this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
1068 points (99.1% liked)
Political Memes
5403 readers
3664 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There's a saying that humans only understand three probabilities: 0%, 50%, and 100%. So if 90% of people who are rich were born into wealth and 90% of all people are not wealthy, what does that mean?
Usually the knee-jerk response is to say that it's equally easy for rich and poor to end up wealthy, or sarcastically claim that it's supposedly impossible to become wealthy if you were poor.
Statistically, it'd mean that while 10% of rich people were self-made, they'd only represent 1% of the overall population, meaning it'd be roughly 100 times more likely for someone who wasn't born wealthy to remain poor.
These are gross oversimplifications with numbers that are not based on fact, but it's just a simple example to show that something can be possible in a system where certain people are disadvantaged and it doesn't detract from the fact that systemic issues exist.