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| ▲ | nradov 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| That perception bears almost no relation to reality. The most reliable path to building a modicum of wealth has remained the same for generations: start a small business in some boring field and work your ass off for 80 hrs/wk. Building wealth through real estate is also still totally possible outside of the HCOL metro areas. Try unfashionable areas like Cleveland or Oklahoma City. And let's not have any low-effort comments claiming that there are no good jobs available in those places: the actual economic data on median income to housing price ratios tells another story. |
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| ▲ | taurath an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Just start a small business, or build wealth through real estate is a take that indicates some severe divorce from the reality of poverty in America. You need both capital (which folks don’t have access to) and the ability to absorb risk (which folks don’t have access to). Similar advice is in the vein of just stay with your parents for free, have a relative invest $50,000 in your business to start it up. This runs counter to your internal narrative as a self made person I’m sure, but have you ever worked for 40 hours a week and not had anything left after paying for your share of rent, food and utilities? This is the reality that doesn’t seep into forums like this, where the majority is wealthy, college educated, and broadly privileged in some way either through exceptional talent or background. > let's not have any low-effort comments claiming that there are no good jobs available in those places I will bite - homeownership is indeed higher in the rust belt, but many folks struggle to find jobs that meet the median without giving up their health and bodies, if they can find steady work at all. | | |
| ▲ | jcranmer 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Upward mobility still occurs in the US, at all levels. While the advice is difficult, almost impossible, for most to apply, it is sometimes applicable. One of the main issues is that a lot of advice is presented as an unconditional, absolute guarantee to success. A college degree was never a guarantee of future success (contrary to great-grandparent's assertion), but the push to get everyone to get a college degree has rendered its utility as a helpful marker much more useless. Similarly, the ability to start your own business is difficult for most people, but even for poorer individuals, it is possible to start, say, a cleaning service with very little assets. (At the same time, such businesses are unlikely to make a whole lot of money at the end, but you might be able to move from working class to middle class, e.g.). A lot of contractor businesses--your plumbers and the like--are going to be from the lower middle class or middle class, and you can make some good money there, although that is also likely to be at the cost of your health much sooner than you expect. | |
| ▲ | nradov 32 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If you try hard enough you can always find a plausible sounding excuse why failure is inevitable. And yet on Saturday at the neighborhood Independence Day party I met a guy who immigrated from Ukraine about 25 years ago with no money, no college education, no family support, and no English language skills. Instead of complaining he just went to work and while not exactly wealthy he's now doing fairly well as an electrical contractor. Life is usually a struggle. No one should expect any different. | |
| ▲ | giantrobot an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don't know what you mean, I mean I made a million dollars with only a small hundred million dollar loan from my dad! This sort of entrepreneurship is available to anyone in America.¹ ¹ Terms and conditions apply. |
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| ▲ | Analemma_ an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | “Building wealth through real estate” should not be possible, and it’s half the reason we’re in this mess: people treating their homes as a store of wealth and blocking new construction to protect the value of their investment has locked young people out of the housing market. Hence all the gambling.
What you should be hoping is that YIMBY policies carry the day in the end and “building wealth through real estate” is eliminated as a thing. | | |
| ▲ | throwitaway222 40 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Building wealth through real estate should not be possible I am sympathetic to this argument, but there are problems. How do you get homes built if you make this change? | | |
| ▲ | myrmidon 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | By people paying for houses they actually want to live in? Real estate as "investment" is not helping anything here; it hurts home availability, first because prospective homeowners have to compete with capital that just wants to use those as store of value/for rentseeking (driving up demand/prices) and secondly because this creates incentives against building more houses (because that hurts those real estate "investors"). | |
| ▲ | Analemma_ 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Construction companies can still turn a profit building and selling them. The idea is that houses should be depreciating assets, like cars. If houses are appreciating in value it means you're not building enough of them. | | |
| ▲ | nradov 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Most houses do depreciate, or they require frequent expenses just to maintain their value which amounts to the same thing. There are occasionally exceptions to this rule in times of rapid construction price inflation but that's rare. It's the land under the house that typically appreciates. Land is unlikely to depreciate unless the broader regional economy declines. | |
| ▲ | s1artibartfast 20 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | or that the cost to build them is going up. |
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| ▲ | lenerdenator 43 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The most reliable path to building a modicum of wealth has remained the same for generations: start a small business in some boring field and work your ass off for 80 hrs/wk. Hardly. My grandfather was working under union rules as a machinist. No education beyond the 8th grade and what he learned in the US Navy during WWII. He was able to afford a house in a Lower Midwestern city (one that would be considered LCOL) and five kids. I have a bachelor's degree that's paid for, a decent paying software job, and no wife/kids. Wanna guess how many homes I own in the same city? |
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| ▲ | criddell 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job. College never guaranteed anything. A college education may still be (statistically) a good investment: https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025/04/is-col... Aside from the financial arguments, the social and personal development opportunities of living and studying with your peers can be pretty great in my experience. I went to a decent school and was surrounded by a lot of very interesting and smart kids and I had some truly great professors. I was really pushed beyond what I thought I could do and my biggest regret is that I didn't take a little extra time for more courses in the humanities (specifically literature and art history). |
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| ▲ | mullingitover 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > There is a market for the gamblification of everything because there is no other widely accessible path for young people to build a future. Gambling is the closest we've come to figuring out how to directly tax hope. |
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| ▲ | dheera 6 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > We can (and should) try and regulate away this kind of gambling No, instead we should tackle the actual root of the problem, and fix the economy. If everyone can make a living, afford housing, find jobs, and find something they love to do that pays, and get medical care they need, they won't turn to these things. |
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| ▲ | Avicebron an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Well said. It's an unspoken "secret" as well that state gambling is a tax on the poor, feeding on desperation. This isn't even funding taxes though, just lining these companies and their insiders pockets. |
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| ▲ | roadside_picnic an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > no other widely accessible path for young people to build a future This is exactly right. Widespread gambling has a fundamental nihilism baked into it. If you believe hard work and frugality are the best path to success, then gambling doesn't feel like a good use of your income and energy. But if you feel like your dreams are falling out of reach despite your hard work, if it starts to look like even big investors are really just playing a game (often with loaded dice) rather than acting on fundamentals, if grift seems like a more reliable path to success then hard work and ingenuity, then all of a sudden gambling seems a lot more sensible. Even if the odds aren't in your favor, you can at least get lucky when you gamble. When the game feels rigged its easy to believe that hardwork is destined for failure, whereas even loaded dice have some probability of landing in your favor. |
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| ▲ | afavour 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job. Building wealth through real estate is no longer viable. ...and winning a life's fortune via gambling is even less viable. I agree with what you're saying about the lack of guaranteed paths to prosperity but turning to gambling is not a logical outcome stemming from it. There is no logic in gambling at all. It is purely a vice that preys on people's weaknesses. |
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| ▲ | PhilipRoman 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you're already losing and losses are capped past some point (worst case just kill yourself), high stakes gambling is quite logical. Of course in reality, gamblers are rarely driven by game-theoretical analysis. | | |
| ▲ | afavour 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think we're trying really hard to rationalize a fundamentally irrational behavior here. The vast majority of people betting on Kalshi are not thinking "well, worst case I'll just kill myself". |
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| ▲ | xg15 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The irony being that gambling is about as far from "guaranteed" or "stable" as you can get. But it does fit the ultralibertarian mindset best, I guess. The right to the pursuit of happiness, not to actually getting it. |
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| ▲ | criddell 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The best way to win at gambling is to be the house. | | |
| ▲ | mothballed an hour ago | parent [-] | | Even better, be the guy that taxes the house and winners, sells the licensing to the house (or friends of them that have privileged advantage to sell compliance services), or the guys who determine whether the house gets its zoning or construction exemptions. | | |
| ▲ | tavavex an hour ago | parent [-] | | How is that better? Taxes are a cut of the profits and they mostly are spent back on other goods and services. The owners of the gambling business take the remaining majority of the money and use it to scale themselves up, remove competition or to enrich their ranks. If you want to exist as a parasite, option #2 is the way to go. It is crazy to me that even when faced with the most irredeemable industry, one that is predicated on abusing addiction and human irrationality, one that takes and gives back nothing, the first reaction to this is to brush all of that off and go "but what about the construction permits?" The American adoration for anything 'private' knows no bounds. When our corporate overlords will be scamming, poisoning and forming quasi-dictatorships to rule over us all for profit, they'll still be cheering that at least it's not one of those pesky public governments. |
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| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They're not independent problems. Right now, someone on the East Coast is taking their lunch break; in a world without phone gambling, they would be studying business principles so they can put their name up for a manager role when it opens. But instead they're trying to pick the right sports bet that will make them rich this evening. |
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| ▲ | deaton 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Of course there are paths to success, and they are available, but we live in a tiktok world where everyone wants to be a millionaire tomorrow and not in 20 years. |
