Sarahproudandtall has a snarky (and very funny) diary up this morning about being a member of the Hated One Percent. It's not meant to be a factual statement, I know, but...well, you see, I am a member of that Hated One Percent. And I have a message for you, and for my fellow one percenters.
I don't deserve my wealth. Not only was I lucky, but I've been subsidized every step of the way. Yes, I worked very hard, and, yes, I've taken a lot of lumps along the way, but, more than anything else, I was subsidized until I became lucky.
I owe it to those who were less lucky than me to make sure thet get the subsidies they need to perhaps get as lucky as I did. Subsidy money, you see, is governmental pre-IPO funding, and like any good capitalist, I know that no more than of my A-series funding rounds will fail completely, perhaps 30% will give me a break even exit, and, on average, 20% will pay for the half that lost money and provide an income. I also know that one in a thousand will be Apple or Microsoft or Google. More than that, I know that we don't know how to find that one in a thousand, because each of them is mixture of circumstance, hard work, grit, ferocity, and, yes, pure luck.
Ignore moral debt to the country that raised me and grew me into what I am. Ignore my parents' notion that we should "pay it forward" through charity. We none of us know how to pick winners, and the money I pay for your roads and bridges and educations and childcare is a very efficient way to bet on people's success, and is the only way to reap those rare-but-critical one in a thousand winners.
I was both born into poverty -- my parents, in fact, took WIC food to feed me and my sisters while my father finished graduate school on a fellowship. (Oh, look, a subsidy!) I grew up in an academic community in the northeast, a moderately disabled child with a flair for math and programming. I learned to program when I was seven, on a computer paid for with an NSF grant. (Another subsidy.) I went to college on a scholarship deal, and spent a large chunk of my junior year as an undergraduate research participant at a national laboratory. (Yet another subsidy. Seeing a pattern here?) I matriculated and chose to attend graduate school at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, because the Teaching Assistants Association had negotiated a contract which limited class size, giving me a better chance to finish my degree. (Still another subsidy.) I spent a year of my time in grad school working with a very distinguished group of scholars in my field, paid for, in part, by research assistantships from the governments of Canada and the United States. (What a moocher I was, eh?)
After receiving my Ph.D., I held post-doctoral and research positions for about six years. (Oh, look, another subsidy!) I then spent a period of time doing defense research. (Another subsidy -- and, FWIW, the most remunerative one I ever received. I don't hear the folks talking about austerity talking about cutting the salaries of folks that do what I did then.)
But the cold war ended, and a lot of folks like me had to decide what to do. I could have stayed in the bureaucracy, because, frankly, I was good at what I did, and I was doing good work, making the country I love safer. I decided to take a chance, though, and move into private industry. I left the Washington, D.C. suburbs and moved to the suburbs in the other Washington, to work for a software development firm based here in Redmond.
And, suddenly, I was a success. A huge success. For whatever reason, I had found my true metier, writing code for a living. My Ph.D. was, if anything, a liability in getting hired, but the expertise in skeptically analyzing problems for which the government had paid a few tens of thousands of dollars generated millions and millions of tax receipts. Even more, after more than a decade at that one firm, I took a radical step and went to work for a different high tech firm where both my programming expertise and my educational background were valuable -- and now my work generates even more millions of dollars of tax revenue.
As an investment, I'm a huge win. I myself have profited handsomely from my time in industry, and I'd lie if I pretended otherwise. But the biggest profit from the long investment in the man who writes demimondian went not to me, but to the society around me -- other people became even richer. States collected taxes (lots and lots and lots of taxes). Other people got jobs and educations, and, by virtue of not being at risk, contributed their own time and labor to making our lives better.
And that's the thing which Elizabeth Warren told you and us, and it's the truth. I'm not ashamed to not be poor any more. Been there, done that, and, yes, hated it. But I was a lucky investment which payed off -- and if you aren't willing to accept the costs of the unlucky investments, then you won't reap the profits of the lucky ones. And that's what the 1% needs to remember.