Honest question, how are “heritage americans” not rich?
This is truly an honest question. I see the concept of “heritage americans” on X frequently, those who have had family in the U.S. for hundreds of years. All of them seem disgruntled by legal and illegal immigration seemingly taking their opportunities. Which is fine and well I guess. However, my question is how are these people not wealthy? An investment of $100 TOTAL in the S&P 500 in 1980 is worth ~$20K today.
Again this is an honest question as a U.S. born son of legal immigrants from a country that is pretty reviled these days (India)
Demanding to be called a heritage American is basically the conservative equivalent to they/them pronouns.
Horseshoe theory applies to wokeness too apparently
Most other countries have families that have lived there for hundreds if not thousands of years (including India). Why do you think there aren't masses of rich people in millennia-old countries like India/China? Likely because most families never had the opportunity to compound wealth with surplus income and were living day-to-day, and/or there were other societal pressures keeping social classes in check. In reality, America isn't much different and wealth inequality/social mobility have been deteriorating rapidly since the second half of the 1900s.
The social mobility in the U.S. over the last 100+ years is far different to that of a place like India where things like the caste system keep people in their place. Those other countries until recently have not had much exposure to things like U.S. stock market and are not living in the greatest economic experiment ever.
I'm not saying a farmer in the 1800's / 1900's needs to be Bill Gates but stocking away even a modicum of wealth compounded by the greatest economic machine ever should at least produce somewhat of a nest egg over generations, no?
In my comment below I go into the forces of how even a good nest egg likely wouldn’t have survived the Great Depression/inflation. Given diversification and hedging wasn’t easy and how technology changed so quickly, it wasnt possible for many people to manage their wealth in a sustainable way that would keep up. ETFs weren’t around to auto rebalance so when you’re balls deep in technology that collapses (river freight, railroad, out of date machinery) you aren’t diversified nor able to react fast enough. Standard and poors 500 had no track record and you had to read the paper to know your golden goose just got choked out by some new invention.
Skill issue.
This.
It's a lack of spending discipline, of so-called bourgeois virtue. Not enough impulse control or self-restraint, or perhaps basic financial education, in order to save prudently and invest for the next generation.
Even those families that momentarily came into wealth would see it squandered by their progeny, who, having been raised in excess, acquired a tendency towards licentiousness and indulgence. This still holds true today. Except, due to capitalist dynamics, the wealthy have become absurdly so; it is meaningfully harder to squander your way through a $50 million dollar inheritance.
It ended with the boomer generation. They don’t want to pass down wealth to their families.
If your dad left and your mom smokes crack, it doesn't matter if you were born in Monaco or Luxembourg. You're life is going to suck. That explains about 60% of it.
British left India in 1948 when only ~40% of households in GB had indoor plumbing but I agree! India has a lot of problems and many lack basic standards. I don't expect "you people" to engage in good faith arguments without crying though
1st gen here. Maybe a hot take - “heritage Americans” who are still broke are losers. Straight up the totality of your family’s generational lineage has lost the game.
Post-USSR, my family lost everything. The state bank was dissolved and entire savings wiped. My parents moved to the US for a fresh start and ended up in a rural town with nothing and now will retire comfortably with $Ms in savings + pension. Funny to see when I go back and visit, the same types of hillbillies who held up their nose to us when we were younger and poorer now think we’re snooty just because we collectively worked harder over the last 20 years and can enjoy life.
Not to say there weren’t good people in that area who I still am lifelong friends with, but a large majority of these types actively look down upon immigrants.
No one from the USSR, a country that lost so hard it no longer exists, has any room to call any American a loser. Show some gratitude for the people who let gave you refuge from your trash heap of a country, igor.
How did you so entirely miss the point of his comment
i don’t understand how people have so much arrogance based on their skin colour, nationality etc.
it’s pure luck where you were born.
not saying anything about immigration that’s a completely different topic but more of that this comment says “A born American is naturally and always superior to a (Russian in this case but i’m sure he means any country) regardless of anything about their skills, character, achievements etc”
Cletus don’t forget to pick your white sheet up, it’s dry cleaning day
You forget that a lot of retirement pots were tied up in the company's own shares, many of which were completely wiped out around 2008
my families been here since the 1700s, sum of it is my mom is worth low single digit millions owning her home outright and a rental, plus a solid IRA, which she inherited from her parents who ran a tiny company
so I guess by reasonable standard my family is still "rich" but not in a way WSO is going to be impressed by
I think the real answer is getting rich has not been as all-important as it is in the 2020s, for most of American history. Think of the ethos of the 60s-70s - many people were excited about expressing themselves and living simply.
There has also been a ton of economic disruption every few decades. my grandfather who made the money that exists today started from 0 in a new state/region after his family business did poorly & didn't have room for him to join post-college
"heritage Americans" are far more concentrated in the South, Midwest, and Middle America, which has had far lower wealth accumulation than the coasts due to disconnection from centers of capital. If you look at heritage Americans from the Northeast or California, they are very successful (or at least far more successful than their hinterland counterparts). Those same coastal areas have been immigration hubs for obvious reasons which increases competition for new "heritage Americans" moving in.
Not entirely dissimilar from India where Gujaratis are much more successful than other groups due to proximity to trade and capital. You're just looking at topline national growth which has never been distributed evenly throughout any country. People from the Vendee or Highlands are similarly less wealthy than their heritage countrymen from centers of industry and capital despite living in the country for centuries.
Regardless, countries aren't brain trusts where the smartest, wealthiest, or most powerful are entitled to its prosperity, like how Britain extracting wealth from India wasn't justified just because they were more powerful and competent than the locals.
like how Britain extracting wealth from India wasn't justified just because they were more powerful and competent than the locals.
boo hoo hoo. seems like you forgot a little concept called might makes right bud.
Families build wealth and then it gets divided between children, taken by tax authorities, or privileged children just spend it.
Heritage American here
may be old news to people here, but would recommend a scroll thru wtfhappenedin1971(dot)com as it does a good job of illustrating the phenomenon OP is asking about.
Not sure there's one answer to the question but I would suggest the following developments as being key to hollowing out the economic capability of the average 'Heritage American':
1. Hart-Celler Act of 1965 opening the floodgates on immigration from non-european nations, greatly undercutting the bargaining power of the American worker
2. US Congress passes the Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China Act (PNTR) in 2000, leading China to join the WTO in 2001. This incentivized a lethal amount of US mfg. activity to be outsourced to China. The wealth of a nation is in its productive capacity, and we've largely lost ours.
3. We've had something like 3-5 major bank bailouts since the 80s, the large ones being in the Savings & Loan crisis, GFC, and during COVID. People lost jobs, careers, savings decimated, resulting inflation...
Tried to be concrete above, but it generally feels as if the US is no longer a nation but rather an Economic Zone. The resume of the guy from Kentucky who can trace his lineage back to the revolution lands in the same stack as OP's, or that of anyone else with a LinkedIn profile who's willing to do the job for half.
I mean this thread doesn’t even make sense, “being rich” is always relative. Relative to the rest of the globe, the typical American IS much richer, as they benefitted from the economic miracle you cite. Within America, obviously the entire population can’t be rich relative to themselves, as being rich in America precisely means you’re doing better than everyone else in America. And indeed, having longstanding family ties to early US would clearly correlate with being in that top 1%.
Exactly. The comparison here shouldn't be between a white guy from Arkansas and an 2nd gen Indian running a sleeve at Citadel, it's between that white American guy and a rural family in India or frankly anywhere else. With few exceptions the Arkansan is wealthier than people from similar regions of other countries.
Wealth is destroyed within 2-3 generations. I know people who have great grandparents that were oil wildcatters with their own drilling companies that are probably not in the top 10% by net worth at this point.
Because they are a bunch of mouth breather idiots that think they are superior because of where/when they were born > what they have achieved.
You can ignore anyone that talks about anything other than what THEY have done.
There are 4/5 big events that destroyed heritage American wealth within the past 140 years and didnt affect new Americans which is why you have a lot of rich people now that are 1-3 generations away from when their parents arrived dirt poor (when 3 of these big events started). Some to all of these can be argued were made specifically to destroy heritage American wealth in one way or another and heavily benefited people that had no skills and could just do simple work and start a generational trend towards education -> specialized labor by using the explosive industrial growth and strong education in America
1: The Great Depression wiped out a lot of heritage wealth. Investments turned to dust and if you held cash in banks they were also looted.
2: The civil war destroyed much of any established wealth in the south. (Related to this and how it affected the north would be number 5: the great migration of southern freed slaves into northern cities. This led to the ultra wealthy neighborhoods moving out in the new burbs and their old property values collapsing in the city. City values didn’t recover everywhere and only really bounced back in NYC/boston/Chicago and that took 30-50 years and some areas in those cities still haven’t)
3: income/estate tax. Back in the day income was earned and there wasn’t the same tax loopholes for the wealthy. When the top tax bracket had a 94% income tax within 20 years of the Great Depression there was no way to build the immense wealth we see done now. the huge gilded age mansions were unsustainable as property tax on the value + unreasonable income taxes made it impossible to keep them afloat. Most were demolished in this time.
4: inflation: it’s 1970, your family survived losing all your investments (can’t trust them anymore!), your families bank didn’t default in the Great Depression, you’re still making money off your (little relative to the new megacorps) family company you own, your family broke up their estate and live in a normal home now because you can’t afford the property tax on your gilded age mansion. But you’re still ‘elite’ and there are, more than ever, a huge amount of status symbols and technology to buy so you continue to spend like you were rich and your kids do and their kids do while your heritage wealth is inflated away in 30 years.
Also ETFs weren’t always a thing so people that invested +100 years ago were investing in individual companies that likely went bankrupt over time, or blew out like railroads.
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