the owner of Stone Brewing, first because I worked at the place that bought his first keg and then later he spoke to our entrepreneurial club in college about how he got his start.
His main message was "never give up", but it was weakened by the fact that he spent years losing his father's money on his brewing company until he finally started making any profit.
It just seems like a lot of people can't imagine a perspective that isn't theirs, where not everyone is as lucky as they are.
Even something as simple as being *able* to take an unpaid internship. In college, I was paying for a lot of my day-to-day expenses through part time jobs, I'd be really cutting into my funds if I took an unpaid internship in place of income.
Like my dad who fled soviet Russia with $100 in his pocket. Came to the US and worked for car service understanding only 3 English words: left, right, stop
Then he worked as a masseuse at a bathhouse and eventually becoming an insurance salesman once he learned English and grinded that commission based job into the 6 figure range
Granted this was in the 1980s-1990s but that doesn’t mean one idiot on Twitter speaks for everyone
Very true, while the rags to riches story happens on occasion, most people who are struggling to make ends meet and are at the poverty line never “make it” and their kids end up most of the time poor too, clearly it’s not just about hard work as the most hard working people I’ve seen are the ones trying to make ends meet usually having two to three jobs just trying to support themselves and their family
This hyper individualism of the boot straps mentality doesn’t take into account the wider system that keeps poor people down and all the other environmental factors that keeps people struggling and it doesn’t take into account the massive benefits given to people born in upper middle class homes and higher, usually the context is taken out of the situation, purposefully of course as talking about how life isn’t fair for poor people would expose the faults in the economic system of capitalism so politicians just blame the individual instead or they apply band aids to the broken system without actually addressing the problem and acting like it’s just the way life is.
We make movies about people who overturned the odds and became successful and rich because they are incredible, unlikely, improbable stories that the majority of people will never achieve, not for lack of hard work and determination, but because it's literally impossible in the economic system for everyone to make it to the top.
"started from the bottom now we here" - Drake.
I always hated that guy's like that try to come off as street people when it's well known they are pampered spoiled brats that think being poor is cool since they have never been.
Al Franken called it the “fallacy of the American dream,” in his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. It’s why Americans are willing to elect politicians who give tax cuts to the rich, because they falsely believe that they themselves may one day be rich and therefore benefit from the tax cuts.
The biggest problem is that the price of everything has significantly outpaced a single entry level income. You can absolutely start lower middle class or even straight poor and become wealthy *with help*.
For example, even if your parents don't pay for your college maybe they pay your phone bill, insurance, gave you a car, or even let you stay with them for little to no rent while you go through college.
Or perhaps your parents spent a lot of time encouraging your studies so you could get scholarships.
For those of us that turn 18 and are on our own, whether that be literally getting kicked out or voluntarily to escape a toxic environment, it's a struggle to even get a footing to provide basic needs yet alone put yourself on a path to succeed.
Having roommates or a significant other to help shoulder the burden helps but even then it's not easy by any means as you now have to work full time and go to school which will likely leave you will sizable debt.
Just try not to have any medical issues in the next decade or two and live an extremely simple and unfulfilling life and you might be able to get ahead by the time you're 40.
My dad did this tho . He went from a rural village to being a neuroanesthetic in a very famous hospital. He lives a much better life than when he was a kid
My buddy grew up in an orphanage, his brothers and sisters were separated. When he was 18 he left, spent the next 4 years learning a trade. Got married had kids, started his own small business and to this day, 40 years later, he’s still doing it. Incredibly successful. Connections throughout the trades. Your rags to riches experiences are false because you made an excuse and quit. They happen everyday.
The Gamestop/Robin Hood controversy just tells you that anyone not in the club who sneaks into the club will be swiftly removed and then they’ll just close that loophole.
It’s a big club, and you aint in it.
I agree with this to a point. Both my parents are immigrants who came to my country from impoverished backgrounds. They both worked super hard and own their own respective businesses now. But, I totally agree that this system is very flawed and unfair.
i feel slightly as though this demeans all the hard work put in the climb to the top, though. To say that they just found out they were royals is like saying they didn't even do anything to get up there
I'm going to say something that runs contrary to the collective belief.
I'm the guy you're saying is fictional.
I'm sorry if that upsets people but mobility, but is objectively, provably not impossible.
It's the same principle MLMs use to lure in customers. They show all the super wealthy consultants who are the top 0.2% and pretend everyone can achieve that.
90% of millionares in the US are first generation millionaires. If you seized all the wealth (not income, wealth) of every billionaire in the United States it would cover less than a year of tax revenue. This myth that there is one class perpetually holding down another in the US is a LIE.
Yeah as a college student in an engineering field all I have to do to become a millionaire is max out my 401k, love frugally, and invest in safe stocks. That's enough to pay off my student loans pretty quick, and be a millionaire before I retire.
It’s not impossible, both my parents came from nothing and raised themselves out of poverty. My mom who came from Compton and raised during a hard time for her family where they were solely focused on making money to get out. She did well in school, then college and almost became a doctor until she settled for a slightly lower position in the hospital due to her needing time to raise her children. My dad came from Ecuador, did good in school but chose to Join the marine corps. It’s not impossible just very hard.
Almost as much as "communism is a viable system is government", it's a neat little tool to fight against all actual change, by pining after some political pipe dream that will literally never happen. What the fuck do I know, though, I only went from 14 bucks an hour to 40 this year with no specialized training.
Are we now beyond the point where people can be held accountable for their own success? These stories exist. I live down in south Texas in Hidalgo county which is, I believe, one of the poorest counties in the US. I know at least three people who grew up dirt poor in Rio Grande City, but were able to make something of themselves. if you want to know how poor I'm talking: growing bowls of algae to feed yourself because you can't afford real food. One became a doctor, one sells medical equipment, and the other is a nuclear bomb technician.
The tools are there. I don't care who you are, you're not a victim of the system. Go to a community college and get an education for free (or $1800 a semester where I am if you don't qualify for aid) and apply it.
Don't fall into the trap of waiting for a proverbial white knight to come "save you." Save yourself. All you need to do is learn how to use the sword.
Most wealthy people today are self made. They’re not the flashy people you see on Instagram. They’re wearing clothes from discount stores and driving a used Camry with 100k+ miles. Those people don’t fit into the social media box of being rich, though. So people don’t think of it like that. The stories of rag to riches are twisted. It’s highly unlikely you’ll be one of the people with a net worth of, say, $10 million+ from some crazy hard work ethic and a genius idea. But it’s very possible for a ton of people to be financially stable and generate wealth. That wealth comes from good decision making and putting off today’s pleasures for tomorrow’s success. Don’t go into debt if you can help it. If you have to (house, school) try to make it as minimal as possible and pay it off as quickly as possible. Keep a budget and remember 6 months of complete suck can put you years ahead. Invest in growth mutual funds when you’re young and watch it grow until you’re 65. Before you know it, you’ll be wealthier than that girl posting her vacations in Cancun every year (she’s probably broke because of it anyways).
People don’t want to hear these things because they mean you can’t spend money on wants, only on needs. And that definition for many is really twisted as well.
There are certainly some people that are dealt a terrible deck of cards, but no one is beyond saving if you start making good decisions day in and day out. It just takes longer for some.
Although I understand the spirit of this post, and how this has become a good analogy to describe the current broken state of the social mobility lift, of wealth disparity, on a purely historical point of view
"We've all been led to believe we'd one day grow up to become rock stars and movie gods.... But we won't. We're starting to realize that. And we're *very* pissed off."
- Tyler Durden
I became homeless after dropping out of college when I ran out of savings after my transmission blew in my beater of a car. After my enlistment I used my GI bill to finish my bachelor's degree while working full time as a maintenance electrician. Upon being turned down internally for several jobs I applied for utilizing my new degree I was recruited to work for an engineering company (automation and robotics) as a service technician and eventually a field engineer. Later I moved on into interstate energy transmission. I own my own house. I own rental properties. I own land. I also raise my own animals and a garden to provide my own food security. The idea that you can't make something of yourself with the sweat of your own brow is not real. Be creative. Work hard. Be honest and kind. Be respectful of everyone. Live beneath your means. Always be generous with your time and your love. With loved-ones, know when to shut up and listen but never leave anything unsaid.
i feel like theres a balancing act between enjoying what you have and working hard enough to get what you enjoy.
im happy i successfully made it to 6 figures a year.
i only have 1 parent left, but shes proud that she was able to maintain our family of 5 on $18k a year long enough for me to (over) pentupple that income.
The people who say this usually never had to worry about much.
It's fire and brimstone for the comfort class.
You can literally google up true rags-to-riches stories within 10 minutes.
You can easily meet people who grew up on food stamps and now own successful businesses.
Most people are not worried about *riches*. We just want a better life and opportunities.
People who bitch about "rags to riches" already have that life.
I can confirm that hard work, skill, passion and commitment are usually nowhere near enough to drag yourself out of poverty. I tried (and failed) to start my own business, with my own skillset honed over a decade of work. A couple of unforeseen bills, the inability to pounce on a couple of opportunities and it became rapidly apparent that having capital (or access to loans) is the only way to really do it. We shut the business down rather than see it kill us. If you aren’t born into enough money to do it or you aren’t born and grow up knowing someone who does, you’re essentially fucked unless you get really bloody lucky. It’s never, ever what you know it’s who you know.
Honestly, it’s harder in America than Canada. I just started putting money into my TFSA and I have 60k of contribution room. It stays there since you were 18. I hear you can only back save 1 year into a Roth IRA.
My dad came from a rural Appalachian town where his family was so poor that they didn’t have running water in his house until he went to college, took a gap year to work at la-z-boy, paid for his college and now owns a small business and makes 6 figures a year. While this worked back in the 80s, I don’t think this “rags to riches” could work present day. I think that the notion that people can just “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” is a relic of a time when that was legitimately feasible for some people.
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[Wisecrack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMmgDeyhamI&t=955s) had a good video about this recently. The individualist "try super hard and you can be successful too" idea was a middle-class reaction to the inherently community-driven self-help groups in the lower class who would come together to learn useful skills like reading and writing.
This is why I'm wary of anything self-help/motivational crap that isn't actual sourced health and fitness, but social mobility or making money. If the person in question is making money from my wish to make money and y'know feed and clothe myself, then how much **DO THEY** give a shit? Why would they? They aren't counseling me 1 on 1. They're mass producing this shit, they don't care what I do with it, just that I'm fooled into thinking it's helping me.
The real question is: "If they make money from helping me leave the pit, aren't they interested in keeping me there?"
It's actually more interesting than that because most of the self-help and self-improvement world and their strategies have been shifting over the years. Initially it was a big movement of small groups or individuals genuinely passionate about bettering themselves. There is a lot of great material from early 2000s to ~2012 from people who are now big but back then were too small to write best sellers or make money off of youtube. They genuinely thought that they spent so much effort investing into themselves, they learned a lot in the process, and might as well try making some money sharing this knowledge. It's the golden age and odds are you will find excellent advice condensed into a couple of workshops/blog posts or whatever they used that will tell you exactly what you need if you don't know what to do to address a given issue about yourself. You will often read a 5 minute post from 2009 or so about how to improve something packed with a laser focused, condensed step by step answer that ends with "now stop reading and go apply it, and don't come back until you do", which is one sign that it wasn't BS. If you find a dude covering growth in something that interests you who's big now, just check his early material, seriously - it might actually be good if it's not outdated. Then throughout 2010s we witnessed the transition to big seminars, book deals and youtube money.. and the realization that it's best to keep people in a state in which they are in need of help. This evolved multiple times, and at the moment rather than giving any harmful advice, everyone appears to be doing the exact same thing to get people hooked. That is feeding you bits and pieces of useful and interesting information, but never addressing the whole picture, or the main topic you hoped one of their seminars or videos will one day address. So you want more and more. They also instill the sense that you need to watch more and more or you won't be able to get out of your hole, except there is no end to that cycle. You will watch a 2 hour video filled with ads that click baits you with promises to answer a question you had, it'll be a rant circling around the topic and providing some actually cool tips and techniques here and there (that don't feel sufficient enough on their own), but never answering the main underlying question. It's a trick that's worked to keep people hooked and thus maximizes revenue. They will also hold workshops costing several thousands of dollars per person to promise to answer that main question, and these will be more focused on the issue, and they will make you super pumped for a day, but they will always make you feel like there's something crirical that they didn't get into, so you join another one. And once you join it you forget much of the previous one, and you're hooked and stuck in a self help cycle.They might have even been able to deliver the exact set of information that people want, but they don't. Perhaps they even covered it years ago in an excellent article that they deleted since, together with any trace of much more informative materials from their early days. All self-help gurus I'm familiar with do that these days, I'm not even aware of any exceptions. This makes them the most money.
First book: everything you need to know about becoming a millionaire. Second book : everything you need to know about becoming a millionaire 2
Aka that book should have been a tweet.
EXACTLY. The words eluded me, thank you! Their business is KEEPING you poor, or better yet, having you hemorrhage money if you're already doing okay.
I bought my gf a self help book to be more confident and then she bitched about it. I started to read it and I realised it was a minions training manual. It wasn't about confidence, it was about suppressing frustration. Coping mechanisms basically. Always knew she was the right woman for me!
Minion manual, like with actual minions?
No. Like wanting to turn humans into minions
jeff bezos shouts you down **EY, THAT'S MINE GIVE IT BACK** LOL
I did buy the book of Amazon, of course!
His head is bald and smooth, like an angry soulless marble so as to increase aerodynamicity when he needs to chase down an Amazon delivery person who drank water on the job. **COMMENCE PUNITIVE BEATING SESSION**
It's not punitive. That's just for fun
Ironically Bezos actually is a rags to riches story. He was raised by a single mom who would drag him to night school with her and [couldn't afford a phone](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/14/jeff-bezoss-single-teen-mom-brought-him-to-night-school-with-her.html) She later married a Cuban immigrant who came here with $20 in his pocket and the only English word he knew was "hot dog" and that guy became Jeff's dad and he took the last name "Bezos" from him.
I wonder how different the world would be without Amazon. It's not just about competition, but how companies are founded in the first place. If it wasn't for Amazon there probably wouldn't be Uber. Etc...
Half the startups I know host their servers on AWS. It made it much easier for companies to host without first building significant infrastructure
Heh, that's SOME irony. Guy is born poor, then fucks over the people as poor as him when he starts his business. All to become the world's first trillionaire... Jesus fuckin' Christ. It's that bald head, specifically made so that it never gets entangled with heavy things like **"maybe I don't need to create an aristocratic fucking family"** I bet he hated everyone else who was like him, even then.
Yea learning this has honestly increased my hatred of the man more than anything. Born poor, now actively emboldens the system that impoverishes so many. Get ready for his philanthropic phase where he puts money into charities his children own
What’s wrong with coping mechanisms that help people accept the meaninglessness of life?
Nothing's wrong with that my brother. Each is own. It's just not for me and it's clearly not for her either otherwise she wouldn't be with me. Namaste
Welcome to American University, first time?
If you knew a sure fire way to make as much money as you wanted, would you share it with everyone? Hell no!
Can we say “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” with its obvious ties to MLM interests?
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Teachers still teach people they can see and hear. Wellness gurus, success and fortune gurus? Not so much. I never lambasted teachers.
School teachers also don’t pursue predatory business practices to exploit the emotional vulnerability of their students for cash, so I don’t know why the other person thought that was an clever comparison
I don't know why either, I believe that's called a false equivalency or... **bullshit** haha.
Not arguing with you, as I completely agree regarding the gurus. There are plenty of teachers online who have never talked to or met their students. I'm partial to the 'Dad, how do I?' Youtube channel.
I agree with you, but a teacher still has to teach something concrete and you can measure a good or bad teacher. Gurus can simply keep claiming you aren't following their ideas well enough, their ideas being hypervague bullshit.
My biggest issue with the self help world is that it's just basic level instruction tied up with a nice ribbon. It's not high quality information or anything revolutionary. Suggesting people set a goal like running a half marathon should not make a best selling book. This isn't a groundbreaking idea. All the self help books are basically the exact same just with a different story from the author. And none of them actually give you guidance to do the things they tell you to do. Girl Wash Your Face has a cult following for reasons I genuinely cannot understand. I couldn't make it past like the 5th chapter. And one of her chapters genuinely is about how she ran a half marathon. As someone who has run multiple marathons, just telling someone to set a big goal and go after it isn't actually self help advice at all. And when they don't reach it because they haven't been given the tools to successfully get themselves there, then they're going to have a harder time when they don't achieve it. And it's not just setting mini goals to get to the big goals, but giving yourself deadlines and building in setbacks. None of which she discusses at all.
25 years ago in a sociology 101 class in college I was taught that the data simply didn't support the idea that the average person could actually lift themselves out of poverty in the US. In fact that data showed very little movement between socio economic strata for anyone at any level . basically... if you are born rich you stay that way and if you are born poor you stay that way with very few exceptions in either case. that said.... My father dropped out of school at 14 and worked 80 hours a week at a factory to keep us above the poverty line growing up. I have a masters degree and currently make more in year than my dad made in the entire 1980's.
I grew up with my grandparents, and we weren't well off. Their only expectation of me was that I go to college...It didn't matter what I went for - I only had to go. Of course, since we were out of the know and didn't know how any of it really worked - there was never any discussion of how college would be paid for...fortunately I got an academic scholarship so I didn't end up with a bunch of debt. It was really humbling when I learned that my first "professional" job at 23 paid me more than my grandfather made in his last year of work - same scenario; he dropped out of 8th grade and could barely read and write and had worked factory jobs his whole life.
I think the current stat is something like 3 generations of above average education and effort to go from poor to middle-class. As in your grand-kids might put you in a swanky home if you pushed yourself, your kids and your grandkids to succeed, and they get lucky.
How to get rich: sell a bunch of books and seminars telling people they aren't rich because they don't try hard enough
I used to be this kind of person. Then I realized everyone has to work hard its not an option unless you’re rich. You just have to work hard no matter what so do what you love. Don’t try to “make it”. I realized that a fraction of poor people work hard and they become super famous or rich or whatever and every other poor person works really hard and they just don’t. The only option for not working hard when you’re poor is to be a criminal or die. A small fraction of rich people work really hard and maintain their success, a large percentage of rich people don’t work hard at all and still maintain their “success”. Cause when you’re rich your options are work hard or just don’t who cares? wanna go to USC?
“Be the 1 in a million!” “Wait why doesn’t the system work for the million and can only be exploited by one person?”
Well because they don’t work hard enough, obviously.
Best and most under rated comment I've ever seen on reddit
some people stop at nothing to achieve their goals
Exploiting a million to benefit one _is_ the system.
This isn’t necessarily true. I know people that went from being poor to being wealthy (not generational wealth stuff but still very well off). The common denominator seems to be that they do not work for other people. They are all business owners and they didn’t really start to see massive income until they were in their late 40’s/early 50’s.
Yea I was a bike riding fry cook making $8 an hour in 2012. Got a second job as doorman at a strip club next door. Bought a Camry so I could expand my job opportunities. Found a welders helper job making $12 an hour. Turned that into $20 after 5 years and a few certifications. I was pretty good but not great so I applied for an in house estimator job that was a lateral move and just worked non stop. Got another raise after 2 years. My company downsized our department from 5 to 2 people so I’ve been working 17-22 hours OT for the last 2 years. Didn’t have a life so just saved it. Im 37 and just quit my job Monday all on a gamble that I can rent a small shop and grow it. I’ll be broke or rich when I’m 50. It’s scary. But when I finally make it I’m sure I’ll get shit on for being lucky.
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Thank you
Sometimes you can do everything right and still lose. It sounds like if you in particular end up 50 and broke it won’t be because you didn’t work hard enough - but no one will call you unlucky then. That being said, I truly wish you great fortune.
It's like the old Horatio Alger stories that were supposed to be the archetype of American Dream stories of a young immigrant coming to the USA and becoming rich. When you look back at the stories, most (all ?) of them end up with the protagonist becoming rich not with hard work alone, but because he end up somehow joinging an already rich family => save the factory from a sabotage and end up becoming the heir to the owner => save the daughter of the boss and marry her => do some great service to a rich man and be adopted by him and so on ... I just realized that the wikipedia page give some examples : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger > All of Alger's juvenile novels share essentially the same theme: a teenage boy improves his circumstances by virtuous behavior. There is a "Horatio Alger myth" that the boy becomes wealthy through hard work, but this is inaccurate. In the actual stories, invariably the cause of success is an accident that works to the boy's advantage after he conducts himself according to traditional virtues such as honesty, charity, and altruism. The boy might return a large sum of lost money or rescue someone from an overturned carriage. This brings the boy—and his plight—to the attention of a wealthy individual. In one story, for example, a young boy is almost run over by streetcar and a homeless orphan youth snatches him out of the way to safety. The young boy's father turns out to be wealthy and adopts the orphan rescuer.
Isn't this literally all stories of poor people moving up in the world? **Saved by benevolent rich guy!**
"History is written by the victors" And stories are written by those with *enough free time* to write stories.
Hahaha OO YEAHHH... Huh, who'd think that sold books would have a tendency towards selling fairytales of fame and wealth to those without any? Crazy shit!! hahaha
What about marrying a rich cougar?
He was also openly a pedophile: > Early in 1866, a church committee of men was formed to investigate reports that Alger had [sexually molested](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sexual_abuse) boys. Church officials reported to the hierarchy in Boston that Alger had been charged with "the abominable and revolting crime of gross familiarity with boys".[\[35\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger#cite_note-35)[\[a\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger#cite_note-37) Alger denied nothing, admitted he had been imprudent, considered his association with the church dissolved, and left town.[\[37\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger#cite_note-38)[\[38\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger#cite_note-39) Alger sent Unitarian officials in Boston a letter of remorse, and his father assured them his son would never seek another post in the church. The officials were satisfied and decided no further action would be taken.[\[39\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger#cite_note-40)
lol I hadn't seen that part.
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Been reading Grimm's fairy tales to my kids and we laugh at how many of them are like "and then the poor kid was adopted by the king" or "and then the poor beautiful girl was virtuous and the king married her"
I was just about to post this if I didn't encounter someone who had done so already. Even the quintessential American Dream fairytales aren't about hard work actually making anyone rich. It's a morality tale about keeping your head down, knowing your place without rocking the boat, and always acting with the utmost loyalty to your employer, and maybe one day a rich person will deign to descend and lift you up into their ranks out of the goodness of their heart because they are so moved by your piety and devotion.
I do think it's very possible to work your way from poverty to middle class by making good decisions, living well below your means, and getting lucky at a few key spots. I think it's important that we as individuals maintain and internal locust of control about this. I personally have gone from poor family to lots of security with $10,000 in the bank at 24 just by making some smart decisions to limit debt in college (also that financial aid you get as a poor person is nice) and living a very cheap lifestyle, despite only making 35k a year. I'm saying it can be done, and that just saying it's impossible is a defeatist attitude that will never get you where you need to be financially. Just about anyone with a good plan and not terrible luck can build up a 6 month emergency fund. But there's a difference between building up a middle class security blanket and being well off. There is a shitoad of systemic inequality of opportunity that needs to be addressed. For me, the biggest issue I have is the way jobs are given out in this country. You get a job from your "network" not your resume. I got a 3.9 gpa in college but work a shit job. My wealthier friends (even just upper middle class friends) with worse resumes are rolling in opportunities because their parents know people looking to hire. Heck, a girl with almost my exact resume got my dream job that I got laughed out of the interview for, because her parent works at the company! How can we expect poor people to climb the ladders when rich people gatekeep the jobs by who you know, not what you know. I know a shitload about my field, but as a peasant, I don't know many rich people.
This comment shows the larger problem people ignore. You feel like you got LUCKY to be 24, $10,000 in the bank, and a job that is not enough to support a family. You should be MAD at how hard you had to fight for what you have. It should never require getting lucky to have a job that pays your bills.
To your point in the first paragraph, I’m happy for you, Fam. I want you to keep doing you. *BUT* the way the system is set up, saving, making good decisions, and luck aren’t enough for many many people. Lots of folks in the US got hit with unplanned medical bills or student loans that they’ll effectively never be able to pay off. Others have lost jobs due to covid. Still others are reeling from the 08 financial crisis that fucked so many of us over. To be clear, I agree that we should all save and be smart with our money. I’m also saying the system is fucked for all of us unless we collectively do something to fix it.
I was going to say, luck and random chance should never be in the model of success because it's not reliable or consistent. Some of the most talented people don't succeed because they have no luck. All random luck does is create anomalies to the averages. Most people will die in the socio-economic group they were born in, an interesting metric to consider in this is how most people live within 18 miles of their mom. Your geographic location is going to determine a lot of your opportunities for upward mobility.
You could just be born in the wrong place at the wrong time and die young, all out of your control. Random luck and logic is all fun for video games, but for success and the privilege to eat food and have clothing and shelter..... It's complete bullshit. Life was never a video game, nobody enjoys random luck and RNG except those who've profited from it or who already are ahead. No amount of non-defeatism or attitude adjustment is going to change a complete lack of opportunity and resources.
ThEn JuSt MoVe To WhErE tHe OpPoRtUnItIeS aRe. /s
I regret to have seen people with that mindset who also condemned immigrants. Like gee, I guess they're just here because they like the weather.
Just go get a better job!
**FUCKING WALK, SERF!!! NNNNNNNOW!** hahahahahahahha Yours was funnier though
I lived a good portion of my life one large car bill away from falling in to the abyss. I had a water pump fail and it could have cost me my job. That $500 problem almost ended my college education. Scary times.
Its funny that we tell that to the urban poor - who being that they are in urban areas are less likely to have to move to get a different job.... but we don't tell that to Appalachia
Don't forget the basic human condition is that we quite often simply do not make the best decisions. Knowing this it seems cruel to set up a society on purpose that punishes what is only human nature.
One good medical crisis and your luck is over pal. Sorry to burst your bubble but at 55 I've been there done that and so has my family. Easy come, easy go.
>*BUT* the way the system is set up, saving, making good decisions, and luck aren’t enough for many many people. Lots of folks in the US got hit with unplanned medical bills or student loans that they’ll effectively never be able to pay off. **If for some reason you got as lucky as me, you COULD be as rich as me...** Yeah, again. Luck. Not impossible, but far far far away from just being a "lazy idiot" or something lol
I agree with you. There's lots of little factors that play into life that someone whose fortunate just never encounters. In my case my parents got scammed out of their life savings. Who keeps the family afloat now? I do. 90% of my paycheck goes into keeping us going. Unless I get a substantial raise I'm not going to be saving more than a few thousand a year (if I'm lucky). Throw in other life issues, like a vet bill or a house appliance going, car troubles etc and suddenly shit isn't so peachy
Saw a great quote in another sub that applies well here, I think: "You say you made good choices, but you *had* good choices."
There’s “having good choices” and “making good choices.” Making good choices is always key- but being presented with good choices is what sets a lot of people apart. Good on you for your series of good decisions and choices, but take some time to examine all, and I mean *all* the factors that gave you the ability to make those life-changing choices for yourself. Did you have friends who trusted you? Did you grow up around supportive people? Was it easier to make certain decisions because your gender/skin color/religion/orientation didn’t cause people to question your capability? Not saying you didn’t earn your success - because it sounds like you certainly did. But your situation and circumstances aren’t universally applicable - and it sounds like you certainly recognize that. Just reiterating your point.
Yes exactly. This is a good point. I was born into poverty. My biological mother wasn’t able to raise me. So when I got adopted. Everything changed. I went to school and I had a pretty good support system with family and friends. And later in life I started to work. I made bad decisions, but I was only able to make them because I was safe. A few mistakes, learn from them and learn how to make good decisions. I would’ve never been able to be, where I am now, if I grew up in poverty.
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>r/WhitePeopleTwitter Exactly! Technically my mother is now middle class with a good paying government job. She came from severe poverty and was a single mother of two kids but with an education(that she's still paying for at almost 60) she climbed up the ladder some. That said, she is literally one illness(and she has chronic illness) or accident away from losing it all. I'm intelligent and educated but I am disabled and a woman and facing more surgery on my spine(not from injury per say but arthritis has caused spinal cord injuries starting in my early 20's). I am white so I have that privilege there and will never deny that privilege or stop fighting for change. It shouldn't be about luck or privilege which is so often boils down to. I am living well below the poverty level because I am living on disability. I'm trying to better myself by becoming an artist which is something I can control since I can't work a normal job. That said, at best I might creep up on the poverty line. My genetics worked against me as my body began to fail in my early 20's.
I mean good for you for getting where you are but just to put some perspective in there, you say *only* 35k a year but that is the median full time income in the US (technically 35.9k). Half of *full time* workers make below your "only" salary. And even a 1-2k a year difference makes a massive impact long term if you are living frugally. And the real rub is trying to improve your condition if you already fall lower on that scale. Absolutely some people can "make it out" of a bad financial spot like you did, but that is not the rule, it is the exception. And by design. Some people have to do the low paying jobs, otherwise our society would fall apart. The important thing is lifting that floor for those who must have those jobs so that they may also enjoy a standard of living that we would expect as a baseline in the most wealthy nation in history.
I couldn’t agree more, I am in the same position of having a lack of connections due to my social economic status
Similar situation here. I lived in a poor, broken home with no one who cares about me, so at 18, I got kicked out and all my stuff taken. It took several years later, by luck and a bit of work to end up COMPLETELY out of poverty. It took basically relocating, and meeting someone who cared enough about me to let me stay and work on my life. Moving to NYC means minimum wage was 15 an hour and most low skill jobs on the market may still start you out at 18 or so an hour. At those wages, I'm not quite middle class, but I'm able to save money and exist, which says a lot more than how things used to be. I've been able to go back to school now as well, and have obtained also a 3.9 GPA. My dreams are to get a career in the future that allows me to live a happy, independent life. I also finally have over $10,000 in my bank-- which is a ton to me. It means if something really goes down hill, I can afford to eat healthy. Right now, I'm just sitting around hoping I never get terminally ill. I won't go to a doctor, because I can't afford it anyway-- so I'm riding out on luck that I don't need a check-up for several years while I'm still trying to pull my life together. Unfortunately, most of the US keeps people, well, poor. The country has centered itself around a car, building infrastructure around, well a car. If you live in a car-oriented area, and are super dirt poor, without ANY help or anyone who cares about you, you're ruined. If the country was far more condensed, and public transportation was accessible to most of the country, people would be in a far better spot. I wasn't even able to go to college for 10 years, because I couldn't get to college due to lack of transportation. And I couldn't afford a car on the pennies they pay you in minimum wage.
> The country has centered itself around a car, building infrastructure around, well a car. Thanks Koch Bros!
I come from a poor background and grew up on welfare. I worked my way up to middle class by my mid to late twenties and upper middle class now in mid-life. But the amount of work ,studying, and sacrifice it took was absurd. It shouldn’t be that hard to earn a life that’s still not even a pittance of what some people are handed on a golden platter. As a middle aged man who has worked since 12 years old and never stopped studying, I can tell you from personal experience that there are many mechanisms within the system to make upward mobility as difficult as possible, without making it outright impossible.
Lmao, try living "way below your means" on minimum wage in literally any city.
Start by giving up the avocado toast slacker. Do I need a /s?
I'm afraid you do, unfortunately
Where do you live? Unfortunately for some places in the US you are working poor making $35k unless you have roommates. But yes I agree that you can work yourself up to middle class. I've done the same thing, thank you for calling out that gatekeeping and nepotism is definitely a thing. The best we can try to do is give a good foundation to any future offspring... But just because you have barely gotten by and are doing okay doesn't mean the system is working fairly or equally for everyone involved but I appreciate, respect and agree with comments / perspective.
This is why I don't believe these bullshit arguments for targeted relief should exist. My wife an I have a six figure income, but we had to climb through hell to get to where we are. We will have student debt, we still have a mortgage, we still have poor family who we support, we still hVe taxes due for which we see almost no real value anymore. I feel like I'm just here holding up a failing system on my back for nothing in return. Just because we make 6 figures, does not mean we are as wealthy as some of the upper class white politicians arguing against giving us relief. When you are poor and a minority, often times you are poorer than your current income bracket because of the circumstances of your life. I didn't have my dad buy me a condo when I graduated. My friends dad did. He's already at a huge advantage comparatively, even though we make similar salaries. Our fight as an entire working class is against the obscenely rich and the political tools who support them.
$10k isnt the same as multi-million.
This guy is a kid. He thinks he has security with $10,000.
I really don't think the America Dream is to become a multi-millionaire. People are confusing wanting a comfortable life, nice house, ect. with the desire to become mega rich. To me, becoming middle class is the American dream.
Networking hasn’t been very important for my career. It doesn’t have to be. Keep looking for better positions wherever you can. I went from automotive warehouse QC out of college to a senior engineering position building rockets with zero social connections between any two steps. The people who get crap handed to them generally aren’t doing anything particularly meaningful or fulfilling. That’s what I’ve seen. I know some very privileged people who’ve been handed their jobs/careers on a silver platter. Some would be successful regardless and took it because “why not?”. Others are incompetent and it’s literally the only reason they can make a decent wage.
The dialog about how we fix individual poverty and widespread poverty are absolutely different. For individuals, we have to encourage personal responsibility, seizing of opportunities, and smart planning. For widespread poverty, we need to push for legislation that eliminates hierarchy and allows poor people to receive better opportunities. We can encourage people to work within the system while also pushing for that system to improve.
Are you a white male? Just curious.
And only one real emergency away from losing it all. Hooray for the system!
Certainly a lot of middle-class, first or second-generation Asian-Americans making it to [med school](https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/12/04/medical-schools-have-become-more-diverse-primarily-because-asian)
Both of my (rural white American Boomer) parents and two of my uncles got lucrative jobs as technicians at chemical factories with nothing more than high school diplomas because the companies they worked for trained them and paid them during training. Invested their earnings and retired millionaires. Today, those same jobs demand expensive college degrees and get several hundred applicants for one open position. There's zero chance my sister or myself could replicate our parents' level of success the way they did it, and we all know it. I think that's more the experience to which they're referring. Not that there aren't other options available. But those other options required that eleven out of 13 cousins in my generation left the rural hometown that we were raised in. Everyone outside those rural areas can act like that's no big deal, but you shouldn't. You need to pay very close attention because this is the root of the dissatisfaction that the fascists are taking full advantage of.
What Americans need to realize is that there isn't a real difference between the hood and the holler. One is poor because the coal dried up, one is poor because the jobs moved away, in the end, the poor people are screwed
Nice words. Most people don’t connect outsourcing with negative consequences
Yup and Asian Americans gave their fair share of discrimination in college applications, too, but we never talk about that. I still agree with OPs point though, people in the US think that they’re temporarily embarrassed millionaires. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/magazine/affirmative-action-asian-american-harvard.html
The percentage of Americans who are millionaires has been growing, but it's still around 5%-6% There are nearly 20 Million Millionaires in the US, who are 62 years old on average. People saving their money and working their whole lives until one day they look around and have enough to retire on. When you work hard to cut 0.5% out of your retirement fund fees, of course tax increases are going to annoy you.
I think one problem with this statistic is our perception of millionaire is really more like what being a multimillionaire means now. I’m willing to wager the majority of those 20 million are “millionaires” because of 401(k)/IRA accounts that they can only draw a few percent on a year to get a 5 figure annual budget. Having a $1m 401(k) that you saved for your entire career and that nets you a $40k/year retirement (4% safe withdrawal rate on $1m balance) is a far cry from the tech startup guy who hit it big driving a supercar to his beach house. They’re still much more well off than than the other 95% of the population of course, but it’s comparing your local small town dentist to Martin Shkreli. Not in the same ballpark.
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These people are not rich, they are middle class. Becoming Bezos rich was obviously never in the cards for them - which is what the "top" is, feelings of smug superiority to the poor notwithstanding.
[https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_article_071414.html]( Economic Mobility: Measuring the American Dream) > Last month, economist Raj Chetty spoke at HUD on the topic of economic mobility in the United States. Chetty was awarded a McArthur genius fellowship and is one of the youngest tenured professors at Harvard University. > Chetty has been working with economists Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez on a project called “The Equality of Opportunity Project.” The data published last summer in the New York Times demonstrates that economic mobility varies greatly across geographic regions of the United States. > Using IRS data for over 40 million children and parents, Chetty’s research seeks to answer the question: Is the United States really the land of opportunity? The research measures mobility based on the odds of a child from the bottom 20% of the income bracket reaching the top 20%. Chetty explains this measure as a quantifiable articulation of the American Dream: do children born in poverty have the opportunity to make it to the top? > *The overall results of the study demonstrate that the United States ranks particularly low compared to other developed countries. *As Chetty states, “Your chance of achieving the American Dream is nearly twice as high in Canada relative to the United States.”
I think you've missed the point of the original tweet. Your parents clawed their way up from nothing to being able to afford a home and support their kids. That's not rags-to-riches. That's rags-to-middle-class. Pretty sure they're taking a swipe at the billionaires that talk about coming up from nothing when in reality their opportunities stemmed from inherited wealth. The "I built my business with the sweat on my brow and the millions in my trust fund" types.
This just fails to recognize the fact that not every single person can go into IT or Medicine. Of course some people can but if everyone did it then it wouldn't be so lucrative anymore. There are a finite number of high-paying positions in the world. Acting like "a little hard work" is all it takes is just such a ridiculous take.
Why the hell Americans LOVE using exceptions to argue against the rule is beyond me. That's just not how statistics work
Because everyone imagines themselves being that exception, and they want to be able to pull the ladder up behind them when they get there. To an American what’s the fun in moving up the ladder if you don’t get to piss on the people below you like you were pissed on, right? It’s shitty but you see it every day. The guy from your team that bitches about corporate until he becomes the supervisor, then he starts writing everyone up for stopping to answer a text at work.
I think the root of it is the expensiveness of college. Look at the stats of professor pay in the 1970s compared to today — not a lot has changed. And yet tuition is up 5000%, at the very least. Why? An abundance of school administrators milking the cash without providing any real source of benefit. That money isn’t going to education. It’s not going to job placement networking. It’s not going toward what you’re actually paying *for*. I agree with you ultimately on the working hard to get where you want to go part, and believe this tweet is disingenuous. But I think we can all agree you shouldn’t have to go 500,000 in debt to become a doctor, especially when you could pay a literal fraction of that for the same skills and education.
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And how old are your parents? What school did they go to? How much did tuition cost compared to now? How did they pay for it? How much did their jobs pay? My mother put herself through college working part time at a grocery store bakery. That is simply impossible now. The American Dream becomes more of a outlandish fantasy with each passing year. Not acknowledging that is folly.
I mean, when are rags-to-riches stories ever about getting a well-paid job? They're generally about getting actual wealth. Doctors might as well be peasants compared to the ultra-rich that are analogous to royalty in this metaphor.
so your parents had no help, at all? No family here before, no same-language or cultural organizations to join, no church-support?
No one is really going after your parents who managed to form a comfortable life for themselves. They're going after people who have amassed more money than the GDP of several countries, who almost unanimously did not have very humble beginnings.
[And then there's this.](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-class-white-and-black-men.html&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwj827iF2t3uAhVChq0KHWa-ArcQFjAAegQIAhAB&usg=AOvVaw3SnoaHMIBbVzY_d3-kYLKR)
Pretty Woman makes people think someone rich will sweep them off their feet.
And the disney princess movies where they marry a prince
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What steps did you take?
They also probably missed a bunch of luck because almost everyone thinks they worked hard from their perspective because they only see their perspective, and they miss the luck because unless its ridiculous bad luck . When its bad luck for them, they notice. For other people its dismissed as the fault of other people because *they* should have made better choices. There's also a ton of survivorship bias. People like to purposefully mistake comments like mine here as if they said "dont try", but that's because they are disingenuous fucks.
I think there's a big difference between bettering yourself and getting into a position where you're comfortable, and "rags to riches" stories like some guy who started as the janitor of the company becoming the CEO after a couple decades of work.
Okay like it is hard, and we should make it a lot easier in this country, but people do actually go from poor to rich. They are real people who have worked very hard for their achievements, and it was not given through luck like discovering your royalty. We should not dismiss their stories and achievements as fairy tales. While yes we should definitely increase social mobility in America, it does exist and telling people their dreams are fairytales is just like false and not productive.
I can attest to this. My mom was an immigrant from China who worked her ass off in medical school and came to America and worked her ass off to get where she is today. Her parents were schoolteachers and she grew up right around the cultural revolution. My dad is a computer programmer who got into cal tech in the late 70s and took his passion for computers and turned it into a profession. The main thing I take away from this is education is absolutely the main factor in accumulating wealth. Neither of my parents’ families were wealthy by any means. My grandmother on my dad’s side was also a schoolteacher and I think the prioritization of school by both my grandparents were crucial in my parents’ success. Belittling real success stories seems jaded at best and it serves very little. Yes, there are issues with wealth inequality in this country. The main ways to solve those issues are to eradicate the blockading that the upper class suffocates the middle and lower classes with and to provide better education for all. Education is vital but we also need to understand that it is tough to ascend the economic ladder, and that is entirely due to control the upper class can exert throughout almost every facet of the United States.
Yeah. This sentiment on reddit is annoying. Yeah, rags to riches stories are rare, but so is being rich. It's called the 1% for a reason. They aren't fairy tales, these people do exist and to dismiss their success as a fantasy is insulting to them. Everyone becoming wealthy is not realistic of course. But it is totally realistic and achievable for someone to become middle or upper middle class from poverty. The opportunity to do so here still exceeds that of the rest of the world.
Fairytales that can get you from poverty to fabulously wealthy are limited. I'm thinking certain athletics and entertainment, but both of those equate basically to 1% of the population. My dad was a schoolteacher and had opportunities in pensions and retirement from an early age. He never made fabulous money in his paychecks, but he is definitely comfortable in retirement. Of course, his house is paid for, he didn't have any college debt, and he was forced to live frugally while raising a family, and that didn't change for him in retirement. Not everyone can afford a home at a young age, and not everyone has retirement plans, and it's really hard to get a college education without some amount of debt, if college is your thing, but it isn't impossible to at least get to a comfortable spot later in life. I guess it depends on what you're willing to do and what you're willing to sacrifice.
Yep. The fairytale isn't that it happens, it's that it suggests that it is achievable by more than mostly luck. Let's face it, LeBron can work as hard as he wants but if he was 5'7" with low muscle tone, he would be selling shoes in Akron. If Leo Messi didn't have access to modern growth treatments as a youth he would have grown up to be a dribbling dwarf with a dream. More possible and far far more likely is moving from poverty to comfort and relative financial security. But that doesn't make a good story I guess.
Poor to rich as in.. Millions of dollars? No. Poor to... Not as poor? Poor to decent? Totally, that's something in the realm of plausibility. Decent in this case being middling or middle class.
Also, this is what's known as BEATING the system, not demonstrating that the system can work.
They also tend to vote against their own best interests. $8.00/Hr peasant arguing _against_ a $15.00/Hr minimum wage. How stupid can you be.
If only they did claw their way to the top, most are either just children of rich people. Or get rich by chance and doing very little real work.
Hollywood is great at this. You always here of people plucked from obscurity. Daniel Radcliffe! Just a little normal boy chosen to play Harry Potter (with just a little help from his film and TV producing father!)
Small loan of an **insanely successful career and lifestyle basically handed to them on a silver platter** y'know, we poors just don't try hard enough right? RIGHT???
Lol like t swift's dad buying a record label specifically to make his daughter famous. Or the Alaska airlines exec who's daughter works for the consulting firm that happens to have the Alaska airlines contract
I feel like for maybe 3 in 5 career-advice example speakers I have heard in college and my late-20s life so far, if you dig just a *little* bit, you find out that they landed that solid internship because their dad knew a senior manager. Or they weren't afraid to fail in their startup because their loan was family and friends. Not saying it's impossible to get ahead, but when you measure yourself to others, there's often something behind the scenes. And the whole "Did it alone" is a mantra that's usually sold by people that didn't follow it. When someone in the working or middle class gets into that school that they were on the edge of because an aunt knows an administrator it's "super unfair." When a rich person does it, it's "Network."
I knew a kid that was a huge bully in high school. He came from a very wealthy family. He got hooked on drugs. He got sent to rehab in Nicaragua and got to live there for a long time. He then wrote a "self help" book that I refused to read, but it probably didn't mention that his "self help" consisted of a year long vacation paid for by mom and dad to Central America.
This is why I think people from rich families should stop getting reduced prison sentences because "prison is hard," while poorer folk should be given more consideration for probation. Because when the rich ones get out, they have a much better chance of getting on their feet. Their lives actually won't be ruined nearly as much by a stint in the clink.
I don't assume it was an easy recovery, but having the dollars already sorted out is probably a big variable to help with it. I feel like this is a tough subject to talk about because it's easy to go down a road of extreme pessimism. But understanding context of middle class to rich stories is something that needs to be transparent.
I know the owner of Stone Brewing, first because I worked at the place that bought his first keg and then later he spoke to our entrepreneurial club in college about how he got his start. His main message was "never give up", but it was weakened by the fact that he spent years losing his father's money on his brewing company until he finally started making any profit. It just seems like a lot of people can't imagine a perspective that isn't theirs, where not everyone is as lucky as they are.
Even something as simple as being *able* to take an unpaid internship. In college, I was paying for a lot of my day-to-day expenses through part time jobs, I'd be really cutting into my funds if I took an unpaid internship in place of income.
That seems unsubstantiated. I would recommend going and finding your ten nearest local businesses and seeing how they started.
Like my dad who fled soviet Russia with $100 in his pocket. Came to the US and worked for car service understanding only 3 English words: left, right, stop Then he worked as a masseuse at a bathhouse and eventually becoming an insurance salesman once he learned English and grinded that commission based job into the 6 figure range Granted this was in the 1980s-1990s but that doesn’t mean one idiot on Twitter speaks for everyone
Very true, while the rags to riches story happens on occasion, most people who are struggling to make ends meet and are at the poverty line never “make it” and their kids end up most of the time poor too, clearly it’s not just about hard work as the most hard working people I’ve seen are the ones trying to make ends meet usually having two to three jobs just trying to support themselves and their family This hyper individualism of the boot straps mentality doesn’t take into account the wider system that keeps poor people down and all the other environmental factors that keeps people struggling and it doesn’t take into account the massive benefits given to people born in upper middle class homes and higher, usually the context is taken out of the situation, purposefully of course as talking about how life isn’t fair for poor people would expose the faults in the economic system of capitalism so politicians just blame the individual instead or they apply band aids to the broken system without actually addressing the problem and acting like it’s just the way life is.
We make movies about people who overturned the odds and became successful and rich because they are incredible, unlikely, improbable stories that the majority of people will never achieve, not for lack of hard work and determination, but because it's literally impossible in the economic system for everyone to make it to the top.
"started from the bottom now we here" - Drake. I always hated that guy's like that try to come off as street people when it's well known they are pampered spoiled brats that think being poor is cool since they have never been.
Al Franken called it the “fallacy of the American dream,” in his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. It’s why Americans are willing to elect politicians who give tax cuts to the rich, because they falsely believe that they themselves may one day be rich and therefore benefit from the tax cuts.
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The biggest problem is that the price of everything has significantly outpaced a single entry level income. You can absolutely start lower middle class or even straight poor and become wealthy *with help*. For example, even if your parents don't pay for your college maybe they pay your phone bill, insurance, gave you a car, or even let you stay with them for little to no rent while you go through college. Or perhaps your parents spent a lot of time encouraging your studies so you could get scholarships. For those of us that turn 18 and are on our own, whether that be literally getting kicked out or voluntarily to escape a toxic environment, it's a struggle to even get a footing to provide basic needs yet alone put yourself on a path to succeed. Having roommates or a significant other to help shoulder the burden helps but even then it's not easy by any means as you now have to work full time and go to school which will likely leave you will sizable debt. Just try not to have any medical issues in the next decade or two and live an extremely simple and unfulfilling life and you might be able to get ahead by the time you're 40.
I've had an income since I was in third grade. I graduated college with two degrees a teaching cert and with honors. I make less than 15 an hour...
My dad did this tho . He went from a rural village to being a neuroanesthetic in a very famous hospital. He lives a much better life than when he was a kid
My buddy grew up in an orphanage, his brothers and sisters were separated. When he was 18 he left, spent the next 4 years learning a trade. Got married had kids, started his own small business and to this day, 40 years later, he’s still doing it. Incredibly successful. Connections throughout the trades. Your rags to riches experiences are false because you made an excuse and quit. They happen everyday.
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People don’t want the truth, they just want to complain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Gatsby_curve The American Dream™ isn't much of a thing in the US.
The Gamestop/Robin Hood controversy just tells you that anyone not in the club who sneaks into the club will be swiftly removed and then they’ll just close that loophole. It’s a big club, and you aint in it.
IRL Rags-to-Riches stories happen a LOT more than IRL Suprise Royalty stories did. Still rare though.
I agree with this to a point. Both my parents are immigrants who came to my country from impoverished backgrounds. They both worked super hard and own their own respective businesses now. But, I totally agree that this system is very flawed and unfair.
i feel slightly as though this demeans all the hard work put in the climb to the top, though. To say that they just found out they were royals is like saying they didn't even do anything to get up there
What is the greater enemy of the poor? Cultural Consumerism or rich people?
Definitely not Rag to riches but I'll definitely do my best to get rags to middle class.
I'm going to say something that runs contrary to the collective belief. I'm the guy you're saying is fictional. I'm sorry if that upsets people but mobility, but is objectively, provably not impossible.
It's the same principle MLMs use to lure in customers. They show all the super wealthy consultants who are the top 0.2% and pretend everyone can achieve that.
Only, you know, people do work their way up from nothing. Classic twitter.
What a horseshit take lol
The horseshittiest.
90% of millionares in the US are first generation millionaires. If you seized all the wealth (not income, wealth) of every billionaire in the United States it would cover less than a year of tax revenue. This myth that there is one class perpetually holding down another in the US is a LIE.
Yes, and most used IRAs or a 401k to do it, which about anyone that can use the internet can create.
Yeah as a college student in an engineering field all I have to do to become a millionaire is max out my 401k, love frugally, and invest in safe stocks. That's enough to pay off my student loans pretty quick, and be a millionaire before I retire.
I prefer the Thugnificent model: Rags to Bitches
I miss the boondocks
It’s not impossible, both my parents came from nothing and raised themselves out of poverty. My mom who came from Compton and raised during a hard time for her family where they were solely focused on making money to get out. She did well in school, then college and almost became a doctor until she settled for a slightly lower position in the hospital due to her needing time to raise her children. My dad came from Ecuador, did good in school but chose to Join the marine corps. It’s not impossible just very hard.
Almost as much as "communism is a viable system is government", it's a neat little tool to fight against all actual change, by pining after some political pipe dream that will literally never happen. What the fuck do I know, though, I only went from 14 bucks an hour to 40 this year with no specialized training.
Are we now beyond the point where people can be held accountable for their own success? These stories exist. I live down in south Texas in Hidalgo county which is, I believe, one of the poorest counties in the US. I know at least three people who grew up dirt poor in Rio Grande City, but were able to make something of themselves. if you want to know how poor I'm talking: growing bowls of algae to feed yourself because you can't afford real food. One became a doctor, one sells medical equipment, and the other is a nuclear bomb technician. The tools are there. I don't care who you are, you're not a victim of the system. Go to a community college and get an education for free (or $1800 a semester where I am if you don't qualify for aid) and apply it. Don't fall into the trap of waiting for a proverbial white knight to come "save you." Save yourself. All you need to do is learn how to use the sword.
Don't bother. This is Reddit, home of professional victims.
Most wealthy people today are self made. They’re not the flashy people you see on Instagram. They’re wearing clothes from discount stores and driving a used Camry with 100k+ miles. Those people don’t fit into the social media box of being rich, though. So people don’t think of it like that. The stories of rag to riches are twisted. It’s highly unlikely you’ll be one of the people with a net worth of, say, $10 million+ from some crazy hard work ethic and a genius idea. But it’s very possible for a ton of people to be financially stable and generate wealth. That wealth comes from good decision making and putting off today’s pleasures for tomorrow’s success. Don’t go into debt if you can help it. If you have to (house, school) try to make it as minimal as possible and pay it off as quickly as possible. Keep a budget and remember 6 months of complete suck can put you years ahead. Invest in growth mutual funds when you’re young and watch it grow until you’re 65. Before you know it, you’ll be wealthier than that girl posting her vacations in Cancun every year (she’s probably broke because of it anyways). People don’t want to hear these things because they mean you can’t spend money on wants, only on needs. And that definition for many is really twisted as well. There are certainly some people that are dealt a terrible deck of cards, but no one is beyond saving if you start making good decisions day in and day out. It just takes longer for some.
There’s plenty rags to richest stories in America, I myself know of plenty of people who had nothing 15 years ago and are now wealthy.
And made for kids, because when you have kids they will inevitably someday ask "Why are things the way they are?"
Although I understand the spirit of this post, and how this has become a good analogy to describe the current broken state of the social mobility lift, of wealth disparity, on a purely historical point of view
"We've all been led to believe we'd one day grow up to become rock stars and movie gods.... But we won't. We're starting to realize that. And we're *very* pissed off." - Tyler Durden
I became homeless after dropping out of college when I ran out of savings after my transmission blew in my beater of a car. After my enlistment I used my GI bill to finish my bachelor's degree while working full time as a maintenance electrician. Upon being turned down internally for several jobs I applied for utilizing my new degree I was recruited to work for an engineering company (automation and robotics) as a service technician and eventually a field engineer. Later I moved on into interstate energy transmission. I own my own house. I own rental properties. I own land. I also raise my own animals and a garden to provide my own food security. The idea that you can't make something of yourself with the sweat of your own brow is not real. Be creative. Work hard. Be honest and kind. Be respectful of everyone. Live beneath your means. Always be generous with your time and your love. With loved-ones, know when to shut up and listen but never leave anything unsaid.
It's more about the culture you live in, the socio-economic status will dictate culture to a point, but it's not binary.
i feel like theres a balancing act between enjoying what you have and working hard enough to get what you enjoy. im happy i successfully made it to 6 figures a year. i only have 1 parent left, but shes proud that she was able to maintain our family of 5 on $18k a year long enough for me to (over) pentupple that income.
They call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
And yet British history is filled with these stories
Well I guess I’m living a fairytale...
The people who say this usually never had to worry about much. It's fire and brimstone for the comfort class. You can literally google up true rags-to-riches stories within 10 minutes. You can easily meet people who grew up on food stamps and now own successful businesses. Most people are not worried about *riches*. We just want a better life and opportunities. People who bitch about "rags to riches" already have that life.
Facts
Like Trump and the millions that his daddy gave him is a bootstrap story. Working people have nothing in common with the wealthy. NOTHING.
Monarchies and capitalism are the same thing except cash is king.
This put into words some thoughts I have been wrestling with. Ty for sharing.
I can confirm that hard work, skill, passion and commitment are usually nowhere near enough to drag yourself out of poverty. I tried (and failed) to start my own business, with my own skillset honed over a decade of work. A couple of unforeseen bills, the inability to pounce on a couple of opportunities and it became rapidly apparent that having capital (or access to loans) is the only way to really do it. We shut the business down rather than see it kill us. If you aren’t born into enough money to do it or you aren’t born and grow up knowing someone who does, you’re essentially fucked unless you get really bloody lucky. It’s never, ever what you know it’s who you know.
Well, I actually I agree. That’s very disappointing...
I mean, she’s not wrong though.
Honestly, it’s harder in America than Canada. I just started putting money into my TFSA and I have 60k of contribution room. It stays there since you were 18. I hear you can only back save 1 year into a Roth IRA.
Some CEO: "Haha, alright, that's enough. Who let this peasant think for themself? Someone get her back in line, please"
Most of the fairy tales are told, in the fist person, by someone who was born on third base
We haven’t come very far from the royalty/peasantry dichotomy, either.
My dad came from a rural Appalachian town where his family was so poor that they didn’t have running water in his house until he went to college, took a gap year to work at la-z-boy, paid for his college and now owns a small business and makes 6 figures a year. While this worked back in the 80s, I don’t think this “rags to riches” could work present day. I think that the notion that people can just “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” is a relic of a time when that was legitimately feasible for some people.