Thomas Sowell has pointed out on several occasions that the people who start in the bottom twenty percent of income earners are far more likely to retire in the top twenty percent than to stay in the one percent. A lot of us will be in the one percent for at least one year in our lives.
It also warrents a reminder that one needs to earn slightly more than $500k in a year to be in the one percent. It's also worth pointing out that the complaints that the middle class is shrinking is always presented without including the fact that the middle class is shrinking because more people are being transferred up rather than down.
None of this should suprise anybody. Most people in the bottom twenty percent are young people.
Life is a journey from becoming less than useless, to becoming useless, to becoming marginally useful, to becoming useful, to becoming very useful, to slowly becoming less useful, to retiring, to dying.
With very few exceptions, young people are going to start their professional lives at the bottom.
When you emerge from the birth canal, you're an expensive burden. You're an investment. You are a pit sucking up money that people are working to keep feeding. For the last few decades, that's what kids are until at least their mid-teens. A century ago kids were working farms to provide their share; but, thanks to capitalism, we don't do that often anymore.
When you first enter the workforce, even if you went to college, odds are your employer is still investing in you and hoping that you'll develop into something that isn't a pain in his or her ass. Older people working with you are probably making more money because they've probably been doing it longer and proven themselves.
Then, hopefully, you prove that you can provide a valuable service for other people and you get a raise or you start looking for another job with better pay because you've proven yourself and learned something.
Eventually, you learn that life is about proving yourself constantly. It's learning to find what you can do to make yourself better so that more people will want to work with you and value you and possibly love you.
We have to understand this and stop teaching kids that they're entitled to something by virtue of simply existing. No one owes you anything. Most of us owe our older loved ones a great deal for putting up with us.
When you take a snapshot of inequality and bitch about it, with very few exceptions, it creates a technically true but actually false jumping off point because you're not dealing with individuals and you're ignoring mobility.
I don't care about inequality. I care about freedom and people having a chance. Failing doesn't mean that you didn't have a chance. Twenty year-olds shouldn't be demanding to be subsidized from fifty year-olds who have already been through all of this.