
Filthy Lucre - lkrubner
http://m.vice.com/read/filthy-lucre
======
mijustin
Two quotes stand out for me:

> _My friends who came closest to attaining the American Dream did it by
> breaking the rules on how to get there._

and

> _For my friends and I who fought our way to moderate financial success,
> money came from transgressing society 's norms. With much luck, it required
> doing the ambitious work everyone said you weren't ready for, then getting
> mocked and rejected for it, until, slowly, the wall began to crack. You
> could never do what you were supposed to, never stay quietly in your place._

There's something about these statements that ring very true.

Upward mobility in the USA has always been difficult for women and minorities;
now it's increasingly difficult for men as well. There just aren't that many
rising from the bottom, and getting to the top. Positions are more entrenched.
Sources: [http://business.time.com/2012/01/05/the-loss-of-upward-
mobil...](http://business.time.com/2012/01/05/the-loss-of-upward-mobility-in-
the-u-s/) and [http://www.pewstates.org/projects/economic-mobility-
project-...](http://www.pewstates.org/projects/economic-mobility-
project-328061)

The author is identifying a response to the glass ceiling: by hacking the
system and breaking the rules.

~~~
wyager
I don't buy this at all.

Upward mobility never existed in the romanticized fashion that people like to
talk about. There was never a point in time where billionaires sprang out of
the ground like dandelions. The most "mobile" periods in history were when
vast stores of untapped wealth were first being tapped. Westward expansion,
the gold rush, etc. That's obviously not going to be 100% of the time.

Today, I guess the closest thing is the internet. And a _lot_ of people have
gone rags-to-riches (or the more realistic not-riches-to-riches) through the
internet. Maybe it's less mobility than, say, a hundred years ago, maybe not.

But really, that's beside the point. _Every single person_ in the entire world
has been "moving up" for the last 300 years. Things are _constantly_ getting
better. Even if we completely disregard the social progress that's been made
(think abolition of slavery), the rapid progression of technology is
constantly raising everyone's standard of living.

~~~
mijustin
"Every single person" in the world has not been moving up. ;)

In the USA, there's a lot of data that says both absolute & relative mobility
is getting worse:

> _The income of a typical working-age family grew considerably in the late
> 1990s. Around 2000, it stopped growing. In 2007, it started falling._

and

> _An under-rated source of income growth for the middle class in the last 30
> years, in face of slow-growing hourly wages, has been increased hours and
> the rise of dual-earner households, where the mother and father supplement
> each others ' income. As a result, household income might actually
> _understate* the middle-class crisis by counting the rising participation of
> women.*

Source:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/12/a-giant-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/12/a-giant-
statistical-round-up-of-the-income-inequality-crisis-in-16-charts/266074/)

Because "absolute mobility" uses household income as a barometer, it appears
on the surface that households are doing better. But we've actually added a
lot of dual-income earning families since 1950, which skews those stats. In
reality:

> _The typical family with a stay-at-home wife /mom has seen incomes grow only
> 1 percent, after inflation, since 1980._

> _The good news here is that women have the degrees, the means, and the
> freedom to work when they want to. The bad news is that the Typical American
> Family has only seen rising incomes in the last half century because of
> working wives._

Source: [http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-
amer...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-americas-
marriage-crisis-makes-income-inequality-so-much-
worse/280056/?utm_content=buffera55d7&utm_source=buffer)

~~~
sejje
He meant moving up in quality of life, not social status. It wasn't even
implied, he said so rather specifically ("but really, that's beside the
point.")

I'd much rather be lower class today than upper class in 1776. Comfort,
medicine, availability of safe food, etc is all far better now for all classes
than it was then for the upper class.

There's a big disparity, in some sense, between lower and upper classes in
today's world, but the disparity doesn't show up in happiness or longevity so
far as I know. Mostly it's about having nice things, or just wealth in
general.

~~~
MaysonL
_There 's a big disparity, in some sense, between lower and upper classes in
today's world, but the disparity doesn't show up in happiness or longevity so
far as I know._

Actually it does: poor people are not as happy as well-off people, on average.

Also, for the past 30 or so years, US life expectancy for higher income
workers has gone up substantially more then for lower income workers. See [1]
for example, or search on "life expectancy by income level"

[1] [http://www.minnpost.com/second-opinion/2013/03/income-gap-
pl...](http://www.minnpost.com/second-opinion/2013/03/income-gap-plays-out-us-
life-expectancy)

------
morgante
It's awfully hard to discern a point in this rambling piece.

But I'm not sure what she expects. She and other liberal arts students
constantly complain about the 1%, but they're the ones who chose to go into a
field which the market doesn't reward.

Yet they're the same people who scoff at and disparage people studying finance
or computer science. We chose to study lucrative things, a choice which is
equally open to them.

Ultimately, we have to confront the fact that certain industries just don't
scale. We don't need more English majors or artists, so if you choose to study
that it's your own choice. Welcome to the free market.

~~~
dylandrop
Teachers get paid basically nothing to do their work. So should no one be a
teacher just because it pays poorly? Absolutely not.

I don't know about you but I'd hate to live in a world with no artists. I
agree with you that she should know what she's getting into, which is why
everyone I know has always told me that if you want to be an artist, you've
got to love what you do (FYI, I'm not an artist). But just because our society
doesn't reward artists monetarily doesn't mean artists don't have a right to
complain about it. Sometimes the free market doesn't solve everything.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_I don 't know about you but I'd hate to live in a world with no artists._

Prices are determined _at the margin_ , not in aggregate. The question is
whether you'd hate to live in a world with one fewer artist. I think we could
manage.

I.e. if the first 10 artists in the world increase wealth by $100k/each, and
the 11'th artist increases wealth by $10k (due to diminishing marginal
returns), then the price of an artist will be $10k. That's how much society
loses if _one_ artist quits. The remaining $90k x 10 artists is captured by
society as consumer surplus.

(This is true of all professions with competitive employment markets.)

~~~
dangerlibrary
Do you really believe that the job market for artists satisfies all of the
underlying assumptions of the economic model you are using?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Basic_struc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Basic_structural_characteristics)

Infinite buyers and sellers (infinite patrons)? Homogenous products (all
artists are fungible)? No barriers to entry and exit (anyone can stop what
they are doing and become an artist, tomorrow)?

Two semesters of undergraduate economics can make you very confident in things
that are utterly wrong, if you're not careful.

------
thatthatis
I have immense respect for successful people, like the author, who recognize
that their success is a factor of skill, opportunity, cash, and luck.

"I am a deity destined to succeed" is a belief held too often by people who
have early success in their lives.

~~~
wyager
Luck is probabilistic. Persistence allows one to exponentially reduce the
chance of a negative outcome. If you fail, try again. And again. And again. Of
all the self-made rich people that I know, their one common trait is
persistence. They failed a lot. They didn't let bad luck stop them.

~~~
mrow84
To translate the article into your probability of success framework: wealth
confers both a higher probability of success at each attempt, and the ability
to make more attempts without becoming impoverished.

Given that the 'number of attempts' part of the equation is generally quite a
small number, if you do the basic maths implied by your comment then you can
see how valuable it is to be able to afford a couple more tries at success for
people with moderate chances.

That same maths also shows how difficult it is to succeed at the bottom end of
the 'probability of success per attempt' space, and how even very small
increases in that probability can make large (expected) changes in outcome.

~~~
thatthatis
This is one of the best explanations of how wealth can buy luck that I think
I've ever read. Thank you.

------
gvickers
The American Dream is not "work hard and you will be successful", the American
Dream is "Work hard at something people are willing to pay you to do and you
will be successful".

~~~
beaner
The people who make the most noise about the American Dream failing them are
mostly young whites who've chosen personal, liberal arts pursuits as a career,
with the expectation that society should support them at it.

Comparisons to rich people are irrelevant and envy-driven. The rich are rich.
So what? Do they deserve it - why do you care?

You can make yourself comfortable without luck or brilliance. Just look around
you, see what the world is paying for, and do it.

If you choose not to do something in that set, you should acknowledge that you
won't get the same pay for it.

Arguments that you _should_ be taken care of the same way aren't really
arguments against the American Dream, they're just a leftward political view.
Which is fine, but don't convolute them.

~~~
olefoo
> Comparisons to rich people are irrelevant and envy-driven. The rich are
> rich. So what? Do they deserve it - why do you care?

Not when their riches come at the expense of everyone else.

For instance the Walton family who occupy 6 of 10 slots on the richest
americans list benefits from an estimated $15 Billion ( with a B ) a YEAR (
every year ) subsidy from the taxpayers to support their employees who could
not survive ( as in feed their families ) without supplemental food
assistance; not to mention medicare, disability etc. Not to mention the fact
that the company they control got to be such a wealth production engine by
arbitraging it's way around labor and environmental protections by exporting
it's externalities to unregulated emerging economies.

All the people who got pushed into extremely bad mortgages and then lost their
jobs because the economy crashed; they were stolen from by Rich People.

All the people who've had their lives destroyed by the financial shenanigans
distorting our healthcare system were stolen from by Rich People.

I don't know about you, but given the trail of destruction left behind by rich
people in the past 5 years alone; we should be handing them a bill, or showing
them the door.

Now, I'm sure many rich people are very nice if you know them socially; but as
a class, they're killing this country and this planet.

~~~
Karunamon
I hate to be "that guy" but:

>All the people who got pushed into extremely bad mortgages and then lost
their jobs because the economy crashed; they were stolen from by Rich People.

Those people share at least the majority of the blame for this. A bank does
not put a gun to your head and force you to sign an ARM for a house you really
can't afford.

I'd call it 60/40 blame. 60 clueless people, 40 banking sector shenanigans.

Remember that if either side hadn't done what they did, the crisis probably
wouldn't have happened.

~~~
ubernostrum
"I lied to this guy, committed fraud left and right, and violated basically
every sound principle of lending that's ever existed to get him to sign on to
a mortgage, because I knew I could sell it on immediately into a CDO and face
no consequences if he defaulted. But since he fell for it, it's at _least_ as
much his fault as mine that it happened!"

 _Caveat emptor_ is the disguise force and fraud hide behind.

~~~
Karunamon
And so someone who signs a mortgage for a house they can't afford is
completely blameless?

~~~
ubernostrum
Well, if you're someone who doesn't really know finance that well, who's
probably never had a mortgage before and so doesn't know the ins and outs, and
doesn't have a lot of friends/contacts who know finance or have mortgage
experience...

...and you're getting pressure-talked by a mortgage agent who keeps telling
you all about how this has a super-low interest rate for the first three
years, and no income verification or down payment required, and that $150k
house will be worth $175k, easy, maybe even $200k before the interest rate
goes up, and it's a great market so you'll be guaranteed to flip the house in
time and make a profit, and real estate always only goes up in value...

...and you give in to the relentless sales pitch and sign the papers, then
sure, we can assign a percentage of the blame to you. But if you think it's a
precise 50/50 split or anything close to that, I think you are a terrible
judge of the situation.

(and that's without getting into the bits alluded to in my previous comment,
like the fact that many of the lenders knew there was no chance these loans
would be good, but were happy to do it anyway since they also knew they'd
never be on the hook when the loans went bad, which is out-and-out undeniable
fraud and has basically gone unquestioned and unpunished because of "well,
_everybody_ was to blame" narratives that try to sweep those inconvenient
facts under the rug)

~~~
onebaddude
> _if you 're someone who doesn't really know finance that well_

Well, you don't have to be a financial expert to understand the generalities
of what you can and cannot afford.

The rest of what you describe can be equally attributed to greedy people
thinking, "if the price doesn't rise, I'll bail in 3 months. No loss." I know
some of those people.

> _But if you think it 's a precise 50/50 split or anything close to that, I
> think you are a terrible judge of the situation._

I know you read stories about the strawberry picker who can't speak english
"pressured" into buying the million dollar home, but those cases were
extremely rare.

The _majority_ were people with $40,000 in income deciding to buy the $750,000
house, rather than the $200,000 house, because, you know, the American Dream
says renting is bad and looking wealthy is a necessity. Give me the most money
you can for the biggest house possible! This happened across the globe.

Oh, and you're forgetting the other major factor of the American specific
bust: people who used their home equity to fund consumption. Mostly boomers. I
guess those were also the unfortunate, duped poor, buying vacation homes, jet-
skis and third cars?

It seems that your understanding of the situation is drawn from the
mainstream, "evil-bankster" meme. But that only works because it's a populist
sentiment. There is plenty of blame to go around; give it to the greedy.

~~~
ubernostrum
_I know you read stories about the strawberry picker who can 't speak english
"pressured" into buying the million dollar home, but those cases were
extremely rare._

The industry which sprung up around CDOs did two extremely dangerous things:

1\. Because of the demand for mortgages from the CDO industry, created an
incentive for lenders to make as many loans as possible.

2\. Disconnected the people who were actually issuing the loans from the
consequences, if and when the borrowers defaulted (since the actual lenders
could immediately sell the loan into the CDO-bundling food chain, thus
recovering their money so they'd no longer need to worry about the loan being
repaid).

The combination of the pressure of (1) and the lack of consequences in (2)
meant lenders drastically relaxed their policies, issuing loans to people who
they knew they never would have lent to if they (the lenders) were going to be
on the hook financially in case of default.

Meanwhile, it has been demonstrated beyond doubt that the larger entities
which were offering CDOs to investors were promoting them as high-grade
investments, with help from ratings agencies who either utterly failed in
their function or were themselves complicit in the deception, even though
those entities knew otherwise and were taking their own private actions in the
market, aimed at profiting when (not if) CDOs failed to perform as advertised.

The result of this is was a large-scale transfer of wealth, largely from duped
investors and duped borrowers (for make no mistake: knowingly issuing a loan
to someone not qualified for the loan is a form of duping), largely to a
relatively small and select group of people who were either involved in the
lending and bundling food chain, or in offering CDOs to investors.

These are not memes. These are facts. This was a massive fraud perpetrated
upon multiple groups.

You can, if you wish, say that the desire to play real-estate mogul or
conspicuously consume played a part in driving people to take out loans, and
assign some part of the responsibility to those people. You cannot, however,
support in any way, based on the known and undisputed facts, the assertion
that the borrowers bear (to quote precisely the original words to which I
replied) "the majority of the blame" for this. The deliberate and knowing
fraud in the CDO industry outstrips that as the noonday sun does a candle.

~~~
onebaddude
You can go on and on, but nothing will ever change the fact that no entity
_ever_ forced someone into a mortgage, CDO or investment. Each and every time
was a voluntary contract between two parties, likely greed driven by both
borrower and lender.

------
badman_ting
There is something disappointing yet deeply unsurprising about the collective
reaction to this piece. Well, here we are.

~~~
mildtrepidation
If you're describing the general HN "I'm not impressed, here are some
ancillary-to-the-point minutiae to debate" attitude, I'm not sure what else
you could have expected.

Similarly the "we're all sociologists here" assumptions that come with the
common belief that a few largely-shared disagreements with American politics
and economy that have somehow turned into truisms here.

If you're disappointed, make a point. As it is you're complaining for its own
sake, which is adding exactly as much as the comments you're complaining about
(possibly less).

------
zavulon
> most people who make the world run—who care for kids, who grow food, who
> would rebuild after natural disasters and societal collapse—will never be
> rich, no matter how hard or well they work, because society is constructed
> with only so much room on top.

That is such bullshit (at least here in the US).

Nowhere in the article does the author support this claim. In fact, the whole
American system is built to prove the opposite. Space at the top is NOT
limited. Total wealth is NOT limited. Anybody who works hard (and smart!) can
get there.

~~~
rfnslyr
Not a chance. It's easy to be disillusioned by our little tech bubble. We have
it easy, others do not.

~~~
mildtrepidation
Easy? Perhaps _you_ have it easy. This comment makes the same mistake the
article makes: Generalization.

Instead of stating that _you_ have it easy, you say _we_ have it easy. Instead
of saying _she_ had certain problems, the author says _everyone_ has certain
problems (and, more importantly, she leaps to systemic discrimination, class-
warfare, etc. as somehow-implied conclusions).

Some of us actually have to work hard, even in tech, and had to work hard to
"make it" in the first place. I didn't have to work as hard as she did, but
others did (and I bet few of us are such attractive females as to have the
options she did, which makes some of her criticism ring a little hollow). And
my experience certainly hasn't been what I'd describe as easy.

~~~
greendata
It's 10x, maybe even 1000x harder to make it as an artist or musician than to
make it in finance, engineering, nursing, or accounting.

------
davidw
One of the ways to be happy is to look at what you have in an objective
fashion, rather than looking at relative wealth. Rankings are zero-sum games
in that someone is always one rung up from you, and someone else one rung
down. In absolute terms though, we live in a time of amazing prosperity.

The fact that you can fly at all is something that a person 100 years ago
would be astounded at. The fact that you can do so cheaply and relatively
easily is something someone 50 years ago would have envied.

That's not to say that there aren't improvements to be made to society through
politics, but that would be an argument for a site where that's on topic: it
is off topic here according to the guidelines.

------
pedalpete
I disagree with the complaints about the 1%. I think that is the wrong focus.
With the exception of the First Class Flight example in this article, I've
seen too many people focus on the 'divide' in the sense of actual dollars,
rather than the lifestyle that the other 80% live, which I believe is actually
quite good.

Things like reading 'every dollar I clawed', makes me think that so many of
these people are so focused on the actual dollars and have no real
appreciation for the true challenges that the bottom 20% suffer.

That's why I think many people here don't feel sorry for the authors of these
pieces. Not only are they considered to be living well, the authors don't even
appreciate the challenges of those who aren't. Discussing people who are
treated like cattle in airports is not an effective argument for those who
can't afford to fly, or eat. I disagree with airport treatment, but I don't
think the 'rich' are to blame here either.

~~~
lhc-
Did you read the article? I'm not sure you can argue she doesn't know anything
about being poor or the experiences of the bottom 20% when much of the article
was describing how she used to be poor and the difficulty in surviving in that
world and getting out of it.

------
calroc
Um this is just babble, and not about hacking?

------
hackaflocka
If you told miss liberal hissyfitpants that Barack Obama and his family (or
Bill Clinton and his family for that matter) were treated like that (the way
she was treated in the first class lounge) whenever they fly, she won't have a
problem with it.

But what sets her off is that ordinary millionaires can get that kind of
treatment in exchange for a little money.

And notice, it wasn't some fictional millionaire she created who described the
people in coach in that horrible way. It was she, liberal hissyfitpants
herself, who did it.

~~~
Confusion
She doesn't have a problem with anyone being treated like that.

What the article is interested in, and what she had a problem with, is that
people feel like they, and those more well off, are entitled to their
amenities. They should be more aware of their luck and should consider how
other people may have been unlucky, instead of dumb, lazy or evil.

~~~
berrypicker
I definitely felt a sense of bitterness towards the rich:

>But it’s too much to ask bankers to justify the bonuses they sucked off the
public teat. >A culture that forbids employees from comparing salaries helps
companies pay women and minorities less

I don't understand these people who are hostile towards "bankers" and "big
businesses" as they call them. Usually they seem to blame poverty to their
wealth, and failure to their success. You may not become wealthy studying to
be an accountant but you sure as shit will more likely have a stable career
than somebody trying to make it in the arts. Yet the accountant is now the
enemy. Somebody founds a company and it starts making a lot of money, suddenly
he is responsible for everyone around him having no money. This is our
generation, no wonder they call us entitled.

I mean she even mentions the economic system being rigged but she can't see
that it is precisely that which needs to change. Businesses and bankers are
trying to make it, like everyone else. Don't complain about them then vote for
Obama.

~~~
gamblor956
(She's rich. She's almost certainly richer than most programmers, and that
includes quite a few SV stars. Her complaint is that her personal wealth and
financial success is largely due to largess granted her by her family's
wealth.)

