> Just 33 children — out of nearly 800 — moved from the low-income to high-income bracket. And a similarly small number born into low-income families had college degrees by the time they turned 28.
What bothers me is not that the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich. That's pretty much the history of the world, and it's unlikely to change any time soon.[1] What bothers me is how people rationalize the very imperfect world we live in. A great example of this is how often people point to outliers in discussing the structural barriers holding back poor kids. It's not rational. Obviously the relevant question is the plight of those with median-ish determination and drive, born into different circumstances.
I've worked a little bit with inner city students, and what just kills me is meeting kids who are like 90th percentile of determination and drive. Not the 99.9th percentile kids that will go to Harvard on a free ride despite growing up in the ghetto, but the kids who are a notch below. Those kids are one wrong step away from never making it out of the ghetto. Their counter-parts, born into well-off families, on the other hand, have a great shot at ending up at the upper end of the income spectrum.
[1] One of the things that really messes with my brain is how hard I'm trying to make sure my daughter has an unfair advantage in life. Not just in terms of education, etc, but even in terms of expectations and aspirations. How do you tell your kid to work hard so they can be anything they want to be, when you your own circumstances belie that assertion?
"One of the things that really messes with my brain is how hard I'm trying to make sure my daughter has an unfair advantage in life. Not just in terms of education, etc, but even in terms of expectations and aspirations. How do you tell your kid to work hard so they can be anything they want to be, when you your own circumstances belie that assertion?"
Make sure, in doing so, you make her aware of the advantages that she has been given, so that she's aware that, as hard as she's worked, it is not merely her hard work that gets her to where she is, and those that don't make it didn't just not make it because they didn't put in the effort.
Brilliant comment. Awareness and acknowledgement of the advantages one has been given can often make a difference between people who put in some effort to ensure that others can do the same and people who believe they are somehow superior and those who did not make it are worthless.
>'A great example of this is how often people point to outliers in discussing the structural barriers holding back poor kids. It's not rational.'
So very true.
I think of this as the 'Black President Dismissal'.
I draw that from a certain set that will immediately raise the 2008 election as 'proof' that discrimination and inequality is an excuse and relic of the past.
You see the same with successful immigrants - who have already self-selected for drive, determination, ability and likely a certain amount of luck in getting here - who are wielded the same way, held up as 'proof' that anyone can make it America.
Well, the fact that someone has made it is proof that anyone can make it. It doesn't mean that everyone will have the same likelihood of making it, though.
>'Well, the fact that someone has made it is proof that anyone can make it. It doesn't mean that everyone will have the same likelihood of making it, though.'
Sure.
Problem is, it takes a basic notion of statistics to grok a statement like that. That's something which, in the US at least, I perceive to be largely absent.
What's said. / What it actually means. / What people hear.
* Anyone can make it. / Anyone can make it with widely varying degrees of likelihood. / Anyone who doesn't make it is a lazy freeloader, except for me and people like me.
* A are more likely than B to have a criminal record. / Though A are 25% more likely to have a criminal record, 75% of A have no criminal record. / A are all criminals.
* On average, C are more intelligent than D. / The topic remains highly debatable, but some research has shown 1 standard deviation difference in IQ between C and D. Whether any observed differences are a matter of genetics or environmental factors is the interesting question. / All C are smarter than all D, period, look it up stupid.
Yeah, technically, Martin Luther King jr. is proof that any black could make it to an important political position in the 60s US, but a single sample only shows that the odds are non-zero.
You also should consider that self-selection of immigrants depends on the country they are from. Most immigrants from Asia (China, Japan, Vietnam, India) have drive, determination and often skills to succeed in US in first or second generation. Most of them were upper/middle-class in their country and are better educated than majority of their countrymen. Structural barriers for that category exist but easily overcome with superior work ethics and education.
On the other hand immigrants from Mexico and Central America are mostly from rural places, poor, barely literate in Spanish and with lower average IQ than general population of their country. Adverse selection in action - it does not make sense for well educated person from Mexico to move to US illegally so only poor and uneducated cross the border. Illegal immigrants from those countries are not really equipped to succeed in American in either first or second generation and this leads to higher crime, gangs, and other negatives. I do not think education system is capable of fixing it.
Do you have any numbers to back up your theory? I'll buy that it's true in certain demographics (say, immigrant Silicon Valley hackers vs immigrant seasonal farm workers), but there are/were an awful lot of Asian immigrants who come/came from poor backgrounds with not much more than the shirts on their backs.
Asian American (mostly first or second generation immigrants) have average household income 14k higher than White Americans (mostly native). It's a pretty good indicator of education and class level of immigrants. Also Asians are famous for their work ethics and respect for eduction. Even if first generation is poor and work blue collar job, the second generation is much more likely to get college degree (~5x more likely than second generation Mexican).
smm responded with numbers. But intuitively, you can compare the efforts needed to immigrate: crossing the border in the desert, or crossing the ocean.
Even in the case of an immigrant with a low level of education from a poor background, there needs to be a group willing to make him/her cross the ocean. So from the start (s)he will be have been selected as worth the cost of the plane ticket, and will be integrated in a community/somewhere as soon as (s)he lands in the country to make up for the initial cost.
Why exactly do you describe trying to best position your daughter for a happy, healthy, successful life as "unfair"? Is this what the world has come to, is this the degree of our guilt, that simply being a good parent and using money where possible to better their children is an "unfair" act worthy of shame?
Maybe something got lost in translation but your inclusion of this one word "unfair" depresses me.
Our goal is literally to try, through the expenditure of money, to make sure she gets more success per unit of her own effort and ambition than other children do. How is that anything other than unfair? I'm not ashamed of it, but that doesn't mean I need to pretend it's fair and just.
> Our goal is literally to try, through the expenditure of money, to make sure she gets more success per unit of her own effort and ambition than other children do.
That depends on precisely how you go about it.
By way of example, a farmer teaching their children how crop rotation works will enable their children to get more crops than other farmers who do not use the technique, even though they work the same acreage. This in turn implies more reward for the same effort. Advances like this are how we build a society of abundance where people have the freedom to devote themselves to music, art, or science without worrying about starving.
The idea that this family's success somehow diminishes the accomplishments of other farmers does not make much sense to me.
There is a lot of artificial scarcity out there so success is closer to zero sum than we like to think. How many new doctors or freshman seets at harvard are there each year? Such artificial bottlenecks mean people are ranked not on some absolute scale of a specific standard but relative to their peers so pushing someone up means pushing someone else down.
It's true that there's plenty of artificial scarcity out there, but that's a social problem that can be reduced, piece by piece. But we simply wouldn't have what we do now if it wasn't positive sum for the most part.
No. Success is, by Western definition, relative. In a post-scarcity society like the West it has to be zero sum or it's meaningless. Once you clear the barrier of survival being a measure for success, success is just doing better than the neighbors.
I'm talking about the "he's a successful guy" kind of success. No, happiness is not zero sum. It's something like logarithmic with absolute wealth, but way more sensitive to relative wealth. Of course there's more to happiness than net worth, but that's outside the scope of this discussion.
Those seem like personal (or perhaps social) problems for those who think that way. Seeing lots of people who are not well off certainly doesn't make me any happier. It depresses me and makes me want to help the local shelters.
Perhaps others think that way, I do not recognize that as "success" at all. I don't care if my lifestyle is better or worse than those around me, only that I have what I want.
Your crop rotation example implicitly assumes a group fo farmers with similar starting resources and information, some of whom choose to take the risk to adopt a new technique, and others who don't, just as most economic models examine the variation in one variable ceteris paribus - all other things being equal.
Now this is sometimes the case in the real world, for sure. And it's even more often the case that if one farmer starts doing something that works, astute neighboring farmers will observe the improved yields and copy the first one.
However what this model overlooks is the situation where one farmer has complex knowledge that is not obvious to others, and parlays that into an economic advantage. If the more informed farmer leverages the advantage long enough, s/he can end up buying the land off the others as they fall farther and farther behind. Economically efficient in the aggregate, but but far from ideal for those farmers who end up as sharecroppers on the land they used to own, or taking up some other line of work in which they have no special skills.
Even this outcome is not so bad where the advantage is based on actual innovation, but in many contexts economic advantage is derived through political maneuvering or similar, and increased yields often reflect an extraction of economic rents rather than profitable innovation. If you're economically-minded, being a rentier is a shameful position to be in.
I see your point, but it is not a zero sum game. The goal is not to make sure she gets more success than other children, but to make sure she achieves a high degree of success.
Though we live in an age of economic acceleration, it is still to some degree a zero sum game. There are only so many good jobs and though the potential to create more of them seems infinite, in reality we know that the demand for a comfortable lifestyle still vastly outstrips supply.
I don't know how any definition of "fair opportunity" encompasses getting a better outcome than someone else despite putting in the same amount of effort,[1] just because your parents had money.
[1] I had "effort and intelligence" here, but I don't think "intelligence" belongs. Our human capital is the hours of life that we are given here on this earth. Free will is what we choose to do with those hours. Getting a better outcome from the same hours of labor, just because of the composition of your parents' DNA, isn't fair. It might be natural and inevitable, but that doesn't mean it's fair.
The simple answer is you're using a definition of "fair opportunity" that is different from what the people who disagree with you are using. Opportunities can simultaneously be 'fair' and 'unfair' depending on which definition you use.
Personally, I don't find the Harrison Bergeron definition of 'fair' to be particularly useful. It seems to be questioning things for the mere sake of questioning things. Yes, in the cosmic sense, everything is unfair, but what's your point? Society wasn't made to give everyone equal "cosmic fairness". This is how you create a society where the gifts of peoples' talents and circumstance go unused. By contrast, the people who are disagreeing with you are interested in maximizing the usefulness of these gifts. Improving peoples' circumstances is part of this, but only one part.
Not all effort is equal, though. Learning to discern which sorts of effort are more worthwhile is an important life skill.
Toiling away for 16 hour days in a factory with no AC isn't necessarily as valuable to others as working from home on computer problems that have huge impact.
And I say this as someone who has done both of those things personally.
The issue is how much of that inequality derives from things inside versus outside our control. Many (most?) people who labor in a factory for 16 hours a day don't choose to do it rather writing code for an equal length of time for much higher pay. To the extent that the lack of choice derives from circumstances that a person didn't choose as an adult, that is unfair. It might be inevitable, but its unfair.
It's not as if I chose to do one when I had opportunity to do the other. The reverse would be far more accurate, that I chose to do what I did for lack of other opportunities at the time.
And yet, oddly enough, doing the one helped me get the other job. Not many come out of a factory job with a letter of commendation from the company president, after all.
I think it is true that we don't all have equal access to opportunity, and that extent I do think it unfair. My solution to that is to use my advantages to create more opportunities for those who lack the same and I have done this where I was able.
>>To the extent that the lack of choice derives from circumstances that a person didn't choose as an adult, that is unfair. It might be inevitable, but its unfair.
Again, its not. Unless you are stuck in a war zone or in some remote corner of Africa.
Most people in developed and developing nations today have the freedom to make decisions that decide how they are going live their lives. For centuries we've fought and asked for these rights, Now we have them. The fact is most people have fewer reasons to blame for their failures these days. Sooner or later you have to face the fact, you are what you are because of your decisions.
Even the person who works 16 hours at a factory has a choice. It might be a difficult choice, but the person still has some remote chance. The question is do you want to the same work another 15 years from now, or can you do something in your spare time and change that.
There are always going to be some people in that factory who won't be doing the same job 15 years from now, and there are always going to be people who will the same job 15 years from now.
> Even the person who works 16 hours at a factory has a choice. It might be a difficult choice, but the person still has some remote chance. The question is do you want to the same work another 15 years from now, or can you do something in your spare time and change that.
What spare time? Have you tried laboring for long periods of time in very unpleasant conditions? The majority of humanity is engaged in a daily struggle for survival (in fact, for most of them our original state as hunter-gatherers would probably be an improvement). For the majority this condition is not a choice, but mostly a circumstance of the birth lottery.
Eh, even at that work load, you do end up with some spare time and, in developed countries at least, vacation time.
I actually ended up using all of my vacation time to take a class that helped me churn out some projects that really impressed them on my interview for a much better job.
They don't 'just' have money. Its not like some fairy shows up on one particular night drops a suitcase full of money outside their doorstep.
Life is full of choices and actions we take.
If a parent slogs all their life to ensure their kids have a good future and another parent doesn't. Then I'm very sorry that's exactly the future these people chose for themselves.
Ironically these are the same people who keep talking of work life balance, quitting jobs and taking care of kids and all that. While somebody else builds a financial empire. In the real life a parent who is always busy but can provide financially is vastly more preferable to kids than some who isn't but stays at home just to take care of them.
I don't disagree. My wife and I work very hard to give our daughter an advantage. Its clearly not unfair to us to get the reward of that hard work. But absolutely none of that is chargeable to my daughter. As far as she is concerned, some magic fairy did drop a bunch of money on her lap. Her own choices, ambition, work ethic didn't factor in to getting that advantage.
Some parents literally just won a lottery rendering that justification moot. But let's lot forget the children of thieves, pimps, and drug dealers etc. In the end money has no moral weight.
>>Some parents literally just won a lottery rendering that justification moot.
How many billionaires exist in the world? Say X000? How does this compare with the world population? You seem to arguing that Y is a failure in life, because X was born to a rich guy.
I wouldn't go to an extent to argue that your initial conditions in life don't have a effect on your future. But at some point of time as you age, that argument just dies.
>> In the end money has no moral weight.
You can either say that and not make money, or go out and earn money. At the end having money would have solved most of your problems and may be even your kids's problem.
Wow, I guess everyone that's not a billionaire are all just poor. No wait, that's nothing like what I said, the difference between your parents making 1,000$ a year and 10,000$ a year is huge. Often people discount the idea that having a collage degree and making 50+k/year is anywhere close to the world's average lifestyle.
> Our human capital is the hours of life that we are given here on this earth. Free will is what we choose to do with those hours.
The more I see in life, the more I question how valid a concept "free will" really is, and to what extent we really "choose what to do with those hours." I'm not prepared to say there's no such thing as free will, but just the way people's behavior changes under the influence of chemicals, or in response to brain damage, suggests that we don't have a satisfying theory of why people make the choices they do.
I keep meaning to re-read John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. What he said about making social policy from behind "the veil of ignorance" makes so much more sense to me now than it did when I read it in law school. (Back then I was much more conservative, and a fan of Robert Nozick's response, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.)
I wrestle with having an increasingly narrow view of the extent to which people exercise free will, and having an increasingly cynical view of the social structures we have in place to help the poor. I agree with 'bane: the marshmallow impulse control experiment says a lot. So what gets to me is the sanctimony. If I were born as one of those kids who couldn't resist the marshmallow for 10 seconds: 1) how much if my outcome is the result of my own choices? 2) how is spending more money on education going to help?
You are in luck: followup research shows that kids with impulse control (er, patience) came from stable families with safe predictable behavior, and less patient kids came from families with unstable environments and adults who weren't reliable. In fact, the kids were roughly equally rational with respect to the environments they grew up in.
If you still have a copy of A Theory of Justice, definitely pick it back up. If you'd like to work through his later-life work, then you'll want to grab Political Liberalism and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, in which he revisits his original ideas, and brings together a full account of justice as fairness as he later understood it. Definitely recommend digging back into him.
Extreme liberals do not want "equal opportunity". What they actually want is "equal outcome in all circumstances", which is obviously never going to happen, not even under socialism/communism.
Mao certainly attempted something like this with land reform. But you have a good point that it was never really equal, as he was living it up in the Forbidden City while the poor were starving.
No, I meant that socialism/communism do not state, in their list of goals, "an equal outcome in all circumstances". This is not about hypocrisy, but about misrepresenting socialism and communism.
This would appear to imply that our needs are somehow 'diametrically' unequal. My experience has been that everyone needs roughly the same basic necessities.
I think he uses "unfair", not meaning that he is ashamed, but rather meaning that his daughter won the ovarian lottery. There's no special morality or justice that his daughter will have a relatively easy life, it's just luck.
On the flip side, there're people out there who will be telling his daughter her circumstances are profoundly unfair because other people are even more advantaged than she is.
>>There's no special morality or justice that his daughter will have a relatively easy life, it's just luck.
Actually thinking this way will leave the person where they are. There is absolutely no doubt that luck exists. But what sort of logic is this to justify your failure with some one else's luck.
>simply being a good parent and using money where possible to better their children is an "unfair" act worthy of shame?
Whatever it is, it's not "simple."
I could describe snatching old ladies' purses as 'simply trying to provide for my children', but that's a deceptive, self-justifying rationalization that begs the question.
If it's "simple", it's not worth thinking about. If it's not, and could possibly be "unfair", then it's shameful to not have thought about it.
>>Their counter-parts, born into well-off families, on the other hand, have a great shot at ending up at the upper end of the income spectrum.
Not only that, but they have a great shot at ending up there even if they make big mistakes, including things like rape and even murder. This is the total opposite of the under-privileged, whose lives can be ruined after a small mistake, such as carrying a few ounces of weed on their person.
I would not worry about telling your kid they can be who they want to be. It's actually a great message.
Yes, it's true that your kid might want to be an astronaut, but not get selected. Or the President, and not get elected. That's ok--when they get to that point in their life, they will understand what's going on. As a kid, they don't understand, so it's better to give them license to dream.
Also, maybe they won't want to be President. My brother always wanted to be a musician; now he's living a hard, low-salary life as a professional musician. He gave up a lot typical "upper class" success metrics like house, family, manager job, nice car, etc.--but he's really happy.
So, telling your kid they can be who they want to be can give them license to be someone who's a bit outside the social norms of success. Heck maybe they will grow to be someone who wants to work to improve education and social mobility.
>One of the things that really messes with my brain is how hard I'm trying to make sure my daughter has an unfair advantage in life
Human beings are genetically and socially wired to do this.
Many people would objectively agree "Private tuition for entrance exams distorts the intake by income not ability". Very few would then refuse to give their children that edge going in to the exam. Similar examples exist for things like inheritance.
Personally, I'm wouldn't try and argue that people should not act in their own (and their children's) best interest. Because there is no chance that takes root. The need is for systemic limits to be in place on the impact this natural/rational behaviour can have.
I've been in that thought train before, and I don't have kids.
When I think of my future parent self, I want to try to walk the thin line of granting advantages to my kids without coddling them. It's easy to fall into this trap, where the kid seems to think only the nice things in life are worthwhile. I think most people would end up more resilient if they didn't think this way. However, I know how the world works, and it loves to reward those whom have already been given much. So, the goal is to have shiny things so you can get more.
It's disgusting, really. I hate that I'm complicit in it all. Really just want to quit all the stupidity.
> What bothers me is not that the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich. That's pretty much the history of the world, and it's unlikely to change any time soon.
I know that was said in passing, but I want to point out that it's not true: Economic mobility exists, and the amount of economic mobility can and does change.
Economic mobility has decreased recently in the U.S., but let's not accept that as a fact of life. We can do better, and we can innovate ways to do better than ever (e.g., by providing quality education to disadvantaged children).
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.
What are you supposed to tell her? That having a defeatist attitude is the best way to go through life? I sincerely doubt that's how those 33/800 children moved from the low income bracket to the high income bracket.
edit: unless you meant that she can be whatever she wants to be without working hard. Then you should have her aim a little higher. :)
Kids aren't stupid. They can draw inferences about how the world works from their surroundings. They see their single mom working hard and getting nowhere, and can draw inference about what that means.
And yet that doesn't stop some children of poor, divorced parents, growing up in educational backwaters, from achieving success far beyond what they could have extrapolated from observing their parents' situation. So what are we saying, that it's the stupid kids who get ahead?
Hmm... that actually may not be as ridiculous as it sounds at first blush. Not "stupid" though, more like "unreasonable". I'm reminded of the George Bernard Shaw quote "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Maybe the most important thing is exactly being unreasonable enough to shoot for vistas that are seemingly unreachable?
I don't know, but personally, I think "work ethic" is one of the most important things one can glean from your family environment growing up. I grew up in a single parent household through a chunk of my childhood, and a poor, rural "white trash" sort of environment through the majority of my childhood, but if I learned one thing from my dad, it was drive and work ethic. And to the extent that I've been successful in life, I'd credit that (and a boatload of perseverance) more than anything else.
I'd be curious to know if those factors are actually largely attributable to genetic factors, or if they're more "learned behavior". shrug
I think you've missed the point. If your parents are intelligent and motivated, having a strong work ethic, and yet have still failed to make ends meet and establish a fulfilling life then the indications are that no matter how hard you work you can still fail. This can look at lot like "you will still fail".
So you say to your kids, work hard at school, et cetera, but what's the backing? "Didn't you work hard, Daddy?". "Well yes, but greedy bankers gambled and lost and caused a recession that made our company fail and we lost everything ...".
If a child's primary example contradicts a lesson then it's a lot harder to justify that lesson for them.
If your parents are intelligent and motivated, having a strong work ethic, and yet have still failed to make ends meet and establish a fulfilling life then the indications are that no matter how hard you work you can still fail. This can look at lot like "you will still fail".
Seems to me you're saying pretty much the same thing as the post I replied to earlier. The point, as I see it, is that while what you say is true, it is still the case that some kids who see evidence which would seem to support a conclusion of "you will fail" still manage to go on to greater success than their parents.
The question in my mind, then, is "why"? What results in the "unreasonable" kids who say "screw the odds, screw fate, I'm doing this anyway", despite the evidence?
As far as looking at it from a parent's perspective... I don't have kids, so I haven't thought about it much from that angle. But I think if I ever have kids, I'll want to teach them a lot of the same basic lessons my parents taught me, including "work hard and you can achieve anything you want". Note, of course, that "can" != "will". But I think kids are smart enough to understand that sometimes bad/unexpected things can happen, and that sometimes even when you "do everything right" external factors can knock you off the rails. The important thing there, IMO, is the attitude of "it's not how many times you get knocked down, it's how many times you get back up".
>basic lessons my parents taught me, including "work hard and you can achieve anything you want" //
This is the crux though. You can't achieve anything you want, it might happen and your effort can help. As I see it the original comment was saying if the only tangible example is the parent telling you this and they haven't achieved anything like what they wanted - like are out of work, no money, living on benefits despite working hard, etc. - then how do you carry off that suggestion that it's better to work hard.
Technically true for a certain level of pedantry, but I still find that a useful overall mindset in general. shrug
then how do you carry off that suggestion that it's better to work hard.
I don't know exactly how you do it, at least not in a consistently reproducible way. What I'm saying is, we know some kids do take that lesson to heart, despite the lack of obvious evidence.
[what goes here?]
"... but you're smarter than we are, and you'll have the benefit of learning from the mistakes we made ..."
Or something like that. Again, I think kids are smart enough to understand the distinction between saying something is possible and saying that it's guaranteed.
I wonder if this is just confusing statistics or if its actually unfairness.
Ex: if 0.04125 (33/800) people are "high income bracket" then no foul. People growing up in low income families have the same chance of getting rich as the average of the populace.
Only 33 children moved from birth families in the low-income bracket to the high-income bracket as young adults; if family had no bearing on children's mobility prospects, almost 70 would be expected. And of those who started out well off, only 19 dropped to the low-income bracket, a fourth of the number expected.
I wish they would have given the stat of how many were in the high income bracket and how many of them moved to the low income bracket. I'm sure not many, but I'd be interested to know it.
> What bothers me is not that the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich. That's pretty much the history of the world, and it's unlikely to change any time soon.[1] What bothers me is how people rationalize the very imperfect world we live in.
A very poignant observation. This is exactly where the root of improving the human condition lies. The HN crowd doesn't seem to care much for ideas and critiques from a Marxist perspective, but there's some seriously important truth about this state of affairs that are always under the Marxist microscope, so to speak. To quote from a recent article on "Karl Marx's Guiding Idea"[1]:
> "One of the strangest features of human existence is that we are oppressed by things that we have created; but anything that is created by humans can ultimately be transformed by us, once we see through its apparently alien character and recognize it as a human creation, so as to be liberating rather than oppressive."
Marx followed and extended a rather lengthy philosophical tradition that was directly critiquing the bizarre notion--which seems to always remain near-universal across different societies--that the material conditions in which people live and either thrive or wither are the product of socioeconomic laws that most believe and argue are as immutable as the laws of nature. Social notions before and since Marx's time have remained replete with this widespread assumption that things are the way they are for reasons that are not our fault and, ultimately, beyond our ability to control--as if we're all just born into material conditions that are like those which govern the entire universe. It's what makes revolutions in history such lightning rod events--until they settle down and back into a new veneer that's just a bit different from that which came before. It's what leads people to resign themselves to the notion that, generation after generation, "the poor will always be with us".
Yeah, for as long as we allow them to be.
We create much of our material conditions and surroundings, and all of the socioeconomic systems we build around them. Then we treat them as if they are unchangeable. We persist in this regard for generations, relegating the greatest number of the masses to increasingly inferior conditions, while a tinier majority increases their material conditions exponentially. When we recognize this, we tell ourselves that it's unavoidable, natural, unalterable, etc. That a bit more hard work from everybody, a killer idea for a new startup and some successful pitches to VCs later, and you're gonna be on your way up, too, free of the need to worry about the problematic shit around you ever again.
This is unjustifiable foolishness.
You and I likely don't agree on perspectives (so please forgive the intrusion and know I'm not trying to convert you or trigger a philosophical debate that completely loses sight of the target here), but we do agree at least on your core point--this is not rational. We made everything around us. We can recognize it as a human creation, and then change it. And I don't mean sitting around waiting for the next election. That's not going to change a thing. All the hope and change so many voters expected to see in the last 6 years has gone ... where? Incremental alterations to things that, sure, matter in some way, but do nothing toward fixing what is fundamentally broken. We are closer than ever to equalizing marriage for all adults; we sit idly by as people continue to slide into deeper poverty and fewer real opportunities for improving their material lives. Such progress. Such hope. Such change.
In the meantime, people do exactly as you point out--identify outliers to avoid dealing with the norms and recognizing things are actually broken. Use anecdotal stories about someone who did something surprising (given his or her original material conditions), and allow themselves to be content with the idea that "if so-and-so did it, then so can everyone else".
As a parent (and a Marxist), I, too, am constantly battling a palpable sense of unfairness and guilt when I examine the ways in which I work as hard as I can to make sure my sons have an unfair advantage. I want them to have a better education, better life, better opportunity, better options, increased chances of avoiding all the shit I was not equipped to avoid by my parents and learned the hard way. I attempt to balance this by raising my kids to be aware and mindful of their advantages and, above all, of the complexity of everything around them--the need to avoid at all costs allowing themselves to look at others and relegate them to simplistic explanations that they're lazy, unmotivated, or whatever. I try to help them recognize the ways others try to boil things that arrest their attention into simplistic (and often polarizing) viewpoints that delete all the nuance of life, allowing an erroneous worldview to plant itself in their minds that they're any different from anyone else. And yet I feel guilty knowing that--because of the structural problems in our society that we've both created and continue to allow to remain in place--they actually will find they are different from others. Experiences that will be known by others because of their material conditions and limitations will be foreign to them (statistically speaking, at least, both poorer and richer included). It's not easy raising kids in a broken society that seems to only be concerned with incremental changes that give people the illusion of hope and change, while resigning itself to doing nothing at all about things that would rapidly and significantly ameliorate a host of social problems.
What do I really want to be part of providing them? A better world. Oscar Wilde wrote the following in The Soul of Man Under Socialism:
> "“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”
I think it's time we stopped dismissing Utopia as a fool's errand, and start sailing toward it as humanity's destination. We need Utopia. It's how we plot our course. We've been severely off-course for long enough now. We could use a bit of fixing our eyes on it to see which direction we should move for the benefit of as many as we can fit on the ship.
They found that a child's fate is in many ways fixed at birth — determined by family strength and the parents' financial status.
This is what is so frustrating about most of the debate in this country. Time and again it comes down to people arguing over laziness and people wanting to be takers. Until we realize the import of the above statement, we'll be trapped in a vicious cycle.
I always subscribed to my grandfather's words: be honest, work hard, do your best or don't do it at all. It's really paid off for me. I grew up as a child in government run project apartments in Texas. I was able to escape that and do well through hard work.
I notice those around me who fail, they tend to:
-Party instead of study
-abuse drugs and alcohol
-spend instead of save
-put themselves in situations that lead to bad outcomes
-surround themselves with others who are not uplifting nor motivating
you should be proud of yourself, but not be so judgemental.... after all you were lucky enough to have a grandfather to serve as a good role model. I'm sure if you examined your life critically you'd find many other instances of luck.
>>I was able to escape that and do well through hard work.
How would you have ended up if you didn't have your grandfather giving you that piece of wisdom? For example, what if he was a drug addict and/or an alcoholic, and he abused you and your parents?
The point is that you had something happen that triggered a desire in you to escape your situation. Most low-income people never receive that kind of encouragement or role-modeling.
>'I was able to escape that and do well through hard work.'
I don't doubt it and I agree with every point.
However, I think it's useful to consider this success in terms of your own advantages rather than a observation of others failings.
As a rule, the latter is quite an easy thing to do.
As I've related many times on HN, I too was born into a number of disadvantages, but notable advantages as well.
A strong mother, an older brother who took the brunt of the abuse in our house and was destroyed by it, a supposedly very high IQ, a sympathetic teacher or two, developing a strong interest in technology where one can easily make a career on demonstrated ability alone, and surely many more.
I walked straight and narrow tightrope relative to many people I knew and still found myself on the brink at times. Therefore, I try to not to be quick to judge people who fall - particularly when there's no net.
What if 80% of kids that come from a family with a net-worth of $10M go on to be "successful", but only 20% of kids that come from a family with a net-worth of $10K do?
You've got a huge disparity. And maybe you can "pull yourself up by your bootstraps". But what about the other 80%? Who are putting in an equal effort to their better funded counterparts and not getting an equal reward?
The hard question is why they want to do these things.
It's tempting to chalk it up to lack of character or some innate shortcoming, but I think there is growing evidence that external factors can have a large effect on a person's personality, particularly in the first few years of life.
As someone who grew up in a dysfunctional "poor white trash" environment but bootstrapped out of it, I recognized many of the same patterns you did. While luck is always a factor, I've also observed many very lucky people fail at life anyway.
I would distill the success factors down to three things that will usually allow you to be reasonably successful even with quite a poor run of luck:
- discipline i.e. non-impulsive
- hard work i.e. diligence toward a goal
- high functional intelligence i.e. ability and desire to learn
I always observed that if people have at least two of the three in good measure, they will do okay without leaning on luck as a crutch. They may not be in the top income bracket but they can lead a moderately comfortable life.
All three of those factors I list are a mixture of inherent characteristics and environment, so there are some individuals that are likely born to fail even if they are lucky enough to be born into a high income family.
I think the debate is more about HOW we should break the cycle. No one wants people to keep being poor (maybe a very very small minority), but people disagree on how effective welfare (which seems to be what you are advocating) is at breaking that cycle.
Maybe better sexual education and access to birth control is the answer?
Maybe mandatory parental education is the answer?
Should we, as a society, allow children to be born into situations where they will not be properly cared for? We usually see reproduction as a right, but should it be?
I don't know if there is really a good answer for that and I honestly don't know how I feel about it. Maybe there are better implementations of welfare that I'm not aware of, but I don't think just throwing money at the problem is going to help anyone.
> No one wants people to keep being poor (maybe a very very small minority),
I think you are being overly generous here.
The fact is, if we raise everyone to a minimum standard of living, the richest will suffer, as will even the upper middle class.
Europe is a great example of this. My programmer friends over there have much less disposable income than programmers here in the states. It is strange to see them discuss saving money to buy a computer. When all my developer friends here in the states earn a minimum of $50/hr, a day's labor buys a good machine, 2 days buys you something really nice.
If taxes are raised to create social programs that ensure quality of life for everyone then average quality of life will go down for those on left sides of the curve.
Now subjectively, one could say that those earning 100 million a year shouldn't complain if they end up only earning 30 million a year, odds are their quality of life won't change much. (Now this largely overlooks that beyond a certain point, money becomes not about buying /things/ but about influence and power.)
The decision of basically capping wealth is a decision that a society as a whole has to make though.
I wonder how much this influences mobility between classes though. Right now upper middle class Americans can just save up enough wealth to branch out on their own and start a business, which gives them the opportunity to move up quit a few notches of wealth. Likewise they can save money up and invest it in various financial instruments. An extra 15% tax (to pick a number) may very well wipe out the ability for many people to save up the funds necessary to make the above movements.
> The fact is, if we raise everyone to a minimum standard of living, the richest will suffer, as will even the upper middle class.
Not a fact-- until we start to reach some physical limits. But, the universe is very very big! Life is not a zero sum game other than in the very very short run (approaching instantaneous) .
IIRC It's not like they're also being paid $100k (equivalent) like Americans are in SV and having it taxed to nothing. Developer salaries are just lower - more in line with other office drone salaries ($40-$60k).
The study shows the outcomes that are influenced by a large number of variables. It's easy to condense it to rich/poor, but you are simply saying that wealth households, on average have a lot less of the multitude of factors that contribute to bad outcomes. The analysis on the root causes and potential policy/social implications isn't really there in the article.
Drugs, violence and parental education are all touched, but it's looked at in the prism of poor vs wealthy. That's basically to say, if a person is wealthy, that person can distance him/herself from societal evils.
My personal view of this, is that we need to view drug use as an illness and treat it. Same that we would any other disease that is a threat to society. One could approach drugs like we do viruses - heroin is more akin to ebola in severity, as opposed to pot being more like the common cold (hardly worth the attention, except in kids).
Don't have the time to quote exact studies, but anecdotally, I believe there is some evidence that decriminalizing drug use impacts violence quite a bit. From there, you can also use the resources otherwise tied up in the war on drugs to address violent crimes and hopefully develop a rehabilitation program, instead of piling more people in jail.
That said, I definitely think that the punishment should fit the crime. In no way should a person who deprived another person of life be allowed to walk free after only a few years... Regardless of excuses or extanuating circumstances.
>Maybe mandatory parental education is the answer?
I have to admit that this sounds a bit dystopian (enforcing all parents to attend a class on how they will raise their children). On the other hand, since raising a child is something anyone is allowed to do and child-rearing is far more of an impact on society than even the greatest inventions have been, it seems logical. Certainly, child-rearing is far more of an impact on society than the things we do expect people to spend years in classes getting 'licensed' for.
I think this topic is due a thorough and deep discussion. Even if the government is completely unwilling to enforce anything, is it possible that 'social pressure/expectations' can be lifted on parents (without that scenario becoming too burdening or dystopian itself)? Right now it seems that social expectations do exist, but that they are also failing (for at least a large enough percentage of the population).
So, I don't know but I am open to everyone's thoughts on the matter. :/
> The kids who got a better start — because their parents were married and working — ended up better off. Most of the poor kids from single-parent families stayed poor.
How about we develop public policies and environments where the family thrives?
Let's do that instead of some Orwellian permission to procreate and mandatory training (have you ever been to government-mandated training?!).
> Should we, as a society, allow children to be born into situations where they will not be properly cared for? We usually see reproduction as a right, but should it be?
Are you advocating eugenics? Forced sterilization? Forced abortion?
The corollary to this is that people also have a vested interest in thinking their failure is the product of bad luck or circumstances outside of their control.
Of course they do. That doesn't mean their success isn't from their hard work. If you are raised in a culture of hard work, it is no surprise that you succeed. If you are raised in a culture of hanging out smoking blunts guess what happens? Immigrants are some of the most astoundingly successful people in the country and they often start with nothing. Victimology is self fulfilling.
You miss the point of the article, which is that it's not victimology to understand that social mobility depends on a lot more than talent or hard work, and that you have to be either young or naive to believe that that's all it takes.
I'm currently reading a biography of one of the most famous and successful British rock bands. The core of the band met at a famous public school. They had:
1. Spare money to buy instruments and equipment, including vans and cars
2. Plenty of rehearsal opportunities - often in very large country houses or grand cottages where they stayed for free
3. Direct access to successful people in their immediate social circles
4. No immediate financial pressures. (Not that they were rich. But they were never in danger of starving or becoming homeless.)
They happened to be very talented. But without those opportunities the talent would not have been enough, and they would have had to join most of their peers in ordinary jobs.
Class is a network of opportunities that is denied to outsiders. It's also about learned social confidence within the network.
A few 'Well I made it so you can too' anecdotes are beside the point. A few people always do make it, no matter what.
The real issue is the number who don't, in spite of best efforts and hard work, and of the talent and hard work wasted in a culture of low social mobility.
The failures never appear in Fortune, but they're out there in their millions.
The article states that the two main factors are family and money. I am of the opinion that family is the much more important, and difficult to solve factor but everyone wants to focus on the money. Growing up rich gives advantages for success, but in my opinion growing up middle class makes it much more likely you will be a success, not just slowly squandering your inheritance. It is hard to have a strong work ethic if you don't have to work for anything. The phrase helpless as a rich man's child comes to mind. We should concentrate on helping families stay together.
Most of it is. Your dad can be LeBron James and you can inherit all his genes, physical characteristics, and natural abilities, but if you don't want to practice 4 hours a day, practice while the other players are playing video games, staying up late, drinking beer and eating junk food, you're not going to be successful in basketball.
Being born into a better family gives you a better chance but it doesn't guarantee you anything, just like being born into a worse family gives you a worse chance but doesn't completely eliminate the chance of success for you. 90% of it is your effort in either case.
No, it's not anywhere near 90%. That is a number you pulled out of your ass that is diametrically opposed to every finding from the study described in the article.
Hard to sustain the fiction that people deserve or earned their outcomes if hard work/effort/gumption/ambition doesn't make up the vast majority of the equation.
Establishing that most/many people are effectively doomed from birth even in the US takes a lot of the validity out of the "personal responsibility" argument.
Even so it's not that simple. If you see your parents - and all the 'mature' people in your life - doing things a certain way, then that it is the "right" way. If what they are doing is complaining how they're ont getting what's rightfully there's (vs working to make it something they earn) -- then you're going to believe that too.
In order to be able to put in the effort required, you first have to have your eyes opened to the fact that there are better ways of doing things than what you're living with every day. WOrse, you have to accept that the people you've been looking up to may be wrong about important, fundamental things.
That hurdle - that awakening to possibility - is so much bigger than any of the rest of the effort required, because people don't generally know what they don't know.
Lebron James was already playing basketball and being noticed by coaches when he was 9 years old. He was incredibly lucky to be in that position. At 9 years old 100% of you do in life is your genetics, environment and luck.
You also can't possibly believe any significant part of the difference between Lebron James and lesser basketball pros is due to effort and dedication unless you assume everybody else is lazy and partying when Lebron is practicing. He is the best (or one of the best) out of hundreds of extremely dedicated professionals.
I think that's an over-simplification. Maybe better put as: 90% of successes required putting in a great effort.
But how many equal efforts did not result in success?
I think it's fair to consider the effort (which undoubtedly is less and less important to success the more resources you start with) a minimum barrier to entry. But I don't think it automatically follows that the effort you put into something is a very good gauge of success. Or even that it's a differentiator between success and failure.
I am very skeptical of the claim that 90% of the variation between the performance of the average professional basketball player and LeBron James is effort.
Part of the equation is undoubtedly the financial resources kids have access to but you have to also factor in what the parents teach children.
If a parent is financially irresponsible and just sits their children in front of the TV to act as a babysitter, the child will have trouble getting ahead in life.
I would like to see a study based on the professions of parents rather than their income. Will a parent who is a scientist, engineer, or teacher generally produce a child who is eager to learn?
How do mentors affect the outcome of children? Is there a substantial positive result when a child has a mentor that supports them and teaches them the things that they don't learn in school? If so, why aren't mentors encouraged more in society? The concept of a mentor was never even proposed to me until late in college, other than the big brothers/sisters advertisements occasionally seen on TV, and they seemed targeted at the orphaned children or children living with grandparents.
Basic financial responsibility and many other basic life skills are simply not taught in school, it's expected to be taught at home. The problem is that many parents do not realize this and fail to ever teach their children anything positive.
Children generally think that their parents are the best people in the world and try to imitate everything they do, that's where the cycle happens.
Is there any kind of government subsidies for mentors? If someone devotes their entire day to helping out several children, that person should be paid, the parents cannot afford to pay them, who will?
>Part of the equation is undoubtedly the financial resources kids have access to but you have to also factor in what the parents teach children.
A problem with this type of discussion is that when people lack financial resources, they often also lack other resources that come with financial resources, such as education or parents who had time to teach them anything that they could either use in raising their children or for teaching to their children.
>If a parent is financially irresponsible and just sits their children in front of the TV to act as a babysitter
I don't see the relation of the first part of the phrase to the last part of this phrase.
>Basic financial responsibility and many other basic life skills are simply not taught in school, it's expected to be taught at home.
I'm not aware of any relationship between financial responsibility and wealth. Plenty of wealthy people are financially irresponsible, and plenty of poor people are not. You're operating under the capitalist-spiritual assumption that everyone is in the place that they belong because of some intrinsic quality in themselves; therefore if someone is poor, then they are obviously more financially irresponsible than people who are not poor.
There are quite a few obvious original sins if you want to consider why a particular family may be poor. Nobody in my family really knew how to read until my grandmothers' generation, and they don't read well now. You could blame that on bad parenting, but it might be more useful to blame that on a society that had no interest in whether they or their parents could read at all, and at one period prevented them from being taught by force of law. Maybe crushing poverty and constant racial discrimination? Anything but 'financial responsibility.'
I believe it's because of the education they get at home. It's the reason why many professional NBA players go broke shortly after retirement. Because a lot of them grew up poor, they never learned from their parents how to manage money. I believe success is LARGELY determined by what family you are born into.
I grew up upper-middle class. While I was going to school, my mom stayed at home and my dad worked few enough hours that he could help me with my homework. I learned a lot more than other kids in the same timeframe because I had someone always pushing me to learn more.
Now that I'm an adult, I have a lot of opportunities. If I have a question about finances, I can ask my dad. If I ever needed financial help, my parents could help out. If I need advice, support, or even just someone to talk to, my parents are knowledgeable and can help me with pretty much any situation. Not to mention that even if they can't help me, they have a network of similar-minded people who can do so.
Poor people don't have that. Education? Go to your shitty school and learn; if you don't understand trig, don't ask me because I never learned it. Finances? I'm in debt up to my eyeballs with payday loans and bad credit cards, don't ask me. Actually, do you have money? I need some right now, son.
I get frustrated with people who say, "You just have to work hard and avoid bad decisions." Poor people never learn how to make good decisions, and they do badly as a result.
I envy having that kind of parent/mentor. It's taken me many years to learn basic things on my own, financial responsibility, social skills, the importance of education, discipline, study habits, etc.
My parents came home and either sat in front of the TV or laid out by the pool and drank. I was very bored at school and teachers see too many students every day to focus on a few to help. I'm not saying that support was impossible to find, but you had to know where to look, that is something that I didn't learn until much later in life.
Most successful people talk about their mentors or how their parents pushed and constantly educated them. That's one of the things I looked for in a wife, the passion to teach children.
Laziness and lack of discipline appear to be taught, and it's something that's very difficult to unteach.
I remember asking my parents to teach me things like taxes or let me help with the work they brought home, the answer was always "later" or "you wouldn't understand it" or "I don't have time to teach you right now", eventually I stopped asking.
I agree with what you said but some of these problems could be helped by a better public education system. Just because your parents don't understand finance or the tax code doesn't mean you should have to figure it out yourself. There should be a high school class or two on these kinds of practical subjects (USA).
The problem is that these poor adults don't realize what they're missing. Maybe they know on some abstract level that education is good, but they don't value it where it counts - time, money, and effort. They get mad when they're expected to be involved with their children's education, ("It's your job to teach my kid - you're a teacher") they refuse to spend money on extracurricular activities, and they don't put forth the effort to actually make sure their kids are learning.
What's more is that they are unwilling to pay the taxes that would pay for better public school education. Public schools in many areas are as minimalist as they can get. They teach only the required subjects; in many schools, home economics, auto repair, cooking, and budgeting are barely even electives.
What's more is that the rich parents see these terrible schools and say, "Well, it's going to cost $10k a year to get my kid an education, but we need to pay it." Now the bad schools are filled exclusively with kids whose parents are indifferent to education. Not good.
I agree that better schools would help with this issue and that there is much room for improvement in the american school system, but I think that parental valuation of, and involvement in, education in still essential.
I think the problem is only perpetuated by inherited advantages or laziness. But there's also the problem that no matter how fast or smart people become, it's possible that there may only be a few elite positions for every race.
But if it's not laziness that holds people back, then it might not be all the hours and sacrifices I made that contributed to my success. Which means I suffered for nothing.
I can see why people don't want to believe it could be fixed at birth.
Maybe success is a combination of factors like birth, hard work and luck? I am always frustrated when people want to reduce an issue to only one contributing factor.
Yeah, but intelligence, beauty, work ethic and all those other things are inheritable. We can (as always) separate the causes of financial success into genetic and environmental traits. The entirety of one and most of the other is determined at birth. The rest is chance.
> And by age 28, 41 percent of white men born into low-income families had criminal convictions, compared with 49 percent of the black men from similar backgrounds.
Both of those numbers are insanely high. Especially when you realize that in the modern era of online background checks, their future employment options practically drop to zero at that point. By 28 close to half of the men from low income families were essentially unhireable for the rest of their lives. How is that sustainable for a country as a whole?
You're operating under the assumption that men with criminal backgrounds can't get work. Unfortunately some people do discriminate, but not everyone does. There are ways to combat this.
1) we learn that it is OK to hire people with previous criminal convictions
2) we change the prison system to successfully assimilate criminals back into society
Probably most importantly:
3) we change drug laws so that holding small amounts of certain drugs becomes a misdemeanor
Interesting conversation, and an important one. Re-iterates the importance of family, or group action. In college I volunteered for Big Brothers and met a number of young men for whom the deck was stacked against them.
One of the interesting things that correlated with success but I've not seen any definitive studies on it was church membership for the family. The young men were primarily hispanic, first generation, and if their family went to church the church community often helped cushion incidents which were disasters in non-church goers. Mom has to go to the hospital, the kids are fending for themselves, with church membership came folks who could (and would) step in and help.
The other part that made a big impression on me was that we also got a large influx of Vietnamese refugees and one family in particular the father told me that he knew his children would be poor like him, but his grand children would not. He was taking a very long view on things which at the tender age of 19 I was left wondering "Am I just a stepping stone toward a more successful clan of kids?" That was sort of the model back then of each generation does better than the last, I've done better than my parents, but lately I haven't felt that this will hold for my kids generation.
"The kids who got a better start — because their parents were married and working — ended up better off. Most of the poor kids from single-parent families stayed poor."
So we should be encouraging people to get married, stay married, and stay responsible enough to hold down a job if they are going to raise kids. Not a new idea at all, but that's cool to have a study to back it up.
One thing that I have observed and learned is money management "strategies" or "styles" vary between socioeconomic brackets.
E.g., tradespeople don't always futz with stocks; they don't have the appetite for risk and volatility that stocks introduce. Long-term investing tends to be not done (maybe 401(k) or an IRA is used). Some of that is due to a lack of discretionary income, some of that is just culture.
When you cross a certain barrier upwards, financial understanding of stocks and so forth increases, and money is leveraged to produce, e.g., use of index funds and their return on investment.
Moving downward in the socioeconomic classes and passing another another barrier, money saving becomes less common, and impulse purchases appear to become more common.
---
Some of this is definitely familial: I never learned about investments growing up and had to self-teach. That has limited my total financial situation to date. I did, however, learn about self-control, discipline, and self-teaching, which has helped me move forward financially.
Another aspect is behavior expectations of the successful - How to comport and present yourself in a way that signals that you are a professional, capable and trustworthy individual? I feel comfortable saying that most anyone from a poor/blue-collar background and who has now made it into the white-collar ranks can join with me in saying that that is a big deal. (n.b., I would totally pony up cash for a local course in So You've Made It Now Past The First Job, Now How Do You Act?)
> Some of that is due to a lack of discretionary income, some of that is just culture.
What's interesting is that you'll find the same group of people often purchase weekly lottery tickets. Which, if added up over time might make a small, but solid stock portfolio.
I firmly believe we are products of our upbringing. Here is my personal example.
One of my facebook friends is a D-1 college basketball from the 80s. Throughout the years, his updates were about running laps and shooting baskets with his two sons. He groomed them to become basketball players. And no one was surprised when the boys made the varsity team in high school.
Replace basketball with programming or financial success. Acquiring a skill is infinitely easier with access to role models.
Did I not understand something correctly here? At first the text says people don't get ahead by education and hard work, and then it lists examples of the (few, of course) example who did get ahead and all of them got ahead by hard work and education?
Of course most people don't get ahead. We are wired to keep the same level of things we know. If we want to study how to get ahead we must study those few who do get ahead, or at least analyze why the ones not getting ahead didn't get or take their chances.
Another point I want to discuss:
I grew up in a village where people also live on the lower social end. Only thanks to my mom I was able to get away from there (education and hard work). And I can say that it's not just all unfair to people who end up in the same low situation as their parents (drugs, alcohol, no job, single parents). In fact teachers, social workers, police officers, old people on the street, the super market cashier,... many people try to support them and give them chances. But many people simply don't take the chances. They can choose the math teacher helping them passing the exam in his spare time without pay (and where I come from teachers already work unpaid overtime in their normal jobs), and they can choose to sit all day at the bus stop, get drunk, use drugs, etc. Many simply choose the second option, because they don't know how to think long term. It's not all unfair just because poor people often stay poor.
Third point:
Assuming my observation is correct, then what can the government do? If people already get chances to work their way up, but they don't take it, what are the options? Force them to not take drugs? Force them to study 6 hours every day? We live in a free country. Hard to convince anybody that this might be a good decision. But if you let people have a free will, to some degree you must accept that people are very lazy.
Nobody chooses which family he/she is born into, and nobody ever will. Each of us is randomly awakened, empty and dumb, on this Earth into a specific family and community outside our choosing, with its own mentors and values. This group will fill us with thoughts for 18 years. So yes, it is unfair that some of us are awakened to find we are poor, without good mentors or educators, and will be hindered for the rest of our lives. Unless society embraces something akin to complete communism or a Brave New World, which to me sounds incredibly boring, this will always be the case. We can't completely solve this issue at an individual level. But the problem is not just an individual problem. The path from rags to riches rarely happens in one generation.
Consider the family as an institution that competes with other families for life's rewards. There are going to be differences in values between families with 10M and families with 10K. Each family will prioritize life's rewards differently, whether that be riches, a passionate vocation, strong relationships, travel and experience, etc. When looked at from the unit of the family, why would we not want to financially reward families that acquire riches more than those that don't? As long as we can maintain a balance, where an individual who so strongly wants to escape their birth family and make it on their own can do so, isn't this the right thing to do?
The researchers found that more affluent white men in the study reported the highest frequency of drug abuse and binge drinking, yet they still had the most upward mobility.
"The extent of what we refer to as problem behavior is greatest among whites and less so among African-Americans," Alexander says. "Whites of advantaged background had the highest percentages who did all three of those things — that was binge drinking, any drug use and heavy drug use."
Upward mobility is constantly on my mind. After I was 10, I grew up pretty poor and rural, at one point my family was homeless for a few months and living in a motel. Despite that unpromising beginning, I was able to work my ass off and get comfortably ahead. It's been a tremendous struggle, but I'd be a damn liar if I said I didn't receive help from people from time-to-time, opportunities that helped keep me on an upward path. But also being positioned to take advantage of those opportunities when they appeared was something I like to think was my own doing. I went to school, I worked 100+ hours a week, I applied for better positions and better jobs and fought for pay raises.
My mother and father both came from large families and it's interesting how they and all my cousins have turned out.
On my father's side, it's pretty apparent that none of the siblings could really stand each other, over the decades they moved all over the country, away from each other, and into wildly different walks of life. They all independently did their own thing and usually ended up in some kind leadership position (foreman, shift manager, etc.) or ended up owning small businesses (with all the risks that entails which is how we ended up homeless). They all grew up in extreme poverty in the mid-west at the end of the great depression. Of them, only my father went to college. But they all became more or less successes if you define success as "able to cover your living expenses while saving some for later". None of them became wildly rich, but all of them share the trait of stubbornness and an unbelievable work ethic.
Their kids are all generally doing fine or reasonably successful. No multi-millionaires, but all productive members of society. I'm the first person from this side to get a Masters Degree, but there are a few other college educated folks on that side. Measured by my father's side, I'm a slightly above average, but otherwise typical story.
My mother's side is a mixed bag, my grandfather was some kind of salesman and for most of my mother's generation they grew up well fed and cared for. He was a "success" by my earlier definition. But severe mental illness later in life, combined with alcoholism eventually put an end to that and my mother's teenage years was basically a collection of episodes dealing with an increasingly wildly out of control father and a deteriorating home environment. One of my uncles eventually also succumbed to the same kind of madness that took my grandfather, but the rest more or less went on to lead normal lives. But I think, looking at their lives, lots of what they chose to do was a reaction to the home environment they grew up in. One uncle ran away and joined the Army, never to return home again. Another became a minister and married into money. One took a decent blue collar job, moved away from home and worked it until retirement. Later on, they all ended up moving back into the same region in a different state (except for the military man).
The kids are mostly a disaster. Rampant alcoholism, drug-use, abusive violent ex-husbands and more. Only one went to college and she dropped out of the work force as soon as she got married right after college. Most of my cousins on my Mother's side hang out together, and all of them party together. At 30, the next oldest cousin, who grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth, has spent his career setting up chairs in hotel ballrooms making slightly better than minimum wage when he works. He went to some community college classes at some point, but eventually spent too much time drunk or drugged out to complete more than a semester. His sister, also born into money, is even worse. At almost 30, she can barely hold down a job for longer than a couple weeks. Co-dependent behavior is a way of life and they all ultimately co-support each other's bad habits. I try to avoid most of my Mother's family at all costs. I stay awake at night terrified I'm suddenly going to start getting phone calls asking for money or a place to crash "for a few days" -- because I know that will turn into a never ending drain on my family and our resources.
Measured by my mother's family I'm a wild success story - a single point of light in a dark pit of failure.
Ideally, you'd think that my mother's family, with the close family links and the availability of money through one of my uncles would have set them all up. My cousin's parents were all "success" in terms of supporting their families, but yet most of my cousins are objectively life failures.
I have people closer than my family in my life, old friends I grew up with. All of us being poor, most of them did not become successes, but it doesn't seem to me that in any case it was as a result of their parents doing more or less for them, but about their own consistently poor life choices. Ones with obvious negative outcomes, but chosen because they provided immediate positive emotional return. In other words, their decision flow chart tests if a choice feels good or not, not if it provides them with a successful outcome. Looking at my mother's family, their co-dependence and substance abuse issues, it appear they're using the same decision making process. One of my drug addled cousins suddenly deciding to stop using drugs, and move away from his group of co-dependent family and friends, and get a decent job, would be a fantastic change in behavior that I'm not aware ever happens with any frequency in reality.
It's obvious that becoming successful is complex, but I think parent's financial status is more of a correlation than a causation for future success (even though it might designate a probabilistic cap for how successful a person can become). It seems that good parenting combined with a natural desire to succeed is what happens. But when somebody doesn't have a desire to succeed, it's likely they also won't be good parents. Children pattern after their parents and also inherit the same lack of desire, from both behavior and genetic factors. Nobody has really figured out how to change that central decision point from "does it feel good" to "does it make me successful" with any sort of reliability. It seems to have to come from inside the person somewhere.
Delayed gratification never gets talked about enough. It is the heart of capitalism. It's also, without a doubt, the most important contributor to success.
But, I don't think it's fair to say it has to come from inside the person somewhere. Obviously, you're right in the literal sense, as you can't impose delayed gratification on a free adult. But, that doesn't mean its inherent in someone's genetics. I think the far more likely reality is that people learn delayed gratification by watching those around them. Even if you do have some preternatural foresight as a child, it's extremely difficult to see how delayed gratification makes you successful in life if you never see anyone that's successful due to their practice of delaying gratification.
This cuts across wide social divides as well. I grew up in a wealthy family, in a wealthy suburb and had wealthy friends. Everyone had wildly successful parents. Guess which kids ended up losers (and there are a lot of them)? The ones whose parents were too busy with their careers and placated their guilt by trying to buy their children's happiness. These were the kids who got everything they wanted, any time. These were also the first kids to smoke, try drugs, have sex, and play video games instead of do homework or go to football practice. Now these people are working minimum wage jobs, if they're working at all. The few who used their family connections to get into sales gigs, or similar, are generally broke. They make a little bit of money, then blow it all in a weekend.
I can only imagine how this effect is amplified growing up in the lower socio-economic classes. My friends at least knew people that became successful, and saw that it was possible. I'm sure it's easy to think that improving your life is impossible if you'd never met anyone who did it, or if your parents, family, and friends were impoverished, or alcoholics, or drug addicts.
Yeah good points all. I say this as somebody who generally is supportive of various kinds of welfare programs, because I've seen how they can be actual safety nets for people in trouble. I think these programs don't address this point at all, and don't really want to face it.
There's a kind of mythology in welfare advocacy circles, that people just need to have that safety net, and some sort of kernel of desire will bounce them right back out of it. I know that's true for some people, but there really are quite a lot of people for which it isn't. And addressing this is a tremendous social problem. The problem in my eyes is that advocacy circles don't want to recognize this and thus haven't really done any real work in addressing.
On the other hand addressing it might also undermine most of modern consumer culture which is a fundamental driver of modern capitalism.
This might translate into a general lack of research dollars and interest into actually solving this problem on the low success end of the bell-curve.
I think you neglect to consider that not all people are success-minded, that some, even given all the good influence and knowledge and skills, would rather not use that to pursue things that are usually defined as success--except for the very very few who make it as cultural big names.
These people are usually artists, intellectuals and researchers and their priorities are a far cry from money (and sometimes stability.) Some good decades ago they could get by with a variety of part-time jobs and work on what they believe on the side, and live their whole lives this way and be happy (even by the process of life itself, as opposed to goals and results.) Nowadays that's getting much harder to do of course, and people with this mindset are struggling to make ends meet, let alone live in a bustling city. Add to that student debts and all that--I think it's no wonder quality cultural production has somewhat declined in the views of many, especially in comparison to the 50s, or the 70s. New York used to have a bunch of these people, and it allowed artistical serendipity to take place easily, so dense were their ranks. Nowadays living there, for these people, is no option unless you can live with well-off parents.
These kinds of people might be labeled the cultural elite, and historically they have created most of our art, either through making ends meet somehow (which was more possible) or being supported by patrons or parents--hence why I think 'cultural elite' is befitting, they're supported by an elite who tends to be success-minded or power-hungry (or rent-seeking, which used to be way more prevalent), but they themselves are not.
They're somewhat carefree people, the saner of whom also do not need a lot to live on and don't want to raise a family, so those could conceivably live off basic income. I think that would be good for society, because the success-minded people who naturally come to control decision-making and run things around don't seem to care much (or don't grok) that there's this other side of mankind who don't quite fit in what they build. At least culturally these people still get a say, they do shape culture after all, but I'm afraid that's gonna be less and less so, at least when it comes to the masses. The internet helps give them voice, sure, but when those who are like this and have a cosmopolitan view can't afford a like-minded city, we lose scenes and movements and all these beautiful artistic expressions of a time and place and group of people.
In the field of software development, of course, there are many, who usually devote their lives to open source or learning materials and don't really mind not having money (except when it starts pressing hard.) Richard Stallman could well be considered a great example who went on to make amazing contributions for our collective good, and his patron was the US Military. Alas, research budgets are being cut and cut, especially long-term research without sure profitability, and universities are on their way to bankrupcy, and times like that don't look like they're coming back again.
Well, I did broadly define success as "able to cover your living expenses while saving some for later".
As a former wanna be professional violinist, I definitely don't think becoming a billionaire is the only mark of success. But I also think that if you can't cover your basic living expenses no matter how modestly you've sized them you're doing it wrong.
Outside of that narrow definition, I'd encourage everybody to do whatever it is they wish to do and gives them fulfillment.
I knew a guy who quite a mid six-figure job to open a Tae Kwon Do school because he enjoyed the art and liked teaching people better than what he was doing. He didn't make much money, sold his house to buy the school and lived in the back of his school for a few years, but he always made rent, paid his bills and didn't miss a meal.
I think that's cool. He did what he wanted to and didn't fall into some kind of sense of entitlement that he should be taken care of by other people because he was pursuing his passion.
I have another friend who graduated with a degree in digital media right at the top of the 90s .com boom, when people were throwing wheelbarrows of money at anybody who could operate a keyboard, and turned it all down to go play guitar in Irish folk bands. He made enough to rent a basement apartment and feed and clothe himself, and got to see lots of the world going on tour. That's fantastic and I love that he got to follow his desire. He still does a version of this, but now he's a also a professional staff guitarist for a major guitar maker and does professional guitar soundtracks for commercials. That's awesome to me.
The heart of capitalism is capital. There are many ways to get it, one being delayed gratification. Another is inheritance, which plays not such a small role. Another is being at the right place and time.
Given how few people actually are capitalists in this world, I suspect a THAT is the heart of capitalism. A small heart with little room for you and me.
I'm assuming this is a typo, but I can't quite make out what you mean. Are you saying that inheritance is the heart of, presumably, the capitalism in practice today?
Even if we accept this as true, I don't think it refutes the main point that delayed gratification is the heart of capitalism. Even if you have inherited capital, this is almost certainly because your ancestor practiced delayed gratification. That capital was accumulated because someone didn't gratify himself by spending it. Simply because the current owner of the capital didn't have to delay gratification to get it doesn't mean that delayed gratification isn't the ultimate source of that capital (nor does it mean the current owner doesn't practice delayed gratification to keep or grow that capital).
Of course, in some very, very rare instances (which of course are highly publicized, so it's what we immediately think of when we think of "inherited wealth"), so much wealth gets accumulated that its more or less impossible to spend it all, and thus no delayed gratification is necessary. But, pick out any time frame, and you'll find that the vast majority of this hallowed class of inheritors squander the inherited wealth by the end of the third generation. If they managed not to, it’s almost certainly because they have learned to practice delayed gratification.
As far as i know, good parent-infant attachment is critical in shaping stable adults with good emotional regulation(because in this attachment process the baby learns how to regulate his own emotions) , and that emotional regulation is critical in good delay gratification(i.e. passing the marshmallow test).
We also know that stress while a mother is pregnant affects the epi-genes of an unborn kid, making him more susceptible to stress - which again delay gratification harder.
We also know from research that depression has a direct impact on negative attachment between mother and baby. We also know that poverty tend to increase depression and stress a great deal - it's just common sense.
In the same vane, we know quite a lot of other things on how to greatly increase the likelihood of creating mentally stable persons who have good delay gratification. Psychologists haven't been resting all these years, you know.
I find it odd that you conclude with a focus on an imparted or innate desire to succeed when the major factors among your family members who didn't succeed seem to be a deadly combination of mental illness and addiction.
Having seen exactly the same sort of split in behaviors play within one immediate family makes me think the disasters are the tails of genetic coinflips.
Yeah, I guess that's a bit cruel. (note: I think of addiction as a mental illness as well).
Mental illness can be brutal to both the person suffering from it, and everybody around them. It affects families in ways that no other illness does, and I think that despite advocacy attempts to align our thinking of it as "just another disease like any other" it's fundamentally a different thing.
I have a pair of cousins, from my Mother's side. Their father was career military, good solid guy and all that. The oldest cousin lives in a bottle, the younger one went to school, got married, has had good jobs, lives otherwise really well.
Another group of 3 cousins, father worked blue collar jobs, has a mild drinking problem but otherwise supported his family well enough:
- one accidentally got pregnant, turns out the father was violently abusive, after sending her to the hospital she got out of the relationship, works decent blue collar jobs and supports herself and her daughter just fine. She looked like a failure case, but I'd call her a success case these days.
- next oldest lives in a bottle or with a needle in his arms. He's "trying" to go to school, but it's pretty inconsistent. Spend most of his waking hours partying or looking for parties. Is it middle child syndrome? I dunno.
- the youngest has a skills based job, does relatively well, parties a little, but not too much, is otherwise a productive member of society.
So I'm not entirely convinced it's nature or nurture. There's definitely some kind of genetic factor at play, and some kind of environmental factor.
The real question is, can you take somebody who could objectively be described as a failure at life and train them/educate them/psychotherapy them into changing their decision tree to seek success instead of immediate gratification?
Can we treat "broken decision making process for life choices" as a mental illness?
>'There's definitely some kind of genetic factor at play, and some kind of environmental factor.'
Absolutely.
>'The real question is, can you take somebody who could objectively be described as a failure at life and train them/educate them/psychotherapy them into changing their decision tree to seek success instead of immediate gratification?'
My armchair theory on this says yes.
Yes, as much as you can train/educate/psych the underlying problems which lead to the broken decisions.
I think we can consider broken decision making process for life choices as a single symptom manifesting from mental processes that are 'out of spec' which may or may not be recognized as specific illnesses.
I tend to think of most everything mental as a continuum. A million analog variables with all sorts of dependencies and feedback loops producing the color of a person and we're holding up a handful of Pantone swatches trying to figure out which matches to determine what they 'have'.
Big problem is, I think there's a fairly limited window on these things an incomplete understanding of what all the various dials do (nurture) and even less about how they interrelate (nature).
Ideally, you're trained and educated within your childhood bubble by your parents, siblings, relatives or some other 'safe' person. Then, suddenly the instinct and extended social contract of 'help kids, don't hurt them' falls away completely and any sort of training becomes far harder as this person is suddenly fair game to be exploited or discarded.
That's not exactly how I wanted any of that to come out, but I didn't want to leave genuine discussion hanging.
"It seems to have to come from inside the person somewhere."
That's quite true.
By definition, this has to come from a mix of either nurture (I think research shows that much of a person's future personality/impulsiveness can be predicted accurately be age 6) or/and their specific genetics.
I am completely convinced parents and culture can influence affinity for delayed gratification. I have watched it happen in both directions. I don't think it is the only factor, but I seems incredibly obvious to me that parents and culture have an effect.
I have no idea. I suspect there's some kind of influence there. But I can think of enough anecdotal cases where it doesn't seem to be true to rule it out as a complete explanation.
I wish we could find a more comprehensive measure of "class" than income, because I think this broader measure has a much larger effect than income itself.
Technically speaking, you'd put me in the mobile group. Growing up, my parents never earned more than median wage and were consistently in the bottom third of the income bracket. Thankfully, I've been lucky enough to leap into the top 5%. I'll be buying my dad his first house soon.
Yet, I've never felt particularly mobile. My parents were both college-educated, and my aunts/uncles are decidedly (upper) middle class. It was always expected that I'd go to college and succeed in careers. By this measure, I haven't moved at all.
I would like to see a study that follows the kids of poor immigrants. Almost everyone I know who came from poor immigrant families, including my own and my wife's, is doing well. We're all middle to upper middle class now. In fact, my family and relatives were so poor, they literally came to American with zero money. My wife's dad came here with only $50 to his name.
It would be interesting to see some statistics on that.
Ironically, one of the books that shaped my ideas on topics like this early on was the fictional 'The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism' by Emmanuel Goldstein in '1984.' Orwell's perspective as a dissident socialist is very unique and made for a lot of nuance. This is one of the places where it shines through, in my opinion.
In any case, in 1984-world there is an exam for moving the most talented of the middle classes into the upper class and least talented of the upper class to the middle. I think Orwell's thinking here was a 'keep the dangerous ones on the inside" strategy. But, I think there's another mechanism at work. Release valves and the creation of ambiguity.
A member of the underclass with undeniable talent and force of will is very dangerous to the order of things. If there are several of them pushing hard against a glass ceiling then pressure builds up. It also becomes very obvious the the ceiling exists. That's where Malcolm Xs come from.
Malcolm X recalls in his autobiography about an incident where he told his teacher he wanted to become a lawyer. The teacher responds that this is "not a realistic goal for a nigger". If he had become a lawyer he might have become one of the (as he saw it) one of those despicable, integration seeking middle class negroes. Blue pills.
Hitting a hard ceiling made the existence of the ceiling undeniable and the incredible force of his personality had no other outlet than pushing against this impenetrable ceiling.
I don't know if how obvious it was at the time that Malcolm X had the potential in him that he obviously exhibited as an adult. But let's imagine that the 12 year old Malcolm X was a 12 year old version of the 35 year old Malcolm X. A system that embraces that kid, makes him a lawyer. Gives him an outlet whiten it and celebrates him as an example of crossing class barriers or even proof for the non existence of those barriers is a more robust system.
BTW, I think it's wrong to read 1984 as a description of a conspiracy. The conspiracy is more of a metaphor, a way of easily explaining how things work. In reality, societies are memoplexes, evolved. To paraphrase Douglas Adams. "A memoplex that survives is a memoplex that survives." They are made up of surviving memes. Memes preventing class movement entirely are likely to bring down the memoplex. I think airtight class distinctions (such as a system of race based slavery) are fundamentally unstable for this reason.
There are interesting datapoints in accounts of ancient slavery. The Hebrew Bible describes a system of slavery with ways out existing in the ancient Middle east. Earning freedom. Sabbatical amnesties. Jacob came to Egypt as a slave. He rose to become a sort of chancellor to the Pharaoh. Ancient Greek & Roman systems of slavery had ways for exceptional slaves to earn freedom or even rise in rank within the institution of slavery. If Spatacus' leadership abilities had caused him to be ejected from slavery, his uprising would never have happened. He might have been a general enslaving barbarians and contributing gainfully to the system.
I will summarize real quick. "Rich" and "Poor" are 2 variable of millions - And no matter how many variables you address you cannot escape one simple fact about "who gets ahead" - "If its important to you, you will find a way, if it is not, you will find an excuse."
> no matter how many variables you address you cannot escape one simple fact about "who gets ahead" - "If its important to you, you will find a way, if it is not, you will find an excuse."
Do you have evidence for that? All the evidence I read, including the research discussed in this HN post, says that it depends heavily on where you start, including factors such as family income.
Are you saying that children born into poor families or who face other such disadvantages achieve less because they have less willpower than children born into wealthier families? If so, perhaps we should look at the relationship between family income and willpower.
This is a good way to think on an individual level: ie. taking control of one's own destiny, but it's not adequate on a statistical/societal level. We know for a fact that there are number of correlating factors to success beyond an individual's ambition/discipline/chutzpah. If we ignore this as a society and the rich people from advantaged backgrounds (ie. the majority) continue to pat themselves on the back for their work ethic, then the growing divide between rich and poor will accelerate and destabilize the very status quo which the self-satisfied rich depend on to maintain their wealth and privilege.
> Just 33 children — out of nearly 800 — moved from the low-income to high-income bracket. And a similarly small number born into low-income families had college degrees by the time they turned 28.
What bothers me is not that the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich. That's pretty much the history of the world, and it's unlikely to change any time soon.[1] What bothers me is how people rationalize the very imperfect world we live in. A great example of this is how often people point to outliers in discussing the structural barriers holding back poor kids. It's not rational. Obviously the relevant question is the plight of those with median-ish determination and drive, born into different circumstances.
I've worked a little bit with inner city students, and what just kills me is meeting kids who are like 90th percentile of determination and drive. Not the 99.9th percentile kids that will go to Harvard on a free ride despite growing up in the ghetto, but the kids who are a notch below. Those kids are one wrong step away from never making it out of the ghetto. Their counter-parts, born into well-off families, on the other hand, have a great shot at ending up at the upper end of the income spectrum.
[1] One of the things that really messes with my brain is how hard I'm trying to make sure my daughter has an unfair advantage in life. Not just in terms of education, etc, but even in terms of expectations and aspirations. How do you tell your kid to work hard so they can be anything they want to be, when you your own circumstances belie that assertion?