My understanding is that social mobility implies being able to climb the ladder from destitute to poor, poor to modestly wealthy, etc. and not referring to jumping to the 1% from destitution.
People like stories of extremely poor ending up rich and it doesn't help that the rich like to abuse these kinds of stories to better their optics.
What looks better on a millionaire:
* The poor guy that invested every cent he had and kept slaving away for years every day at the brink of certain failure.
* The rich kid that got several hundred thousand from his parents for his first company and knew exactly that failure just meant asking his parents for another go or having to switch to a management position that has probably been waiting for him since he was five?
Of course the first one looks better, you can also bet that any millionaire telling it is a habitual liar that paid a good sum to have some PR guy find ways to navigate around his actual rich kid background without looking too obvious about it.
Except, some of us really did grow up in trailer parks and make it. Mostly through hard work. Luck too, but it isn't a completely false narrative. I am sure there are a lot of biases at play and that is not the statistically average way someone becomes a millionaire, yet it does actually happen.
Some people win the lottery too, it doesn't mean it's actionable advice or good policy. It also happens to be statistically easier if you can afford more tickets.
And everyone seems to think that the fact that all the billionaires came from a situation of decent familial wealth enabling them to make big bets refutes the fact that most people who don't screw up too bad end their career much better than they started and that most people's kids manage to start a rung up or so. Plumber sends his kids to community college and all that.
> Plumber sends his kids to community college and all that.
This is precisely the wrong model, one which accepts that there is no guarantee of equal opportunity. You're describing a promise almost as unworkable as the promise of heaven: if you're born poor, and you do everything well in life, your grandchildren's grandchildren will have a chance to enjoy the good life!
That is not what a democratic free society should mean.
That's exactly the point. For example, my parents sacrificed a lot of give me and my brother the opportunity to get a good education, and now when they want to retire, they are unable to do it safely, as they could not accrue the wealth required to retire. They literally lived just to improve my chances of having a good life, which I might not have even succeeded on that.
Instead of ensuring certain comforts in old age, your parents made an investment into future. This way they get a peace of mind, a feeling of beating their own mortality, leaving something (well, someone) behind after they are gone. It's a great deal if that's how they see things.
It's traditionally three generations, not six. And it's just human nature to look at things in a relative sense. If you are living a lot better than when you grew up, you are very likely to be comfortable and stop there. Similarly your parents might just be happy to see you reach that next rung, rather than pushing for more.
Immigrants doing it in one generation, working blue collar jobs while sending their kids to the ivy league or med school, prove it's not based on real barriers either way.
This is not about barriers (fortunately, most of us do not live in a feudalistic or caste-based or apartheid society, where this would be literally the case); it is about probabilities and effort, even when accounting for genetic differences.
It is extremely clear that our society, nowhere in the world, doesn't offer equality of opportunity; based on your birth, even accounting for genetics, your mid-life expected income could be predicted with decent accuracy.
> (fortunately, most of us do not live in a feudalistic or caste-based or apartheid society, where this would be literally the case)
It's great that you agree with me about barriers, but you might mention it to the posters in this discussion who are explicitly making claims of feudalism and apartheid. Beyond that, my post gave a logical explanation for probabilities. I don't see where you provided a counter to that logic, or even addressed what I said. How is my statement about three generations, for example, countered by your claim about predicting mid-life expected income for a single generation?
Depends on the word games being played. We don't deserve anything, but being born as thinking humans we have certain inalienable rights. They aren't "deserved", they just are.
I think the point of the question is, that we as a society try to sell the plumber's kid on the idea that everyone gets where they are through hard work and therefore deserves what they have. But the millionaire's kid can coast into a life that the plumber's kid could likely only achieve by incredible luck combined with hard work. In light of that, the idea of the millionaire's kid deserving what they have is called into question.
Is the millionaire's kid successful if he does literally nothing in his whole life, lives off his mommy or daddy's money, and still lives better than the plumber's kid?
Ok, sure, but that isn't the same thing as meritocracy is it? It is hard to justify to the population at large that billionaires earned their wealth and deserve to keep it when they could only get to that position by being born out of the right womb. That's just a different kind of aristocracy.
