You see, my parents were both fishermen. It's a grueling, painful job that can destroy your body as you age leaving you with back problems and forcing you to retire early. It also paid poorly and had a lot of risks. Which unfortunately for us, resulted in the loss of his life. His boat had capsized after a routine trip. Turns out there were some issues with the way the boat was built, stuff that should've been caught by the owner. My father and three others died that day.
It was because of his death that my mother filed a wrongful death suit with a lawyer that was luckily working pro-bono, winning a small sum of money that she put in an account to be released on my 18th birthday, money that ended up being the only reason why I was able to go to college and become a software engineer.
So why do I bring this up? It's not for sympathy, but rather to illustrate that my parents were some of the hardest workers I've ever known. They were rewarded for their efforts with little savings, broken bodies and a life of poverty. For a lot of people it doesn't mean a single goddamn thing how hard you work or how hard you try. I bring up personal stories like this because I've talked with coworkers and friends who think that grit and hard work is all you need to make it. That jobs will elevate people out of poverty by virtue of existing.
Honestly it sounds like you were born with a certain amount of intelligence, got some money to go to college, and you made the most of it. But where would you be if you had neither, I wonder?
I think that was just to add to the shock factor. The point was that his hard work would not have taken him anywhere, were it not for the money brought by his father's accident lawsuit.
Similarily, it wasn’t applying for oodles of financial aid/loans, working throughout college, and applying for scores of scholarships that let me study software engineering - it was the fact that my great-aunt, who I have exactly one memory of, left a fund to cover rent and books each semester. That arbitrary, fortunate fact gave me the substrate with which to form my education.
Hard work will only get you so far when you show up to the pottery wheel without clay.
A fair amount of that money went to support my family because by that time my mother and my step father (also a fisherman) were disabled as a result of their job and practically unable to work. It was through that money plus the aid I got from FAFSA that allowed me to get through college and support my parents, though I had to make many other health sacrifices along the way.
Other people aren't as lucky.
If you consider my situation to be the norm for a lot of poorer students, then you also start to see where the student debt crisis comes from and how it ties into the economic well-being for many people my age. There's a lot of people where they would have no choice but to dive straight into a lot of these predatory loans without prior education or finance knowledge and graduate knee deep in debt.
In another way, I was lucky that I graduated college with only $0 to my name. I could've graduated with -$40,000-80,000.
* Hard work
* Smart decisions (your mother deciding to go after the other and putting the money off)
* Luck (pro-bono lawyer, and your father's death in some sense)
I think the formula is that you need all three:
-Relatively consistent work ethic
-Decent decision-making
-Some minimal opportunity
Often the argument seems to swing between these absurd positions that it's all about just one of these and the others don't matter. Of course they're all necessary, and different people lack different components. There's no shortage people poor hard-working people. There's also no shortage of people who blew a lot of money or opportunity due to laziness and terrible choices. There's terrible luck events and great luck events. It all matters.
Some smart person said: People are usually correct in what they assert, and incorrect in what they deny. (I think maybe it was Hume).
The biggest problem is role models. If your family or friends live a certain way then you tend to copy them unless you're able to think differently or have someone to advise you thru your early years.
Not only that, getting out of poverty is a long-term process that requires hard work in the right areas. But even hard work is not enough. I can do very hard work all my life at a minimum wage job and never get ahead.
At a very basic level getting out seems very simple. All people need to do is to study to get a good job and work hard. But in reality, that's not enough. You need the support system and the right mindset to get you out. Many people can do it but as we see over and over many people can't.
I think the throwing jobs and money at the problem is not enough. I think what would work is to consult young families and young kids that are at risk on what they need to do to get ahead. This needs to be done not once but for years and on a regular basis. It would be similar to a regular check up the way we visit the doctor or dentist.
The biggest problem is role models. If your family or friends live a certain way then you tend to copy them unless you're able to think differently or have someone to advise you thru your early years.
Not only that, getting out of poverty is a long-term process that requires hard work in the right areas. But even hard work is not enough. I can do very hard work all my life at a minimum wage job and never get ahead.
At a very basic level getting out seems very simple. All people need to do is to study to get a good job and work hard. But in reality, that's not enough. You need the support system and the right mindset to get you out. Many people can do it but as we see over and over many people can't.
I think that throwing jobs and money at the problem is not the solution. What will work is to consult young families and young kids that are at risk on what they need to do to get ahead plus the support system that will help. This needs to be done not once but for years and on a regular basis. It would be similar to a regular check up the way we visit the doctor or dentist and get advice on what to do.
Eventually I landed on a great company that was willing to do that, but it was a difficult search as an entry-level developer. Would I have been able to pay off my debt? In 5-10 years maybe. That's still a large burden for people to bear, and we're in one of the better paying careers.
There are large amounts of cultural and career inertia that you have to overcome to 'pivot' your career towards something wildly different. Not everyone can pivot towards something better especially as times change, education changes and people change. My father never graduated highschool and for him, fishing paid better than other opportunities. It was the same for my step-father.
It was also all that they knew how to do. There were few retraining programs (that they couldn't afford even if they could) and to them, their career was their life. Their friends did it, their parents did it. It was their entire identity.
What I'm doing is effectively the pivot away from the family career. It doesn't change the fact that it left a generation in the dust.
Is it possible wages often don’t reflect the value of the work people do?
The lack of social mobility is well documented, and it's a travesty that's affecting large parts of the developed world still (and shamefully, the UK pretty much leads on it):
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/institute/working-papers/17-2...
https://www.suttontrust.com/newsarchive/disturbing-finding-l...
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/15/social-mobil...
Unfortunately I'm not as well versed in reliable US sources, but there are references through here that the US doesn't exactly beat us hands down on social mobility either.
I do implore everyone to read more on this topic, there's a lot on HN about "meritocracy" and "well, just work harder", but that's just simply not the world we live in. It's a shit-show out there, and people's ability to break through the "class-ceiling" is being stunted, not improved.
I think a roughly accurate statement is that over half of Americans end up within one income quintile of their parents.
That doesn't seem like much mobility to me and many European countries apparently rank better. The American Dream might be mostly marketing at this point.
No. The human society would not collapse if there were fewer fishermen. The fact that the fishermen are so badly paid even if they work so hard, to me is a clear indication that the human society does not value their effort and it would be probably better if they would put their efforts into something else.
>>Is it possible wages often don’t reflect the value of the work people do?
I agree, there is often little correlation between the wage and the value of the work but the rational workers should optimize for the wage not for the value of the work if they don't want to be poor.
From my viewpoint, breaking out of poverty comes down to these factors, in order of greatest to least importance:
1. Starting off on the right foot at an early age with regards to academic performance. Circumstances can make this tough. Lack of access to good schools, parents too tired to engage their children (e.g. reading to them and instilling academic curiosity) due to working long shifts at strenuous jobs, lack of attention span on the part of the kids, etc. But coming out of school with good academic performance opens so many more doors than not.
2. Choosing a career path that has good job availability and pay (software development, healthcare industry, etc.). You can be a master of your field or trade, but if there aren't enough positions to fill, or if competition is fierce, or if the industry pays poorly, then what's the point unless you have a deep love of it?
3. Luck. Being in the right place at the right time. Not having a major medical issue. I'd almost consider placing this first.
4. Working hard.
Working hard has its place, but it's last on my list. I've known many people who did the first three and don't work hard, and still remain employed since the job market is so good for what they do. We had a developer who was absolutely terrible, but he'd regularly job hop every 1 to 2 years and get more money in the process. To be fair, the software development industry has some serious flaws in its screening processes, but nevertheless, it seems you can't ever hire enough developers. I'm not condoning being a poor worker, but the reality is that, though hard work has its place, there are more important criteria in raising oneself out of poverty.
I believe that without proper financial aid, it may not be possible for everyone to pursue further education.
It's possible to do this, in fact, this is what I did; however, there is a lot more to a college degree than just the loans. You still need to be able to afford college living, food, expenses, etc., and anything which is not covered by loans each semester (which sometimes can be put on a private loan if you're fortunate enough to be able to get someone to cosign for you). I worked all throughout college and still barely made the cut. I had to stop going one year due to financial pressure but was fortunate enough to be hired for a paid co-op internship. This allowed me to save more and continue/finish my degree.
Just offering my perspective, you may or may not already see this.
The immediate alternative that came to my mind is trucking. I have a relative who pivoted from factory work into trucking and working with heavy machinery in his 50's, after the factory jobs dried up. Though he definitely had hard times, it is certainly doable and beats dying or getting crippled working for pennies.
Though far from a cushy job, trucking seems comparable to fishing (e.g. you're away from home for a long periods, doesn't require much education) without the danger and backbreaking nature of the work.
Or do you just mean things like free education for all?
I don't doubt that it's substantially harder for people who lack financial resources, but it doesn't seem that much harder to me. It seems well within the realm of ordinary stuff that is is a bit more difficult. I admit that maybe there is an aspect of it that I don't understand, but what I see here is both you and this guy seeming to say it was difficult, but then you both managed to do it.
My perspective on a lot of this is that there is a whole generation of kids who went to college with the promise that what they majored in was irrelevant - that they should pursue their passion and things would just work out, because the important thing was going to college. So they majored in things like English, Philosophy, and Psychology. And then they graduated with those degrees expecting the world to pay them a comfortable six figure salary. Except that nobody wanted those skills. Even worse, they took on debt to do it. So upon graduation with a fine mastery of medieval English literature, they found themselves saddled with debt and no job prospects.
People like you and the other guy in this thread, on the other hand, did exactly the right thing. You took on a level of debt that was commensurate with the earning power of the degree you obtained. That's how this is supposed to work. You look at the value you can get out of the degree, and you compare that to the cost of obtaining it, and if a > b, you do it. That worked out for you not because you were lucky, but because you made the right decisions and you put in the effort required to realize the benefits.