Quote: (01-28-2014 01:48 PM)WestCoast Wrote:
The USA has problems but it's one of the rare places where one can go from the gutter to the top of the pile and that is a rare thing across the globe.
I used to believe the same once, but sadly...
http://money.cnn.com/2013/12/09/news/eco...-mobility/
(rehosted since I suspect that CNN doesn't like direct linking images)
Possible? Sure. Likely? Nope. Likely to be an actual reflection of one's intelligence or hard work (as opposed to luck, politics, corruption or crime)? Not likely at all.
People should recognize this fact and be humble about their (relative) success. For example, Croatia has a 17.6% unemployment rate (only Spain and Greece are worse) right now and I as an individual happen to have not one, but
two jobs. I'm a huge outlier. Is it because I'm smart and decisive? Sure. Is there also an element of luck in having fought my way past the system grinding me down? Sure. I can't not acknowledge that.
I have a friend who is just as smart as I am and more hard-working but who hasn't ever been employed. Fuck, if a professor hadn't sent a SWOT analysis I wrote to his friend who owned a company, I would have never gotten that first bit of business experience from which things continued unrolling favorably for me, and I might have easily ended in the same pile as my friend right now. The idea is terrifying. It's certainly terrifying enough that I would never come up to my friend and say
"hey, stop bitching". Of course, there are many people who are in the same situation with less going for them so you might point a finger and say "ok, this one is a lazy fuck", but we shouldn't make gross generalizations because of that.
And mind you, I'm talking about being lucky in scrounging a middle-class existence here. If a person is driving an expensive car here, there's a 99% chance there's crime or politics (the same) involved rather than the 50% I mentioned for myself.
Anyways, this is all offtopic from my original point:
the small possibility of someone going from bottom to top of the USA is just that: a small possibility. It's not something that people just reach up to and grab. To assume otherwise is not realistic.
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