What Does It Take to Climb Up the Ladder?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> the expected returns to child investments by parents with > limited resources and uncertain futures may be lower than > for more educated parents with greater and more secure > investment capabilities.
Sure we live in a capitalist society, but treating my sons like an "investment opportunity" looks crazy.
A common share of Google may give you financial value in return, whereas a child will give you emotional or psychological return. Technically, children should be classified as more of an investment than stock because they can go work and provide for you financially while still giving you emotional value. Stock can't really give you emotional value (other than pride).
Things.
There's an old saying: Everyone has a price. I'm not convinced it's 100% true for everyone on every topic, but in general terms, it holds quite well.
In other words, they're suggesting that not only are children in these disadvantaged situations starting off in a worse place, but each additional dollar or hour of time spent on them gives less benefit than that same dollar or hour as a child from a more privileged background, further widening the spread between these two kids.
Children were investment opportunities before capitalism. Retirement, genetic success, tribal power, I'm sure I'm missing some. If you interact with powerful families, the CGP Grey video above becomes very evident - you hit talk of people referring to families rather than individuals - "the kennedys are . . . ".
Yes, it can be chilling to see someone explicitly state implicit calculations that have been done for centuries.
How many times have you seen a powerful world leader without a family or children?
Isn't improving chances for all going to create misery for those that have their prospects raised, but whose ambition exceeds their talent? I'm reminded of an essay titled The Rise of the Meritocracy in which if I recall correctly a perfect meritocracy is depicted, and one of the problems is that the unsuccessful genuinely have no one to blame but themselves for their status and are even more miserable as a result!
I still think there would be interesting problems to solve, even in a perfectly educated society. I don't want to be a brain surgeon, or any surgeon, or anything really in the medical field. There is a theory that some people are "naturally inclined" to certain tasks and maybe we could realize that and have a society that allows everyone to specialize in that...
Many people may want to be a professional beer taster, but we don't need very many of them.
Why does the author dismiss the possibility that the argument has at least some truth to it?
For a variety of reasons, some which are due to government policy, the necessity of marriage has reduced dramatically.
That's good in many ways, such as reducing abusive situations. But it also means that people who could get married peacefully choose not to, to the detriment of their children.
Students may left to figure out successful habits on their own. I believe education could be improved by officially defining successful habits. It may sound silly to have Tony Robbins courses taught in school but something along those lines could have great benefits. As it stands today, parents are left to define successful habits and that is not happening for every child growing up.
I would suggest that some portion of intelligence has a hereditary factor, and (outside entertainment and professional sports) intelligence has a correlation with income levels.
Maybe those kids from more wealthy/well-educated families are more persistent and tempered because their self-image aligns with society's looming popular image of what people /should/ be: wealthy, polymath millionaires.
This is a great article but this point kind of made me chuckle. "Has become?" It's always been that.
Marriage has been and is many other things, too. It's has been a tool women have used to escape their parent's house. It's been used to build social ties among disparate groups, as well as maintain social ties within tight knit communities. It's been a union of two humans in the eyes of God. It's been a tool for subjugating women, and social control.
College graduates are getting married less, and later. The point of that sentence, I think, is that the values driving the decision to get married have shifted, and are somewhat stratified by socioeconomic status.
In any event, in 2017 and 5000 you'll be able to spend your life arguing what a fact is. I'm an atheist, but I'm totally OK with that comment. People should relax across the theological board...
I don't believe in the Judaeo-Christian God either, but I don't feel compelled to make nasty remarks about it in public. Other people have different beliefs than you. Judge them on their behavior, not their beliefs.
Now it seems like the auto response to someone saying something distasteful and liberal is to say "you, saying stuff like this that I don't like, that's why Trump got elected" and intended or not it's an implicit threat -- don't say things I don't like or else we'll get another Trump.
People being rude on the Internet is NOT why Trump won the election and believing so, and letting people hold you and what you say hostage with the threat "I might vote for Trump again if you e.g. defend feminism too rigorously and loudly, watch it liberal" isn't sustainable or acceptable.
But you're right the comment you're referring to was very rude and unacceptable, my response is intended towards this sort of response /in general/.
There's a difference between between not respecting a person's beliefs, and not respecting a person because of their beliefs. It is possible to engage in the former while not engaging in the latter.
This breaks down, though, when people somehow equate what they believe with who they are, and thus if you attack their beliefs in any manner, somehow you are now attacking them. This isn't confined to any particular belief system or ideology (you see it in liberals as well). One should, however, be on guard to not let this kind of conflation happen to themselves, because it does nothing to further discussion or reflection upon the ideas/beliefs, and their likely veracity or usefulness to themselves and/or society at large.
Unfortunately, many people lack this kind of ability to self-reflect and understand that they are not being attacked or derided, but rather their ideas and beliefs are. There are very few cases in which an individual should not be respected because of their beliefs; these cases are typically when society has deemed such ideas/beliefs to be harmful or dangerous to society or others, yet they continue to hold onto those ideas/beliefs and/or promote them as well.
Otherwise, except for those cases, one should feel free to criticize, attack, or disrespect beliefs apart from the individual holding them, and that person should also understand that they are not the target of such - and should self-reflect upon why their beliefs are being viewed this way.
Of course - this can lead to absurdities - for instance, if all of a society deemed that hitting oneself in the head with a hammer was the way to cure a headache, despite objective evidence - to go against this idea while being in the minority can and would be extremely maddening and depressing.
One can thus understand why being an atheist in a country that is mostly religious, has almost no representation within their country's government, while being told that they are part of the problems of that country, that they are the immoral ones (despite what statistics really show about crime and incarceration demographically), and that the religious ones (and mainly of a particular religion) are the ones being suppressed (again, never mind the real objective facts of the matter) - can be an almost Kafka-esque experience...
There is no separation here, and particularly not in the case of religious beliefs.
The type of belief a person can disidentify with, and evaluate objectively without emotional response, is basically a very narrow subset of beliefs that are limited to things that are 1) empirically falsifiable and 2) not fettered with excessive social attachments.
almost no beliefs meet both of those criteria. the vast majority of people's beliefs, ESPECIALLY RELIGIOUS BELIEFS, are core to identity and must be treated as such during discourse if we have any expectation of getting good political and social outcomes.
I realize this is very disappointing to people who live a very rationalist, atheist, materialist world. The standards of discourse in that world are extremely different than in the world of religious belief. There is a huge difference between ecumenicism and rational debate. It's even more painful in that the irrational behaviors of some religious groups result in a lot of nastiness directed at non-believers. I don't like that either. It's not ok. However, the solution to it is not to be nasty back to them (or pre-emptively nasty to them). That only makes the already bad situation worse.
I'm a political realist. I don't like that intolerant religious fanatics have as much influence as they do, but that is the situation we find ourselves in. I try to behave appropriately given the world we live in. Save myself and my loved ones a lot of grief while focusing on actions that can actually make a difference, and in particular not making things worse by provoking a group of people that is in a position to hurt you.
For one thing, it made sense financially because the gov't stopped counting my parent's money (that I couldn't touch) when determining how much aid I received.
It was also nice just to have someone to help me out with things (eating decently, remembering to print homework, etc.)
And, of course, the usual benefits of being married...
Can confirm. If my (now) wife and I'd gotten married freshman year instead of waiting until junior year we'd have saved a hell of a lot of money.
> It was also nice just to have someone to help me out with things (eating decently, remembering to print homework, etc.)
Works both ways. One person's ice-cream craving easily becomes both people eating ice cream, to pick an example. Or "I'm in a hurry and hitting Arby's, do you want me to bring you something?". Well, I didn't, but now I guess I do.
Much easier to eat healthy solo unless you marry someone with significantly healthier eating habits than yours, IMO. Even if they're just similar to yours there's a good chance you'll end up eating more junk for the above reason. And such habits can drift over the years.
Marriage could be considered a serious life hack.
I think it is, by some. One of the things I learned in college economics was that, statistically speaking, the single most certain way to avoid poverty is get married.
In the past, you would marry for many different reasons that had nothing to do with children - including simply social pressure or wish to be more independent from parents.
Neither my wife or I did any enriching activities as kids. We ran around outside and played with sticks, or sat around and read. Teach your kids to read as quickly as you can, because then they can entertain themselves and leave you alone.
Not just this, but educate themselves too. Best Child-Hack you can do is teach them to love reading.
I love the NYT. Years ago, when I got into it, I was blown away by Krugman, Kristof, Friedman (yes), and even David Brooks. They sounded sensible, nuanced, and intelligent.
A lof of that hasn't changed (except perhaps my opinion of Friedman!), but NYT's comment section is a cesspool. I'm as liberal as they come, but every NYT comment section is effectively blaming the right-wing regardless of the context of the article. When Brooks talks about values for example, or "social fabric", I think he does a good job of being reasonable, and if the article were from "anon" vs. Brooks, people would say "Yeah, sounds about right." Instead, all we get are "David, your party caused this, blah blah blah".
Even in this article, there is a lot of data and lots of food for thought. And yet, the top comment starts out: "Is the problem "single mothers" or is it the right-wingers who conspire to create, perpetuate, and steadily increase economic inequality?"
It's as if you only care about establishing what side the author belongs too, argument be damned.
In a sense the net, first seen as flattening the classes, have instead empowered the elite to make both Stasi and Bernays look like bungling idiots.
Rather than crude manual policing etc, computers can both monitor all activity online (and offline, thanks to the likes of smartphones) and insert data to affect opinions and future activity.
edit for clarification.
'The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.'
I would happily vote for any politician, party be damned, who talked about the importance of listening to multiple perspectives, compromising and not simply wielding a narrow majority like a club against the losers.
Historically speaking the prejudice against single parent families and single mothers has been punitive to the point of some extremely dark places: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/07/cathol...
So a lot of "jumping the gun" goes on: as soon as it looks like the discussion might be heading in the direction of criticising single parents, get your retaliation in first.
They've advocated for war and economic oppression, for a living, for decades.
To answer your question, yes, the the problem is, in fact, people (right wingers and otherwise) who conspire to create, perpetuate, and steadily increase economic inequality.
Since the author seems to be advocating efforts to change personal traits (rather than societal systems) as the main focus of combating inequality, I think the types of question the questioner is asking are extremely important (even if the question itself is rather blunt).
I mean, it's not like it's all that difficult to rephrase the question in a way to be less thought-terminating (and this is literally one substitution, you can imagine even more eloquent ways of phrasing it):
> "Is the problem "single mothers" or is it the people who conspire to create, perpetuate, and steadily increase economic inequality?"
I want to believe that most people KNOW this, and it's merely "virtue signaling" as another poster noted. An easy way to vent frustration, maybe. But it's not a question that asks for sensible discussion. It's a "when did you stop hitting your wife?" type of question - one that insults the very people you really want to answer the question. How do you expect to have a reasonable discussion like that?
> I want to believe that most people KNOW this, and it's merely "virtue signaling" as another poster noted. An easy way to vent frustration, maybe. But it's not a question that asks for sensible discussion. It's a "when did you stop hitting your wife?" type of question - one that insults the very people you really want to answer the question. How do you expect to have a reasonable discussion like that?
As something like:
> This type of comment probably isn't the type that would best encourage an open debate with someone on the Right. My personal suggestion would be something that addresses individual policies and avoids a monolithic view of one side of the political spectrum.
It would be more diplomatic, sure. But is that closer to what you really wanted to express? Maybe not.
Sure, and that's my point: Are you just venting? Fine. You're making a choice to vent your frustrations and not hoping to actually have a discussion. You're making yourself feel better. There's nothing wrong with that, either. We all vent in different ways.
It's just unfortunate that many people choose to make internet comments the location of their venting. Worse, this becomes the sort of discourse that we come to expect from any sort of public internet forum. We don't expect reasonable discussion: We expect angry people yelling about the other team and how their team is the best team. It's become a stadium full of drunk fans.
> It would be more diplomatic, sure.
Eh, not really: I never mentioned left/right in that chunk of text on purpose (because I think both "teams" do it). So your rewrite is actually significantly less diplomatic because it singles out one group of people who previously were part of a larger group.
Might seem annoying of me to call you out on this (and I fully understand why you assumed that given the context of our discussion), but I think it's an important correction nonetheless.
You were directing your remarks at the writer of the comment and those that write similar comments. Not everything is a Left/Right divide.
I'm not sure where you find issue with the comment "This type of comment probably isn't the type that would best encourage an open debate with someone on the Right" since you're saying that making the comment about the Right shuts down discussion and that you would remove it. I think it's more diplomatic to comment to make about the author than saying something like "I want to believe that most people KNOW this, and it's merely 'virtue signaling' as another poster noted."
But perhaps that brings about another point - different people have different opinions about what kind of discourse is more diplomatic and which is less. I think my revised version of your comment is obviously more diplomatic; you disagree. You think your revised version of the NY Times comment is obviously more diplomatic; it's quite possible that the author would disagree.
I've noticed it too and it affects all layers of the paper, not just the opinion pages. The news reporting has become much worse as well. Distorted, biased, propagandized. Dubious sources. Anonymous political operatives leaking rumors to the NYTimes for pure gamesmanship in their ongoing partisan (and internecine) warfare. The NYTimes has become a pawn in a geopolitical and national power game being played by factions that have very little accountability and no transparency.
On top of this the Times has really raced to the bottom to get more eyeballs on ads. They have succumbed to market pressure to cater to their audience's biases and preferences. They are optimizing for FB shares and retweets just like everyone else in the business. This is destroying our society. The Times will not be judged kindly by history.
I call this the "Fox News-ification" of American society. Fox started it and it worked for them so now everyone is doing it. We're suffering the consequences of it.
If you aren't reading the articles to the end (not to suggest that you personally aren't) it would be easy to feel the commentators are unfairly jumping on him. But I think they have also observed the same pattern and feel that he is playing a softly-spoken rearguard for odious views and policies.
Isn't the article implying that even the very desire and will to climb it are significantly influenced by upbringing, income, etc?
So even if two feet and the desire were all you really needed, you'd still be at a disadvantage compared to people in different income brackets and more stable family status.