Wages In The US
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Wages in the US
All my life, I've been told by family and others that "getting ahead isn't about what you know, it's about WHO you know."
I honestly believe that. ...incoming "that's not reality" arguments? Valefor.Applebottoms said: » All my life, I've been told by family and others that "getting ahead isn't about what you know, it's about WHO you know." I honestly believe that. ...incoming "that's not reality" arguments? edit: or you know, be a total lying asskiss
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Brown nosing! tee-hee.
But yeah, sometimes you need the smarts, sometimes you need to know someone. Depends on the situation. I still believe knowing someone helps you get ahead. Honestly, knowing things and people are just doorways, you have to open the door yourself. There's a disconnect here that I see constantly, people have connections and skillsets, they just don't understand how to combine them and open those doors. Some people have opportunities basically fall into their lap, but that's only because someone has put their nose in it. Some people have much farther to go for those opportunities to be available, and often have to make unjustifiable sacrifices for them. There is always a price to be paid, for some, it's just too high.
And ad hominem ensues, nuff said.
For what jassik said, Quote: Honestly, knowing things and people are just doorways, you have to open the door yourself. There's a disconnect here that I see constantly, people have connections and skillsets, they just don't understand how to combine them and open those doors. Some people have opportunities basically fall into their lap, but that's only because someone has put their nose in it. Some people have much farther to go for those opportunities to be available, and often have to make unjustifiable sacrifices for them. There is always a price to be paid, for some, it's just too high. Thinks falling into their lap is the definition of statistical outlier. And even then, if they aren't up to the task then they'll fail and it'll pass on to someone else. Most of the time it's opportunities you make for yourself, people you get to know, connections you make and skill sets you develop. Learning to sell yourself is a skill set on it's own. And yes sacrifices need to be made, especially on personal time. Those sacrifices are orders of magnitude easier to do when your young and don't have a family. Having a family is in and of itself another choice, especially in this day of contraceptives and abortion. So if someone chooses, either consciously or by lack of action, to have a family before setting themselves up for future success, then they are still responsible for their failures. People can only hide behind the entitled victim mentality for so long before it catch's up with them. Valefor.Applebottoms said: » All my life, I've been told by family and others that "getting ahead isn't about what you know, it's about WHO you know." I honestly believe that. ...incoming "that's not reality" arguments? Learning to network and connect with people is a skill set. There will always be something that someone else knows that could benefit you. You need something valuable to offer them, knowledge or your own ability to get stuff done. What you'll find is that successful people surround themselves with other successful people, if your surrounding yourself with unsuccessful people then you'll never go anywhere. Lakshmi.Saevel said: » And ad hominem ensues, nuff said. For what jassik said, Quote: Honestly, knowing things and people are just doorways, you have to open the door yourself. There's a disconnect here that I see constantly, people have connections and skillsets, they just don't understand how to combine them and open those doors. Some people have opportunities basically fall into their lap, but that's only because someone has put their nose in it. Some people have much farther to go for those opportunities to be available, and often have to make unjustifiable sacrifices for them. There is always a price to be paid, for some, it's just too high. Thinks falling into their lap is the definition of statistical outlier. And even then, if they aren't up to the task then they'll fail and it'll pass on to someone else. Most of the time it's opportunities you make for yourself, people you get to know, connections you make and skill sets you develop. Learning to sell yourself is a skill set on it's own. And yes sacrifices need to be made, especially on personal time. Those sacrifices are orders of magnitude easier to do when your young and don't have a family. Having a family is in and of itself another choice, especially in this day of contraceptives and abortion. So if someone chooses, either consciously or by lack of action, to have a family before setting themselves up for future success, then they are still responsible for their failures. People can only hide behind the entitled victim mentality for so long before it catch's up with them. Completely agree, but I also don't count people who chose to be less successful in order to serve the needs of their family or who take an easier path to be failing. They are making a choice whether they understand it or not, but I just see them as separate paths. We are starting to split hairs a bit, though, as the exceptions of people who don't have opportunities (or very very limited ones) generally would have to sacrifice far too much. Lakshmi.Saevel said: » And ad hominem ensues, nuff said. For what jassik said, Lakshmi.Saevel said: » So if someone chooses, either consciously or by lack of action, to have a family before setting themselves up for future success, then they are still responsible for their failures. Lakshmi.Saevel said: » Most of the time it's opportunities you make for yourself, people you get to know, connections you make and skill sets you develop. Learning to sell yourself is a skill set on it's own. Lakshmi.Saevel said: » Thinks falling into their lap is the definition of statistical outlier. Is there a point at which someone gets to stand up and say, "My life is in my hands"? Sure. The outcome of that statement is never as simple as, "If I take control of my life, I'll earn $200,000 next year." Claiming differently is engaging in the same kind of snake-oil chicanery as the *** that publish The Secret. Taking a given person with a given aptitude and raising him or her (and his clone, obviously) in either an affluent or impoverished situation, hypothetically they can arrive in the same place. Realistically they will not. The affluent one could burn out, spend 3 months out of every year in rehab, and basically leech off his family's money because he was never really challenged (Paris Hilton comes immediately to mind) while the impoverished one writes the great American novel, starts a successful radio show on NPR, and may never be a multi-millionaire but is comfortably recognized within the intellectual circles of society. The rich kid will probably never, under any circumstance, work for minimum wage past the age of 17, though. Quote: Define "success." Value assessments like these are meaningless without first defining the premises. The same definitely being used throughout this thread, being upper middle class, having a long term financial plan and the capability to support yourself and the results of any decisions you made (family / ect.). Effectively success is making it so that your children enjoy a better life then you did. Quote: Curious: what's your feeling on people who suffer a legitimate disability and are effectively incapable of selling themselves? I'm referring to autism and similar social-learning conditions, by the way, not physical disabilities. Intellectual disabilities (e.g., Downs Syndrome) effectively put someone out of the race on all counts, so they're also not the people I'm asking about. If it's a legitimate disability, as in something they were born with or acquired through genuine accidents, that that is what social welfare is for. Social welfare isn't for every person in the country to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle, it's for those who are actually incapable of supporting themselves. And no being born poor isn't a disability nor is being born a minority. Quote: Suspect you meant "things"? Anyhow, there are a great many advantages afforded to someone as a direct result of their family. To flatly deny this as "statistical outlier" is disingenuous. Exactly delineating the benefits of one's upbringing is where things get complicated. For instance, financially affluent people generally have adept manipulation skills, but so do people with long criminal histories (there may arguably be no ethical/moral difference between the two, but that's a different debate). Affluent or influential people tend to socialize with similar people, though, which habitually opens doors for their children. The impoverished may attempt the same game, but the difference is that a job lead from your stylist at the $150 hair salon is probably going to differ substantially from your stylist at the $30 salon. There's also the flat, undeniable reality of education inequality between rich and poor neighborhoods. All the Asian families in my city live in one of two neighborhoods and everyone knows why (can't blame them, either). Most successful people aren't from the super wealthy. Your assuming most of the "1%" is from super wealth, they aren't. More like 0.00001% or so. That, by definition, is a statistical outlier. It is an incredibly small yet visible minority that is used to judge the majority of successful people. Everything else after that is you trying to shift responsibility for people's choices away from themselves. Your also confusing cause and effect as you assume those skill sets are present directly as a result of being rich, that's false. Those skill sets are required to become wealthy, you can't develop them afterwards. What your actually seeing is the patriarch of a family passing their skill sets onto their children. They are teaching them to be successful, and the children are, for the most part, learning. That knowledge is available to anyone, most are simply too ignorant or too lazy to make use of it. Like I said earlier I could give you 100M USD and you wouldn't know what to do with it. You could go around giving every poor person 100M and they would just go out and waste the money and within a few years be right back where they started, just like the majority of former professional athletes. Your attempt at demonizing wealthy people shows that you can't be reasoned with. People like Paris Hilton are again, by definition, statistical outliers. They are doing nothing but wasting their family's money, money earned by their parents and grandparents. If they keep that up, then they and their children are going to be poor before they even realize it. Yet you have somehow convinced yourself that most wealthy are like Paris Hilton, which is fairly standard for liberals.
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Shiva.Onorgul said: » Although fonewear's comment is apposite and does give me pause on the subject of raising the minimum wage, spending all one's money is not unique to the impoverished. I have a bunch of friends who are making considerably more than me, sufficient to at least pretend to be middle class (especially given two of them are a cohabiting, child-less couple, so two hourly wages just shy of $20 adds up fast) and who still bemoan never having any money. Their cost-of-living is identical to mine, too (within $1,000/year, anyhow). Well, that doesn't really work against what I was saying. In fact it only shows just how drastic the income issue is these days. When people are talking about the economy as a whole, middle class isn't rich, hell, most of the upper class isn't even rich. We're talking about the top 1%, 0.5% or 0.1% of the entire nation, which is rich beyond belief. For most Americans, they won't save up a whole lot of money because they choose a better living space and that scales almost directly with your income, so most people play their finances pretty tight, a LOT tighter than they should, but that's what they do. This ties into what I said in that the "poor" spend their money, the "poor" umbrellas to mean pretty much the entire lower and middle class. We've been in an economic slump for so long because the lower class is doing poorly, which makes the middle class do poorly (since a lot of middle class jobs are servicing other people in some capacity, if those other people don't have the money, those jobs don't exist). We need to get money back into the hands of those at the bottom, and a minimum wage increase is the most direct way to do that. Then we need to institute other legislation to deal with the other issues. Lakshmi.Saevel said: » And no being born poor isn't a disability nor is being born a minority. Lakshmi.Saevel said: » Most successful people aren't from the super wealthy. Lakshmi.Saevel said: » What your actually seeing is the patriarch of a family passing their skill sets onto their children. Lakshmi.Saevel said: » Your attempt at demonizing wealthy people shows that you can't be reasoned with. So, yeah, filing your nonsense away in the circular file where it belongs.
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Lakshmi.Saevel said: » Thinks falling into their lap is the definition of statistical outlier. 2. Lakshmi.Saevel said: » Most successful people aren't from the super wealthy. Your assuming most of the "1%" is from super wealth, they aren't. More like 0.00001% or so. That, by definition, is a statistical outlier. That phrase does not mean what you think it means, at least not how you are using it. Statistical outlier has a specific definition. Quote: An outlier is an observation that lies outside the overall pattern of a distribution. Usually, the presence of an outlier indicates some sort of problem. This can be a case which does not fit the model under study, or an error in measurement.  On to your points: 1. You have no data on "things-that-fall-into-peoples-laps vs. people-who-work-hard vs. people-who-can-never-catch-a-break". Even if you had data that doesn't mean it would be a statistical outlier. It could be within normal parameters for that data set. *2. If household/annual income numbers were a sampling rather than the full raw data set you could make the argument that there is a sampling error. However, that is not the case. Just because the data has a max and min that are far from the mean does not mean either one of those are a statistical outlier. This is, however, why people should discuss the median when talking about income, as the mean can be distorted. What monetary limit is success, according to you? What monetary limit is super wealth, according to you? When referring to the top 1% wealth holders economists are referring to net worth, not annual income. There are differing conclusions on this for a specific start amount: -IRS has data from 2004 showing 2,728,000 million people had a net worth of $1,500,000 million+, which would be roughly 1.2% of the 2004 adult population. Today that number would be higher due to inflation and wealth gains. There has been no updated report using this methodology. -According to the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances data and Professor Edward Wolf the top 1% has a net worth starting at $9 million in 2010. edit: this I cut for some reason. *you can look at the incomes by quartiles but this would remove the bottom and top quartile. This would take the 1% completely out of the discussion.
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