> Most people need money to eat. I don't know if you can ever really have a fair negotiation with an employer when "the rent is due" is involved.

Your definition of "fair" is questionable.

If you're negotiating from a position where you've taken on debts and rent that you can't afford to pay, and time has run out to the point where you're desperate for a paycheck as soon as possible, that's unfortunate. But that's not the fault of the person you're negotiating for a job with. Exceptional cases aside, 95% of the time that's likely due to your own risk-taking, neglect, poor decision-making, or financial mismanagement. And you had a "fair" chance to not get into that situation to begin with.

But regardless of blame, it's certainly not the fault of the counterparty in your employment negotiations in that you're in that spot. Nor is it their responsibility. Nor should we want it to be! What kind of system would that be, exactly? A brutal one where many more people fall through the gaps than would otherwise. A much better system is the one we have, where people pay taxes, and do so at higher rates the more fortunate they are, and that tax money goes into programs like unemployment, which helps people in exceptional situations.

What's so unfair about this, exactly?

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stackbutterflow 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Actually it's probably more 99.99% likely due to the family you're born in.

> What's so unfair about this, exactly?

We don't roll the same dices at birth.

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csallen 2 hours ago | parent [-]

No one's saying we roll the same dice at birth. That doesn't mean that people who are so desperate that they can't risk negotiating a job offer are 99.99% in that situation because of birth rather than decisions made subsequent to birth.

Especially because in America at least, over 200 million people are born middle class or above. An even lower class in America is doing much better than many other countries in the world.

At what point in your mind does personal accountability come into play? How prosperous does a nation have to be for people to have some responsibility for the consequences of their own actions? Or are people never responsible?

	▲	stackbutterflow 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Regarding personal responsibility, at an individual's level it's your responsibility to improve your life, because that's the only lever you have and you don't have the time to wait for societal changes that take decades or centuries to arrive. When we're discussing policy for our society however it's too easy to blame people for the choices they made so we don't have to think harder. The world's complexity is beyond what the humans brain can hold at any single time. Some people are dealt bad hands, born in a difficult family, born in a body that slow them down or drag them down. Some people make one bad choice (even something mild like a financially unprofitable carrer choice) at 18 because millions of parameters that played since their birth compulsed their brain to make that choice at that moment in their life. Not even mentioning meeting the wrong people. You can do everything well and cross the path of someone who breaks you. Truly and without getting too philosophical,looking back and learning about people's stories I've come to realize that we have little agency and by the time we understand how the world works and what we should have done instead it's often too late to change the outcome drastically. To tie it all back to the topic of this thread, the 19 year old who's been pushed by his parents all his life to get good grades, study well, get involved in the right extracurriculars, ends up at Stanford, starts a startup because that's what people do around him, is told to apply to YC, is accepted, is taken care of by YC, tell me how much is he responsible for his success?