Would you rather be rich in a third world country or poor in America assuming you can't move?

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I’ll play Devil’s Advocate here. The question stated you couldn’t move. It didn’t say you had to stay poor. If I couldn’t take advantage of American income mobility then the question is just as much of a no-brainer as everyone else says.

Notice the question said ‘poor’, not ‘homeless’. If I’m poor, then at least I have my person, a place to live, and the ability to make and execute a plan. I’ve been poor before. It sucked, so I worked hard until it didn’t suck so much

If I can take advantage of American economic mobility, then that means realistically speaking, it’s a choice between being rich in a third-world country and being middle class in America. And if I can’t, then am I really living in America?

And so that’s actually a choice I’ve seen people make. Well-off families send their kids off to America to go to school all the time and in general, once here, those kids don’t want to move back home.

If I had to put a finger on why, I would have to say it’s rigid, traditional culture. Moving to the US feels like a breath of fresh air from all that oppressiveness, even though they can no longer take advantage of family wealth, even though they will just be normal middle class Americans their whole lives. That tradeoff appears to be worth it, even if the tradeoff between being rich there and poor here isn’t. .

As an aside, I get a little eye-rolly whenever people in America with a dead horse they want to beat start talking about the poor. It seems like whenever they hear this phrase they get this picture in their mind of someone who has been rendered totally and completely helpless by “the system.” The poster child for frustrated liberalism. And when I point out that there are different gradations to being poor, that being poor in America is not about a dollar figure in your bank account, they finger me for an evil conservative and tell me I’m not talking about the “real poor.”

So let me say that the only thing truly required of anyone who wants to take advantage of America’s limited economic mobility is to make and follow through on a plan, and to get yourself back up and do it again, if and when that plan fails. You’d be absolutely amazed at the number of people here who can’t do that. I’ve seen many many people in life who were hard up for awhile and then pulled themselves out of it. I’ve also seen many people who just couldn’t do it no matter what.

This fact, that you can pull yourself out of poverty by your own bootstraps, should be a no-brainer, but apparently it clashes hard with people’s political beliefs. Even when they’re doing it, or they’ve done it. No they were lucky, or privileged or whatever.