In America, Where You're Born Is Correlated With How Far You'll Go In Life

Thing is, my success is not your success is not their success. If they lead happy and fulfilled lives in that way, is it wrong?

I'm sure it broke a lot of teachers' hearts to see intelligent, gifted pupils throw away a better life to stay in a small town and get by on a HS diploma.

I knew people who turned down full tuition scholarships to the flagship state university because they wanted to follow God and marry a nice boy from their church

Uuuggghh... "follow God"... uggh. Makes me want to puke. I've come to the conclusion that Christianity is just a cult, no better than any of the others, just bigger. And due to its prevalence and ubiquity, more damaging.

The only reason I'm not still there today is that for some reason, as a nerd and social outcast, I rejected that path from an early age and my top priority out of high school was to get the hell out.

Same here. This is why I have mixed feelings about a lot of the commentary on poverty and education and what-not, however. On the one hand, a lot of my county does live in poverty and maybe that argues for some of the social intervention stuff that the Socialist / Progressive camps tend to push for. OTOH, I know from experience that, even growing up somewhere like that, if you want to get out and go build a better life, it is possible. Yeah, it means moving away, but I don't see why that should be considered such a big deal... in the course of human history, people have always moved to new areas to look for better opportunities. Not all will, but those who are motivated to do so, do.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Swamp_(North_Carolina)

People do not want to leave Hattiesburg. It is completely foreign to them. They want to marry young, have children, and stay within a few blocks of their family.

Move to California? You're going to fall into the ocean. Move to New York? Too much city. Move to Texas? Too hot. Each of those arguments is easily debunked. The humidity makes it hotter in MS.

My life changing moment was taking a Greyhound to Wisconsin with $1,000 and starting my life over. Afterwards, I moved from place to place knowing I could make it where ever I ventured to.

I have female friends in MS who got Masters/Ph.Ds and married the same year they got the piece of paper. Never used it once. It saddens me. Some of those people are brilliant beyond my abilities. Yet, they chose to follow the culture of the community.

People are so miserable there, but it all by choice. My mother had cerebral palsy and received a check for $500/month. We lived in a trailer, and I made it out when I was ~21-23. I had no car, fallback, or family to depend on. I just had to take a risk and go with the flow. It pays off well now.

I have offered people from MS jobs here or connections to jobs here. They would never take that bus.

So, unless your income is very high, to avoid having your income canceled out by the local costs, you will either need to find a rare high-paying job in a low-jobs, low-cost city, or find rare low-cost housing in a high-jobs, high-cost city.

Not that this isn't already the case--just saying, I think America's "jobless recovery" is going to make this effect more extreme in the near future.

IMO access to efficient public transportation has an outsized impact on people's ability to move up the economic ladder.

An important note, though: While this data is useful for relative measurements, the absolute gain or loss in income % is less meaningful. For one thing, they're comparing ~30-yo's today to their parents in the "late '90s". Let's say I was 32 in 2012, and we compare my income with my parents' in 1998. In 1998, I would have been 18, which would mean my parents were likely at least 38, and had a few more prime years of earnings growth racked up.

Relatedly, my understanding is that there is a long-term trend towards later earnings years, tied to more professional and graduate education. Today's 30-yo just graduating from medical or business school might be primed to make great money later even if their parents were making more at age 30.

Just fascinating data.

The middle tier is mainly made up of areas where moving from a suburb to a major city does not involve getting on a plane to visit relatives. (Chicago being the exception, not sure why, maybe its proximity to Michigan?).

The lowest areas are primarily the deed south without access to oil/nat gas reserves. The deep south has a triple challenge of low income to reinvest in to school systems, limited opportunities or areas near Detroit which have seen a complete collapse of jobs.

This map is basically a heat map of areas which saw rapid changes to their underlying economies because of forces they could not control.

Are you sure about that? I grew up in Texas and I remember taking Spanish in elementary school.

Or at least what it takes to learn another language according to the school system.

I don't think I could have said it better. I too grew up relatively poor, in a hick area 30 minutes outside of the nearest white trash town, lumber yard, dying steel mill and trailer park.

I never even conceived that I would be able to obtain the life I have now, not even by half. Outside of my school teachers, I knew exactly one person with a college degree (my father) who spent most of his life dealing with family members who attacked him for having one ("so Mr. College, do you want to join us for a family dinner, or are you too good for it?" was a common thread). The available options to me were so limited, and going elsewhere involved so much more money than I had, it was inconceivable that I would have a life other than what I had seen.

I managed to pull myself up just enough to realize I didn't want to work low-paid hourly jobs and drive discount used cars for the rest of my life and enrolled in the local Community College to try and learn a trade.

As it so happens, my wife grew up in a newly wealthy family (her almost entirely uneducated father made a boat load during a housing boom in his native country), and simply "knew" how to operate in the upper-middle class. I met her while she was studying English at the same College as an international student (with the insane international student tuition paid for out of her own pocket). She simply had the cognitive tools to know how to make good money management decisions, how to buy things and haggle for good value, how to represent herself (even as a foreigner) so she'd end up paying the middle-class price for things instead of the poor person's price for things (one of the first lessons I learned, turns out it's cheaper to be richer):

An example:

I grew up where everyone around me bought used cars, some junk, some okay, all had expensive maintenance issues within the first year or two...but it's just what people did. The redneck with 20 cars in his yard? That's because he figures he can by 3 cars at $100 a piece and cannibalize (with hundreds of his own labor hours on top of any extra parts he needs to buy) them to make one good car he can drive for a couple months.

My wife was able to demonstrate that people like my parents, were spending on average, much more per mile over the life of their used car than we would if we bought a cheap new car with a reputation for high reliability. I still drive that same car 11 years later. My current cost per mile, even with high gas prices, is something like $.18 a mile. My parents spend something like $.50-.60 per mile.

And on and on and on. It was an entirely new way of looking at the world that simply never occurred to me or it appears anybody else around me.

Recently, one of my old friends from my hometown was up in a fit that a sweet lease he has on a basement apartment is going to be up in 2 years. This was a problem because he couldn't figure out how to afford the higher rental price that the market had gone to in the last 5 years and thought he might have to move out of state (another strange compunction I'll get to in a minute). I asked him, "wouldn't you be making more money via raises or a new job by then?". "I'm not qualified to get any of the jobs around here, the closest one I could find required at least an Associates Degree or a Certification."

So given a 2 year lead, it never occurred to him that he could simply solve his entire issue by getting some education or a couple of quick certificates out of the way. Worse, and I've found this as very common where I come from, pointing out these simple facts generates lots of very aggressive resistance.

The other strange obsession I've found is the "solution" some find in poor areas or "chasing expenses down". This means that, stuck in a job that's paid the same for the last 10 years, and costs rising, they can no longer afford to stay in their home areas. So the solution is to move to an area that has a lower cost of living -- of course without regard for the lack of jobs.

They try and and "chase" down expenses. This is of course opposite of moving to an expensive city, making much more money only to have it gobbled up by very high living expenses...except in an expensive city, the opportunity to keep moving up ahead of the rising expense curve actually exists. You can't chase down expenses forever, eventually you find yourself in an area with no jobs and miles and miles of endless 4th hand trailer homes and no opportunity to chase expenses down even further.

Being poor without access to what people with money actually do with their money (and how they come about that money) is very very hard for a young person to figure a way out of on their own. It's why poverty is systemic in many areas and the examples that are shown: boxers, basketball players, drug dealers, etc. are the ones kids gravitate towards because that's all they can see.

I tend to take the another point of view on this: a society structured in a way that denies determination to individuals and communities because those people/communities are perceived to be untalented or unworthy is a society that perpetuates injustice and perpetuates and creates institutionalized class divisions.

> The way to maximize success for society as a whole is to maximize the opportunity of its most talented members, by eliminating cultural and social barriers to success.

Is this really true? If we ignore the problems of the average person or community do we really advance society? In a lot of ways western societies now turn a blind eye to class divisions, racism, sexism, etc. Can we say as a society this treatment really advances things? Is advancement for some really a society-wide advancement?

Race still matters, very much.

I think the big take away is that education should be the number one priority. In my situation, my parents pushed either college/university or a trade school. The military wasn't an option (Father, dear, had a terrible time with Vietnam), and getting a job straight out of high school was out as well.

I genuinely believe that the attitude of --you'll go somewhere and study to do something, no matter what-- is what really counts in kids' lives.

Yes, it's much, much, much easier for the ones who have money and cultural capital; but it's the lessons of do anything with your life that seem to impact harder.

"You would be amazed at the things people would give up if they thought "God" told them to."

I wouldn't be surprised at all. My parents made tremendous sacrifices to provide their children with a better life because they believed God wanted them to.

On the flip side, I have often seen people making poor decisions and attributing the decision to what they believed God wanted them to do. However, I don't think it is at all obvious that this is caused by their belief in God. It seems more likely to me that in the absence of belief in God, they would make similarly poor decisions but give different justifications.

Government funding is pretty limited so a lot of schools are supported by the church there, I think the funds are mainly provided by Christian organisations outside of the country.

My theory is that people with a better education are more keen on education. In South Sudan the people in church leadership are highly educated compared with the average person.

I’m not sure how what data on religious people they are referring to. The Bible Belt is clearly deep red in the income mobility map.

So... how often have you moved to where the work was?

So my dad grew up in a village (they didn't get electricity until the 1990's) in Bangladesh. He went to college and graduate school, eventually moved to the U.S., and ultimately my brother and I grew up solidly upper middle class. One thing he always told me is that he was never the hardest worker or the smartest person in his peer group, but was ultimately more successful than nearly everyone he thought was harder working and/or smarter. He said that what he had, in addition to being very smart and very hard working, was being very lucky.

(Actually ours was an SX-64, the ill-fated portable version, which did so poorly that my parents got one from a discount catalog for $50 in 1985, only a year after it debuted at $1000. Folks didn't know what they were missing! Years later we got a full-size C64, and when that broke down, a C128. As far as I know, the SX works fine to this day.)

What you've personally found is that your life is what you make it, despite where you came from and your background. To generalize from you onto everyone else is, as I'm sure you know, faulty thinking.

Especially so when every statistic on social mobility flies in the face of the conclusion you've drawn from your anecdote.

No, it really isn't. Statistics show this very clearly, and this shouldn't require statistics for us to know it.

"Many of us have been extraordinarily lucky—and we did not earn it. Many good people have been extraordinarily unlucky—and they did not deserve it. And yet I get the distinct sense that if I asked some of my readers why they weren’t born with club feet, or orphaned before the age of five, they would not hesitate to take credit for these accomplishments. There is a stunning lack of insight into the unfolding of human events that passes for moral and economic wisdom in some circles. And it is pernicious." http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/how-to-lose-readers-witho...

I want this to be true, I really do; however, the article you're commenting on is telling us exactly the opposite. You're very likely to be here posting this comment I would say because on average people on Hacker News are more driven than an average person. I really think the success stories are exceptions that prove the rule.