This phenomena (that children are not statistically independent of their grandparents even when controlling for parents) has already been found to be robustly true in Europe and some eastern countries. Gregory Clark wrote a book on it that was widely discussed.
The point is that families transmit something across multiple (> 5 generations) that's responsible for strong persistent effects on economic success, and it's almost certainly not money (which can be measured and decays faster).
How can the OP author honestly suggest conclusions about what this means for America without contrasting with Europe, and the known hypotheses? Indeed, Clark argues that multi-generational economic mobility is remarkably constant across vastly different political and economic systems.
I'm skeptical about whether they can really account for available financial resources, broadly measured. Not just how much money you have, or your parents have, but how much money your more distant relatives have, and your friends and neighbors and their friends.
This can have implications that might not come out in the statistics. Even if you don't have any money, if most of the people you're connected to are mostly financially stable, they are (1) less likely to ask you for help and (2) more likely to help you if you need it. Being from a poor family in a poor neighborhood will likely have the opposite effects - they can't help you as much, and are more likely to need your help.
Do you think that hypothesis would hold up to twin studies and adoption studies? Or if you looked at immigrants who moved to countries with no familial ties?
Those sound like good ways to test it, though they have their limitations too. People looking to adopt probably have a stable situation, and immigrants are usually self-selected.
Often times people will compare with Europe when it advances their agenda, or ignore Asia if it advances their pov or just focus on America when it's convenient. Seldom will people do cross country comparisons.
So, whether your issue is guns, drugs, police brutality, censorship, inequality, bias, gender equality, etc. People tend to focus the studies in such a way to make their case and ignore things which would make things more muddled.
Part of the reason why I have not much respect of social sciences. Scientific rigor there seems rather flawed. Even the fact that the topics and tabus change like a slow fashion cycle shows that annealing the truth isn't really the highest commandment there.
A publishing system that treats repeating and potentially nullifying old studies the same as new findings, would go a long way though. There's also no reason why it has to be so linear. Why can't a reviewer accept, but ask the question 'what abou Europe?' publicly, to which thr same or other researchers could attach their studies and get on a fast track to acceptance as well? You know, like an Academic wikipedia in shape of a journal.
Gregory Clark has compared social mobility across the U.K., China and Sweden at the least. The rates of social mobility are almost identical in all of them.
It's genetics, why is this such a mystery? The whole point of evolution is that you pass on good traits. When people do well, they pair with other people who are good genetically, and through the generations, their children do well. Why is this such a mystery?
It's not only genetics. Parents who do well know how the system works and pass that knowledge on to their children. Children who come from poverty have a lot of learning to do and it's hard to do this without role models.
The compounding effects of this learning gap can't be overstated.
One of my best friends who is very intelligent and successful came from a working class family that didn't emphasize sound personal finance education to say the least.
He kept his savings in HS in his "sock in a drawer" account.
I came from an upper middle class family that was the opposite. I was given a share or two of stocks for birthday gifts sometimes (often at my request instead of toys) when I was young to educate me on their value and was taught from a very young age to invest, save in a bank, build credit, and live below my means.
While my friend is doing well financially, you can perhaps guess at how much of his money is invested vs mine.
This story plays out in numerous other ways that also can lead to compounding effects with things like education, health, criminal activity, etc.
These things are picked up on by children from all parts of the family. If your family generally has their act together, knows how to be smart with money, etc. there's probably a good chance of that rubbing off on kids which sets them down a certain path in life that might be very different otherwise.
I have a friend who keeps lots of money in bank accounts, too. He is aware that he could be investing it, but he just doesn't seem to care. It appears to be half "everyone is expecting another financial crisis anyway, if you buy now you're buying high" and half "I just can't be arsed".
Don't forget connections. If your parents know the right people, even in passing, it can help you in substantial ways, and the compounding effects of such benefits early in life (e.g. being able to get into a good college, being able to find a decent job after college, etc.) can translate to significant social mobility.
The genetic explanation doesn't even require a correlation between the traits of people who pair up.
Suppose your grandparents genetic "quality" is statistically independent, so you have four quantities g1, g2, g3, g4. Your parents quality is approximately (g1 + g2) / 2 and (g3 + g4) / 2 and yours is (g1 + g2 + g3 + g4) / 4.
Now if we assume that income is a noisy measure of your "g" then it will follow that your income is correlated with your grandparents' even after accounting for your parents' income.
The problem is that there is too little variation inside families and too much among families.
Let's say that there are exactly two alleles: successful and not successful. So, successful people pairs with successful people and have successful offspring, as you propose. But then, there should be little variability among successful unrelated families, and that is just not so.
Let's say that there are many different alleles that combine in lots of ways: then, there should be lots of variability inside families.
"But then, there should be little variability among successful unrelated families, and that is just not so."
This does not follow from your first statement. It's not a logical conclusion. For your reduction to a binary set of alleles it does, but it does not come close to being an analogy for real life.
Let me try to be more clear: I make two opposite hypotheses: two alleles versus many alleles. The two alleles hypothesis would imply little variability among families, many alleles would imply much variability inside families. Where is my logical error?
Many alleles does not imply more variability if there's a chance of some of those alleles cancelling out.
Think about it in terms of coin flips. One coin flip is random: you get heads or tails with 50% probability. A small number of coin flips can lead to large swings. However, many coin flips reliably produces a Gaussian, with only small statistical fluctuations.
Now imagine that you decree that for the first ten coin flips, if the result comes up tails you'll ignore it. With many flips, you will still get a (somewhat smaller) Gaussian, but with the mean # of heads shifted over by 5.
This is what natural selection & assortative mating does: it doesn't prevent the millions of coin flips from happening, but it eliminates some number of "known bad" outcomes, which will shift the mean over by some amount even as variability remains roughly constant.
While I agree that genetics can play a part, it's certainly not the case that people who 'do well' necessarily 'pair with other people who are good genetically.'
> The point is that families transmit something across multiple (> 5 generations) that's responsible for strong persistent effects on economic success, and it's almost certainly not money (which can be measured and decays faster).
Has it actually been proven that it is not money or stuff that money can buy?
It's been awhile since I was reading into this stuff, but I believe the idea is that these familial success correlations last a long time (Maybe multiple centuries? Certainly at least one) where as money and other forms of success (which are the things we are actually measuring) have significant noise on much shorter timescales. Those fluctuations would kill the long-term correlations if money were doing the heavy lifting.
In other words, if this were being transmitted through money, you'd just condition on the parents (or grandparents) amount of money and expect to find that the success of children to then be independent (unless, e.g., children were all digging up gold secretly left to them by their long-dead great-great-grandparents). But instead, I think the idea is that even after you condition on success of parents and grand parents, the success of great-great-grandparents still has strong predictive ability.
Indeed, if you thought money was playing a significant role, you'd expect that exogenous injections of money would lead to long lasting effects, but in fact they decay very quickly.
That still allows for the possibility that money is buying something that one's ancestors can robustly transmit across many generations (often bundled up under the term "culture"), but then you could test that hypothesis with twin studies and adoption studies.
Anyways, that's a cartoon version, and undoubtedly simplified and biased by the small number of people I was reading. Would love to get counter data.
I liked Gladwell's take in Outliers on this topic.
Impoverished immigrants are more successful than American born poor because of the belief that amount of effort has a high correlation with success/results. This belief is cultivated through culture values (ex: Chinese proverbs on working hard) and working in a profession with a direct link between effort and result (owning tailor shops, dry cleaners, restaurants, etc.).
That mentality is transferred to the immigrant's children, who end up becoming more successful than the children of the American poor despite their parents' inability to teach them English or American culture (advantages that the children of American born poor comparatively have).
This is kind of pre-selection. Immigrants are, by definition the people who were brave and clever enough to get out of their own country and come to their destination. Therefore they are better mentally prepared to succeed in life than general population.
There is also selection bias among them. I.e. It takes motivation/drive/purpose to become an immigrant and travel to another country for work, permanently.
Its rare for family firms to last for 5 generations on one of the rare exception that I know in the UK is Charles wells (the brewer) when one of the board is a family member.
Of course. After all he is seriously suggesting that:
There are genes that are present in every rich person across the planet but absent in every poor one.
That the human genome is so poorly understood, there's plenty room for that hidden in it.
That these genes evolved in the last 15k years (because before agriculture, wealth was limited to what you could carry and everyone was a generalist and so there was no selective pressure)
That they did not evolve at a single site like every other gene (because then we would find all the rich people on earth clustered in one spot with no poor people around with a density spreading outward) so...
The genes appeared coincidentally in every civilization and society independently the same time. In the last 15k years. With very mild or no selective pressure.
And this was discovered by one person (Gregory Clark) with no background in genetics and in opposition to near universal criticism while, coincidentally, telling a story that comforts the rich.
>fewer than 10 percent of people in the bottom fifth of the wealth distribution will make it into the top fifth. Things weren't much better for the middle class: Only about 20 percent of people in the middle fifth would rise into the top fifth over the course of their lives.
Maybe I am a bit confused,
but isn't 20% the exact right amount to move into the top fifth?
This is the problem with using a relative measure rather than an absolute. There can only ever be 20% of people in each relative quintile, but the percentage of the population above and below a given wealth line can change dramatically. If through some social magic, everyone was elevated above the poverty line, you'd still have a lowest quintile.
This also seems a little biased. Sure only 20% might make it from the bottom to the top, but what about the other 80%? Do they just stay there or move up? That would be important to know.
Here's a crazy thought that's illegal to think nowadays. If you want to avoid crazy, illegal thoughts, please stop reading.
Maybe - just maybe - we're not all equal cyphers at birth like we learned in school. Maybe genes are part of the reason a successful person's daughter is successful. Maybe important character traits are heritable. Maybe the 20+ years we spend being raised is less consequential to our character and intelligence than who mom and dad chose as partners.
For example: IQ is highly heritable, and IQ is positively correlated with income, employment status, military rank, having a "socially desirable" job, etc. [1] Perhaps other traits are similarly heritable and correlated with the attainment of traditional markers of success.
Studies like this one on inequality are common - and useless. They ignore the genetic confound, the possibility of genetic influence on the object of study. In this case, why not look at identical twins of rich and poor parents who were raised apart in different environments?
My own suspicion is that our social rules play some role in inequality, but genes play a much larger role than is commonly accepted.
This sounds like a testable hypothesis -- that the effects of genetics should be separable from the effects of upbringing via twin and adoption studies. In fact, I'd wager it's already been done.
From what I understand many twin studies have been done, and generally they indicate a much stronger genetic effect than is generally thought.
But because these kinds of findings are so sensitive and have a long history of being abused, there's a tendency to downplay them or at least avoid discussing them. Maybe even a (slight?) tendency to avoid further research.
But please correct me if I'm wrong. Most of my thoughts on the matter come from one of Steven Pinker's books and I've never done a thorough review on the subject.
I find it honestly disturbing how, throughout the ages, there's always people desperately trying to justify to themselves their exalted station in society.
It's super easy to find examples of old white men talking about how women couldn't handle voting because the blood drain through their ovaries, or racists talking about how the cranial differences explain the difference in intelligence.
And yet in 2016, in the face of massive blatant inequality in living standards between races, and provable systemic obstacles, you still have tons of nerdy LessWrong types talking about how it's time to own up to genetics.
Maybe I'm unusual in that respect - genetic differences are not an emotional subject for me. My 3 siblings and I were adopted at birth, all from different parents. From birth, we had the same environment, but the differences between us in terms of intelligence, interests, education, career tracks, The Big 5 - are extremely dramatic. I'd prefer not to discuss my family too much here, so I'll leave an exercise for the reader instead: imagine the largest possible diversity in all of those categories. You would not be far off.
The differences I've seen between my siblings are much, much greater than those I've usually seen between biological siblings. And the studies I've seen have yielded similar conclusions.
My claim in my original post - that DNA and society both play some role in inequality - seems obvious and benign to me.
Honest question: why do you want this to be false? Do you think we have social policies that promote kindness, tolerance, and charity only because we believe everyone is identical?
Wouldn't it be insane to, for example, study the effect of something (anything) on mortality - without asking study participants if they smoke tobacco? How is adjusting for the tobacco confound moral, but adjusting for genetic confounds immoral?
Wouldn't it be better to follow the truth wherever it leads?
Of course genetics is a factor (and I think you're overplaying the rejection of that), but to what extent does it explain inequality?
Now I haven't personally looked into it in detail, but I'm guessing that, since it's obvious as you say, some studies on inequality have indeed considered genetics. And I think that if the answer was "Yeah, poor people were all just born too dumb to be rich" it would probably have been a pretty big story, and brought up often in these debates.
Since it hasn't, I'm guessing the answer is that it's more complicated than that. Do you have evidence to the contrary?
> Only about 20 percent of people in the middle fifth would rise into the top fifth over the course of their lives.
In an equal system, the middle fifth would be expected to migrate into any of the other four fifths equally. Which means exactly 20 percent of them would head into the top as often as 20 percent would head into the bottom.
This is almost identical to the notorious Manager's Complaint: that 40% of sick days are Mondays and Fridays, insinuating employees aren't really sick because "so many" of them extend the weekend. But with a perfect random distribution of sickness (which is an acceptable assumption), precisely 20% would be on Monday and another 20% would be on Friday.
"...suppose you have a banker whose son decided to become a poet, surrendering a huge income in favor of a more fulfilling career.
"If you just looked at the poet and his daughter, you might think that economic mobility is alive and well in America -- she probably makes a lot more money than her
father does. But actually, the daughter might be drawing on much older, preexisting family resources – such as financial resources, personal connections, or knowledge
about how Wall Street works from her grandfather – that make it easier for her to become a banker than it is for the average kid."
This sort of thing sounds like a plausible explanation for what happened in America during the 60's and 70's, when there was a huge social movement that rejected the materialism and self-centeredness of earlier generations. But then starting with the 80's, most everyone seems to have gone back to trying to make as much money as possible and "looking out for #1" (themselves).
why does the article never consider IQ to be a factor in success? in almost every success story that i come across, the story is about someone who is obviously very smart. and rags to riches stories, stories where a successful person bootstraps him or herself out of an impoverished family, almost always begin with accounts of their gifted childhood.
also, is it not obvious that social mobility is fucked? without unskilled labor, you need capital to get a nice job or start a business.
Poverty and inequality and mobility are all different things, and I think it's perfectly valid to ask what the right amount of mobility is. Obviously it's not 100% of people in the bottom 20% moving to the top because that would just mean that the top moves elsewhere.
I'm not sure it is. If 100% of the population is above the poverty line, how much does mobility matter?
Similarly, if 20% of the population is always below the poverty line, zero sum mobility means that for every person rising out of poverty, someone else sinks into it.
I think the metric we should focus on is reducing poverty.
Even homeless people these days live better than Aztec kings a thousand years ago.
To be facile, if you want to reduce poverty to zero, merely reduce the poverty threshold to zero - as long as you're alive, you're not living in poverty.
Based on standards of living, nobody in the United States right now compared to the rest of the world throughout history is living in poverty.
FTA:
The study focuses specifically on how the educational attainment of families changes over time, which the researchers use as a proxy for economic mobility.
That use as a proxy has not been justified. It is a massive cognitive leap. Nobody brought up poverty in the article.
>Research by economists from Harvard and Berkeley found that fewer than 10 percent of people in the bottom fifth of the wealth distribution will make it into the top fifth.
Poverty is an arbitrary threshold. Its definition if you Google it is "the state of being extremely poor" and as you noted, you can eliminate poverty by reducing the threshold. This is why the article chose quintiles.
As someone else said here, the article is bringing attention to a problem--lack of intergenerational social mobility. This has a lot of implications, one of which is that families born into poverty are unlikely to get out. It has other implications too, such as that middle class families will stay middle class and the elite stay elite. From what I have seen, the middle class are pretty happy being middle class and the elite like being elite, but the anxiety and stress of the low-income lifestyle is pretty horrible for people living in it.
If people were happy at all tiers of the socioeconomic ladder, social mobility wouldn't be worth discussing. We brought up poverty because those are the people who are suffering the worst.
As for living better than Aztec kings, that's too sweeping a claim. Aztec kings might not have been able to enjoy hot pockets or McDonalds, but they knew they were going to have dinner every night.
Edit: I know what you're both saying that being in the bottom 20% does not imply a low standard of living in the same way that being in poverty does. But in the US, the bottom 20% implies a low standard of living. The median net worth for the bottom 20% in 2011 was about -$6,000 [1], which means the lowest income households are consuming more wealth than they are creating. Combine this with the article's thesis that people are stuck in their quintile, and it's a statement that our nation's poorest are not able to escape a cycle of living off subsidies, presumably from the government.
Understood. I am leery of the article because they're trying to conflate two studies, and statements like this:
TFA: Things weren't much better for the middle class: Only about 20 percent of people in the middle fifth would rise into the top fifth over the course of their lives.
Isn't that expected? If you were to just randomly toss names into a hat, and pull out people who would be ranked on the order in which they got pulled out of the hat, wouldn't that be what statistics would say would be the case?
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
> As for living better than Aztec kings, that's too sweeping a claim. Aztec kings might not have been able to enjoy hot pockets or McDonalds, but they knew they were going to have dinner every night.
Anybody in the United States can scrounge one meal a day. It might not be the best food, and not to your liking, but it would be food none the less. The main thing that makes people feel poor is that other people have more than they do.
you have to weigh the removal of that incentive against the degree to which the ability to give your offspring a leg up makes the system inefficient and unappealing
see Adam Smith and the Founding Fathers on eg. inheritance taxes:
> "A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural." Smith said: "There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death."
We're not even talking about money at this point. The study is talking about educational level of children vs. the education of parents and grandparents.
It stands to reason that highly educated parents produce highly educated children - they've been through college, probably know what to do in college wrt financial aid, and probably have more books in the house and talk about more educated things around the dinner table.
How is that ability to give your offspring a leg up going to be removed?
I'm talking generally about "removing the incentive", using the estate tax as an example of removing an incentive that may nevertheless be desirable for efficient market outcomes.
I'm not saying that it maps out 1:1 with this situation. Just observing that the fact that something being a positive incentive isn't sufficient to justify its persistence.
In a rich country, that's a very easy thing to say.
In most of the world and most of human history, success definitely equates to wealth, because the poor are permanently one bad harvest away from starvation. Wealth is the only road towards securing safety for you and your progeny.
Even today in the US, wealth might not imply success, but when unexpected bad things happen, money is the best safety net.
This is anecdotal in some ways but I think some of my observations can be generalized and observed consistently as I've moved to various places.
I have (not a graduate degree but a Bachelors) a degree in Engineering from a top Private University but neither of my parents or their parents even graduated from highschool, much less went to college. I loved to read and learn from a young age, made straight As and thought Engineering would be cool because I liked math and Science but I knew being a Scientist meant long turn around times for learning cycles and now I do software dev because, learning cycles are fast! and I enjoy it, alot.
My parents lived in a trailor park, both druggies, I eventually got an academic scholarship to a private school while my Brother failed out of highschool. My dad has been in and out of prison and my mom would be at home drunk meanwhile I'm going to school day to day with kids who drive beamers to highschool and parents land helicopter to their kids crew meets.
It has been a bizarre experience to be able to be friends with people from my hometown in trailor parks who go to church and walmart and have babies at 17 (basically all of my cousins) and also know and become intimate and working peers with "the super elite".
I want to make a disclaimer that Yes, I acknowledge that some people start off in worse situations and that should be accounted for. This is not an opinion about who deserves what and what is fair and what is not. It's about observing issues people have when they are poor.
When it comes to trying to calibrate and be fair to historically economically disadvantaged ethnicities and demographics, the Government sucks at that.
My dad is full blood Native American (I'm half, and for those of you wondering already. nope. I did not put it on my college application, I left it off and wanted my perfect SAT Score and 3.986 unweighted GPA to be enough to get me into my dream school, and it was).
Welfare and closed off land for Native communities feels (and yes I say feel because I've LIVED in these places) more like a closed off culture for self perpetuating destruction from what I've experienced and also continued to witness from my extended family and their lives.
Issues of proper ways to calibrate disadvantaged people aside. Debates about whether people can get out of those situations and whether some deserve to be there aside.
For all people who are really poor in America, whether fair or right or how they got there, I've noticed that poor people across the board tend to have the following issues:
1. Their economic neediness attaches them to other economically needy people to pool resources like ride sharing, furniture, food, childcare. Therefore, their social networks are closely linked to other needy people. If one person becomes less needy, the balance is offset, people notice and immediately try to maximize the other persons resources because they can benefit greatly from it, obliterating the gains the increased wealth could be used to invest in more long term purchases to set that person up for a more stable life.
It can be done, but usually requires being a black sheep and experiencing an extreme amount of social isolation.
We already know strong social networks correlate with less depression so this creates an incredibly hard to document relationship when it comes to someone breaking out of their network of other economically needy people.
2. They don't realize this is happening. People who are the most self destructive tend to not realize when they are engaging in self destructive habits and with self destructive people. If this is how you grew up, it's hard to understand you deserve to be treated better, and that there are more productive ways to sooth yourself through stressful situations.
3. It is not rocket science for me. I know firsthand there is alot of unintentional emotional manipulation from people who feel threatened by someone else doing better. If you are born to an economically needy and codependent family in an economically needy and codependent community who exists by pooling resources because they are caught in a cycle of being desperate to meet basic life needs and self soothing with instant gratification that is self destructive, it is hard to take increased wealth, keep it to yourself or use it for the good of the community to invest in long term benefits for yourself and the people around you.
4. Investing in education is hard when you are poor, and trying to overcome the learning curve that other more privileged kids around me took for granted like connections to elite companies and institutions, having a dad who was an Engineer help you with your math homework, having a family who stays healthy and has healthy habits, took even more time.
When you are poor, being broke, dealing with stressful relationships and maintaining social connections to people who need you economically takes up time, time that you have even less of when you are making up for the learning curve just to calibrate to the elite.
Most people cannot overcome this even if they try because the emotional and cultural imprisonment, intentioned or not, can be soul crushing, and the guilt tripping associated with "thinking your better than everyone else" forces people in these intermediate situations to "choose sides" and some people don't make the best long term decision for themselves here.
For me, I moved far away for college, and have consistently relocated myself and each time associated with smarter people more aligned with my goals. If I still lived in my hometown and had people whose lives are going poorly around asking me for favours and wanting me to come to family events all of the time, I would not be as successful.
You want to believe that everyone will work as hard as you to make their lives better but the truth is alot of people are scared, don't believe in themselves and American poverty is comfortable enough that its easier to surround yourself with other people in that situation than experience the soul crushing isolation of trying to make yourself better without the full support of your community while also entering into a new community and trying to overcome the inferiority complex.
I'm a female Engineer Age 26 and now I make 6 figures, almost done paying off student loans, which were steep going to a private university, don't tell my family how much I make, live far away from them and am doing freelance software on the side outside of work, working 70hours a week to make passive income and invest more in software and bring those skills back to my niche industry so I can increase my salary even more.
Alot of people tell me "all you care about is money". No, you obviously have never lived on food stamps, lived with a single working mother whose father is in prison, and been sent to live with aunts and uncles when your mother couldnt afford to have you. Being broke is stressful and all consuming and forces you to be dependent on other people who are stuck on making short term economic decisions because they can't save up enough (for whatever reason, legitimate or lack of planning or putting in enough effort, stress, too busy working long hours at min wage etc) to invest in a better life.
Screw you. It's not about the money, its about creating a stable life so I can invest and focus on what I love to do. If I love what i do and I invest in that, I'll get a job doing something I really like, and I will be good at it and want to spend my time doing that, and I'll have the opportunity to work on big problems that help alot of people, and I won't be distracted by my lack of ability to take care of myself or pay my bills.
I've had fake hipsters who are Art Majors "living at home" buying a $5 latte not realizing what an economic luxury it is to sit a coffee shop and "contemplate" life, tell me all I care about is money has never really been poor, and thinks backpacking and asking people for money here and there is a cool socioeconomic experiment (that can be cushioned by crashing at your parents house when it doesnt work out), has idea what they are talking about.
This is an incredibly interesting story. I haven't been through nearly anything as bad as you, but my insight onto the issues of my family were similar - poverty and lack of knowledge and hard psychological issues. Because our society doesn't consider (yet) psychological issues to be "real" in the sense that any other illness is, we get this dumb talk about how "you can get out of it if you want". Yes that might be true, and you are the proof of it. But there is a huge denial going on in our society about how psychology actually works and how bad it can really get before you get marked as a "clinical" case. Society is bleeding people to cure them, to make the analogy with an old medical practice that we now know is insane.
Yeh, I think people underestimate the power of influence and people do not correlate it or study cause and effect enough in studies.
The influence your community has on your personal decisions and how that impacts your personal wealth is significant.
Weve already witnessed highschool suicides tend to happen in clusters. Weve witnessed it as a nation at Gunn Highschool in SanFran and other areas. If one kid does it, the two others who were seriously considering it are more likely to follow through.
This is also a root cause of the housing foreclosure crisis. Wired Magazine did a piece. One of the missing pieces of analysis was the correlation noticed when one person on your street forecloses on a house, how much the likelihood goes up that other people on your street will too. They retroactively did that analysis and found a huge correlation.
We should do this type of correlation in alot more studies, particularly ones dedicated to trying to understand socioeconomic mobility.
I say correlation because correlation is not causation. The causation we can't know right away but it might be helpful to first look at some significant correlations and then try to understand if there is a cause and effect relationship. Or at the very least come up with some likliehood statistics.
How much weight would you put in the saying that you are the average of your five closest friends? Do you have any close friends who didn't make it out?
1. Yeh I would put alot of weight into that. It is honestly some of my closest friends now who said they saw potential in me when I was at my weakest who helped me and put me in touch with other good people.
My exboyfriend and his friends were all Engineers but graduated and wanted to live a comfortable life. I was supposed to marry him and cater to him until I found out he was cheating on me. I left him but the hard part was we had a tight knit group of 20 mutual friends. They were my life but I had to leave them because they all wanted to treat eachother like shit and get comfortable.
It was REALLY hard for 6 months I felt like I had no friends but if I did not have those times I Would have never met the new people in my life, one of which also ended up leaving that group. She is my age and the CEO of a multimillion dollar company. From her I have met so many amazing people and when I share my story they are like "oh yeh I know those kind of people i DO NOT spend time with them."
Then it makes me feel less crazy. When you are an outlier, its more likely people say you are "crazy" what is crazy? Crazy is an extreme outlier. The key is to not be an outlier, by surrounding yourself with people like you..
My ex actually made me believe there was something wrong with me but thats because I was not hanging around other really motivated people who wanted to spend more time doing cool things and less time on drinking and drama. In that circle I was crazy. Even though I act exactly the same, in my new circle, people think I'm awesome and they all really want me to do well.
I look back at my friends from two years ago and I cringe wondering why I ever put up with it. Slightly embarassed I did. When I fly home to visit my family and see their lives, it depresses me.
Definitely want to surround yourself with people who challenge you, not make your feel like "you work too hard. youre crazy. everyone treats eachother this way were ok with it you should be ok with it too."
Thats a self esteem killer.
Oh sorry did not answer second question.
2. Yes I have friends from my hometown who are heroine addicts, and no I cannot be too close to them because they end up asking for money and it causes alot of tension in the relationship.
And yes most of my female friends, even the highly educated ones, actually are settling for men who they have lots of problems with but they are comfortable with eachother because they have been together for so long. THey have given up good jobs to move to their boyfriends new jobs even though their boyfriends would not do the same for them. It's hard to see smart motivated girls slowly settle over time and our lives go in different directions, but already years later I look back and look at their lives and know I made the right decision for myself.
If you are an attractive smart female in tech, alot of guys want to date you. I think that makes it really easy for a female in that position to actually marry another successful person and get comfortable spending more time on the relationship than on their career. There will always be men vying for that spot.
It was a tad weird because I Expected women in tech, like the females I met at Engineering school to be very feminist and independent, but because they are a scarce and highly coveted resource, men rise to the challenge to accomodate them and alot of women get comfortable with that.
Would I say they didn't make it? I dont know about that. They will live financially successful lives still and live at the upper income. Will they reach their full potential that way? No, but I could ask myself that question everyday and always push myself harder.
Did you find this new group of friends before or after you left college? How did you find them? For many people, it's quite hard to find friends once out of university.
Basically one kid who worked for the startup I worked for right out of college started inviting me out for drinks with his friends, after I quit the company we both worked for to work for another company.
We both found out we live a few blocks from eachother downtown so we would meet up and catch up, he would update me on how the company is going, and I would update him on my new company because he originally had wanted to work there years before.
From there, he introduced me to people who were also really smart motivated people working for startups and we would all meet up once every week or so for drinks or coffee. From there I met alot of great people, some from my university, some not.
I agree it is harder to find friends once you graduate, but at the end of the day you have to be willing to put yourself out there. I am a very shy person and if I had not been invited out with that group of people by someone I had gone to class and ended up working closely with at my old company, I may not have felt comfortable just going out with people for drinks.
if you livei n a bigger city, reddit meetups are great, and going on eventbrite and going to entrepreneurial events is good. Even if you are not looking for a new job, that demographic is more likely to have self starter smart motivated ambitious people that you will run into, if thats the crowd you are looking to run with.
Native American Father: Great grandparents hung by the KKK in South Georgia in the center of my hometown. No Formal education.
White Mother: Great Grandparents rich oil $$$ in Texas. Wife no formal education, alcoholic. Father business degree white men making oil money in Texas. Had ONE child. The ONE child was a girl (My grandmother). Rich Girls in Texas are not allowed to learn how to handle money. She went to finishing school. She inherited the money, and did as she was told and taught, gave her money to the man to let men handle the money.
Married a Southern babtist preacher and he squandered it all in 5 years dont know how. BY the time my mom was born they lived on a farm in South Georgia and he was preaching at his church.
My mom was a preachers daughter who fell in love with the Poor Native American kid in South Georgia, from the Natives who refused to go on the trail of tears.
It was the beginning of a BEAUTIFUL LOVE STORY! lol. and the rest is history as they say.
and yeh, my mom is extremely religious as is all my family. I am not. So add that onto the list of socially isolating struggles and criticism I had to deal with. I was taught women are not supposed to talk about science or politics, and that science is a scheme to eliminate god from the equation. Ummm yup, it is! It's a pretty good one too, trying to replace God with understanding and answers.
So In Summary
Background
FEMALE
NATIVE AMERICAN
CHRISTIAN
WELFARE POOR
goes to be an Electrical Engineer working in a male dominated environment, compounding every minority status to the extreme. Dude, its been an interesting ride but I can tell you one thing, I don't give a F^%& about what other people think now because I'm used to being an outlier, so I HAD to overcome that to do well and have good self esteem and tell myself I can keep learning and do well.
Some people would complain and say its been hard. It has been hard and socially isolating but actually if you choose and force yourself to look at your uniqueness as an advantage I think about things differently and it usually gives me an edge in applying ideas I have or understanding how to communicate and implement them. People get scared or attack things they don't understand. I'm not as understandable or relatable to other people but the more you hang out with intelligent people the less they do that so its just motivation to be around better people and do better things and work on more challenging things.
Also, people will try to tear you down at first, but if you hold your ground and respect yourself and respect other people regardless of how they respect themselves and how they respect you, eventually they will respect you, but theres not alot of instant gratification here, so I can only say this in retrospect.
Is this headline not the very definition of scare-mongering? I'm all for a rational discussion of inequality; but my experience with similarly-titled articles suggests I will find just the opposite therein.
"...conventional measures of immobility, which just look at parents and children, have underestimated mobility by 20 percent compared to looking at three generations or more"
20 percent of anything is a pretty big difference. If the study has merit then the news could be called "striking".
the headline has been updated since my previous post, and for the better. thanks, even small steps towards more civil discourse do matter. the title on the linked article is, of course, unchanged.
I would love to know how they link 3,4 And 5 generations, being an amateur genealogist.
Speaking personally, Family pressure to obtain degrees came from gggGF. But "women don't go to college." meant the females went only After their mother paid. (And could). Marrying "up" was the only obvious decision looking back on female members of our tree (from 1853-1946)
No surprise in social mobility being unequal, but isn't years of education a poor measure to go by in the first place? They also mention 5% of the bottom 1/5th making it to the top 5th and 20% of the second fifth making it to the top fifth. Wouldn't a better measure be to feature the % of people that move up at least one fifth? That would tell a completely different story
Is "ability", or market value, static over time? I don't think it is, wrt both an individual's ability to change learn and grow (short term), as well as natural changes in the market (long term).
This doesn't disprove your statement--social mobility can still go to zero--but I think it's something that people can, should, and do strive to make as large as possible, be it individually, through legislation, etc.
The irony of WashPo publishing this article when Bezos has been under fire for near-servitude conditions in AMZN facilities for years, is palpable.
It's common sense that certain people are predisposed to learning certain fields quickly, especially given a family tradition.
I mean, consider a family where the husband is a carpenter. Then, one day his son decides that he's going to be a carpenter, but his dad has retired so he find another carpenter to apprentice under. That very same day, the carpenter actually hires another apprentice from a family of bankers. Which apprentice would be MOST LIKELY to become the superior apprentice, learn quicker than the other one, complete more satisfactory work, etc?
Multiply that by a hundred years or so, thousands of industries, millions of families, and there it is. Maybe the banker-family-apprentice has a knack for it, and becomes a carpenter one day. If he sticks with it long enough, surely he'll figure the work out. That's what mobility is all about anyways, being able to adapt to new circumstances.
I don't really buy in to this idea that there's shame in coming from a family that has done well. Now, this is from someone (me) who comes from a "family" that has done very poorly, and I've done sorta kinda good. The banker-apprentice has as much chance and opportunity to become a carpenter as the other one, since they were both chosen in the first place.
Knowledge isn't some heirarchical weapon that only the privileged elite can obtain.
"– such as financial resources, personal connections, or knowledge about how Wall Street works from her grandfather – that make it easier for her to become a banker than it is for the average kid."
What about the library? The NYPL SIBL has an entire section of FREE textbooks. You want to learn about Wall St? Free. You want to take the series 7? Free. You want to take the series 66? Free.
The phrasing of "surrendering a larger income to write poetry" or whatever it was, is some sort of prose gymnastics that I think is trying to imply that people are "destined" to become poets, and that there's some boogieman to point the finger at and scream about inequality. If you wanna get rich, maybe you should think twice about writing poems. If you want to create art and have some sort of impact on the social sphere, maybe you should think twice about sacrificing your life for FINRA's sick amusement, - I mean premiere regulatory excellence.
Anyways, this was an OK article. I chuckle whenever I see WashPo trying this pandering to try and convince ambitionless people it's the rest of the world's fault, somehow.
I find this perspective frighteningly cynical and self-perpetuating. Government policy is one of the few mechanisms that has the possibility to address (if not fix) systemic inequality. And I think there's broad agreement across the political spectrum that inequality is a problem; rather, there are disagreements about how to best address it (social welfare and regulation vs. efficient markets). This isn't ammunition for political agendas---improving equality should be a central objective function of any democratic political system.
"This isn't ammunition for political agendas---improving equality should be a central objective function of any democratic political system."
- proceeds to advocate a particular political agenda. While "government should promote equality" is a statement virtually everyone would agree with, how much equality, what else to compromise in order to get it, and what equality even means are in fact not widely agreed upon.
"Do you feel that the distribution of money and wealth in this country is fair, or do you feel that the money and wealth in this country should be more evenly distributed among more people?"
'Should be more even': 44% for Republicans, 89% for Democrats, 66% for Independents
This was back in 2015 -- given the way the campaign has gone this year, I'd expect those numbers to have risen.
Why must you ignore opposing viewpoints "in order to stomach American political discourse"? I find this point quite dismaying. Speaking as someone who has strong views, I think we should all strive to grant our intellectual opponents the respect we expect from them, and we should endeavor to understand their views. Ideally you would put yourself in the position where you could argue their side of the debate in a manner indistinguishable from them (according to them), only then could you claim to understand them.
>which imbues the government with the imaginary omnipotence
No it merely recognises that the government, by its nature, is in a unique position to attempt to tackle these problems, because pretty much any other actor has neither the power nor the inclination to do so.
> What evidence do you have that this possibility exists at all?
Perhaps there is none. But unless you can prove that, I'd rather continue trying, because inequality sucks pretty bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book)
The point is that families transmit something across multiple (> 5 generations) that's responsible for strong persistent effects on economic success, and it's almost certainly not money (which can be measured and decays faster).
How can the OP author honestly suggest conclusions about what this means for America without contrasting with Europe, and the known hypotheses? Indeed, Clark argues that multi-generational economic mobility is remarkably constant across vastly different political and economic systems.