Not if you don’t have the money or time because you’re working three jobs. Or you have kids from a previous divorce and can’t leave the state or you never see them again.
The homeless in Seattle are largely not from Seattle. Somehow they managed to get here.
So do the people who come by the millions, walking across the continent to get into the US.
In fact, America was populated by poor people coming from Europe. The Titanic's money maker wasn't the first class section, it was steerage. Maybe check out Ellis Island.
Chicago was populated by poor people looking for work.
The American West was settled with people with no money.
> Or you have kids from a previous divorce and can’t leave the state
That's the result of choices the person made.
I wonder what the schools teach about American history :-/
I wonder what the schools teach about economics :-/
Please don’t attempt to educate me on the idea that “poor people can move.” My parents were poor immigrants and moved twice, across two continents, with nothing in their pockets, to try and make a better life.
That does not mean they could do that today. The economy has changed. Cost of living has gone up dramatically. There is no more “western frontier” where one can luck out and find gold. It is much much harder to move now than ever before.
And that’s before you get to the fact that my parents were here illegally for almost 30 years, but had SSNs, paid taxes, handled all their debt, did not take government handouts/subsidies, never got in trouble, and so on. They were able to do that because paperwork back then was … paper, and they could find people to make it work. Today they’d be deported.
With all due respect, your point of view is marred by the fact that you’ve had success. Spend some time actually talking to some poor people, before you start to tell them why they are poor.
As for “That's the result of choices the person made,” this is a dumb argument. Condoms break. Abortion is illegal in many states. Divorces happen because of things that are not entirely in someone’s control, even after years of happy marriage (i.e. someone cheats). Full custody is something only courts can grant, not your own choices. If you can’t get it, you can’t leave the state, or you don’t get to see your kid again. That has nothing to do with your choice to get married to the love of your life and have a child with them.
The logical conclusion of your argument is “well you can choose to leave your kid behind” which is nonsense.
Please consider that your perspective may be biased by not having actually spoken to anyone in the situations you purport to know so much about.
Unfortunately, that's not how it works. a) no you can't just decide to go and live in any postcode you want, you need to be able to afford the cost of living there, and b) the study is about where you're born, not just where you end up.
> no you can't just decide to go and live in any postcode you want,
Yeah, you can.
> you need to be able to afford the cost of living there
More affluent places hire maids, gardeners, handymen, drivers, etc. The even wealthier ones have places for them to live on the premises. In Seattle, of course, they just pitch a tent on the street or live in their cars.
> More affluent places hire maids, gardeners, handymen, drivers, etc. The even wealthier ones have places for them to live on the premises.
I’m trying to tell whether this is a serious argument. Yes, the very wealthiest might allow their most trusted servants to live on their estates but that’s like saying that anyone can go to the moon or win an Olympic gold medal because some humans have done it. Most rich people do not do that and those positions are not widely available: for example, the most common would be live-in nannies which often require things like college degrees and the “right” background. The far more common outcome is that most workers commute to those exclusive places and they often have very strong rules (the last time I drive through an expensive area outside of San Diego, it was noticeable how often the roads were blocked by landscapers’ trucks because they weren’t even allowed to park in the dozen car driveways every estate has). It’s not even uncommon to have things like shuttles so they can park where it’s cheaper and not have to drive all of the way in.
Like many people with a libertarian outlook, you don't seem to understand that laws aren't the most limiting factor in most people's lives. Simple economic realities prevent most people from moving to "whatever zip code they want."
Every disadvantage seems trivial if you ignore the actual barriers they impart.
An unwillingness to do whatever is necessary to improve one's station in life correlates with a lack of success in said life, I am afraid.
Another easy thing to do to improve your "luck" is vote pro-free-market, pro-business and pro-competition policies in your area. Sadly there is a high correlation (at least where I live) between how poor people are and how leftist they vote...
This is ignoring the fact that most people commenting here already won big time in the lottery of life: the family you were born into.
If you were born in a family in the wealthiest 10% of the world you have a lot of advantage over the person born in the least wealthy 10%. It's a lot more profound than that you got a game console for X-mas every other year.
For instance, does drowning while crossing the Mediterranean sea on a substandard boat not constitute a willingness to do whatever is necessary to improve one's station in life in your view?
Yes-- and beyond that, to be in the top 10% as of 2019, you needed a HOUSEHOLD income of $154,589. I'll bet many, if not most of the people on HN make or beat that with one household salary. I imagine that it's gotta be close to 200k by now, but a household with the income of a public school teacher and a construction laborer would undoubtedly get you into the top 25%.
Yeah, well, my family was lower middle class. The same for many wealthy people I know.
I noted also that my comments were referring to America, which is (still) a free market country that provides a great deal of opportunity. That's why millions of poor people try to get here.
> Another easy thing to do to improve your "luck" is vote pro-free-market, pro-business and pro-competition policies in your area.
Even granting the ideological premise, this is nonsense. Your vote has a minuscule chance of determining who gets elected or what policies they enact.
> Sadly there is a high correlation (at least where I live) between how poor people are and how leftist they vote...
What idiots, preferring the side that at least claims to care about them and is somewhat more likely to help them afford their next meal and their medical bills, rather than the side that blames them for their poverty and offers them 'economic freedom' without the resources that would make it meaningful.
America is not full of people who can't afford their next meal. America is full of middle class fat people. Americans throw away what, 40% of the food they buy?
The vast majority of Americans are also healthy and able-bodied, they are not dependent on life sustaining medical help. The bulk of a person's medical bills are heavily skewed towards aged people. And there's Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare.
> without the resources
Every American child is offered free K-12 education (with free lunches), and easy loans for college.
> Every American child is offered free K-12 education (with free lunches)
Spend some time in the south. Parents don’t let kids go to public schools and send them to parochial schools that teach creationism as science, and deride anything that disagrees with God’s word as false. That’s the schooling many kids get in the south.
Go read up a bit on A Beka books and the Bob Jones curriculum.
Those kids didn’t get a choice as to which parents to be born to. It was luck. That’s the point.
> and easy loans for college.
Hahahahahahahahahaha. Yes, “easy loans,” that depending on the job market you graduate into, you may never pay back.
Those students didn’t get the choice as to when they would be born and, thus, when they would graduate school. Entering the job market in 2003 and in 2008 was wildly different, and those that entered in 2008 were stunted not just for one year but many, as those that entered in 2006 or 2007 had more experience, fewer unexplained gaps, etc., all because of when they happened to be born.
Speak to people who don’t have money. Listen to what they say. Based on your responses, I can pretty much guarantee you’ve never done that.
I don't think this conversation is just about the US; an earlier comment in the chain said "for those in democratic socialist countries, stop voting for socialism".
But if the parent commenter was talking about America, 'leftist' presumably means Democrat. Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare were all introduced by Democrats and signed into law by Democratic presidents.
Until quite recently it was Republican policy to repeal Obamacare, and in 2017 a partial repeal (including big cuts to Medicaid) would have gone through if not for a small number who voted against the party line.
Actually, this should be expected: an inability to see beyond populist promises and to reason about the world and its immutable laws should often be correlated with staying poor.
The same mentality is pushing people to play the lottery, join pyramidal schemes and vote representatives pretending to solve their problems for them.
> An unwillingness to do whatever is necessary to improve one's station in life correlates with a lack of success in said life, I am afraid.
An unwillingness to recognize that willpower isn't enough to overcome many, if not most blocks to social mobility in the US correlates with blind support for lazzais fair free market evangelism, I'm afraid.
Yes, I am a libertarian. Libertarianism is often derided as "simplistic" and "naive". The irony is it's anything but simplistic and naive. It's difficult to understand how order can arrive from chaos. It's difficult to understand how greed and selfishness produces great prosperity for a population.
Simplistic is the Star Trek world, which is ruled by an all-wise, incorruptible, benign dictator. It's the progressive vision of Utopia. The idea is that with enough laws (backed up by force) and enough propaganda, people will behave selflessly and will cooperate for the common good. Why this fails constantly baffles people, and they just reach for more laws and more force.
Your worldview is amusing. Everything is simple and consistent. Simple concepts, simple explanations, simple recipes. You have to be a complete idiot or very lazy not to succeed in the world as you see it.
If you don't play the lottery, you can't win. That's obvious. But the vast majority of people in America will not succeed even if they are convinced that success is possible.
You're changing the topic. This conversation is not about the quality of life among lower-income people-- It is about the opportunity to become a very successful entrepreneur.
And 'better than most countries' isn't a very high bar for the richest country on earth. The Economist ranked the US 30th in food availability, and 28th in food affordability among 112 countries. Not exactly a slam dunk.
What examples of "democratic socialist" countries do you have in mind that would be likely to achieve significantly greater economic wealth/material standard of living just by voting differently?
Britain, for example. For others, there are the former Soviet bloc countries. The ones that voted for more free markets have done significantly better than the ones that clung to socialism. Chile is another one that prospers and declines based on them vacillating between socialism and free markets.
Pretty sure Britain's economic woes have not been tied to an excess of socialism on account of its governments, at least in the last few decades.
At any rate, both the UK and USA (and arguably most other modern wealthy countries) are essentially social democracies - it's largely a matter of degree (and to what extent it's prevalent at a federal vs state vs local level). But from the perspective of an Australian, the economy of the USA looks for all the world like one I want to avoid ours becoming at all costs. To be clear, I'm very much envious of the opportunities US-based technology workers have, and if there were a way to achieve that level of entrepreneurship and sheer variety of industrial success stories here while still maintaining a cohesive society not beset by destabilizing levels of inequality* I'd be all for it.
(*) on the inequality front, perhaps what puts me off the most is seeing the degree to which relatively few mega-corporations appear to dominate much of the social fabric. Which is a problem in Australia too but to a lesser extreme.
If you vote for less inequality, be prepared for a lower standard of living. No country has ever managed to raise the standard of living of its citizens by preventing people from getting rich and/or confiscating their wealth and/or murdering them (see Pol Pot).
I never said anything about preventing people getting rich. But a slightly lower material standard of living on average seems a reasonable price to pay for avoiding the least desirable outcomes from excessive inequality.
How slightly? Do you have a number? Because in certain places lowering the standard may very well people losing access to healthcare and education.
I am afraid that "but inequality!" is today used as an ideological rallying cry used to inflame spirits and create hate against a class of population. It's an old communist tactic, quite effective during the beginning of the Cold War but less now as people have seen the failed societies with their best and brightest massacred under this cry.
I'm purely comparing Australia and the US. As a personal preference if we were given a choice to achieve an average material standard of living equivalent to the US, but the price was its measurably less egalitarian wealth and power distribution I wouldn't take it, even though I'd likely personally financially benefit from it. And yes it's an ideological position, but I don't see why that's a bad thing. If there were persuasive evidence that less equal economies/societies were better functioning and provided more fulfilling life experiences for the population as a whole I'd abandon it.
As it is, statistically the US seems to be somewhat of an outlier in having both a very high GDP per capita and a relatively high GINI coefficient, so there's little reason to suspect Australia would benefit at all from higher inequality.
Geez are you really arguing that the US is somehow a model for access to health care and that it's because of the free-market? Is that why the more economically free (according to the heritage institute) Switzerland has better health care outcomes than the US at a lower cost? If so, how does that explain the access to health care in the dramatically less economically free Cuba? Maybe it's because they both have universal health care? Why does the US has an avoidable mortality rate closer to poor eastern bloc countries than the rest of Europe?
US health care is not a free market, it's heavily regulated.
As a person living in the Eastern Block right now, I'd invite you to use the medical facilities in my town but I am not that cruel.
Luckily free private health care is becoming increasingly good so soon the state-provided horror show will become a distant memory like the communist era that spawned it.
As a non-Swiss-resident who has to use the Swiss health-care system for anything less urgent than emergency services I can report that the private health-care in Switzerland is quite developed and quite expensive.
Not sure how, but I will say statistically there's little evidence that in general higher inequality leads to greater overall wealth anyway: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gini-coefficient-vs-gdp-p... - if anything that tends to indicate the US is something of an outlier.
This is such a bizarrely extreme non-sequitur. From the UK, which is neck-and-neck with the US on the Heritage Institute's economic freedom rankings, to Pol Pot. Good lord.
