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.
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...