World's richest woman says poor should have less fun, work harder. Calls for lower minimum wage and tax cuts

[Kasz216]

Immortal said:

Kasz216 said:

Immortal said:

I don't think I can argue with you very well given my relative lack of knowledge, but, going by the argument presented by the other member who quoted me, education is evidently much better and more effective for rich people, leading us back to poor people being born in a situation which won't let them get anywhere.

As for your anecdote, while there are obviously people who manage to get far against the odds, they are normally considered the exception. For every story about self-made millionaires (or even the less extravagant climbed-up-the-economic-ladder stories), you'd probably be faced with a dozen anecdotes from the other side telling you about people who are working/have worked insanely hard, are trying/have tried to follow the classic recipes to economic success and are still getting nowhere.

By the way, I'm honestly not completely sure if I disagree with you. Since I'm slightly left-leaning on this subject, I'm just keen to get the opposition's perspective here.

The problem is.... his stats are wrong... as can be shown by the article he himself presented that suggests the worst case scenario.   He said most people stay in their same economic condition yet....

"A project led by Markus Jantti, an economist at a Swedish university, found that 42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults."

42% isn't even close to "most".

 

My browser explodes when I click the link, but that statistic alone is inconclusive. If 42% stay there and another 50% or so move up one fifth, then that kind of fluctuation still seems to imply that most people stay in a similar economic condition, albeit not the "same". It's already enough to construct something of an argument on if nearly half of them don't even move up a fifth. I'd agree that it's a bit of a stretch, though.

Alright some interesting data here... haven't analayzed it's accuracy, as I wanted to go through this quickl so just the data.

I suppose the best to point out at the start  that...

The best country of the Nordic countries when it comes to Elasticity, and the only one better in a statistically significant way?   Denmark.  Which (un)coindentally happens to be the most "Free Market" of the Nordic Countries.   They have a huge social saftey net, but are pretty largely deregulated.

It's RIGHT below the US in the "Economic Freedom" index.

Denmark being an interesting country because of that, they're very buisness friendly, have a social saftey net, and have a pretty interchangeable workforce, so the average welfare recipient tends to receive benefits for less then one year, and most of the population actually expects to be laid off or be between jobs for a short period of time.

 

Though now the breakdowns your looking for... rounded to the nearest percent not evened out so the other way likely won't fully add up.

 

In the Lowest Quintile Fathers breakdown for son earnings? 

40%/25%/17%/10%/8%. 

Pretty bad... not really that awful though considering the problems listed above.  35% chance to not be poor.  Means a lot of people aren't following the above.  Don't know where the article got 42%.  There data clearly says .400%.  So it's as close to 40% as possible, and would be 39% if I tried to make both sides add up.  (The horizontel = 100% like the vertical does.)

Second lowest?

20%/26%/20%/18%/16%

Over a 50% chance to not be poor if you started off in the secondary "poor" class

That's suddenly a whole hell of a lot better and pretty evenly distributed.

The Middle

18%/21%/25%/20%/16%

Hard to get more evenly distributed then this.

Lower Rich

14%/17%/21/23/25

A little less then a coinflip to stay rich.

Richest

9%/11%/15%/25%/25%.

When your the richest it seems somewhat hard to blow all that money, probably due to getting investments and such transfered over to you giving you instant income.   Still, 50% of the Children of the Richest people in the US, no longer are rich by the time they are adults.  That's a pretty big difference to me anyway.

 

So, everything seems pretty fine, except for that bottom quintile, which is largely due to the problems previously listed.... in general, unlike a lot of other countries, in the US, those on welfare seem to be a much higher % of "Chronic Welfare families".

We need a way to combat this.