
The 'Glass Floor' Is Keeping America's Richest Idiots at the Top - paulpauper
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/the-glass-floor-is-keeping-americas-richest-idiots-at-the-top_n_5d9fb1c9e4b06ddfc516e076?ri18
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arbuge
“Having a college degree is most beneficial to the kids who aren’t that
smart,” Reeves said. Intelligent kids will have thousands of opportunities to
demonstrate their skills. Less-talented kids, on the other hand, have to rely
on credentials that make them seem intelligent — high SAT scores, top-tier
diplomas and corporate internships."

This would seem to contradict the premise of the article. The talented poor
kids would by that argument have no problem breaking into the top echelons of
society, irrespective of the resources available to rich kids to attend the
best colleges. Reality is somewhere in between.

~~~
FussyZeus
> This would seem to contradict the premise of the article. The talented poor
> kids would by that argument have no problem breaking into the top echelons
> of society, irrespective of the resources available to rich kids to attend
> the best colleges. Reality is somewhere in between.

You're talking about two different metrics there, intelligence and
achievement. Ideally the former would lead to the latter, but in practice,
I've seen myself and read in numerous places how the most clever people rarely
ascend into management, because management doesn't want them in management,
they want them doing the work. They do it best.

There's a reason "failing upward" is a concept.

~~~
steve_gh
Yeah - I have come across this on a number of occasions. The CTO of am company
I was contracting for once described it to me as "The Technical Ghetto" \- he
had been pulled in of CTO of the division from CEO of another division.

Basically, tech skills are in high enough demand that good tech people are too
valuable to be allowed into management

~~~
wool_gather
A very cynical but funny take on this premise can be had in Venkatesh Rao's
series of essays [ _" The Gervais Principle"_][0]. He posits three groups:
Sociopaths, Losers, and The Clueless. Here the Sociopaths are the intelligent
but ruthless C-levels who build and oversee organizations. The Losers are the
ones who actually get the day-to-day work done, at the expense of their own
progress in life. And the Clueless are moved "up" from the ranks of the Losers
by Sociopaths into middle management, where they insulate the two productive
groups from each other.

[0]:[https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-
principle/](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/)

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Merrill
Is Inequality Inevitable?

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-
ine...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/)

>Wealth inequality is escalating in many countries at an alarming rate, with
the U.S. arguably having the highest inequality in the developed world.

>A remarkably simple model of wealth distribution developed by physicists and
mathematicians can reproduce inequality in a range of countries with
unprecedented accuracy.

>Surprisingly, several mathematical models of free-market economies display
features of complex macroscopic physical systems such as ferromagnets,
including phase transitions, symmetry breaking and duality.

An interesting article that argues that wealth inequality is inevitable in a
free market system which does not have non-market measures that counteract the
tendency to oligarchy.

~~~
gbrown
>Surprisingly, several mathematical models of free-market economies display
features of complex macroscopic physical systems such as ferromagnets,
including phase transitions, symmetry breaking and duality.

I'm always super skeptical of claims like this (disclaimer: haven't actually
read the paper), because they seem to make clearly overextended analogies
between dissimilar fields. If you're used to studying "phase transitions,
symmetry breaking, and duality" in ferromagnetics, then when you look at
economics you're likely to see similar patterns - but at face value, we're
comparing replicable features of (relatively) simple physical systems to non-
replicable macroeconomic behavior. If we could rewind time and run a bunch of
population level counterfactual scenarios, then it might be worth taking
seriously, but I have yet to see a convincing case for making conclusions
about population level systems based on unrelated physical models.

CAVEAT: this isn't to say that _models_ aren't useful. Neither am I claiming
that we can't take some insights from other fields. I just think we tend to
sometimes forget that the map is not the territory. For example, I could
certainly imagine populations undergoing changes between states which we could
roughly analogize to be "phase transitions", but I wouldn't therefore conclude
that those states were, in fact, fundamental - I'd expect similar dynamics to
play out differently depending on context.

Mandatory SMBC Comic:

[https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21](https://www.smbc-
comics.com/comic/2012-03-21)

~~~
specialist
Preferential attachment is just math.

~~~
gbrown
So, a mathematical/statistical tool which usefully describe a variety of
phenomena. I have no issue with that kind of framing.

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swalsh
> America has a social mobility problem. Children born in 1940 had a 90%
> chance of earning more than their parents. For children born in 1984, the
> odds were 50-50.

I think it's not unimportant to remember that Americas economic position in
the world was dramatically different then. With the end of WWII, we had the
Brenton Woods system, and the Marshall Plan. Those 2 systems drove economic
growth, and placed America in the center of it. It was an unprecentented
period of economic development worldwide, but especially so for America. The
tech boom drove quite a bit of growth too, but it was narrower, and not in the
same level of magnitude.

The point is, 1944 - 1991 is a HIGHLY unusual economic state, and it's not
reasonable to expect that the mobility that existed then should still exist
today.

~~~
FussyZeus
> The point is, 1944 - 1991 is a HIGHLY unusual economic state

This part I agree with.

> and it's not reasonable to expect that the mobility that existed then should
> still exist today.

This part I absolutely do not. Perhaps the social mobility wouldn't be exactly
the same, but surely we can do better than the current state of affairs? I
wonder how many people could be elevated to comfortable middle class status
with all the money hoarded so Jeff Bezos can have over 20 different
extravagant homes?

And that's to say nothing for the cost of college going through the roof while
conferring even less benefit to people's careers, stagnant wages, ever-rising
taxes on the 99% since the IRS finds it difficult to audit the wealthy...

~~~
tachyonbeam
> how many people could be elevated to comfortable middle class status with
> all the money hoarded so Jeff Bezos can have over 20 different extravagant
> homes?

More fundamentally: money is created through debt. Central banks print money
to increase the money supply. This money is being used to buy assets to float
up the stock and real estate markets. In other words, central banks are a form
or corporate welfare for the rich. It doesn't have to be this way. We could
print money and use it to build housing for those who can't afford it. That
would also stimulate the economy. The problem is that we think of real estate
as an investment, when housing is actually a fundamental need.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
There's a sense in which it's true that central banks print money to increase
the money supply. But it's not at all the case that central banks say "hey,
Jeff Bezos, have some of these millions". There's no transaction where the
central bank just hands people money for free.

------
maze-le
The best phrase of the whole piece: "hereditary meritocracy".

It's an oxymoron, but elegantly explained: “When you create a ‘meritocratic’
selection process where the production of merit is increasingly skewed by
parental income, you end up with a hereditary meritocracy.” Sums up the
situation pretty niceley. I can't speak for the US, but in Germany it's been
this way for quite some time. The single most important factor in determining
future achievements is the income of ones parents.

We start the "selection process" even earlier than in College. Kids after
elementary school (at the age of ~10) go either to the Gymnasium (which gives
you a university certification) or Realschule + Berufsschule (trade school). I
know some elementary school teachers and hear horror stories of vindictive but
resourceful parents suing schools, teachers and whole school-districts because
their kids didn't get into a Gymnasium. This has lead to a situation where as
much kids as possible get funneled to a Gymnasium, in order to avoid being
sued by the parents.

Gymnasium education is being diluted so every idiot in the class can
participate. And the young adults that achieve Abitur (Gym-degree) are utterly
unprepared for any form of University-Level education, since self-organized
learning and critical thinking skills are still somewhat important here. At
the universities, the same game happens again, only it's a bit more
complicated to influence positions there.

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BlameKaneda
I know someone who's one of the heads of a large law firm and a few weeks ago
they invited a dean from an Ivy League university to their office, probably to
discuss their son's education (senior in high school).

While there probably isn't any bribery happening, to me this reeks of sheer
unfairness.

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robert_tweed
This link as posted tries to do a tracking redirect via a domain that is
blocked on my network, so I had to use Outline to read it:

[https://outline.com/hPWSHk](https://outline.com/hPWSHk)

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coding123
So we're all screaming and calling Lauren Laughlin names and this article is
saying the problem (college admissions scandal) pretty much spans the 1%. Are
they all kinda secretly cheering her on saying thanks for taking the fall for
us oh rich Jesus.

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throwaway5752
No problem with it otherwise, but it is a duplicate of the same post from a
month ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21259175](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21259175)

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buboard
Those floral button-up shirts are why the world needs more Weworks and their
founders.

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RickJWagner
If this were truly journalism, we'd be reading a bit about Chelsea Clinton,
the Obama daughters* and most of Hollywood.

They managed to torpedo the Trump family, and the (hated by the far left)
Bidens as well. If this were real journalism, we'd hear about some favorite
lefties as well.

* Fun fact: In February 2017, Malia Obama started an internship for Harvey Weinstein at The Weinstein Company film studio in New York City. Good luck reading about that one in an article like this!

------
pgt
The author seems to hate the rich more than he loves the poor. Orwell wrote:

"The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution
does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate
themselves; it means a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going
to impose upon ‘them’, the Lower Orders. ...

Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is
perfectly capable of displaying hatred — a sort of queer, theoretical, in
vacua hatred — against the exploiters. Hence the grand old Socialist sport of
denouncing the bourgeoisie. It is strange how easily almost any Socialist
writer can lash himself into frenzies of rage against the class to which, by
birth or by adoption, he himself invariably belongs."

– George Orwell, “The Road to Wigan Pier” (excerpt from Chapter 11)

