Well, kandrathe; FIT is right actually.
First because of the examples he mentioned which don't (as you do so often) are single cases that you personally know of but really represent the majority of people on the globe.
You can say that in another system, another political system things would be equal or worse but saying that the american dream exists is just nonsense.
In the Netherlands we were also doing really good in the 17th century...you know why? We got us some colonies emptied them of what was valuable and sold it.
Your type of american dream existed for what? 50 years, and now already things seem to be changing a lot (energy crisis, food crisis, economic crisis).....I mean I know of many empire in the history of men that laste longer.
I think that instead of being happy what you have (because you were born in a good place) and telling it is the best of the best you better look into the future and see how we can make things better.
On the other hand, of you just keep repeating the capitalist mantra (because it works so great for us now) you always have chance to win the 'nobel price' in economics.
(12-06-2011, 10:45 PM)Jester Wrote: You are not merely claiming there isn't perfect equality of opportunity. You are claiming something like the opposite, that success is almost entirely a function of your birth - and that is an extraordinary claim, requiring, as Sagan said, extraordinary evidence. Certainly it is not self-evident, and it is not a reasonable null hypothesis.
Indeed, if you look at the studies behind the website you link us to, you actually find that quite a lot of people move from the bottom quartile to the top quartile, and vice versa. Income at birth matters, but it hardly determines your future status in an entirely deterministic way. The coefficients of correlation show neither a trivial effect, nor a dominating one. These are aggregate statistics, not anecdotes.
But, then, you supposedly have me on ignore, so I guess this is for the peanut gallery.
-Jester
And to add to that. The american dream only works if for every winner you have a whole bunch of losers. So yes, of course there are people climbing up the socioeconomic ladder. But for every person that clims up, several fall down.
Let's take the case of warren buffet. I would like to see some probability calculation of how many people started of just like him, and then had his succes rate in choices made. (so simply, buy cheap sell for more). To become Warren you have to have say a 65% succesrate of buying/selling.
So first besides warren, how many are there that tried the same but just missed that little bit of luck that he had?
And lets say there were anothe million besides Warren that had exactlt the same intelligence, work ethics and luck.....would they all be multibiljonair as well? No of course not that is not how the system works. If one person makes a billion other loose a billion (of course you have inflation and all but basically this is a fact).