Quote:
Originally Posted by TheNoodleMan
You realize this is just a huge bogus crutch right?
I know that living in a dirt poor part of the world means you can scrape by doing what you are doing but there is not a significant socioeconomic barrier to improving at poker.
The stuff you linked is about how people are constrained by where they are born, due to education and opportunity. You were educated in a modern country and choose to play poker, which is a meritocracy. The only thing holding you back is you.
I chose the life I live; I like it perhaps overmuch, so I have no real ambitions to change it. My standard of living is about what you would get on $60k a year in the USA. I built my own apartment from my poker winnings, send my kids to private school from my poker winnings, eat, drink and smoke what I like, paid for from my poker winnings.
My progress in poker is glacial, but there is progress, and in time, for my own satisfaction, I will establish myself at a level where I am more financially comfortable.
I don't draw the same lessons as you from the graph: what was most interesting was that the average income of the top 5% of Indians is lower than the average income of the bottom 5% of Americans. The effects of globalisation mean that poor countries are now legally and politically structuring themselves in similar fashions to rich countries. The internet has globalised knowledge.
I see in this graph the huge restructuring of income which is happening globally as the poor increase their incomes and the rich stagnate. The West has lost its monopoly on capitalist structures and education that gave it such an enormous advantage and produced widespread wealth for its citizens. Even if the US tried to end its participation in free trade, it could not stop the rise of the poor countries, and indeed its wealth would diminish absolutely not just relatively.
The poor countries now have the value added abilities that the West used to feel were their protection. Low skilled jobs could be safely offshored because the high skilled jobs would remain, and generate more than enough income to provide the social safety nets for globalisation's losers. But now the poor countries are developing the skills to outcompete the west in the very areas which construe their competitive advantage.
If the graph does not show the world changing, it shows the scale of the change that the world is facing now that the poor are no longer "constrained by where they are born, due to education and opportunity".
OTOH I have to admit that your criticism has reenergised my desire to do what I do better - if this translates into more study and better results I will owe you one!
And you are still v welcome to come and visit me in Peru. I think the way we post often misrepresents our true personalities: Lacky thinks we'ld get on well, and he knows both of us. GL with what you do