[mediasavvy]

What percentage of self-made billionaires started out as millionaires?

what percentage of poor people become self-made billionaires?

What percentage of poor people who become self-made billionaires do so by going to trade school?

[smallnamespace]

I think people argue past one another a lot about this because both facts can be simultaneously true: the US really is a land where a hard-working, smart, and motivated person (with a big pinch of luck) can work their way up from the top, and yet it's also a place where most people at the bottom aren't simultaneously hard-working, smart, motivated, and lucky. If they were, they would've moved up the rungs already.

I mean, if you lived in a strict feudal society, the nobility as a class was CLOSED. Commoners not admitted. End of story.

At the same time, even if say 20% of people at the bottom quantile of the wealth/income bracket make up into the next 20% every generation -- is that enough social mobility? Not enough? Should we just not have any poor people at all?

If the goal is to have no people who are poor, doesn't the fact that we admit millions of (relatively) penniless legal and illegal immigrants make that goal much harder to achieve?

[SapphireSun]

You've arrived at the unthinkable thought. Why indeed, in a very rich country, do any poor people at all exist? Why is this crime not remedied immediately? The only possible explanation in a democratic society, is that somehow the upper classes have rigged the system via political machinations, voter suppression, dividing the intermediate classes against each other, and propaganda. It's a sobering thought. We might also ask ourselves, why are billionaires allowed to persist? Is that not itself, in the face of suffering, a crime on the face of humanity?

[watwut]

Upward mobility is lower in US then in other western countries. The feudalism would have much lower mobility, but none of those countries have feudalism and did not had it for years.

[learc83]

Where do you get the idea that we admit a significant number of penniless legal immigrants?

[dundercoder]

Anecdotally, I worked for a CEO twice who had successful exits (8 figures), was raised poor.