An event that will always stay with me, some years ago I a job opened up where I would have some sway in recommending candidates. I had a uni friend who would fit the role well. A great bloke, smart and hard working. He came from a very blue collar, low income background. His job was pretty middle of the road stuff.
This job would have been lateral in responsibility but in a better industry giving about 2+ times salary. I mentioned this role and said I would get him a chat with the hiring manager. They seemed interested. I said you can double your salary. At this point they got cold feet and said 'it sounds too important for me'. I told them I knew the job, that it would suit them and I wouldn't burn my own credibility if I want confident they would succeed. But they money spooked them.
And while this was a sample of one it really opened my eyes to sense of entitlement that comes with growing up in a wealthy vs poor enviroment. And simply the expectations you approach life with, having a overriding effect on natural ability.
There are so many variable in play for this its not a one issue answer but I suspect this one is more important than we typically give it credit for. An expectation on oneself of where we should end up based on how we grow up.
I once had a conversation with a very, very experienced developer who ran a local meetup and was discussing salary options at a new job. He balked when I told them what I asked for, and replied:
"Just because you grew up as poor as me doesn't mean you should fear wealth. If it makes you feel that guilty take the shit and donate it to charity."
And its really true.
My first engineering job I made almost 3x what my mother ever made in a year over her entire life's highest salary.
I was a college dropout that was enthusiastic and knew enough to be functional.
It really is a strange, new thing to come from nothing and all of a sudden be able to go out to eat at an Applebee's without worrying about your finances for a month.
Edit: The first thing I did after collecting my first 'engineering paycheck' was go out to Applebees and get an appetizer, a drink, AND an entree, and then proceed to not worry about it.
My father was a high school director. It was a 900-student school for lowerclass jobs, with... well, many lowerclass situations with students who hadn't necessarily ever touched a phone, in the 80s. Part of the job was managing financial resources and deciding of his own salary. He decided to lower it, because he didn't feel like he needed that much. And he decided to apply it retroactively upon two years. He gave money back to his school. I wonder whether I'm plain selfish for thinking he would have had better credit taking the money (even to give it to charities) than returning money to a public institution. But I find the gesture admirable.
> It really is a strange, new thing to come from nothing and all of a sudden be able to go out to eat at an Applebee's without worrying about your finances for a month.
This. I come from a background where ordering pizza was a special event. We weren't poor poor, but we had to be careful.
I'm getting more used to eating out and getting takeout, but I still read the menu right-to-left (prices first) even though 99% of the time it really doesn't matter.
Maybe someday I'll stop feeling guilty for not ordering the cheapest thing on the menu. Took me 2 years to get used to appetizers.
It's a weird feeling to walk out of a store with a bag full of stuff and realize you have no idea how much any of it cost. Whenever that happens I think of that minor scandal when the nation found out the Clintons(?) didn't know the price of a gallon of milk.
I see not having to know prices as one of the best perks of being decently well off. I've had to count every penny when I was younger, and look for cheaper alternatives, and defer purchases, and it made money one of the big stressful things in my life.
Eventually arning enough that I could stop thinking about it other than checking my balance now and again was far more liberating than any of the subsequent improvements in my finances.
But I would like to add to it. Not only is it emotionally liberating to be better off, but it actually frees you up practically as well. Like you said: count pennies, look for cheap alternatives, defer purchases. If I wanted to buy something when I was younger, I would save money for a year, then spend hours/days/weeks comparing prices, waiting for deals, etc. This lingered deep in me, and I had a hard time shaking it as an adult. It's only recently that I can decide to buy something, have a quick look at what's good and where it's cheapest, and then buy it.
I never want to go the other direction and purely equate time with money, but to some extent any of the meaningless time I spent worrying about money I now can make money, and when I don't feel like it, I can have time off, without worrying.
Sorry for the rant, but what I really wanted to get to is: Having money means having time and energy to learn more ~= making more money.
I remember a quote about the best part of wealth being that you never feel like you need to cheat another person.
I can't google the source of it (you get some really weird results about rich men cheating, or being cheated on) but it always stuck with me as something to be grateful for every day.
Obviously, some rich people however, never got the memo.
Seriously. Probably the biggest mentality shift I had was when I stopped looking at receipts/prices. At this point, the only prices I ever pay attention to are travel ones (hotels/airfare).
Speaking of ordering a pizza, I remember visiting a very cheap pizza place in my home town. It was during a year I earned around $200k, and the pizza over there was around $4 (whole pizza, not just a piece).
While I was waiting in line, an elderly couple entered. It looked like it was a big event for them - average earnings in Poland are around $10k/yr, for them it was probably a half of that.
They looked at the prices, I think they asked about something cheaper, or sth.. I don't remember the details, but I remember them leaving because it seemed it was too expensive for them.
If I had more wit, I would just buy them dinner, and make up some kind of a story of me celebrating or sth, so it wouldn't look like a charity. I didn't, because I seriously didn't know how to react...
Some other time, I remember getting into an argument with a bum a Warsaw city center. Bums in Warsaw are much cleaner than the ones in SF or in States in general. I don't know why...
Anyway, I had a good day, so I told him I will buy him a warm sandwich. He followed me to the shop, and I told him to pick the biggest and best one he wants (biggest one being $5 vs. $2 smallest, again, pocket change in US).
The guy was literally unable to make any kind of a choice. The lady at the counter asked him for a kind of meat, and he couldn't choose which one he wanted. My bet was that he was unused to a situation of abundance of anything...
Anyway, he finally managed to make the choice, with my help. I remember how grateful he was. He ended by shaking my hand, and saying something about having a dark past, being a part of SB (kind of like polish KGB) and doing a ton of bad things to people before 1989...
That's some of my recent memories. I still remember reading menus from right to left, and I try to buy people food whenever I can, and whenever it won't make things awkward...
This is a throw away account. I'm writing this because I'm the embodiment of poor and the embodiment of lack of social mobility.
As a child of divorce, I lived in affluent suburbia. However, everything was devoted to keeping the house and to food. There was next to nothing for anything else. I had three jobs going through high school. When I was in school I was told that I couldn't qualify for financial aid because of how much money my father made. His life was dedicated to revenge on my mother and he spent HUGE swaths of money to avoid paying $200/month in child support. Getting money from him for tuition or getting him to sign on the student loan forms was an impossibility. Ironically, I had none of the advantages of being poor.
Graduating average was going to be 96%. They kicked me out at the last minute almost. Truancy. I had the flu for a couple of days. Doctor's note required. The father trying to make my mother's life a living hell by yelling everyday at school administrators did not help either. Nothing in my life was stranger than having a school administrator that I had never previously interacted with tell me that they want to kick me out of the school simply to make life easier for themselves.
Finding employment in 'my field' had not been easy. Usually I worked at mind numbing non-WDS Windows 7 deployments for a one or two month stint. I have not been able to ever get work 'in my field' that paid over $20,000 USD per year. I've had employment where I was programming at minimum wage and the clients were billed $3000 USD per day for my work. Respectfully negotiating was of course fruitless in this situation. I've been in this sort of situation several times. The worst people seem to find me and take advantage. Usually, pay to billing factors are between 5-10.
I started to not want to interact with employers in person. I started making my living making making Android Apps for clients on RFQ sites until 2014. I was getting paid from $50 to $400 per app or app framework. One client took one project and now has over 100 million users across a dozen similar apps. I was hoping I could start to charge more but that never seemed to happen. The best thing that happened was that I had people halfway around the world constantly hounding me to work at what was essentially still minimum wage.
I am lucky because I took an early interest in Bitcoin. I'm willingly hiding in the lowest caste of society. I'm trying to work on myself. I'd like to be treated like a human being one day by an employer, when I am ready.
I'm not writing this to ask for help. I'm writing this to say that the stigma of being at the bottom is very very real. And while it, at least for me, has predominatly been an internal battle of asserting self-worth, there are definitely people who saw the precarious situation that I was in and use it for their advantage. Or to revel in being cruel.
I mean this respectfully, but have you tried to do some introspection?
If you actually have the skills you claim, there is huge money to be made in hiring you as a programmer making $40k/year. Your background really should not be such a determining factor: I have clients who have literally never met me and have only the vaguest idea of who I am. It's all about making compelling work and demanding compensation for it.
If you think this is impossible, I would happily be that guy and pay you $40/hr (which is under market but a hell of a lot more than $20k a year) to work on client projects.
Speaking as a relatively new parent, what your father did is unfathomable to me.
It sounds like you got great skills, but need to be connected to someone who just doesn't take advantage of them. Were you working on Kerbal Space Program? Those devs surely got a raw deal too. Sadly the world is full of people caring only for themselves. But there are exceptions, and hopefully it'll be your turn to come across some of them soon.
I was going to say, can you do your own project? But it can be very hard to get started with that, finding the right idea etc. (At least it is for me.)
At any rate, essentially, just wanted to wish you all the best for the future.
Yes, I've a couple projects. A couple are more popular than others. My own stuff has about two million total users. But for about the last four months, I've been working exclusively on creating some (combinatorial) design theory algorithms.
2 million users, that's fantastic work - and the algo stuff sounds like a page turner in the making as well. Keep at it, and please don't ever discount your own worth.
(Not that I'm massively successful myself or anything. In fact, I'm currently unemployed and seeking .net roles, after redundancy; facing difficulties with this as I have only just under 1y of .net xp even as I've done development for 20. Refreshing / learning new skills on SOLID, DDD, CQRS, EventSourcing, etc, and trying to keep chin up. I have faith and refuse to go back to my old tools that are just about dead anyway, even though there's the odd contract coming up. Love C# and .net.)
>And while this was a sample of one it really opened my eyes to sense of entitlement that comes with growing up in a wealthy vs poor enviroment.
In the UK, the primary selling points of the Public School system (i.e. private schools priced far out of the reach of most of the population) are three things - social confidence, entitlement and a sense of superiority, and networking.
Conversely, the primary products of the state educational system are low confidence, low expectations, and exclusion from social capital.
It's a perfectly rigid and self-sustaining caste system. Of course a few individuals break out of it, but the social and economic effect is deadening.
Although wealth and opportunity aren't fairly distributed, there's a more subtly destructive effect on the rich. I've known people who grew up with huge privilege, and some of them have been very successful, because all that education and opportunity allowed them to explore and develop their talents.
But I've known others who have been crushed by their backgrounds. They can appear successful outwardly, but in fact they've never developed an independent sense of themselves outside of their families and their wealth.
This usually happens in families that are externally wealthy but emotionally austere or even neglectful. It's a particularly toxic combination socially because these people can end up having wealth, influence, and power, but their emotions and humanity are stunted and crippled.
Wealth inequalities can cover up these deeper issues of neglect and sometimes outright abuse. And if these people become politically influential, they tend to repeat their abuse on a much wider and more destructive scale.
There's also a lot of complicated signaling that says I Am Elite Like You. Hard to pick up on or transmit out if you're not in on it, and I don't think people in it are doing it consciously.
I'm from a region of the UK that when people, especially abroad, hear me speak they ask why I don't sound as expected. They have been to where I am from or met other people from there and think I sound "posh". I'm not posh at all but grew up in the middle of nowhere and that's just the accent people there have. Posh is my friend Graham who pronounces his name as "grah-am". Graham's annual school fees where half the annual wage of the shop manager where I worked as a student.
> In the UK, the primary selling points of the Public School system ... are social confidence, entitlement and a sense of superiority, and networking.
> It's a perfectly rigid and self-sustaining caste system.
The problem with your statement is that all 3 qualities you have listed could actually be acquired at the cost of $0, either by the parents raising their children differently or by the child itself if it desires so.
Therefore I can't agree that it is anything resembling a caste system. (in such systems there'd be use of force for anyone who steps out of line)
The only way that I see how you could argue that these examples prove that it's a caste system is if you denied that there is free will. Yes, if there's no free will then we only react predictably to the environment like mindless machines so being unable to put your children into private schools will cause them to be poor if they don't have some amazing genetical quality that allows them to transcend the competition.
I strongly oppose this line of thinking. Why? Because it leads to Nihilism and a sense that everything (including your own life) is worthless. It would also allow you to do whatever you want without following any moral code if you take this philosophy to its logical extreme.
Edit: What I mean by that is that it's not like parents do not have choices, no matter how poor. They can teach their kids moral values and discipline, they can encourage them to do something useful with their lives. And the child also can do something about its situation once it gets older.
The economist Thomas Sowell made the very strong argument in one of his books that it is actually culture (= set of all social norms and rules) that determines success of a group. For example some Asian cultures or Jews have always been highly successful, no matter where they immigrated to and no matter how much they were persecuted. In case of the Jews they've faced unequal treatment and persecution for thousands of years.
So what makes them able to overcome all odds? They raise their children with certain values (I doubt its the religious values) that make them (on average) outcompete the children of all others.
So it doesn't matter that much if I'm poor, if I'm rich or what skin color I happen to be born with. If I'm white and from the upper class and decide to use the N word in every other sentence, dress like a Gangsta Rapper with pants down to my knees and have no discipline or work ethic then I'm likely going to fail hard in life. If I'm black and decide to learn how to speak eloquently and dress well then I might become the US president.
Culture is learned behavior that is transmitted from one person to another. If your parents don't know elite cultural norms and your schoolmates don't know elite cultural norms, then how exactly is a child supposed to learn elite accents and elite cultural norms?
There is a staggering number of parents who are struggling to keep their children fed and in a moderately stable home life, and a staggering number of kids who go to school hungry nonetheless. More than any other first-world nation, the US tolerates a high rate of poverty and economic inequality, which is what drives our average standardized test performance down (for example). "Half the children need to starve to motivate the others" is not only an obscene moral argument, it drags everybody down.
> Culture is learned behaviour that is transmitted from one person to another.
Essentially yes, though I don't mean to say that some religion or some culture in the sense of history, music, food and arts is lesser than others. All I'm saying is that some cultures strongly reinforce certain qualities that help children being successful. I'm not a Jew or an Asian, but I do try to learn what is useful about these cultures so I can apply it myself.
> If your parents don't know elite cultural norms and your schoolmates don't know elite cultural norms, then how exactly is a child supposed to learn elite accents and elite cultural norms?
I did exactly that which you seem to believe is impossible or very hard. I'm from a immigrant family that started with nothing in a western EU country and I became part of the top 1%.
What I can tell you about my experience is that I did not know the elite accents but some universal qualities like strong discipline (I never did any kind of drug), dedication to work hard and the wish to compete (I'm not the kind of guy that uses his elbows to get in front) were reinforced by my parents. I also tried (not always successful) to keep away from people who act destructive or totally lack focus in life.
Now about the part with the struggling parents and hungry children:
First of all I believe it is an extreme exaggeration to say that half the children need to starve, I actually believe that no child needs to starve in the US or go to school hungry.
All kinds of welfare institutions are in place that would prevent that from happening. But we still both know that it does happen, even though everyone gets the necessary resources from the government to prevent that from happening. (at least here in the EU)
I'm willing to bet that in most cases it is caused by bad decisions of the parents. Decisions like abusing alcohol, drugs or wasting money. (gambling, buying products they can't afford)
The question is if it is even possible to prevent this from happening, even if you expand the welfare state. I doubt it. I believe this issue will always exist as there'll always be people that make lots of very bad decisions because they have the freedom to do so. (I assume you don't want to take everyones freedom in the process of achieving equal outcomes)
On the other hand the welfare state incentivises those who are dependant to stay dependant (a job would have to be really well paid to offset the tax punishment and very safe as well because if they are fired early they will often disqualify for welfare payments for a few months - could be fatal for many) and this situation also wears these people mentally down and causes divorces, which leads to a further breakdown of society as a whole. (see divorce rate today - or see birth rates in the EU which is in the process of going full Socialist)
And then there are tons of regulations that make it very expensive to hire someone for businesses (minimum wage, bureaucratic red tape) which further worsens the situation for poor people. A hundred years ago anyone with two arms and two legs could find a job in the US, even if it was only day - to - day. We certainly do not want that everyone stays in low pay jobs, but starting doing _something_ would change the life of most persons who are dependant on welfare today. Chances are they'd learn new skills and become more valuable as an employee over time and it would on top of that improve their sense of being in control of their own life.
But the way it is now you can't ever find a job if you have no skills whatsoever. How could a business pay an Afghan guy who barely speaks English the government mandated $15 minimum wage without going broke? The business wont and the Afghan guy will stay dependant and will have to live in a depressing situation.
If you are interested I can recommend the Milton Friedman series "Free to Choose" (from the 1980s), in specific Part 5 which is all about the welfare state:
I was just getting ready to make a reply along the lines of who cares what outcomes for rich kids are as long as there is opportunity for non rich kids. That is to say, who cares if little Richie Ritch will succeed 100% of the time because of his wealth, as long as your average poor can succeed provided they put in the work (i.e., isn't denied opportunity).
Your comment took a way different direction than I was expecting and genuinely made me reflect.
You see, I grew up extremely poor (yes, those "hoods" you hear about), and figure it's possible to make it out. But, I do do what you mentioned above A LOT. To the point that some times I feel guilty expensing my cell phone even though it's a perk.
I grew up privileged -- and in most decades, fairly rich. But I definately feel guilty about expensing things. I think that's just because my personality is pretty diffident.
Though, as I started earning money myself and not living off my family, I became more open to enjoying the perks that are offered me.
There may be some interplay with Impostor Syndrome, but IMO what is being discussed here is a different thing, for which there may be a more specific name... but if so I'm unaware of it.
Impostor syndrome is pretty much universal (insomuch as it crosses class/economy boundaries) whereas what has been mentioned here is a sort of anti-entitlement very specific to people who grew up poor. People in this situation are often afraid to ask for what they are worth (to the point where they will sabotage their careers to some degree as noted in Gustomaximus post), are generally afraid of authority even when there is no reason to be or the authority isn't actually an authority over them, etc.
I've definitely seen and experienced this phenomenon myself speaking as someone who grew up fairly poor -- single-mom American poor (which, as all things are relative, is quite different than seriously-might-starve poor... at least for now).
It sounds a little like learned helplessness ... having spent some time in the UK I have noticed this unquestioning deference to "ones betters" and I wonder how it comes about. How is this trait acquired?
I got it from my father, who rose from poor to wealthy through education. He taught me that education was all that mattered. When I achieved a prestigious Silicon Valley position after dropping out of college, I considered myself a fake who would be discovered at any moment for a long time. All my colleagues had compsci degrees. Thing is, I eventually discovered that I could hold my own. What my father taught me is only one way to achieve success, as I later realized. But that he taught it as dogma crippled me for a long time.
It is acquired socially. The UK has a formalised class system dating back to the "divine right of kings". The "ruling elite" are rather literal as the membership of the upper house (House of Lords) is limited to hereditary peerage.
92 out of 813 seats are hereditary peers, the remainder are life peers [Edit: forgot the Bishops] appointed (technically) by the monarch on the advice of the government.
There's really no such thing as a class 'system', let alone anything one could point to as being 'formal'. There is a bunch of in/out group signalling with fairly extreme geographic variations. Mobility across social boundaries can be achieved by understanding and adapting to the signalling although crucially (and getting back on topic) this requires the belief that you are entitled to do so.
I'm down on the notion of class in general personally. I think it's at best an incredibly lazy intellectual model of complex social phenomena. Basically I think there's no such thing [0], but I do very much enjoy listening to the things people say while they're explaining why I'm wrong about this.
[0] Problematic for this theory is that people certainly believe there is and this has operational effects.
I have seen this before. Some people will only take a job if they KNOW how to do the job. Others will take a job, and are confident they can learn it along the way.
It might have more to do with that confidence than being poor.
One distinction that I like to make is that in my own life, I've definitely been poor, but I've never been in poverty. I've been a student and I've been unemployed almost without money to even get food occasionally, but I've always been in a position where I could ask my (middle-class) mother for a bit of cash to tide me over (or even move back 'home' for a while.
I have never had to ask, but that option/safety net has always been there. That, to me, is the difference between merely being poor (a transient state) and living in poverty (no simple escape route).
Hell, even simply knowing that you can escape poverty is an advantage that some people don't have.
I grew up poor, and after my first bout of college, I only had $400 to my name, nowhere to go, no job, and 28 days until rent was due. I spent that month freezing in an empty apartment eating potatoes with soy sauce on them. And then may landlord wants to play "this is a stupid college kid" and starts claiming that I must keep paying rent until I can find a new lessee (which I didn't.) Nevermind that I always payed my rent 3 months in advance.
These kinds of experiences really color your perspective on wealth. There's no reason for some well-off, undereducated, underworked adult to literally threaten the survival of another person simply because they're too lazy to do their own job for a business they owned.
I remember this lifestyle pretty well, for me it was rice with various homemade sauces, a big bag of rice was $5 and that could last me a couple of weeks if it was all I ate.
One benefit is that I was an overweight child, being too poor to eat properly brought me to a "perfect" BMI for my age.
Random trivia, the real person that song was written about, is the wife of Valve Economist and recent "star" of the debate around Greek economic issues with the EU, Yanis Varoufakis.
This is particular true if you have a mortgage and children to feed. For the sake of keeping the house and bringing food to the table, the majority of people will gladly accept less salary for greater job security.
I mean it worked for me. I took some really risky decisions that could easily result in me being homeless, etc. Most of them paid out so far. I guess it's up to your priorities - I would rather fail hard than settle for being where I am right now in the long term - taking risks is the only option.
This article is terrible. It makes a shitty and misleading graph, and generates a variety of nonsensical judgements from it.
The graph used makes it really hard to see what the actual distributions of overall income are. If you make, say, a bar graph of the income distributions, you'll see that poor college grads do much better than rich high school dropouts. I made such a graph here:
I also estimated the average incomes of both groups based on the given statistics, and found an average income of $78k for the poor college grads and $60k for the rich high school dropouts.
The main piece of evidence that this blog post uses to support its thesis is: "Specifically, rich high school dropouts remain in the top about as much as poor college grads stay stuck in the bottom — 14 versus 16 percent, respectively. Not only that, but these low-income strivers are just as likely to end up in the bottom as these wealthy ne'er-do-wells. Some meritocracy."
The first of these statistics is not clearly related to meritocracy. If you want high income mobility, you want both these numbers to be low. The sentence is phrased as if it's bad that the numbers are similar; that doesn't make sense.
The second of these statistics is correctly interpreted, but seems cherry-picked: I could just as easily point out that 41% of poor college grads end up in the top 40% of income, while only 19% of rich high school dropouts do. To prevent such cherry-picking, we should probably use the Schelling point summary statistics like mean income or median income, both of which indicate that the poor college grads are doing significantly better.
As far as I can tell, the original paper didn't do anything wrong, this "reporter" just decided to make up some bullshit conclusions from the statistics. This is even worse than most reporting--the mistake isn't something you have to read the original source to find, the mistake is right there in the graph that Facebook is suggesting as the image preview. Alas!
From the graphs provided, comparing them makes no sense. Each should be taken own its own; i.e. At the start of college, 100% of the poor kids where in the lowest income percentile. At age 40, only 16% remain. Whereas, for the high school dropouts, only 14% remained in their income percentile (the highest) at age 40.
I think that describes a meritocracy very well. The opportunity is there - you have to work at it.
Even with your analysis, the numbers look pretty bad. I get it if you're being critical of the journalism. But, if you're trying to suggest that rich and poor have equal (or even relatively equal) opportunity, you'll have to present different evidence.
> Specifically, rich high school dropouts remain in the top about as much as poor college grads stay stuck in the bottom — 14 versus 16 percent, respectively.
They're saying social mobility (up or down) is attainable for 85% of each group. And graduating college is not really the same as making all the right choices...
The linked PDF's conclusions and figures gives a bit more context; the numbers are not 85%. From the PDF, rich means the top 20th percentile of income, whereas poor is the bottom 20th percentile.
For the dropouts, you only have a 46% chance of mobility if you're poor. For the college graduates, only 63% of the rich will be downward bound.
Another interesting bit: a poor dropout is more likely to remain poor as a rich dropout has to remain in the top three quintiles of income. They also have only a one percent chance of bucking the trends and becoming rich.
A rich college graduate has almost 2x the chance of remaining rich as a poor graduate has of getting rich.
Also, the country heatmap of percentages of people who achieve mobility is very telling as well.
In all, college appears to be a good equalizer for mobility; but given that most people want to be upwardly mobile, you probably don't want to be poor to begin with. Also, don't be born out of wedlock or black. If you really want the best chance of living the "American Dream", your best chance is to be born to white, rich, continuously married parents, and go to college.
> A rich college graduate has almost 2x the chance of remaining rich as a poor graduate has of getting rich.
This is all super fuzzy and almost impossible to interpret. It sounds to me like people are becoming rich at some rate, and staying rich at a higher rate. Seems like it would lead to everyone being rich, in the end (though these are quintile numbers, so it's a relative ranking, so I assume some other outcomes are available that make things balance).
Yeah, I think the author is drawing the wrong conclusions by comparing two variables. It looks like, from the graph, there's some staying power within the top 20%, but that still leaves a great amount of mobility for college graduates.
>graduating college is not really the same as making all the right choices...
Perhaps, but completing college is generally considered to be a better choice than is dropping out of high school. And it is generally associated with better decision-making and better outcomes.
Whether it should be or whether it's changing may be subject to debate, but we have generally rewarded that choice in the past, all things being equal.
But one of the big ways in which English-speaking countries are dropping the ball on equality is by making everything depend on university degrees.
We lose the opportunity for people to rise by becoming good plumbers (and then becoming owners of growing plumbing related buisinesses). Instead we try to fake equality by getting more and more students into soft degrees where the graduates still end up working at McDonalds.
The 1% write the rules, so whilst its illegal to ethnically cleanse its not illegal to financially cleanse people. Divide and conquer its starts with education and continues on throughout life.
This is presented as if this opinion journalist found a causative relationship when he's done no such thing. He's just looking at correlations and then shoehorning in his favorite explanations (glass floors, glass ceilings, diploma mills).
I skimmed it, but I didn't see much of a point except that he seems to be implying that poor people are more likely to be less intelligent (or rich people are more likely to be more intelligent).
So, let's say his analysis is correct. What then? Does it mean that we should, as a society, test for intelligence early in life and subsidize incomes appropriately? Or, just let the poor suffer if they don't have the correct genes?
It's probably not genetic. Ask any school teacher who does well in class and who struggles, who has ADHD and who concentrates for hours at a time and they will tell you diet and routine (also linked to wealth) are almost always obvious signals for success.
It's not scientific, but the kids that struggle eat frozen pizza and stay up late. It could be the teachers I know finding evidence where there is none, but year after in that job by all those teachers suggests otherwise.
I created the blog post. That post was largely focused on academic outcomes, especially variation in various test scores and related measures of general cognitive ability (aka "intelligence"), but:
1) there is also good direct evidence that genes explain a large fraction of the systematic variation in economic outcomes. I invite you to read this https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/38881/HECER... (especially pg25, table 1, and compare h^2 vs c^2 )
3) teacher observations and other casually observed bivariate correlations are heavily confounded by genes. the kids with seriously disordered lives are significantly more likely to have parents with low executive function and cognitive abilities and are more likely themselves to have low executive functioning.
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/xge/137/2/201/
4) I am not arguing that parents/communities are entirely unimportant in all dimensions, but the role is much, much smaller than is commonly believed and it particularly has relatively little influence on cognition and closely related phenotypes. The influence of parents is more on things like educational attainment which, while significantly determined by innate ability, are probably not purely genetic (holding other things equal children of more educated parents get more education..... much more about culture/preferences than ability to afford though
So, assuming that you've thought a bunch about this topic, what kind of policies would you recommend to address it? That is, given the genetic influence and subsequent lower quality of life, should it be considered and treated as a disease?
I'd recommend focusing on policy that is actually informed by a realistic assessment of the evidence regardless of your personal views/preferences.
In my view, we spend a tremendous amount of money on schools (over-funding -> fancy facilities, labs, etc), pre-K, enrichment programs and the like that have approximately no effect on predictors of future success, some direct evidence suggests does nothing for income/employment, etc. I'm not fully on board with the progressive agenda (basically center right), but I'm not totally heartless either. I'd rather see that money spent on direct transfers to families. I don't believe the issues faced by lower income are purely economic though. Redistributing money will generally accomplish less (not nothing) than people think in terms of the things that are associated with poverty/low income (health, behaviors, etc). The issues are in part moral and spiritual; lack of purpose through lack of steady work, family connection, etc is an issue in some parts of the country and more money won't do much to solve them (may actually make them worse in some dimensions, especially if it encourages less work->drugs etc). We may find that we accomplish more good by keeping people engaged with some kind of work and community activity (which is why I'm opposed to minimum wage and would rather see EITC expanded).....
I also think we need to think carefully and honestly about immigration policy. Bringing in genuinely low-skill labor by the millions is not a formula for long term economic or social success. Though many of these immigrants are decent hard working people that stay employed and see large increases versus what they would have had in their home countries, their children and grandchildren tend to look and act more like equivalently skilled multi-generational citizens (similar problems in multiple dimensions).
Maybe in 10-20 years genetic engineering people for intelligence and related characteristics will be feasible, probably a few more for it to become cheap and acceptable in the developed world, but I'm not quite prepared to bet the farm on that today. If it does, however the implications for the world will be staggering though (especially in the developing world..... so many problems are ultimately a result of issues here)
Do we really need genetic modification to address this though? Humans have had an effective history of inventing tools to scale their performance by magnitudes. For example, a Human was quite ineffective at digging the land so they invented the shovel and plow. There are a million examples, of course.
Why would attributes of the mind somehow be impossible to similarly enhance?
Anyway, it seems like you're main concerns are ineffective and costly methods that don't address the root problem. So, why not propose a new method or invent a tool? Bringing light to the issue helps a little, but at a certain point it is better to do what we're good at - inventing things to make us more effective.
I don't know about you, but personally, I'm exhausted from always being the smartest person in the room. I would love it if someone invented a mental shovel, because there's too much work to do and not enough people to do it.
Sure, it'd be great of someone invented some kind of mental effort multiplier. We might even call these devices "computers" ;-) In all honesty though, (1) I don't know where to begin here (2) I'm not sure something akin to a "mental shovel" would significantly address the distributional issues. Some people are still going to be significantly more able than others.....
1: There were several concrete suggestions there. It's not mere "concern trolling".
2: Ending wasteful or very low value-add spending vis-a-vis "better outcomes for the poor" is useful regardless. Whatever your priorities, we can allocate those resources better.
3: Just because the economic and social woes of the poor are tough problems that admit of no easy solutions does not mean that we cannot speak frankly about the nature of the problem. Yes, the issues are substantially genetic and, to lesser degree, cultural. Today people with sub-par cognitive skills (not to mention other issues) have limited market value, which leads to unemployment and lower incomes, which further encourages social breakdown (above and beyond that which we'd otherwise find), which leads to other problems. Deluding ourselves about the nature of the problem isn't going to get us any closer to helping the poor.
So it's a moral argument of what you want to do with the "genetic inferiors" and how much resources you actually want to allocate helping them. That would require making a judgment call about their utility curve.
"Genetic inferiors" is your phrase, not mine, pal. I do not quite think of it in those terms and I am not advocating that we end the welfare state in its entirety. Quite the contrary actually, realistically assessing the evidence has lead me to be significantly more sympathetic to non-market remedies of various sorts. The main idea I am trying to communicate here is that if you actually want to help the poor, instead of just protecting your ideology from information not congenial to your world view, you are best advised to grapple with the evidence.
Hmmm but it doesn't look so bad when you consider that 67% of poor college grads are at least 50-percentile in wealth, vs 49% of rich high school dropouts.
I'm sure is even better when you compare poor high school dropouts vs. poor college graduates, which is why a college degree may still be worth the money and the best pathway out of poverty, especially if you major in a high ROI field like STEM.
> Hmmm but it doesn't look so bad when you consider that 67% of poor college grads are at least 50-percentile in wealth
Where does it show that? The chart you linked to shows income quintiles, not wealth. I couldn't find it in the article either, but may have overlooked it.
A wealth visualization would be quite appropriate here though, as a high income does not necessarily lead to retaining wealth. Some suggest that those who grow up poor struggle to manage their money, so it would be interesting to see if those who came from poor families with higher earnings became rich themselves, or if they remained poor.
> I'm sure is even better when you compare poor high school dropouts vs. poor college graduates, which is why a college degree may still be worth the money and the best pathway out of poverty
I'm not sure what you are really going to glean from that comparison? People generally don't drop out of high school without a reason. Usually, those reasons are what also lead them to do poorly in the workplace. If you try to compare education and income like that, you end up with a bias towards those whose situation did not provide the problems that resulted in them dropping out of school and doing poorly in the workplace.
What may be revealed here is that rich kids have more opportunity. They have all the reasons to drop out that the poor have, but additional reasons such as having a golden opportunity at the family business or within the family's social network. The latter does not negatively impact their future because they dropped out for positive reasons, not because they had a deeper problem that was holding them back in their schooling and continued to hold them back in the workplace.
I think this is overlooking another potential factor: Rich culture is better than poor culture.
A college dropout who has grown up rich is going to be more likely to value knowledge than a poor person, will have been exposed to more money management, and being rich is positively correlated with making good life decisions.
Contrast that with poor culture, where we know that the inverse is true in many cases:
Knowledge is not valued to the same degree -- or at least not the same type of knowledge. Money management might have been understanding how to live paycheck to paycheck (which is a valuable skill, but not the same as understanding how to save). And being poor is positively correlated with making bad decisions.
The more that I unlearn my "poor person habits", the better my life becomes. While I always enjoyed learning, so much of my time was spent on useless, consumerists things. I binged on television and video games. As recent studies have shown, rich people were more likely to have been doing something productive (networking/reading etc.) with that time.
Being poor is actually associated with making modally appropriate decisions. That is to say that people adjust to it.
Case in point is discounting: offer someone £20 today or £100 in a year. A person poor enough will likely take the money now, and this is because it has more value to them now.
People aren't awful, they're adjusted to circumstances that are awful, being the products of a sick system. Properly provisioned welfare - a genuine safety net instead of a humiliation - could prevent the circumstances that lead to this kind of adjustment.
Economics has much to say about how people value things differently based on their circumstances. There is no "better" or "worse".
This assumes that everyone is a rational actor. Unfortunately, assuming that everyone is effective at allocating resources or time is unsafe and wildly inaccurate. My mother's hours spent cutting coupons rather than finding a job (over years) misvalued the long term impact of having a job and developing a career. My father's allocation of money that we did not have to cigarettes rather than a savings account had extremely negative long term effects.
I grew up around poor people, and I saw their mistakes. I made their mistakes, and I still do. Which isn't to say that all poor people are incapable of making effective financial decisions, just that the distribution is skewed; there are "better" and "worse" valuations of things, and fundamentally people who are worse at making these valuations will on average be poorer.
I like where you're going with this, but, it does a shit job of establishing what "poor" means. The words in the article first mention the middle class vs rich, which makes it harder to derive real conclusions. I mean, I think you're right - doesn't look so bad for the people in the "poor" category - we just don't know what category that actually is.
It compares the top 20% with the bottom 20%. It doesn't make much sense because a son of a doctor that dropped out of highschool is obviously going to earn less than a poor college graduate.
I also don't understand why they are comparing highschool dropouts with college graduates. The article should instead compare college dropout vs college graduate.
The only conclusion you can really draw is that the rich highschool dropouts have a very big safety net which should be obvious.
I feel like the provided chart doesn't quite match up well with the presented narrative. Granted it's hard to evaluate since they neglect to define what the bar for rich and poor is, however, assuming by rich and poor they mean born in the 1st and 5th quartiles by income, the chart would imply over 80% of 1st quartile dropouts fall at least one income quartile and corresponding graduating college (note there's no stratification as to what kind of college, ie whether predatory for profit schools are included, breakdowns by tier of university, etc) results in income mobility (measured by an increase of one or more income quintiles) for over 80% of 5th quartile students.
Granted, I think a better state would be closer to 100% of college graduates are able to live comfortable lives, but I think the data doesn't point to the doom and gloom of insurmountable educational advantage the author seems to want to present.
> the chart would imply over 80% of 1st quartile dropouts fall at least one income quartile
While I agree that stronger definitions are necessary, that implies that all high school dropouts from rich families were personally making 1st quintile incomes at some point before the age of 40. That seems highly unlikely to me. Even children of rich families are usually expected to work and find a way to make their own income (even if that comes through family connections), not have their parents income flow to them unimpeded and reclaimed as their own income. There is no reason to believe that these children of rich families were ever making as much as their parents at any point in time, save the 14% that did accomplish it.
As such, for all intents and purposes, the chart shows what two groups who both effectively started with zero income were able to achieve by the age of 40. The interesting thing is that there isn't much variance. Yes, the poor college graduates fared slightly better – but only slightly. That is in stark contrast to the popular narrative that high school dropouts are doomed to failure, forever stuck working for minimum wage, if they are lucky and that getting a degree will magically save you from being poor.
1. Millions of people live their life
2. Academics put people into buckets in order to count them
3. Other academics group that data and label those people
4. Even more other academics come along and do more groupings then write a paper.
5. A newspaper writes an article with a catchy headline and an out-of-context image with arrows drawn on it to call your attention to one correlation but not others, then proceeds to use that data to make arguments that don't actually follow
At every step along the way, a biased researcher or newspaper makes assumptions, discards outliers, and labels individuals in such a way that if we focus on their chosen pivot, we see what they want us to see.
Longitudinal studies, machine learning, and more are all improvements on the current shaky process. I just hope they continue to catch on despite being tougher to do.
I agree with your take on newspapers: they try and capture the attention of a layman audience. As such, their work can be simplified to the point of impropriety from time to time.
I'm less inclined to agree with your opinion on academic research, however. Systems of peer review--and softer systems, like those of repute amongst colleagues--are in place for the express purpose of eliminating biases and errors across research works.
In the social sciences, there is a great amount of care that goes into ensuring that:
1. Data is handled properly
2. Future inquiries are sound
Whether or not that care happened in this body of work is up for debate.
There's a lot of conclusions being drawn here and not much data analysis.
Just going off the chart, it seems that poor college grads are more likely to be in the top half of the income distribution, while rich college dropouts are more likely to be in the bottom half. Isn't that good news as far as social mobility goes?
If you're a poor kid that manages to mingle with the rich and famous, I'd imagine you'd have some pretty good opportunities come your way too regardless of education.
That's the real factor here. If you're connected, you can sell your shitty web hosting to all your dad's friends, and you can have doors open for you with minimal effort.
Regardless, there are rags to riches stories - sure, if you're poor you will probably have to play life in hard mode, but it's pretty cool to say "I started on $4.75ph, and now I make $100ph". There will still be struggles however - it's hard to buy a house when none of your family can act as guarantor, and you may have to help family members out every now and then.
In the end, we all die, and life is what you make of it. It's also nice to remind ourselves every now and then of how much better off we are than 90% of the world still.
If you're a poor kid that manages to mingle with the rich and famous, I'd imagine you'd have some pretty good opportunities come your way too regardless of education.
In theory. It is a theory I would like to believe in. But as a homeless woman who has managed to become the top ranked woman on HN, a forum that has plenty of people with quite a lot more money than me, as well as expertise in making money online (the thing I desire to do to resolve my personal problems, rooted in an incurable medical condition), so far, it seems to have not done all that much for me.
Being homeless has been incredibly eye-opening as to just how invisible you can be to people who think you aren't good enough for some reason. So saying "well, you just need to meet the right people..." sounds like yet another excuse to me for The Haves to wash their hands of improving the world and justify the suffering of The Have Nots as somehow all their fault.
FYI: I was not only one of the top students of my graduating class, I was one of the top students in my state and in the country. I was state alternate for the Governor's Honors program at age 15 and I won a National Merit Scholarship at age 17. So my lack of ability to make connections that benefit me isn't because I am inarticulate or incompetent.
Being popular on HackerNews is not what I'd consider mingling with 'the haves'. Mingling to me is being invited to dinner parties, socialising in the real world, being called a friend.
Of course if you start from homelessness, then you have a hard journey ahead of you. I'm not saying it's easy - it's a long and arduous affair no doubt.
I resent your tone somewhat, I can assure you that I did not start from the top at all - that my views are extremely well balanced.
It sounds as though you are quite competent intellectually, but as we can see from the research, competence does not equal effectiveness at least not in the financial sense. This is why I say - it is who you know. And not just 'who knows you', but who likes you, who has a feeling of obligation towards you or someone close to you.
I don't say this to beat down on people that haven't 'succeeded' in life, I say this as a pragmatist - as someone that recognises inequality, recognises that the world is not fair (and may never be), and offers a view of how to cheat the system somewhat. It's a hack, but it seems to work so why not give it a go?
You resent my tone. I resent your implicit dismissal that I have a point at all. That is something routinely done to people who are "the wrong kind of people," whether it is their gender, sexual orientation, social class or some other Othering category.
Calling it a hack that you are suggesting is an extremely different idea from your initial framing. I am someone who focuses a lot on what the disadvantaged individual can do for themselves in the here and now, in spite of the system being broken. I have learned to be more careful about how I speak of such things because if you aren't careful, it absolutely reads as blaming the victim and dismissing the idea that the system itself needs to change.
Your initial framing of "It's not what you know, it's who you know" is an incredibly problematic framing. It implies that you don't really need to study or make an effort or have ambition. That works for the rich kids, as this article suggests. If you are poor and trying to find a hack to get ahead, you better be smart, knowledgeable, hard working and ambitious and have a plan. Then finding the right person to connect with might open doors for you. But when a poor person hears It's not what you know, it's who you know, there is the danger that they will interpret that to mean that they just need to find a rich person to latch onto and take advantage of. It also is very disrespectful of the few who do make it that way, like their sorry ass got saved, not that they succeeded against long odds, in part due to using a social hack.
Some of your implicit assumptions seem to be that we are talking about people with entrepreneurial ambitions. Not everyone has that. Furthermore, my mom and aunt used to work dinner parties at rich folks' houses. Most folks at those parties are pretty well heeled. Most poor people at such events are serving the food and cleaning up, not hobnobbing with the rich.
I suggest you seriously rethink your dismissal of the value of meeting people online. Plenty of people make that work and it has the potential to bring down social barriers and allow poor folks to make connections and further plans in spite of not dressing right, not being able to get an invite to a cocktail party, etc. But one of the problems is that if people online learn you are poor, they turn a deaf ear to your efforts to further your entrepreunerial plans and dismis you as someone trying to hit them up for money rather than recognizing that your goal is to make money online -- just like a lot of them are currently doing.
I will also note generally that you are not the first person to dismiss out of hand the idea that me having a few thousand karma on HN should mean something. I don't know if it is classism or sexism or what, but that is an example of "the rules are differemt for some folks, and not in a good way." Because when men here have several thousand karma points, it absolutely does get cited by people as evidence of their intelligence and the value they have to offer. (Recent example : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12775170) But if I say I have inordinately high amounts of karma for a woman here, that is routinely dismissed as not meaningful in any way, shape or form.
Also, I am not "starting from homelessness." I was 46 when I ended up on the street. I am noting that as a PSA. People who are homeless routinely get treated like they were born homeless and never had a life. Their educational background and other relevant life experiences get completely dismissed. This is a significant social barrier for those who are homeless and would like to actually solve their problems.
I never intended my initial post as a dismissal of hard work. I actually assumed that people would understand it to be an expansion of a common saying "It's not what you know, it's who you know" - although I didn't feel the quotes were necessary.
I'm not saying that there's no value in meeting people online - I think that's quite different than having a million karma points on a forum however. I also don't know how you can equate sexism and classism to 'dismissing' points on a forum... for starters, I didn't even register that I was talking to a female, and to be honest, all the points say to me is that you must spend a whole lot of time on here!
Lastly, I understand that you relate what's said on here to your current living situation. It seems to me however that you're reading into things that are simply not there. I have no intention of oppressing or judging anyone, and in fact my intention is quite the opposite. I would hope that if anything, someone might stop and think critically - think about their connections, or their social skills, think of how to improve that area of their life alongside their other skills. That's my real intention here.
I wish you all the best - I know that it sucks to be poor. My mum is poor, I bought her a car last year (she used to just walk everywhere) to be able to take my brother to school etc. When it comes to money, my Grandmother instilled in me a great mindset (probably some Tony Robbins in here as well). She would say that she is rich - that being poor is a mindset. My Grandmother is actually extremely rich - she just happens to be temporarily broke a lot lol.
I do not really want to fight with you and I think you are reading in a bunch of stuff that is not there. But I do want to say framing matters and the quotation marks you left out would have helped, though probably not enough.
It is a long story, rooted in the aforementioned incurable medical condition. Serious health problems are a common root cause or contributing factor to homelessness. (Source: I had a college class on homelessness and public policy some years prior to ending up on the street.)
At this point, if I could come up with a few thousand dollars in relatively short order, I believe I could get off the street under circumstances that would not make my health worse. But that's a rather tall order to fill, given my current circumstances.
Could you elaborate on your living conditions a little more? What is stopping you from gaining a place of residence?
I am quoting you this time so that if you change your comment completely for a fourth time, people will at least know what I am replying to.
I have a deadly genetic disorder. I need a high degree of control over my living space. Renting is a no go. I need to go from homeless to homeowner. I think I could arrange that for around $10k, but, alas, I don't happen to have that kind of money just laying around somewhere.
Actually, it is who trusts you to solve their problems.
This is influenced by both what you know and who you know but also by your ability to communicate well, your ability to present a credible appearance, and your ability to actually deliver.
to a degree yes, but how many people subscribe to something just because it's "little johnny from two doors down". Many people will give you a shot just because you are close to them in some way. When you put someone credible next to someone close, you'd be surprised at how many people would choose the close person over the credible. Just look at how many family businesses there are - you can't tell me that the family members are always the most credible.
These stats are interpreted wrong. Assuming poor college kids started out from 1st quintile(<20%), then at 40 yo, 41% of them are above 4th quintile(>60%), while only 19% for poor HS dropouts. And there are more poor college kids in 5th quintile(>80%) than poor HS dropouts, 20% to 16%. This is from conclusion of the paper: "Nonetheless, we find it encouraging that a set of well-evaluated programs appear,
according to the model, to make it possible to close most of the gap in the lifetime incomes between children born into lower and higher income families"
Anyone else confused by the diagonal arrow on the graph?
edit:
> Specifically, rich high school dropouts remain in the top about as much as poor college grads stay stuck in the bottom — 14 versus 16 percent, respectively.
The arrow basically says that 14% and 16% are similar.
"As a rich high school dropout, you have a 14% chance of being in the top 20%."
"As a poor college grad, you have a 16% chance of being in the bottom 20%."
If you're in that ~15% of each group, you get the premise that the "poor" college grads didn't do better than the corresponding "rich" dropouts.
But that makes no sense--if you want high social mobility (and you think college grads should be paid more), you want both those numbers to be lower. The article treats it as a problem that they're similar.
Well, that's what economical disadvantage is about.
A rich student can afford to attempt to enter a top school many consecutive times, by not having the pressure of having to work as soon as possible. Then once accepted, can afford to have minimum passing grades.
A poor student can only enter a top school by earning a scholarship by having good grades, and sometimes that scholarship needs to be maintained by keeping certain grades. A poor student might also need to work to supplement his income since the scholarship might not cover all costs. So less time to socialize and relax.
Then, there's also a disadvantage of food, health, housing, risk of being exposed to bad influences, physical security.
To people who agree with this post, I have a genuine question: Is it a general principle of yours that the parents' efforts and accomplishments should not carry on to the child or there should be a limit to the benefit? Aren't you ignoring that, excluding historic inequities, rich people's parents didn't grow money on a tree? If Rob Rich's and Pete Pauper's grandparents had the same opportunities, but Rich's used their resources more wisely, made better decisions and fewer mistakes, shouldn't Rich benefit from that? Or is it that you think most old money is tainted? If so, do you have a # of generations in mind beyond which the money should become common good instead of go to heirs?
We should invest resources empowering people that have a higher chance of advancing our society.
Just like people believe that a guaranteed minimum income --or other forms of arbitrary wealth distribution-- is not a good idea because it encourages people to work less, this would be the same thing but across generations.
Why should a meritocracy be individual based instead of family based?
I personally think it's okay for families to give their inheritance/assistance to their children even if the children don't "deserve" it. etc. Working towards bettering your children lives is a reason many of us get up in the morning.
A family generally supports each other and works together. Parents help the children, etc.
Knowing this, wouldn't it make more sense to see if our society follows a meritocracy on the family level than on the individual level? Individually our society might not follow a strong meritocracy, but familially we might.
Now the question exists, is that still a meritocracy? On the family level, yes.
Are we okay with giving up a meritocracy on the individual level to allow a family to help each other? Probably yes to that as well. We should be more concerned with family meritocracy than individual meritocracy IMO.
> Working towards bettering your children lives is a reason many of us get up in the morning.
Absolutely! it's just that when someone has a lot of success because their family helped them, they are successful because of that help. It's not a "meritocracy". The same reasoning can be used to invalidate the claim that there is a "meritocracy" of families. If you claim "family X has more merit than family Y", well you can apply the same reasoning to show that just like person A got their privilege from family X, family X got their privilege from situation Q (not from an impoverished country, not from a persecuted ethnic or racial community, not ravaged by war or genocide, not enslaved, etc. etc.).
Some of the comments here seem upset that the author is trying to link a correlation to a causation. That's not the case; the premise of the article is about the lack of a cause of something; e.g. that someone who is extremely successful cannot claim that such success is obviously due to merit. If anyone is to be accused of premature "correlation == causation" it would be those who claim that merit is the leading factor in one's success.
> The same reasoning can be used to invalidate the claim that there is a "meritocracy" of families. If you claim "family X has more merit than family Y", well you can apply the same reasoning to show that just like person A got their privilege from family X, family X got their privilege from situation Q
Not at all. Situation Q could be the same among many families, but only a few will succeed.
That is what I often wonder on the larger discussion of "privlege". What draws the line between your parents or grandparents having worked for a better life for you and having some sort of shameful "privelege"? I understand that there is a difference when it comes down to historical oppressions of entire categories of people, but I feel that many people often confuse that and "rich parents vs. poor parents", seeking to remedy some percieved unjust inequality where the inequality comes from earlier sacrifices leading to more positive outcomes.
We have a saying in Britain, that few people remember now: "rise with your class, not above it".
That comes from an understanding that making the best of living under a system that creates opportunities to be rich and opportunities to be poor is not the same as altering that system.
Really, the idea of privilege as people use it now is too individualistic to make sense at the macro level.
Going the other way is far worse. Imagine a 100% inheritance tax. You basically get punished for helping your children and encouraged to spend your remaining money in a unproductive way. Inheritance only affects the children when the parents are already dead. It's too late to achieve equality when the children are already in their 40s. They've benefited from their parents during the time they were alive the most. Even a low inheritance tax doesn't make sense because the money was already taxed when it was earned.
Equality is probably unachieveable unless we physically seperate parents from their children or abolish money altogether.
Not even slightly true. 100% inheritance tax means relative equality between members of the same generation. There are still differences in upbringing to contend with, but the extra tax money can fund education or other compensatory measures.
There's nothing stopping you from buying your children houses and transferring money to them while you're still alive to set them up for success. Including all the other things like paying for their education and perhaps other expenses.
There's absolutely 0 need for inheritance if you want to set your children up in life, barring of course sudden death (which, even then, is still easily circumvented via life insurance policies)
Only if you assume a meritocracy has to be on the individual level.
A meritocracy of families vs meritocracy of individuals. Also, how do you contend with married people? Does it really make sense to look at how they perform on the individual level? Isn't it more of a group effort?
I think it also has a lot to do with the way different "classes" of people like to interact with each other. People can tell when you're from a different social group by the way you act. If you're a lower-income person interviewing for a job at a company run by more affluent people, there might be a culture clash which could hurt your chances of being hired. I think I've experienced this a couple of times.
Honestly, I think this explains quite a bit. I grew up fairly poor (single income household in Appalachia). I had to train myself out of a lot of speech patterns / mannerisms that don't fly in other parts of America.
It's unfortunate, but the stereotype of inbred white trash is still alive and strong when most people hear Appalachian drawls. They hear the way we talk and immediately think we're ignorant. It's an openly-mocked culture.
Speech patterns / mannerisms might be one factor, but looks are another:
I worked on Wall St for over a decade. I regularly walked into the corner store (Duane Reade) in a high-end suit, $300 Thomas Pink shirt, cuff-links, a tie, and shiny shoes. I also had the mannerisms i was expected to take on having gone to an Ivy League undergrad.
Still on at least 5 or 6 occasions, individuals would walk up to me and ask "oh which aisle has the detergent" as if being of Indian origin automatically made me the store keeper. They saw right through my impeccable outfit, ignored it all, and saw "the Indian store-keeper guy."
I'd go so far as to argue that it's harder to get by as a white Appalachian than as a black urbanite. Plenty of people & programmes care about the latter; few about the former.
There's a lot of truth to that. I grew up in a poor single-income family in rural southern Illinois and the only programs we really had were free lunches, special ed, and a few assorted gifted classes in some grades and subjects (and honestly, I don't think they were as advanced as the normal classes in average or better school systems). We had very little in the way of access to museums, schooling alternatives, after school programs, etc.
A conversation with the Wash U financial aid office made it very clear just how bad the low-income white situation can be. We were working on my financial aid package and trying to figure out some way I could get the loans and grants I needed (I nearly had to quit school) - and as the woman was looking through her options, she jokingly asked if I was hispanic, saying they had a number of full-tuition scholarships and other funding opportunities for black and hispanic students plus a few opportunities for inner city St. Louis residents. Nothing targeting the low-income and rural.
The good news is that they (along with many other schools) later dropped the race requirements for their scholarships. They also offer free tuition for most, if not all, low-income students now. Sadly, those changes were too late to help me avoid $100k in student loans.
Even now, though, I wonder if many rural students would know about those opportunities. When I was applying to colleges, I went through a couple guidance counselors before I found one who didn't try to talk me into going to community college and studying something easier, like cosmetology or secretarial work. It takes an abnormal amount of effort and drive to get beyond that kind of rural upbringing and educational system, but people tend to ignore the fact that white people can also have a lot of systemic disadvantages.
That may be true, but the white Appalachian can learn to switch accents/mannerisms (code switch). A black urbanite (who may already have had to learn to code switch, depending on where they grew up) can't change their skin color.
Yup, that is indeed a problem. 'Race' in the U.S. is, I believe, really a cypher for class, and where in other countries someone born to a lower-class can learn to fit in among a better class, it's impossible to change one's race.
This also hurts immigrants from other countries: they may be well-educated but on first sight they appear to belong to a lower class. It's very unfortunate.
There's also the reverse effect, notably lampooned in the film Love, Actually: if you've a British accent, Americans will assume you're posh.
No you misunderstand people talk about and pretend to care about the latter. Unless you actually know what those experiences are like. It is very unlikely that a white man is going to go to the top graduate school in the country and discover that they don't give white people Phds. Black people can't say the same.
> It is very unlikely that a white man is going to go to the top graduate school in the country and discover that they don't give white people Phds. Black people can't say the same.
Got a link? I'm not questioning you, I'm curious to know more.
> But, of course, it's not just a matter of dollars and cents. It's also a matter of letters and words. Affluent parents talk to their kids three more hours a week on average than poor parents, which is critical during a child's formative early years. That's why, as Stanford professor Sean Reardon explains, "rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students," and they're staying that way.
I agree... that's why I work a traditional 9-5 instead of traveling the country with my wife and kids in an RV and working 15 hours per week remotely.
I view wealth not only as an exercise in creating income streams for myself when I retire, but as a means of ensuring that my descendants have the best possible chance at success.
There is an old proverb my grandmother used to say: "My house is my castle, my cheap cotton silken, my wooden chair, made of gold". My take from that saying was that our current economics is all gold-backed economics, and that we express the value of something only in terms of how much we value gold. The moment you unlearn that gold is valuable, or has some innate intrinsic value is the moment you can replace gold with your own version of value. That is to say, the currency you use is the language you are speaking in your society. If nobody speaks your language, the task is on you to disseminate your language and propagate it, and this can be tough. This is where the 'hard work' ethic does apply. It's easy to talk gold; not so easy to convince us of silver being more valuable.
Some might argue that gold merely enables us to create these abstract forms of currencies, or in some cases, economies, in the first place, but actually they could form in pirate utopias that have little or no scaffolding at all, or exist cybernetically, for example, like Bitcoin or Ethereum. A bit of a chicken and egg situation, of course, where gold bootstraps /enables the other alternatives. But frankly I think we are left with no other choice. We either innovate our way out of gold backed economics (using gold) or we don't prosper and thrive.
"It's an educational arms race that's leaving many kids
far, far behind."
This isn't a bad thing. It's an educational arms race that is moving the human race forward faster. Communities that have placed emphasis on education early on have not only typically outperformed their peers, but also add a lot to human knowledge.
Nobel Prizes have been awarded to over 870 individuals, of
whom 185 - over 21.264% - were Jewish or people of Jewish
descent, although Jews and people of Jewish descent
comprise less than 0.2% of the world's population (or 1 in
every 500 people).
Furthermore, I don't understand the criticism regarding "opportunity hoarding". I don't have children yet, but I hope to have children in a few years once I've built the amount of wealth I would like to have before embarking on that adventure. I don't yet feel like I've built the amount of wealth necessary to provide my children with enough of a competitive advantage to succeed in the 21st century. If I've worked hard to create opportunities for my children, why should I give them away to someone who is not my child?
It's not "rigging the game". Saying that it is rigging the game is a misunderstanding of the game. The game spans multiple generations. The game isn't reset every generation. That's not a game I want to play. My parents were my teammates and my children will also be my teammates.
The criticism of pitfalls out there (e.g. degree mills, payday loans) that entrap and deprive people of opportunities is totally fair, but criticizing the decision to spend the wealth one has earned to their progeny seems like wanting to change the rules of the game.
Wealth inequality itself isn't the problem. Not having access to basic necessities (health, education, sustenance, shelter and the Internet) upon which an individual can start building their wealth is. I think it's reasonable to pay a certain amount to level the playing field at the bottom so those that are determined and principled can reasonably begin creating wealth, but that's a totally different goal compared to reducing wealth inequality. Basic income for example would be a great way to begin meeting needs so individuals can start building wealth.
If wealth inequality were the problem, the 10% should complain about the 1% and the 1% should complain about the 0.1% and the 0.1% should complain about the 0.01%, so on and so forth.
I wouldn't discount the probability that some people know how to handle money and how to make money, and they transmit this knowledge to their kids. I attended public schools K-12 and do not recall a single lesson on handling money or making money.
It sucks, but what's the solution? Because let's face it, the primary purpose of "being rich" is to provide for one's family, at least from my point of view. If I work my ass off it's to make sure I can help my kids do better than I did.
What's the point of being "wealthy" if it's not to help your kids have a better life than your own?
I don't want to sound insensitive. All these studies about kids born in poverty and unable to escape it sound very unfair. On the other hand, there has to be a reason for people seeking wealth. And taking care of your children has to be the main driver.
If we believe that few employers are happy to carry employees who provide a net productivity deficit, then on the face of it we cannot assume that those who are impoverished and employed are not meaningfully productive. The question we ought to ask ourselves is how much disparity is acceptable to allow across the incomes of productive individuals; or more bluntly, why do the executive and management typically earn several orders of magnitude more than the producers? Is it necessary to encourage upward motivation, or is it exploitative and predatory?
Surprisingly, there are some recent, more sophisticated studies indicating that our social mobility is a lot better than earlier thought, relative to the countries that are usually lauded for social mobility.
For example, Scandinavian countries are famous as exemplars for how to be a developed country with high income mobility. But a recent paper focused on Denmark (the most income-mobile country in the group) in order to study the effectiveness of the Scandinavian model. It found that pre-tax, pre-transfer income mobility was the same as the US! Needless to say, this is a pretty shocking find, as it belies years of assumptions about equality of opportunity and its effect on achievement (as measured by income). Even the addition of Denmark's much heavier investment in all levels of schooling does nothing to budge the level of educational attainment among the poor, relative to the US.
From the Atlantic article linked in my footnotes:
> Low-income Danish kids are not much more likely to earn a middle-class wage than their American counterparts. What’s more, the children of non-college graduates in Denmark are about as unlikely to attend college as their American counterparts.
IMO, Denmark's generous redistribution is worth the impact on outcomes, but it's fascinating to see redistribution have almost ZERO impact on one of its most positive-sum, universally appealing benefits (moving more towards equality of opportunity).
Coming from Denmark I can totally agree. Of course can't speak on behalf of US conditions, but NO we sure as hell haven't solved the redistribution problem here in Denmark. Haven't read the article you linked, but judging by the quotations I totally agree. There are big obstacles if you are born out of the "wrong" family, in the "wrong" part of the country. Of course you can overcome them, but you start at an disadvantage.
What could make a difference though is the relative difference between poverty in US and poverty in DK. I am pretty sure that you are better of as poor in Denmark than you are as poor in the US. We probably have a better safety-net. And in the other end of the spectrum I'm pretty sure that there is a smaller percentage of mega-rich in Danish terms even. So while I agree that there is still a problem in Denmark I don't think our problem is as big as the US.
My main point being that you can't just look at Denmark through this lens and say - Hey! They haven't solved it. And you also can't say that we have. As I see it, it is as always; a lot more complicated.
I wouldn't be on it, being poor in America still means you have more money than everyone in the world, including more than the middle class in most EU nations.
Social mobility in Europe is also really not great especially once you adjust for the immigration, you also need to account for the fact that social mobility studies in Europe are based on the income level of parents and grandparents, both WW2/Eastern Block and immigration from Africa, Asia and the Middle east inflate the social mobility figures considerably.
Actually being poor in America is worse than being poor in most other OECD nations; most first world countries have unemployment benefits that don't have time limits (they may have performance limits, i.e. you need to apply for X amount of jobs per week, etc). A number of them have free health care (and even some 2nd world countries have this). A non trivial number have free university education, or a university education that is paid out of your taxes (after an earning threshold) and the outstanding balance forgiven after 25 year or so. The USA can at times be a brutal place to be poor; even still this can be better than a large number of 2nd world countries, and almost all 3rd world countries.
That is not indicative of social mobility, the tax liability on the poor and the middle class in the US is considerably lower than in Europe.
Wages are on the other hand considerably higher.
This holds true even for low income jobs, McDonalds pays nearly 10$ an hour in the US vs 4.35 GBP in the UK, or 6.50 EUR in Germany (there are comming minimum wage changes in Germany so it will increase to about 8 EUR in 2017) and US those workers are taxed at considerably lower rates.
The current minimum wage in the UK is £7.20, and what's more if you are on the minimum wage in the UK the government will frequently top that up with tax credits (money paid directly to the claimant either weekly or monthly) and possibly housing benefit (money paid to either the claimant or landlord, and in some cases help to pay your mortgage) as well, although these typically only apply to people who are earning less than an equivalent to a full time minimum wage job and/or have children.
Despite your claims about socialization of higher education - which is perfectly true - America actually graduates a lot more people out of college than European countries. A lot more.
There is a better 'safety net' in most European countries, but there is a lot more opportunity in America. It's 100% true that 'anyone can make it' - as long as 'making it' means having a job, owning a home, in a regular place like Cleveland or Pittsburg or whatever.
Europe has a much, much stronger class system than the US.
American companies have tons of workers and professionals who came from poor situations. Europe is not like that at all.
> Despite your claims about socialization of higher education - which is perfectly true - America actually graduates a lot more people out of college than European countries. A lot more.
A lot of what would be a college degree in the US is done though trade schools in Europe. I also think there are much stricter requirements on what the degree is in most countries, as in the won't fund a lot of arts degrees.
> I wouldn't be on it, being poor in America still means you have more money than everyone in the world, including more than the middle class in most EU nations.
The US poverty line household income is $22,541, this is more than the median income in Poland, and not that far from the median household income in developed countries like Belgium.
Stop reading libertarian / right wing / whatever propaganda, open your eyes to the real world. I've lived on both sides of the Atlantic. Being poor in America is a lot worse than being poor in Europe. Dress up your statistics all you like, the fact is America is a trap for anyone below middle class.
That's not saying there are rivers of milk and honey flowing in the EU either. But over there, at least you still have access to decent health care even if you're at the rock bottom, and at least your kids could get decent education so they achieve escape velocity.
But here? Once you're below a certain level, society just throws you on the dung heap. Leaves you to your own proverbial "bootstraps", however stupid that meme may sound when you see how things could be handled differently in a civilized world.
I wonder if you ever actually bothered to go through any of the actual poor regions in Europe and tell me how well they are having it.
I live in the UK, I'm not a libertarian, I'm not a right winger, and I don't read propaganda.
"America is doing quite poorly in terms of social mobility, compared to other top-tier countries."
I think this is a myth.
Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland all do pretty well on the 'gini coefficient' - but they are tiny, relatively homogeneous societies. They are ethnic groups - and they are each smaller than Los Angeles.
What would the gini coefficient look like for 'The entire EU' for example - which would be a better direct comparison to America.
It would be terrible.
Why? Because Greeks grow up mostly to live in Greece, and much poorer than Swedes, who grow up to be Swedes, generally much richer than Greeks.
Poor Greeks, Sardinians, and Bulgarians kids mostly do not grow up to reach the level of wealth of middle class Scandinavians - not even close.
From Slovenia to London ... the gap is really quite huge.
I generally agree, but we benefit from realizing everyone's potential, and this study seems to indicate we're not doing so now.
There's also a political angle; Meritocracy is an important justification for American capitalism. If you can't make the argument that the system is beneficial to the whole, then there's going to be support to overturn the system.
The arguments you present seem orthogonal to the point. What's the relevance of people wanting to be wealthy in order to give their kids a better life? It's not as if we should improve equality by making sure children have worse lives than their parents.
If you worked very hard to become rich in your life (and presumably secure a future for your children), then congratulations, your hard work paid off.
If your children squander your fortune and squabble over their inheritance, how you feel about that is entirely up to you.
Warren Buffet said he would donate the vast majority of his wealth to charity upon his death. When asked about inherentance for his children, he said that a couple hundred thousand each would be enough.
Parting thought: if your children waste the fortune that you worked so hard to build, that says just as much about you as it does your children.
But this is all hypothetical. I'm sure you have fine kids.
(View this as a follow-on, not a counter. I agree with both you and the GP).
Wealthy kids will always have a leg up on poor kids. It can never become completely equalized, as whatever new attribute that does cause your children to do better will become a new aspect of wealth. That's one of the corollaries to what the GP was saying, and by its nature that leads to a system that leads to a system where the outcomes can never be entirely equalized as lone as you allow different wealth levels.
It's not that children from wealthy families do better (as any situation where that is not true points to a very sick society), but how much better they do, and how well we catch those that are disadvantaged when they fall. This is also complicated by the fact that poverty is relative (and when not, such as using official definitions, nobody can agree how useful it is), It's a very complicated topic, and in my opinion you are generally either stuck with so much nuance that it's hard to tease out some useful plan of action, or so little nuance that you risk taking away the wrong conclusion.
For example, in the end, is how wealthy your children are even the correct thing to be measuring for outcomes? What about happiness? What if we focused on increasing the number of people that reported being happy with their lives? That probably doesn't require people being in the top bracket for income, but it might require that most of the time they aren't in the lowest bracket.
Note that I wasn't talking about inheritance or legacy. The article makes the point that people with money are able to spend more time helping their children, or maybe pay for a tutor, or send them to a great private school. Basically spending money to help them learn how to be successful and be happy.
I don't think I'll ever reach a point where I have a "fortune" to give to my kids :)
You're probably correct in the N+1 generational context, but there are good reasons to consider policies that mitigate entrenched multi-generational aristocracy.
I, too, think the educational system is the place to turn to help fix lots of society's problems. We have kids "captive" for 8 hours a day for 13 years, so it's an amazing opportunity to do some good. The problem is that everyone has different opinions about what "good" is. I tried a little experiment a couple months ago: I asked 5 of my highly educated friends from MIT how they would improve the educational system. And I got back five very different answers, most of which I found pretty unimpressive.
For example, my material scientist friend immediately launched into a tirade about how we should teach kids how subatomic particles actually work rather than the simplified model of the atom, about about how history is a useless subject that should be removed from school altogether. I couldn't have disagreed more.
Personally, I'd like to see tons of changes, including:
- vastly more funding, so we can attract more skilled and experienced teachers and have smaller class sizes
- year round school programs, so poorer children don't fall so behind during summer break
- more emphasis and encouragement around reading, which much fewer restrictions on what we consider "acceptable" to read (my high school did everything in its power to get kids to hate reading)
- systematic experimentation around different teaching styles and educational systems, so we can learn what works and doesn't
- history classes more focused on storytelling and distilling lessons from historical events, and less focused on pro-America propaganda and remembering random disconnected facts and dates
- more focus on practical psychology, rhetoric, debate, logic, and/or research in the curriculum (how can people become productive citizens and informed voters when they can't dissect an argument or perform research?)
- more emphasis on the benefits of the scientific method compared to alternatives
- practical education around business, finance, etc, so that poor kids aren't left behind in that arena
> my material scientist friend immediately launched into a tirade about how we should teach kids how subatomic particles actually work rather than the simplified model of the atom,
That's the problem, we have to get rid of the idea that there's a set of ideas that kids "have" to know. Why don't you let the kid decide what he wants to study. Like there will be limitations but fuck it, if s/he is interested in something weird, encourage it instead of killing it.
> vastly more funding, so we can attract more skilled and experienced teachers and have smaller class sizes
I think that the teacher model doesn't scale. Develop MOOCs and like online communities. School will be the bridge from real world to these communities. Teachers will help you when you get stuck.
> more emphasis and encouragement around reading, which much fewer restrictions on what we consider "acceptable" to read (my high school did everything in its power to get kids to hate reading)
Exactly. Also remove the idea that reading means reading fiction. Make sure that the kid is doing something somewhat productive and that s/he's engaged. Engagement is key.
>systematic experimentation around different teaching styles and educational systems, so we can learn what works and doesn't
> - more focus on practical psychology, rhetoric, debate, logic, and/or research in the curriculum (how can people become productive citizens and informed voters when they can't dissect an argument or perform research?)
Exactly. But also fundamentally just make sure the kids can explore whatever area of human endeavor they want to.
> That's the problem, we have to get rid of the idea that there's a set of ideas that kids "have" to know. Why don't you let the kid decide what he wants to study. Like there will be limitations but fuck it, if s/he is interested in something weird, encourage it instead of killing it.
The collective cultural experience is that this is sometimes incredibly valuable, but very often leads to intense study of subjects of marginal economic value. A person may be intensely interested in Latin and Greek Classics, but the odds of this producing skills for a livelihood are not as high as some other subjects.
Which is to say there's sometimes an awkward tradeoff between "Weird thing a kid wants to study" and "Thing that can be studied that will pay the bills later in life". This is not something that can be avoided by making education services free at point-of-consumption, because student time is finite.
I strongly suggest to speak with some actual teachers, instead of blindly relying on ridiculous propaganda. The problem is not the system, the problem is social mobility.
Poor kids don't do well in school because their families and their environment don't value education. They perceive (correctly, BTW, from a statistical perspective) that if you're born poor, there isn't much you can do. You're gonna die poor anyway. So why worry about school? Families don't care (exceptions do exist, of course), peers look down upon you if you're "bookish", it's a vicious cycle.
There's a lack of hope among those at the bottom. No amount of educational reform will fix that. People know they're in a social straightjacket from birth.
Fix whatever systemic problems keep America's social mobility so low, and the aforementioned issues will get a lot better.
>They perceive (correctly, BTW, from a statistical perspective) that if you're born poor, there isn't much you can do.
How can you blithely state this "fact" given that the article itself shows that a poor person who graduates college has a better-than-average income distribution (every percentile is better off than the population as a whole).
It's really frustrating to me that people like you don't make any honest effort to distinguish between objective "lack of hope" where poor people actually cannot improve their situation, with subjective "lack of hope" where people for whatever reason are unable to be motivated to take actual opportunities that could help them. Clearly these are different phenomena and conflating them is irresponsible and dangerous.
What I was getting at is that the subject matter often isn't applicable to helping them solve their specific problems. Education (curriculums) shouldn't be one-size-fits-all.
What subject matters do you think are substantially neglected by the American educational system that fails to reflect the needs of the poor? How should curricula be changed? What specific problems are unaddressed?
Well I imagine the needs of inner-city-poor and rural-poor are often different, to pick two extremes. But I myself have never lived either of those lives, and I've only interacted with the rural-poor (through volunteer organizations). So, I can't really know their needs. But where I'd start, is with what I might call the "forbidden subjects" - stuff you and I probably learned from our families, if we were lucky. Interpersonal relationship skills, managing personal finances, and probably most importantly, mental patterns/attitudes/habits/priorities for more effective use of the mind. (Because complacency is effectively the "default state" of the amygdala. And combined with ignorance of the mind's ways, it can only stay that way.)
You know, my rural poor high school had a course covering personal finance, relationships, health, home economics, and so on. It was a required course for all freshman, who were 15 or so and not yet eligible to drop out.
It did not accomplish nearly so much as you might hope.
The underground hip hop complaints as relative to material mostly cover political questions and show that he didn't pay attention to the courses that would help "get our rent paid".
OK. What might you or your friends have found to be more helpful uses of time? It doesn't have to be in a classroom setting. Or in your experience was the curricula more-or-less sufficient and you consider something(s) else might be better targets for improvement/change? I would like to understand your perspective better.
Most of us would say material directly relevant to our later specializations of choice. That's difficult to do in practice, both because of the diversity involved and because of the difficulty in predicting eventual specialization. Not everyone knows at 12 that they want to be a programmer!
More diverse electives for specialist history would have been nice, but there are practical restrictions on the specialist teachers available in a town of 50k people.
Huh. I felt the same way about my high school. I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised.
I wonder if it could be feasible to rotate kids through some kind of county/state shared resource with opportunities for "demoing" various specializations. Educational almost-internships for kids, if you will. 180 days/year, 5 days/week = 36 specializations. That's probably not enough time to get much of any feel. Kids pick their top 5 or 10, and spend a year learning about those. You don't necessarily need a specialist teacher for everything, but rather a specialist skilled in teaching research / getting to the bottom of a field/industry. Make the kids teach each other; teacher is basically a facilitator? Too impractical?
I would agree it's not enough time, and plenty of workplaces aren't practical for that. Psychology and medicine come to mind for privacy reasons, and lots of workplaces are generally not kid-friendly (construction sites, heavy factories...)
Getting kids to teach each other strikes me as impractical. Most of them aren't going to learn enough in a few days to teach a useful amount, and learning about a profession through the lens of an opinionated kid seems very sub-optimal. Plus, a year is a lot of time.
I have seen a lot of schools have "career day" type things, where parents come in and briefly discuss what they do. That's a little more direct and a less time consuming at ten to fifteen minutes a parent. This is valuable in proportion to the economic diversity and schedule flexibility of parents, though.
The classes are never the suitable speed for all the students. When learning on your own, you set your own speed but you can't do that when in school. But note that all subjects are like the subjects you mentioned you took in HS. The mathematics doesn't actually go all that far. Note that all of HS mathematics can be summarized in those HS math review books that are actually not that thick. It's a travesty that fundamentally, you spend maybe like 4 years reading like 6-7 books?
The point is not to be optimal for every student - the resources required for such are not available and MOOCs are not an adequate replacement. The point is to lay a universal foundation in a series of selected subjects while socializing students.
The model of turning a literate child loose in a library and letting them be for six or eight years should not be assumed as universally useful. It's not a good way to produce a shared general foundation for a modern democracy.
The main issue is that you don't really learn anything in depth. You get some sort of very general overview but your knowledge still has so many gaps. If you make the educational system more efficient, when you leave the reformed high school, you might actually be somewhat proficient at X.
Most people agree with this. What becomes more difficult is figuring out what concrete steps make the educational system more efficient.
OTOH, even that would still probably disproportionately benefit those with the best home environments and support to make use of the more efficient system, and increase rather than narrow the gap between the best and worst served. Efficiency and equality are largely orthogonal concerns.
It sounds like your complaint is that the basic primary/secondary educational system does not produce specialists. Have you considered the possibility that neither primary nor secondary education serves the purpose of specialist training, that being reserved for tertiary education?
The purpose of the current design for primary and secondary education is to produce a general foundation atop which any sort of tertiary education can be built.
My main issues are the lack of efficiency and lack of educational freedom.
> The purpose of the current design for primary and secondary education is to produce a general foundation atop which any sort of tertiary education can be built.
It's relatively efficient compared to alternative currently available approaches. We have not reached a point where Khan Academy and Udemy can replace everything - or even a major part - of education after basic literacy and numeracy.
The model of turning a literate child loose in a library and letting them be for six or eight years should not be assumed as universally useful.
I'm not sure I really want to argue about this but fundamentally I think that you might be thinking that fixing the educational system means making the schools on the wrong side of tracks perform as well as the schools on the other side. It's definitely not that simple, the system as a whole is somewhat flawed.
"Scapegoat" is probably less accurate than "symptom". In that, in many states (i.e. Kansas), the education system has been deliberately hamstrung by people empowered by the "entrenched problems".
even if the educational system is fixed, it doesn't change the fact that if you're poor you first have to find a job, and entry level jobs in careers are hard to find, so you might end up getting something you're overqualified for just to pay the bills, something unrelated, then maybe while you work at something unrelated life happens, you maybe get married, or have kids, and now leaving your underqualified but paying unrelated job becomes impossible, and by the time you can you've lost 10-15 years and your opportunities will be minimal.
If you're rich, you start working in your parents' business, you're also likely to intern in it, and/or in your parents' peers' companies, and if you're any decent you're likely going to be groomed for an exec position, a position the poor college grad will never be able to aspire to, and if you're not decent you're probably going to get some sort of face-saving "consultancy" position, paying again way more than the poor graduate can ever hope to get.
This is unrelated to the education system, and it's not something you can ever fix, because people will always try to make sure their family has an advantage, which means that as soon as a family reaches a position of influence it will use it to perpetuate its position.
Meritocracy is nice in theory, but humans as a species are wired a lot more for tribalism than for meritocracy, hence why to get some semblance of it you need a culture/government that fosters it, and those are in short supply.
Jobs aren't hard to find if you are one of the few people in the world who can do the job. I know, these aren't entry level jobs but given the right education, you can skip those I think.
> This is unrelated to the education system,
Fundamentally, I think that few things in society aren't fundamentally related to the educational system. Or more precisely, quite a bit of society can be explained by looking at the educational system 10 years ago.
I'm personally all for fixing the education system, but the idea that this would fix (or even help) income equality is a fantasy. Denmark is often held up as a model of low-inequality, high-income-mobility, high-education-investment countries. But a recent study indicated that these policies' have zero effect on Danish income mobility and education-attainment mobility relative to the US! Their high levels of equality rely entirely on direct transfers. There's nothing wrong with this per se: despite the costs I'd bear, I wish our system was a little more redistributive, including education investment. But the theoretical positive-sum gains from broadening opportunity regardless of your background are simply not supported by the data. And this is in one of the most income-mobile countries (post-taxes and -transfers) in the world!
Ok, I haven't read the study too closely but I can't imagine how having a more educated population would be beneficial for the society. Also note that you can't really measure poverty by just percentage of income alone. The pool people in US are probably doing better than in Somalia. If nothing else, I can't imagine more education not raising the general standard.
1: We have very limited ability to change educational outcomes in this country and the differences between schools have little to do with external inputs (systematic differences in per pupil funding, teacher quality, etc). https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/my-r...
2: Years of schools have essentially no explanatory power at an international level (even in lesser developed countries that should have much more "low hanging fruit") Other research shows that without improving test scores, which are strongly influenced by genetics, education is basically worthless for economic development.
3: Poor people in the US, especially net of taxes and transfers, are quite wealthy by broader international standards. US poor vs Somalia? LOL that's not even a question. The poor in some of the more economically successful nordic/northern european countries might have somewhat higher material living conditions, but the differences are much more modest than you might expect and as compared to what you find in other developed countries (especially larger, less homogeneous, less cherry -picked countries), say, France, Italy, Spain, etc it's far from clear cut. The US also has significantly more diversity in multiple dimensions, especially as compared to an extremely (traditionally) homogeneous country like Denmark.
Fundamentally I think that we have to get rid of the concept of a teacher and replace it with person who helps you when you get stuck. I think that fundamentally, the school should just teach you to read as soon as possible and from there on it should just give you things to read. You should also have much more freedom in what you want to study, e.g. if you want to check out idk, optical engineering in high school (even if for the reason that it sounds cool), the high school should be able to somehow assemble a path for you.
I think that just about everyone has dreams that can be solved with more knowledge and skill. The path to achieving these isn't always very clear though. The school should be the organization that gives you that clarity and supports you.
> I think that fundamentally, the school should just teach you to read as soon as possible and from there on it should just give you things to read.
I fail to see how this won't devolve into parents that have more time to devote to their children's education through encouragement, steering, tutoring, or paying for the same having a better outcome. And since I think having more money is causal for having more time, I think that's just a way to make the problem worse, not better.
You replace teachers with tutors. You encourage study group work. You use better educational tools. In Mindstorms, Papert talks about how the computer is fundamentally the best educational tool. This reflects my experience but for some reason computers are barely used in education and if they are, they are used in all the wrong ways.
On some level, I think that if the kids need tutors, the system is broken.
What you describe only solves the problem of wealthy parents providing an advantage when the tutoring and/or computer system is perfect with respect to what is available otherwise. At any point where it could be improved wealthy families will be able to take advantage of that improvement for their children. This is a natural consequence of how we value our young and their future.
What you describe would be good to reduce the advantage of wealth on outcome, but it's also papering over how hard the problem is. The real problem is getting from here to there. It's akin to saying "well, just eliminate racism." Sure, that's a good idea, nobody should object to that. But it's not like we'll wake up a year from now and say "problem solved!". As a simple example of this, we probably can't make good computer tutors for kids without somewhat good AI. That's not exactly an easy problem to solve.
That's an idea, and I've seen your other comments and think that they are interesting. I don't see how this would fix the phenomenon of wealthy parents being able to support their children better than poor parents.
Wealthy families will be able to pay a better "person who helps", or send their children to a better high school to study optical engineering. Fundamentally, wealthy people will always have access to better services.
"Fix the fucking educational system and stop wasting people's time."
America spends more % of it's GDP and more $ / capita than any nation on earth.
America graduates far more people from college than any European country.
European Americans score better than Europeans on standardized testing.
Same for all ethnic groups: Asian Americans do better than Asians, African Americans do better than Africans etc..
The reason America - on average - fares a little lower than Europe has to do with it's ethnic composition. BTW - I'm not saying that some ethnic groups / races are 'smarter' than others, but that literacy, attitudes towards education etc. are multigenerational things, and most Latino Americans and African Americans are only about 1.5 generations fully literate, so it will take some time to fully catch up.
In fact - if you account for ethnicity - America has the best schools in the world - wherever they come in from - they do better than they would have from whence they came.
I'm not saying American schools are perfect or whatever - but it's worth noting that if you look at the facts, they don't fit the whole 'American schools are crap' narrative. It's more nuanced than that.
Yeah, everyone knows that causality has a hard limit of 25 years!
It's a ruse to imply that Reagan's policies don't play a role in this. GP didn't claim that he's exclusively responsible, just that correcting those mistakes would be a good place to start.
Do you think that kids aren't thrown in jail every single day for war-on-drug offenses simply because Reagan was president almost 30 years ago?
Who said anything about him being President? Look at what he did to the university system in California as Governor. That was the model for the disaster that followed.
Gotta love the kneejerk downvotes I'm getting from people who likely don't have a clue what happened.
"A lot of people work their ass off just to pay the rent and feed their kids."
We should also be questioning why someone that can barely pay the rent decides to have another kid (or even a kid at all). Financial management should be a bigger part of our education system.
"Working your ass off does not imply wealth. That's the problem."
It has never and should never imply wealth. When I was in college, I worked my ass off and studied for an exam one time. I barely passed. Do you think this is fair? I probably worked harder than many of my classmates.
Obtaining wealth involves: timing, hard work, intelligence, and discipline...with a little bit of luck thrown into the mix. Most wealthy people in the US did not inherit it.
Before claiming that the system is rigged (which seems to be pretty common these days in our presidential campaign), we need to take a hard look at the responsibility of the individual.
There are plenty of hard working, well disciplined, intelligent poor people. There are plenty of lazy, stupid rich people. There's virtually no correlation between any of the things you named and wealth.
The question then becomes how much should a lucky person be "rewarded," or how much should an unlucky person be "punished." A lot of people feel that being unlucky shouldn't mean living in perpetual debt, for example, or going bankrupt because you broke a leg.
A lot of people feel that our society could gain a lot by helping those unlucky people rise to their potential.
We should also be questioning why someone that can barely pay the rent decides to have another kid (or even a kid at all).
This statement is rife with all kinds of shitty assumptions. Until Obamacare came along, it was common for health insurance in the US to not cover birth control -- yet it often covered Viagra. So, a guy who is too old to get it up anymore is entitled to sexual pleasure, but a young woman servicing a man is going to vindictively be made to pay, both literally and figuratively.
Second, a woman can be raped and end up pregnant. Rapists aren't exactly known for using protection and one rape case was determined to be not rape because the victim managed to convince her assailant to use a condom to protect her from disease. The courts determined this somehow proved consent on her part.
Third, it's quite difficult to get an abortion in the US. There are a lot of barriers to getting an abortion. So if you get raped and wind up pregnant, good luck ending it -- even though rape is supposed to be one the exceptions that allows you to get an abortion.
Fourth, there are religious faiths that tell women they are going to hell if a) they don't willingly oblige their husband for sex or b) they use any sort of birth control whatsoever.
I could probably go on, but I am a desperately poor woman who needs to try to get some work done so I can keep eating this month, in spite of having been one of the top three students of my graduating high school class and having had both my kids legitimately within the bonds of matrimony and generally having done every goddamn thing "right" that I can possibly do, but it is still FUCK YOU Michele, because, hey, women don't need no stinkin justice or respect. And before you ask: I have been celibate for more than 11 years at this point.
Wow, do assumptions of the sort you are making piss me off. It is a great way to guarantee that the world will continue to remain in the toilet, no matter how hard people work or how virtuous they are.
> Until Obamacare came along, it was common for health insurance in the US to not cover birth control -- yet it often covered Viagra.
Birth control costs literally $7 a month. You can get it from almost any pharmacy in the nation. Complaining about your health insurance not covering birth control is like complaining about your car insurance not covering gasoline.
Men tend to make more money than women. Seven dollars a month may not be a big deal to you, but it is for some people. And my criticism is more like saying that insurance companies would pay for your gas if you were male but not if you were female.
> Men tend to make more money than women. Seven dollars a month may not be a big deal to you, but it is for some people.
How is this also not an argument that health insurance should pay for food? People (including women!) pay way more per month for food than the $7 that we've agreed birth control costs, and it's far more vital to one's continued health than birth control is.
> And my criticism is more like saying that insurance companies would pay for your gas if you were male but not if you were female.
Only in a tortured and incorrect fashion. Insurance companies will pay for treating all kinds of maladies that only women can get. Is that an argument that they're discriminating against men?
Everyone believes they work their asses off, but like every other expression of human ability, the actual amount of ass-working is normally distributed.
You may be conflating the resulting tiredness of menial physical labor with actual productivity, which is certainly understandable from an emotional perspective, but not really logical.
where did the parent say anything about "evil rich"? At the moment, your post is the only one on the page along those lines.. so it seems to be a narrative you're injecting.
Edit: also, whether or not someone worked for their money, says nothing about good or evil. I'm sure we can all point out people in both camps.
The set of people who worked their asses off and the set of people who were considered wealthy when they reached the median retirement age (or at the time of their death) don't necessary have a high degree of overlap.
Ancestor post stated that the intersection was not equal to the empty set. Its reply post implied that the intersection was not equal to the union, and perhaps that the intersection was not even a significant fraction of the wealthy set. They were speaking past each other.
Wealthy people like to overemphasize the contribution of hard work to their own wealthiness, which has a side effect of encouraging non-wealthy people to fall into exploitable patterns in their attempt to become wealthy. If you want to get rich, don't work hard. All that hard work is just going to distract you from what you should be doing--acquiring ownership of moneymaking machines that are either fully autonomous or have a very high multiplier for turning your own work into spendable money. You can buy them, or you can build them, but you'll have a hard time doing either unless you spend a lot of time around wealthy people, leeching off their knowledge of how the machines operate.
Maybe. I didn't see any figure in the article to define what "rich" means in this context. Different persons have different definitions. I don't think I'm technically part of the 1%, but I do make very good money, I just work hard for it and wasn't born with it.
> I don't think some people realize the value of a hard day's night.
What do you mean by a hard day's night? AFAIK this expression was invented by the Beatles for their eponymous song and means something like "a rough day". But that doesn't really make sense in the context of your comment so I'm wondering if there's some usage that I (and a quick googling) am unaware of.
It's not quite a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose game where rich kids get better educations, yet still get ahead even if they don't—but it's close enough. And if it keeps up, the American Dream will be just that.
>That includes everything from legacy college admissions to unpaid internships that
>let affluent parents rig the game a little more in their children's favor.
Why does the author imply something sinister with economic division? I want my kid to succeed, so I fight for his chance to succeed. I have high end skills to offer, first in line to learn from me? My children.
This isn't deliberate exclusion of everyone unprivileged, it's hyper-inclusion of only the ones I love the most.
This is interesting. I was a scholarship kid to a private boarding school, and then went on to get a scholarship at a private university that was $50k+ a year in tuition. I need to preface that I met a lot of good smart hardworking kids who did alot of great things with their education and their parents taught them good work ethic. Alot of the parents worked hard for their success and knew instilling good work ethics was important. I also went to an Engineering University so more likely that smart successful people there were inclined to have valuable degrees to put to work than say maybe a school where Political Science dominated the potential work atmosphere.
Anyways, despite this, there were these disease ridden people called "helicopter parents". The angry moms who believed their genius little sons didnt belong at ANY place beneath what they deemed to be good enough for them, which of course was only the Ivy Leagues or perhaps the trailing 5 after (but only because they DECIDED, not because they couldnt get in ugh how dare you make such an assumption).
The sons, these rich little beleagured alcoholics had been drinking their way through highschool as their parents shoved them into every extracurricular they could think of and
1. Made them feel they were never enough while simultaneously sending the message they were privileged geniuses who were entitled to the best --> that mindset will screw with ya abit and I witnessed it in the guy I dated for 3.5 years from college
2. Completely strips away their ability to have
a. self initiative
b. be curious and have confidence in their own intelligence
This leads to a lot of rich entitled kids who simultaneously had low self esteem and no idea what they wanted to do with their lives and were alcoholics.
My ex is interesting particularly because his 4 closest friends were all just like him/similiar background. They all have brand new sports cars fresh out of college and 3 of them have totaled them drunk driving and should be in jail or loaded down with fines and lost their jobs. Needless to say parents payed for lawyers, court, new cars and hooked every single one of them up with jobs and when they "get sad" they can go home and layout at their pools while their mothers dote on them.
My ex before I met him was "depressed" because he wished he could go to state school so his parents sent him to Denmark to party in Europe for a Semester to "cheer" him up....
These kids don't have any sense of consequence for their actions or any idea what its like to work to get into college. They actually have the attitude of being dragged there against their will...
As someone who started on welfare very young and eventually reached lower middle class, going to my college was a dream come true...
Let me tell you though in our 20s ill be paying off student loans and working hard but I am a much happier more intelligent curious person and love my job. These kids are miserable alcoholics bored with life and sitting in jobs their parents put them in.
Their snapshot wealth portfolio may look better than mine ....for now, but they are not happier. They may inherit their parents houses and money but they will still be bored and sad and drinking all the time.
That being said, I know alot of kids who are wealthy and genuinely doing well in life though. I think it is opportunity hoarding when kids who don't want to be in college are forced to go to college, and while some of these kids are obnoxious, upon years of observation I mostly blame the parents for exerting their awful pretentiousness and ways of life onto these kids who basically feel helpless like they don't have any other choice.
But, of course, it's not just a matter of dollars and cents. It's also a matter of letters and words. Affluent parents talk to their kids three more hours a week on average than poor parents, which is critical during a child's formative early years. That's why, as Stanford professor Sean Reardon explains, "rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students," and they're staying that way.
It's also a matter of genes. Actually, mostly a matter of genes because this is by far the biggest influence parents have on their kids. Affluent parents pass high IQ and conscientiousness to their children which are critical for the rest of their lives. That's why, as anyone who skimmed the twin studies or maybe on of these new fancy GWAS can explain, rich children increasingly exit the womb better prepared to succeed in life and they stay that way. (That and the fact that we removed most of environmental instults.)
It doesn't end there either. They will also be wealthier, healthier, and live longer. "All good things tend to go together, as do all bad ones."
This comment should not be downvoted. It's correct in describing what's being asserted. And what's being asserted is the definition of the affirming the consequent.
I know this is HN and we love to point and shout the names of informal fallacies, but maybe learning some formal ones would be useful, too.
Lol this correlation says nothing about poor people being dumber
But that better educated make more money
Get back to me when society stops tilted the economic success playing field against poor people, and offers them the same welfare we give the rich
Until then this 36 yr old, born and raised in a trailer park, college dropout with enough assets now to only have to work part time on contracts that interest me, while living in a city with higher than average cost of living, will call bs
This is one of the most HN comments ever. Without getting into the nature-vs-nurture debate for the trillionth time, "Actually, mostly a matter of genes because this is by far the biggest influence parents have on their kids" is a totally preposterous statement. Genes are certainly AN influence, but I think my parents' encouraging my nerdiness, buying me a graphing calculator in high school and surrounding me with computers my whole life had something to do with how I got interested in computers and subsequently developed a career out of it.
That's just not an option for a lot of kids, and that has zilch to do with genes. But hey, keep thinking Ayn Rand's not full of shit, Hackernews :)
My view is anecdotal. I come from a family with adopted children. My siblings say how I talk, act and think like our parents. I am the only biological child of our parents.
Does this prove IQ? No. however, I would be astounded if there was no relationship (just looks, voice, height, thought patterns, but no IQ correlation).
At the same time, my kids are quite different from each other. However, my siblings' kids reflect their parents and have diverged significantly from my family far more so than my kids diverge from each other.
My eldest brother (as an example), earned good money but spent it all. He put very little love or effort into his kids, despite him being raised in a household of caring and sharing. He's also a drinker and drug taker. His kids all have troubles with drugs and alcohol.
This is nothing like my family. We have continued down a path of caring and sharing and support quite a few community activities.
I'm not inclined to equate IQ directly, but, I am strongly inclined to say "there is a lot more than just looks that gets passed down to children".
My eldest sister is a behavioural clone of her biological mother. They didn't know each other until their 20s. That was the moment I knew that behaviour could be inherited by children, because my eldest sister is an aggressive hedonist. No drugs, just wild partying and ladette behaviour.
The other aspect of this article that is true is that luck favours the prepared. Some people send their kids to private schools so they can
Mingle with other well-to-dos.
What I do like about today's society is that there is a wealth of opportunity if you look for it, regardless of socioeconomic status. I am a huge believer in opportunity but I totally reject political correctness (and any other prejudice for that matter, PC just happens to be the most popular prejudice today).
You raise some really interesting points. I've seen similar as well. But what I draw is not so much that there's an IQ gene (though I'm sure that there are genes that affect brain physiology in some ways), but more so that there are known genes that affect compulsive behaviours which can trump rational processes e.g. addiction, risk-taking.
And while I'm sure lifestyle factors (including nurture, environment) may impact the "degree" to which the expression of these genes "take hold on behaviour", the overall probabilities are more likely to be based on the genetics. I'm thinking similar to how genes increase likelihood of getting cancer, while behaviour/lifestyle can affect treatment outcomes.
If we blame problems on genetics that means they are out of our hands. We cannot solve them. At least not without preventing reproduction of undesirable genes.
Actually the smug, dismissive tone of your comment is equally common on HN. Neither you nor the OP have given direct evidence on the matter, and it is presumptuous to think that the narrative you presented trumps the OP's vague reference to twin studies.
A quick google study yields "Using 15 years of data on Finnish twins, we find that 24% (54%) of the variance of women’s (men’s) lifetime income is due to genetic factors and that the contribution of the shared environment is negligible."[0] But I don't want to claim this is the final word, it's just the kind of evidence that is useful rather than blithe assertions and name calling.
Given the issues the social sciences have with reproducible results, that Gwern is linking more science blogs than papers, and that we know rich people have conspired to hold poor people back via laws and other self serving maneuvers I'm still going to lean into "bullshit" category
When you have evidence that the supposedly smart and highly moral are guilty of oppressing an entire swath of people and you point at mostly economic markers without controlling for bad behavior by the "haves" you're just skewing your own results
That rich do better within our culture, which is rigged to give the rich an advantage, it doesn't say much to whether they are truly smarter
> but I think my parents' encouraging my nerdiness, buying me a graphing calculator in high school and surrounding me with computers my whole life had something to do with how I got interested in computers and subsequently developed a career out of it.
We'll never know for sure, but would you likely have turned into an artist if your parents had surrounded you with paints and canvases instead? Would you have possibly turned into a tinkerer/problem-solver "of some sort" even if your parents hadn't surrounded you with computers?
It's interesting that you say your parents "encouraged" your nerdiness and didn't say they "instilled" nerdiness in you. It implies there was something innate to start with.
Perhaps there is a set of genes linking curiosity, detail-orientation, problem solving that are at the core of people that become engineers, programmers etc?
In seriousness, it's frustrating that you're making such a bold assertion about causality. There are more male executives than female. Are you saying that's caused by genetics?
There are more males at a very high IQ than there are females.
There are also many more males at a very low IQ than there are females.
I don't know why people downvote the parent comment, just because it's not exactly fair that people aren't born equal, doesn't mean we have to just sweep it under the rug.
Why are you so confident that the IQ test is measuring "intelligence"?
The causes of wealth, scholastic performance, etc. are quite important for policy. Therefore we should hold a higher burden of proof for causal inference on those topics than, say, the communication mechanisms of ants.
It's not that folks are sweeping differences under the rug. It's that they're saying the differences might not be the things you're saying they are.
No, the 'biggest influence' that parents have on their kids are the values, attitudes, the disposition, the care, the temperament, the focus, the self restraint and self discipline , and all the other behaviours they instil in their children by instruction or by example.
After that I would say it's economic and social class.
Of course genes play some role, but there's a pretty low correlation for inherited IQ anyhow.
Back a couple of decades ago in India. I was working for an American telecoms co. I grew pally with an HR manager. He showed me the background on a new hire. The new hire was the son of a mid-level government official cum career civil servant in a dept that oversaw the telecoms industry.
I saw the letter Daddy wrote ON HIS OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT LETTERHEAD... addressed to the head of the Indian division of the telcoms co... recommending his own son for a job.
My point? It's not just rich kids. It's also well connected kids. In high-regulation environments, government officials, although they may not be rich, have the highest access.
I worked at a Fortune 50 and we hired a lot of interns.
After I left, I thought back on the kids we hired, how talented they were, and what they went off to do afterwards.
The 'rich kids' were better prepared, more responsible, better communicators, had a better sense of the vision for the company and the consequences of what we were doing.
'College education' is surely causative to some degree, but in America, most wealth is not inherited, and those parents who can afford 'activities' for their kids are probably far, far better parents than others. It's not the 'activities' that I think develops the kids, I think it's the very fact that these parents are investing a lot of time and energy in their kids, teaching them positive behaviours that matters much more.
I wish I had the link but I read a study a while back that showed that 'rich parents' were far more conscientious than other parents.
I don't doubt that money is a big advantage, as well as social class, but it would be foolhardy to think that these are the fundamental issues.
Rich kids are posited as 'brats' in films and TV because it's populist - most viewers are not rich. And of course - those douches exist. By by enlarge, upper-middle class kids are great. I would bet they make better players than otherwise on average.
I should also point out that kids from communities wherein they were not seen as lower class - i.e. rural communities, seem to have decent dispositions as well, and at least by the numbers, they didn't have a lot of money. But it doesn't cost a lot to have a stable home / good parents out in the sticks.
I don't think he was suggesting that paywalled articles should never be read, but rather that they're ill-suited to content aggregators like HN, where you're likely to visit 10 domains for every 10 links you click. Particularly because the vast majority of paywalls are subscription-based, not pay-per-content, paywalls and content aggregators aren't very compatible.
Wapo has a huge social media team that tries to get free traffic from sites like us.
The paywall is a clumsy and ham-fisted attempt to monetize that traffic. It is unfriendly to the community and provides no value to many non subscribers.
I have no issue with ads or polite monetization (I am a publisher myself)... but paywall sites really don't belong on content aggregators.
If I posted a teaser article with thin content for a $199 report on HN, I would likely be banned as spam. Paywalled articles are very similar to this in principle.
"Fuck you, pay me" is applicable when someone is owed. Using a non-paywalled site over a paywalled one is more like using a FOSS project over paid software, which here on HN is quite popular. I don't see the supposed hypocrisy.
Dropping out of high school isn't "doing everything wrong" and finishing college is pretty far from "doing everything right" so this seems to be a little bit of editorial journalism.
From the paper: "Children who go on to achieve a college degree, irrespective of their parents’ income, are more likely to make it to the top income quintile [...] Bottom-income children without a diploma have a 54% probability of remaining on the bottom rung as adults."
So really what it says is that you have a much better shot in life being educated regardless of who you are. But if you don't like to stay in school, you'd better be rich, because there are some chances you will end up being rich anyway. If you are poor and don't stay in school, you are very likely just live your life miserably.
> So really what it says is that you have a much better shot in life being educated regardless of who you are.
Not quite. All it says that the people who are able to do well in school also are able to do well in the workplace.
If you want to try and derive causation here, the simplest and most reasonable explanation is that the qualities that allowed them to do well in school are also what allowed them to do well in the workplace. It does not seem shocking at all to think that those who have drive, desire, ability, etc. perform better in everything they do, be it education or the workplace.
The idea that schooling magically turns you into a new person able to finally succeed for the first time seems like a huge stretch.
That's better. There is some back-and-forth between the how much drive one has correlated with how far can one get in education, but I totally agree that you have a more direct narrative of what the paper claims.
This job would have been lateral in responsibility but in a better industry giving about 2+ times salary. I mentioned this role and said I would get him a chat with the hiring manager. They seemed interested. I said you can double your salary. At this point they got cold feet and said 'it sounds too important for me'. I told them I knew the job, that it would suit them and I wouldn't burn my own credibility if I want confident they would succeed. But they money spooked them.
And while this was a sample of one it really opened my eyes to sense of entitlement that comes with growing up in a wealthy vs poor enviroment. And simply the expectations you approach life with, having a overriding effect on natural ability.
There are so many variable in play for this its not a one issue answer but I suspect this one is more important than we typically give it credit for. An expectation on oneself of where we should end up based on how we grow up.