America - the land of "Get Rich Quick" ...

(Disclaimer: if you are hoping to learn something in this article, you are probably going to be disappointed. It's kind of full of useless facts)

America - the land of "Get Rich Quick" ... e)

Ah, America. The land of the American dream, billionaires, technology innovation and free bathrooms. It's the country where you can make a fortune in Silicon Valley or spend your whole life toiling away at everyone's favorite employer – Walmart (or McDonalds, depending on your preference).

Who doesn't enjoy metaphors? They help explain complex things by comparing them to something easy. So I often think about them (not in a weird or creepy way). I've come up with a grand total of two metaphors to describe America as a country. I know you might have been expecting three or four, but not today. Be happy I have two. I could have had none. And you would be doing something else right now besides reading this. Probably something more productive. Or not. Let's face it, probably not.

Metaphor number One (or numero Uno ? … for the Spanish speakers):

1) America attracts people on a principle of the Gold Rush – it's the land of promises of “Get Rich Quick”

Ok, you say, tell me how it's like the Gold Rush? Here are some of the characteristics of the Gold Rush.

It attracted people who like gold … duuh. Or, in other words, it attracted people who like to get rich quick. To any intelligent person, it was sort of obvious that your chances of striking gold there were little. And that the place would be quite dangerous: teeming with criminals, shady people/etc. So, to even undertake that journey to California to look for gold, one had to be a little nuts and unrealistically optimistic.

However, who really got rich during the Gold Rush? Hint: not the gold diggers … (whose reputation has sort of gotten worse in the last 200 years). The people that got rich were the ones offering ancillary services: maker of Lee Jeans, operators of stores/etc, real estate owners who rented their properties.

This is very similar to America of today and of Silicon Valley, in particular. It attracts a lot of people who are hoping to get rich (ie economic migrants), but in fact, they are the ones who OTHER people are getting rich OFF OF. Western Europe has figured this fact out, and that's why migration from that region became almost non-existent after 1930's. However, other regions of the world still come to US in great numbers. And a lot of them experience tremendous and unexpected hardship, both culturally and economically.

Metaphor #2:

2) American economic system has a lot of elements of a lottery

The basis of the lottery is that 1) everyone is hoping to get rich by playing it 2) the awards it gives out are very significant and random. It doesn't have any system of giving out awards to those who deserve them, those who win are simply lucky – they are in the right place at the right time.

Economic success in US is often given out on a somewhat random basis. American CEOs are given huge salaries, as if they … you guessed it – won the lottery. There is nothing significantly special about what they do – you probably can pick out a high schooler working at Best Buy who could do a better job.

Some other segments of rich people include tech company founders, movie and music stars. What's disturbing is not even the … fact that some of them are successful … and deserve it, but the margin of the divide. Silicon Valley is divided into a very small number of VERY lucky and VERY rich and the overwhelming majority of “have nothings”. And it's not that the lucky ones are so significantly smarter than the rest, it's just that they were at the right time and place and under a system that awards wealth on a “lottery” basis. This system also does not believe in sharing this success, instead, the “haves” squeeze every last dollar of profit, even if it means its employees live in vans (I am looking at you, Google).