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Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦 Profile picture
@Noahpinion
Aug 14, 2019 • 16 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X
1/Today's @bopinion post is about getting rich.

The dream of getting rich is fundamental to the capitalist system. But in America, that dream is getting further out of reach.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/Wealth mobility has decreased. It's less likely for people outside the top echelon to make it into that rarefied percentile.

clevelandfed.org/en/newsroom-an…
3/What's the classic way to get rich?

Start a business.

But fewer people are starting businesses.
4/Big chains have been muscling out local businesses, closing off an essential route into the upper middle class.
nber.org/chapters/c0487

And high-growth startups are becoming rarer as well.
econweb.umd.edu/~haltiwan/EER_…

Big corporations are taking over.
economics.mit.edu/files/12979
5/How about investing in other people's businesses?

If you bet big on Google or Amazon stock, you'd have a lot of money now. But most people who play that game lose.

So stock investing is being taken over by institutions.
pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10…
6/How about real estate?

Middle-class Americans at least know how to play that game. But many were crushed in the crash.
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
7/House-flipping is still around, at least...

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
8/But thanks to tighter lending standards and the entry of institutional investors into the housing market, even that is increasingly a game for those who already have money.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
9/The crisis was a turning point for the wealth distribution in America.
10/What about making money by working hard and getting a top job?

Increasingly, that requires a degree from a top school...or an advanced degree.

statchatva.org/2019/05/10/a-g…
11/Getting a plum job is still within reach if you're a genius with a PhD. But what about everyone else?

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
12/And remember, even getting through college is very dependent on how much money your parents have.
13/Normal Americans, without rich parents or sky-high IQs, want a path to riches.

Maybe that explains the enthusiasm for crypto. In crypto, outsiders, rebels, and normal shmoes can still get rich.

I gave an impromptu speech about that on this podcast:
pscp.tv/EuclidAndOaks/…
14/But even in crypto, the big companies are coming in and taking over.

coindesk.com/rising-institu…
15/The basic story here is that big organizations are coming in and dominating all of the paths by which Americans traditionally could get rich.

And when people can't get rich, they look for other avenues to status and meaning.

16/If big organizations are allowed to continue to shut out young ambitious Americans, don't be surprised if the next hot growth industry...is socialism.

(end)

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦 Profile picture
Jun 10
Russia's empire is a nested hierarchy. At the center is Moscow. Under them are mid-tier Russian cities and rural areas, then subject peoples like the Buryats, Sakha, and these African folks.

The closer you are to the center, the less fighting you do, and the more money you get. Image
In fact, the circles of Russian hierarchy don't stop at Moscow. There are privileged subgroups of Muscovites, then more privileged groups inside that circle, all the way up to the Tsar himself.

The principle still holds: Closer to the center = less fighting, more money.
The advantage of this organizational structure is that the more power you have, the less likely you are to ever suffer negative consequences from adverse shocks or bad decisions. All the losses from failed wars, bad economic decisions, etc. get taken by the less powerful.
Read 16 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦 Profile picture
Jun 3
In fact, it's not law even now. This executive order is (sadly) AGAINST the law and will probably be struck down, because our asylum law says we can't discriminate against asylum claimants for crossing the border illegally. That law needs to be changed by Congress.
The problem is that the U.S. is a party to the 1967 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, which says that your asylum system can't discriminate against people for being in the country illegally. We wrote our domestic law to comply with that treaty.
The non-discrimination provision is obviously stupid, so what we need to do is flout the 1967 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, and simply amend our domestic law to say "You can't claim asylum if you crossed illegally". But this would require an act of Congress.
Read 5 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦 Profile picture
May 7
I'm incredibly bored of talking about the Palestine protests, but here are some results from the recent Generation Lab survey.

Key fact #1: College students just don't care about the Palestine issue that much.

axios.com/2024/05/07/pol…
Image
About 8% of students have participated in the protests on one side or the other. That's a substantial number, but less than the 21% who joined BLM protests in May/June 2020 (and the latter were pretty much all on one side of the issue).

collegepulse.com/blog/8-in-10-c…
Image
Only about 1/8 of students blame Biden for the conflict. 34% blame Hamas, and 31% blame either Israel in general or Netanyahu specifically. Image
Read 6 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦 Profile picture
May 2
The Palestine protesters have created a dream Palestine that is almost entirely disconnected from the real place, in which all of their fantasies of a perfect society are realized.

This is a bit like what weebs do with Japan.
FromTheRiverToTheSeaboos
Most weebs don't actually want to live in Japan. They want to live in a local subculture of their own creation, whose values are based on gentleness and romance -- the ideals that attracted them to Japanese fantasies and made those fantasies resonate.

noahpinion.blog/p/weebs
Read 9 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦 Profile picture
Mar 24
Comparisons between the Cultural Revolution and the Woke Era get laughed at. The Woke Era didn't use violence, of course. But the *motivation* of people wanting to overturn social hierarchies, especially students wanting to overturn academic hierarchies, is recognizably similar.
In 2010s America, there was a widespread desire to overturn local social hierarchies -- the classroom authority of teachers and professors, the cultural power of entertainment stars, the authority of nonprofit execs and heads of civic organizations.
In 1960s China, overturning local hierarchies happened via physical mob violence. In 2010, it happened through online mobs destroying people's reputations on social media. Obviously, the second is far preferable to the first. This is why economic development is good!
Read 10 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦 Profile picture
Jan 19
Here are some countries that did catch up to other countries.

Poland caught up to Portugal: Image
South Korea caught up to Japan: Image
Ireland caught up to the UK

(graph ends before major Irish tax shenanigans begin) Image
Read 13 tweets

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