
Inequality and the Sergey Brin Effect - prakash
http://www.american.com/archive/2008/september-october-magazine/inequality-and-the-sergey-brin-effect
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jyothi
_Two generations ago, a couple married to share production. Today, they choose
one another because they have similar tastes in consumption._

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ojbyrne
"There is also another factor at work. A trend is underway in America for
marriage to be increasingly “assortative.” That means children of well-
educated parents tend to marry one another and the children of less educated
parents tend to marry one another. This was less the case a few generations
ago. For example, sociologists Christine Schwartz of the University of
Wisconsin and Robert Mare of UCLA found that beginning in the early 1970s
there was a striking “decline in the odds that those with very low levels of
education marry up."

I'd be curious to see if someone has connected this to the rise of the Neo-
cons. They're all about classism.

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menloparkbum
This is interesting. From life experience (over-educated liberal parents, 4
years in Cambridge, MA, 1 year in Berkeley), the "left-wing" is as class
oriented as the neo-cons (that is, if you can define "class" via degrees
granted). I've been on the hook to marry someone with at _least_ a master's
degree since I turned 25.

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ojbyrne
A master's degree is slightly different from a master's degree from a "good
school." I've also been pushed to associate with well-educated people, but not
necessarily from schools with high tuitions.

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menloparkbum
I guess that is my experience, also. One of the reasons I left Cambridge was
because I found the snobbery alien and slightly revolting. People who go to
Philips Andover and then onto Harvard may be liberal in their politics but are
very neo-con in their classism, even if they didn't start out that way. I
don't remember what essay it was, but I vaguely remember PG writing about
people in Boston trying to become "Thurston Howell III" and this unfortunately
transfered over to much of Cambridge.

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antiform
In Disciplined Minds (a book certainly worth reading, but take with a heavy
grain of salt), Jeff Schmidt made an observation about highly educated people
and their political tendencies that made me stop and rethink my own personal
views.

He believes that while highly educated people are usually considered to be
liberal, they are, in practice, a lot more conservative than they seem. Most
are usually only liberal when it comes to personal viewpoints on social
issues, viewpoints which have little social impact. Many professions which are
usually seen as left-leaning, like university professors, are in fact very
conservative when it comes to beliefs and values that they act upon in the
workplace.

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hugh
That sounds like an interesting book. Does he come at the problem from a left-
wing or right-wing perspective?

In my experience, academic leftism is seen as more of a social obligation than
a set of deeply-held beliefs. (There are, of course, many exceptions).

This, of course, is one of the reasons that I hate to socialise with my fellow
academics.

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joestrickler
<http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html>

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zandorg
I have read most it, so I hope I'm accurate as to its meaning. But Sergey Brin
is an outlier, because as an immigrant he started a tech company. The only
other example of this I can think of, is Max Levchin of Paypal, etc. I don't
see a guy with a lemonade truck as being as profitable as Sergey.

Another point is, those lemonade trucks will be expenses, and most of the
lemonade profits will go to those loan costs. Sergey started off with a low-
spend company.

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wheels
Jerry Yang, Ruppert Murdoch, Shai Agassi, Miguel de Icaza, Loic Lemur, ...
Paul Graham. :-)

...and that's just off the top of my head.

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wheels
Also just noticed that Trevor from YC is an immigrant (though, admittedly,
from Canada) -- so 50% of the YC co-founders immigrated to the US.

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pavelludiq
Sergey Brin and Britney Spierce are in the same category? I didn't know that.

