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Opinion | Why So Many Children of Immigrants Rise to the Top - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Upward Mobility Is Alive and Well in America - WSJ

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change: Covey, Stephen R.: 8601419641499: Amazon.com: Books

How Do You Define Success? | Psychology Today

....Computer programming training could set former inmates up for success after prison : NPR

 

Again, anyone who wants to can improve their economic situation. It's not like in the past where you just go to college and climb your way to the top of whatever company you start working for, but you can improve your econimic situation.

I could improve my economic situation. But that would require sacrificing something else I'm not willing to sacrifice right now. If your family has enough to live happily there's no need to abandon it just to send them more money.

The reason programming is so well paid is that it is a hard job. I'm not saying that a person shouldn't work hard, but it's not the kind of job just anyone can do. And the stress level is very high. If anyone else has the knack for it or simply wants to make a lot of money, then go for it. But we're talking about why new cars are expensive. I don't think a person should get a job at programming just to fulfill the goal of getting a new car. I know that this 52-year-old who can't figure out how to use a smartphone touchscreen isn't going to be able to jump into computer programming anytime soon.

 

This is their source.
Computer Programmers : Occupational Outlook Handbook: : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Note that the projection is for this field to decline in number of workers. The grunt work of coding is something AI will likely be doing in the future.

 

That's a point I aluded to before.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach. What works today may not necessarily work tomorrow. One job pays great because there are hardly anyone in that field. Next thing you know, everyone flocks to that career and now you have a low demand for workers in that field and so wages stagnate and people are layed off, especially once some machine is invented that can to the work more efficiently with fewer workers.

 

Best thing you can do is start your own small business

 

Right now, yes. And that's what I'm doing as I only work self employed under my own sole proprieter business with my wife (aka joint venture). But who knows if this will still be a good way to get by 10 years from now.

The thing is that the cost of living has increased, houses are more expensive than ever, and the cheapest cars are dissapearing. And in line with the title of this thread, EV's can save money, but not for everyone.

In the end, yes, working harder and working more and trying to get more education can all help get more money and live more of the American Dream. But at what cost? It's not as simple of a solution as just changing your job, doing your best at it and still working 40 hours a week and maybe adding a couple hours of classes for a few months in order to obtain that dream. I've known plenty of people who've decided to work 14 to 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, both the husband and the wife, in order to obtain their dream house and car. Next thing you know they're divorced and their kids hate them.

 

Yeah the dream house/car is just envy/greed, tough place to start a marriage from.
Our kids all work hard, but no harder than I did.
It’s a tough world out there, makes you wonder who all the people are driving up prices

 

Isn't a simple answer.
House prices started going up during the pandemic because people were moving out of crowded cities, and then companies started buying them as rental investments. A corporation is better able to out bid an individual.

Cars suffered from parts shortages, so what was available went into trims with better margins. Those had higher prices. The auto companies got used to that income, and some are now keeping supply low.

See the price of eggs being brought up as a sign of a poor economy, when it is actually because of recent bad years of bird flu thinning out flocks of layers.

 

Bacon has gone through the roof as well. Must be not enough pork bellies.

 

is there any way to know how much real estate has been bought by corporations?

 

The thing to keep in mind is that COVID only accelerated what was already happening.

Ever since property started being viewed as an investment it has only gone up in price. It used to be that you could buy a house off of minimum wage, and you only needed one working adult to do it. But home prices go up faster than wages and inflation. This obviously isn't sustainable. But so far the result is that we pay more for homes today than our parents and grandparents did, and our children and grandchildren will pay even more, even if we adjust for inflation.

This is why you cannot buy a house off of minimum wage any more. In nearly the entire country you can no longer buy a house with a household median wage.

I'm not saying it's wrong or bad, it is what it is. But more and more people will be forced to rent and fewer abd fewer will have the luxury of owning a house. The only way to make that reverse is to make homes lose value in comparison to wages. A single family or individual might be able to do that, but not the whole nation without sone huge change in the way we do things.

 

That isn’t the only way.
For the past 30-40 years US businesses have had HUGE productivity gains.
Those gains went to the CEOs and not the workers.
Also since the 80s the almost all of the tax breaks have gone to the wealthiest citizens. The money was supposed to trickle down, but it didn’t.

So, the other way to correct this would be to undo the tax breaks for the rich and add tax breaks for the middle class.

 

How much you need to get your foot in the door turns on where you live. Minimum wage might work in some states but in socal? 1970s minimum wage was $1.65 & after saving $3,500 - & barely securing a FHA sponsored loan - it was all i could muster to afford the payment on a house costing in the low $50K's for One of the worst dumps in a ½way decent city. That was working a non-union welding job making 5X minimum wage (8.50hr).
No complaints, we did okay before retiring a couple years ago.

It's not just corporations that gobble up properties. We allow the Chinese to own a lot of it, & then there's the (RET's) real estate trusts ... where you put in $100K or more into the pool & the trust handles all the property managing. There can be > 200 homes in some RET's. We would have lost our shirts in the 2008 real estate crash but fortunately never invested in it.
.

 

Well, that's still the same idea, or at least striving for the same result. Regardless of what is done, if we want to get more people into home ownership then what they take home in pay needs to increase in comparison to what properties are worth, or vise versa. The problem with that is it would spell the end of property investment. You can't have propertie values increase accounting for inflation and a growing middle class that is better able to afford a home at the same time.
If that happened, it would make more sense to actually go to work to make money than to invest in property and homes.

 

Sure you can. Allow property values to increase according to supply and demand.
Increase wages as a factor of BOTH inflation and an increase in productivity.

 

That's not exactly how it works. In the world there is only so much production. You can't have a win-win situation without everyone increasing their efficiency and production.

Say you have three guys shipwrecked on a deserted island. One knows how to build shelters, the other knows how to gather food and the last knows how to make clothing.

It also just so happens that each one has to work one day in order to provide one week worth of their product for one person: If the guy that makes shelters works one day he can privde a shelter to shelter one of them for one week. If the guy gathers food works one day he can gather enough food for one of them to eat for a week. And if the guy that makes clothing works one day he can make enough clothing to last one of them one week.

So each one of them works more than one day a week in order to provide enough for all of them. But these guys have gone a bit crazy, so they all decide that one week's worth of shelter should be worth two weeks' worth of food. And one week's worth of food should be worth two weeks' worth of clothing. And therefore one week's worth of shelter is worth four weeks' worth of clothing.
How much does each one have to work in order to provide for himself?

The guy that builds shelters has to work only 3 days, one for himself, one for the guy that gathers food and one for the guy that makes clothing. But in return he gets two weeks' worth of food every week as well as four weeks' worth of clothing every week. In order to put all his stuff he decides to work one more day of the week in order to build a total of two shelters for himself that last a whole week. So 4 days worth of work per week and has two weeks worth of shelter and food, and four weeks worth of clothing.

The guy that gathers food has to work at least four days, because he has to work two days in order to trade for enough shelter. But maybe he wants more, so he could work another day to have two weeks worth of food per week. Maybe he wants two weeks worth of shelter per week so has to work another two days. But now he's working 7 days a week and still hastn't obtained the level of living that the guy that builds shelters has because he only gets two weeks worth of clothing per week for his trade of one week's worth of food.

But what about the guy that makes clothing. He has to work 7 days a week in order to make ends meet. One day he works for himself to get one week's worth of clothing. Then he works two days to trade for one week's worth of food. Then he works four days in order to trade for one week's worth of shelter.

But what happens if these three guys come to their senses and decide that one week's worth of shelter should be equal to one week's worth of food, which in turn should be equal to one week's worth of clothing? Well, regardless of whatever monitary value you place on each of these three necessities, the guy that builds shelters suddenly will have to live with less because since his shelters get him less in return.

The same with lowering taxes on the middle class and raising taxes on the higher classes. If that makes the middle class able to afford more housing and therefore the higher class afford less housing than before, then the housing that the higher class invested in previously will be worth less than before when adjusted for inflation. This is because realitive the the average take-home pay the cost of owning a house will decrease. If the average person makes $4,000 a month and it costs $2,000 per month to buy a home, whether you increase the take-home pay to $8,000 per month or lower the cost of the home to $1,000 per month, those buying the house are doing the same work as before but getting more house, so in the end, housing loses value.

The only way to make a win-win situation is to increase the productivity of everyone and to not allow the rich to exploit the increased productivity of the poor. But if productivity stays realatively the same, making it things cheaper for some means those those things will be just that: cheaper.

 

Which is pretty much exactly what I said. And you apparently starting by saying that would not work??

I get that actually voting in people that will implement this is difficult. But hypothetically, if you can increase productivity while distributing the gains fairly, wouldn’t that ‘raise all boats’?

 

Well, if you put it that way, yes.

But we don't know how much productivity can actually be increased through incentives. It takes me around 1 hour to clean 10 bathrooms. I don't see any type of incentive that's going to help me clean more bathrooms in less time.

You'd also have to distribute the gains fairly, which is near impossible due to competition. If it takes 5 people 5 days to get their jobs done, but you increase their productivity 5 times, well now you only need 1 day of work from each one. How do you keep one of them from taking the work from the other 4 and making 5 times the profit and leaving those other 4 in the poor house?

It's like the orchards out here. A bumper crop is worse than a bad year because the first to sell sells and the rest are left with nothing in terms of money, just trees full of fruit.

If you increase the productivity you will usually end up with the rich figuring out how to invest into the system and pull out all the gains from the increased productivity leaving the ones doing the actual work making the same as before.

 

Easy, you keep all 5 working, make 5 times as much product.
You then take the increased profit and split it up between the workers and boss.

Everyone wins.

 

When and where was that?

Here are the stats on home ownership rates since 1950. Most decades have gone up and up or were flat, except one.
Can you guess which one dropped?

Census link:
Homeownership by Selected Demographic and Housing Characteristics

Mike