Japanese 'Prince' Switched At Birth Was Raised A Pauper | Hacker News Reader

Japanese 'Prince' Switched At Birth Was Raised A Pauper

npr.org

76 pointstimr71 comments

If you think about it, it makes no more sense to be angry at having been switched in the hospital than to be angry about having been born to poor parents in the first place. Adding the random element of the hospital switch doesn't make the underlying process any more random than it already was.

And of course while the single data point of the fact that the man ended up being a truck driver, while his counterpart became the president of a real estate company, proves nothing, I do find it an interesting anecdote. People who want to downplay the importance of class delineation like to point to the extraordinary people who rise from poverty into success. But my hunch is that given two individuals of ordinary moral fortitude, the one born into a rich family will tend to be pretty successful, while the one born into a poor family will tend not to be.

Sounds similar to the premise of the 1983 comedy film Trading Places (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086465).

Relevant: http://www.theonion.com/video/ceo-worked-way-up-from-son-of-...

my hunch is that given two individuals of ordinary moral fortitude, the one born into a rich family will tend to be pretty successful, while the one born into a poor family will tend not to be.

Is it even possible to disagree? This seems as obvious as gravity, but the counterargument (if one exists) may be interesting to hear.

I have seen the opposite cases as well:

The one born into a rich family tends to get spoiled, become wasteful and when the money exhausts becomes poor.

The one born into a poor family develops a hard-working attitude, becomes more careful about money, and eventually becomes rich.

A poor person becomes rich only through the exercise of their own expertise.

A rich person can draw on the professional expertise of others in order to stay rich if they are not particularly clever.

This is a huge reason why the rich stay rich.

I doubt anyone would say that rich family leads to poor family and vice versa like some sort of cyclic pattern.

You'd be surprised. There's a certain segment of the population thats finds it vital to their self-image to insist that--in America, now--absolutely anyone from any social background can be guaranteed success if they only work hard and apply themselves; and therefore, if you're poor, you must obviously be lazy and deserve to be poor.

Naturally it's mainly successful people who say this, but they say it with such fervent faith and belief that there's a fair few miserably poor folks who buy it, generally in the form of "I'm better than the rest of you poor bastards 'cause I work hard and I'm gonna be rich any minute now." And then they spend the rest of their lives slaving for minimum wage and not rocking the boat, always convinced that the American Dream is right over the next hill. It's sad.

The Declaration of Independence says "pursuit of Happiness" and anybody can pursue it. I've never met anyone who thought it was a guarantee even with hard work and I live in the area of the country that still believes in the American Dream.

Of course, I also live in the part of the country that doesn't measure happiness by the size of the bank account when you shuffle off the the great beyond. Although the farmers and vocationally trained in the area are doing pretty darn well.

Hard work seems to give one a better chance at reaching your goals, much like exercise seems to help with keeping you healthy. Some folks live a long time without exercising and some die early even when exercising regularly.

"The pursuit of happiness" is an attempt to express human rights in a positive way. That is, rather than say what the state cannot stop you from doing, it attempts to say what it is you are supposed to be allowed to do. This is important because many people will want to say "I agree with human rights but why would you ever want to do X". "The pursuit of happiness" is an expression of what we are trying to protect: people freely choosing the lifestyle that they feel is best.

There is a term for what you describe: The "Just World Fallacy".

It depends on what you define "pretty successful".

If you come from an American point of view, then success = money and nothing else. In America you need lots of money for everything, just giving a good education for your kids is 10 to 15 times more expensive than in Europe or Asia, same with health care.

But on other countries success is defined differently, like having a good relationship with your family and friends.

I know quite a few very rich people, and some of them are as miserable or more miserable as people without money. With broken families, no real friends, and no time for living outside work. With women or men around them that just want their money and will do anything to get it.

> Adding the random element of the hospital switch doesn't make the underlying process any more random than it already was.

if there were an intentional policy of randomly reassigning all children born on the same day to non-birth parents, does it also make no more sense to be angry at this policy than to be angry about some children being born to poor parents?

It doesn't make it any more or less rational. Whether that's enough justification for it to make sense is somewhat subjective.

But: my parents are the people who raised me. If I found out I was adopted or switched at birth I don't think I'd see it any other way. A tiny chunk of dna is barely an investment at all compared to an entire lifetime of money, time, and support (whatever the means).

Also, it's not this guy's parents, of either set, or the hospital's fault that some people get a better education than others. It's society's fault as a whole and it's something that it would be nice if we could work on improving.

Randomizing children at hospitals would likely have big negative impact on society. On the long term, everyone would loose social cohesion because of the lack of bonds between brothers, nieces, whatever.

Families would lose every incentive to have a child in the first place, if it would be randomly switch to another (things like inheritance, family history and lineage comes in my mind). On the other hand, adoption would surely skyrocket.

You don't need biological connection to develop bonds. See adoption, step-children, etc.

That's an incredibly personal subject. Some people can develop such bonds, others cannot get past the perceived distance. The importance of bloodlines runs very deep in most western societies (I don't know much about other societies, so I won't generalize...), and simply saying it is possible ignores a lot of social stigmas and personal attitudes.

The bunch of traditional sayings and tales about stepchildren and stepparents aren't without a basis in reality. You don't neccessarily need biological connection to develop such bonds, but it does have a fairly strong impact and correlation.

No, but the biological bond is started while the child is still in the womb. The child is born with a knowledge of the people around the mother from hearing them while in the womb. If I was in the office, I could site some recent studies, but they should be pretty easy to find. Talking into the belly looks dumb, but it is a pretty good idea for the father.

A real, tangible problem would be, you don't know your family history so you don't know if you have a higher genetic risk for this or that.

There'd probably also be more inbreeding. Not truckloads, but more, just when chance decided to step in.

> Randomizing children at hospitals would likely have big negative impact on society.

I disagree, and I think the opposite could even be true. We are hard wired to protect our biological offspring; if we know that our offspring will be placed randomly into society, we would have greater reason to concern ourselves with the well-being of society in general.

(All successful modern societies have communistic and capitalistic components in simultaneous operation. Capitalism provides the incentive for productivity and communism ensures that incentives can be acted upon by as many people as possible. The most successful societies are arguably ones that balance these aspects well.)

That is precisely the prisoner's dilemma. People have some interest in making society better, but not nearly as much interest as they would have had in improving the well being of their biological children.

Well, there is a slight difference here in that someone made an error for that to happen, which means there is a person responsible, rather than Chance (or whatever you wish to call what assigns us to our parents)

It's chance it happened to him. It's also chance if I happen to get hit by a drunk. Yet we still hold the drunk responsible.

Well, you could say that the system we've created is a result of decisions made by several people, just like a mistake at a hospital is the expression of a fallible system of quality control: You don't design procedures at a hospital based on the assumption that no-one makes a mistake, but try to make sure that when someone makes a mistake, someone else is there to notice (and correct it, if possible, before it causes a serious issue).

By that argument there's people who's responsible for the lack of possibility afforded the poor in both cases -- but in case of the global system we've set up that responsibility has been diluted to the point that we no longer seem to be able (or willing) to hold individuals responsible.

Now, when you raise a kid it's easier to understand what's happening when she/he has the same kind of behaviors, physical type (including heredital illnesses) as you.

For instance if you have weak body defenses and your kids are too, you'll be pretty understanding and know first hand lots of ways to help them, and they'd be handicaped put in other hands. Your kid won't be some random living being alien to you [1], the outcome of putting a kid in another random family doesn't make a balanced experiment about success or failure in society.

[1] that happens with adoption for instance, but that doesn't make a neutral experiment either.

> Now, when you raise a kid it's easier to understand what's happening when she/he has the same kind of behaviors, physical type (including heredital illnesses) as you.

I feel this is a very important concept.

I have some personal experience with aspergers and ASD, and have learned a great deal about how such people look at the world and how that differs from those more neurally typical.

I intend to have children, but I would seriously reconsider bringing someone with my genes into the world without the benefit of my experienced guidance. I would be able to teach them so much that other parents would not even realize they needed to learn. Borderline cases in particular can leave people relatively normal in appearance (although no one who knew me ever called me normal) but completely blind to so much that they need to be able to see to function successfully in the world.

I know it well because there was so much that nobody realized that I needed to learn, and so much needless suffering that I now know is largely preventable. An aware parent with your own genes is irreplaceable.

off topic, but I am curious. How were you able to learn what was necessary to overcome your ASD?

I personally struggle with some of these issues, and while I feel my father shows many of the same symptoms, he happened to grow up in an extremely large family (5 brothers and a sister) which I think helped him to get past the socialization issues.

A woman can have 13 or more children in her reproductive lifecycle. I think you'd have to call this a large family, or at most a very large family, or else I have to call a family with 13 children super extremely large, which is just getting silly. ;)

I wouldn't claim to have overcome my ASD, that sounds like more than I could ever say. What I have is the ability to enjoy my life tenfold more than I could before I came to understand how I think, and how to get along with others, insofar as I have. I can answer your question for my particular case, but the process itself is not easily repeatable.

What I learned from a passing interest in social psychology and repeated examination of significant events in my life gradually imparted an awareness of why some difficulties kept recurring, and also something of an understanding of what brought me to each point along the way. It helped that a close friend was a counselor, who shared with me experiences she had with autistic clients. This was important for providing an objective contrast of the conclusions humans would reach in different situations. I never knew anything I shouldn't, regarding the specifics of an individual or who they were, but I learned enough to gain a certain perspective on how we ASD thinkers tend to think, and what that often overlooks.

Thus the short, useless answer is: by thinking. Funny thing is, I have so little interest in contemplation and reflection, it's amazing I've ever accomplished anything with them.

To me the important thing is a perspective that can only be imparted by experience or a like minded thinker. This is why I believe it is crucially important for me to raise my own biological children. By understanding where they are as they develop, I will be able to guide them in ways I needed by never had. What I know about how other ASD individuals think is incidental. Not something I particularly care about, but something I happened to notice after speaking with some, after gaining my own perspective on very different forms of cognition.

Agreed.

If anything, the parents would have a right to be upset, but not the child.

> But my hunch is that

This is not a hunch right? There's so much evidence supporting this. Off the cuff, I can recall the following the studies. In the US, SAT scores correlate with parental wealth; in India, IIT JEE qualification success correlates with parental wealth; there was this story about 'crack babies' here a few mon ths ago which also cited a long term study showing that kids born in poverty are less likely to complete high-school, college etc.

I'd be interested in studies showing the opposite.

Well, what do you mean by the opposite? SAT scores negatively correlated with parental wealth? Kids born in poverty more likely to complete college?

You can find e.g. that adopted children's income as adults is closely related to their biological parents' adult income, but unrelated to their adoptive parents' adult income.

> You can find e.g. that adopted children's income as adults is closely related to their biological parents' adult income, but unrelated to their adoptive parents' adult income.

I tried looking for a bit but couldn't find a citation for this. Can you help?

http://www.nber.org/papers/w10894

If you listen to the whole thing, they say that the "prince" made some efforts to escape his new fate. They were pretty vague on why the younger siblings of the other guy that lived in the rich family went into all the trouble of not only proving that he is not their brother but in addition to locate their biological one. I would love to hear some details, I don't think that just different appearance would lead to such a commotion.

> the one born into a rich family will tend to be pretty successful

Well chosen word, "successful", because it refers only to income. Happiness itself is more correlated with social integration than money.

Quite. The rich guy seems to have his 3 "brothers" rejecting him.

The craziest part is that the three brothers were so sure that their oldest brother didn't belong that they travelled back 60 years in time to uncover the truth... can you imagine being so convinced someone in your family was an outsider?

Casts my weird uncle in a whole new light.

Before the US was so identity heavy[1], it was not an uncommon phenomena for a family to raise a child as their own[2] and the child not be told. That crazy uncle or great aunt might find out and might not.

In more modern times, questions generally get asked as a result of some blood tests or organ compatibility tests.

1) birth certificate for everything, although I remember an old story that the birth certificate might have been written by a sympathetic official

2) sadly, some stigmas were pretty great

The older brother was also requesting most of their parents heritage and the others weren't frilled by that. It seems their mother first realized the possibility but never bothered to check, and the inheritance problem was a good timing for the siblings to go down the rabbit's hole.

Now, should a lack of biological link count if you've been raised the same as the other natural kids is up to debate, but at least the brothers think that this will push further their position, outside of all the more healthy 'we met at last' feelings.

This is an interesting news story about one case of a "natural experiment" on human beings that would be quite unethical to perform on a large scale. The study of twins reared apart, which was especially active at my alma mater university while I was a student there,[1] took advantage of some other happenstance separations of monozygotic ("identical") twins into more than one family of upbringing to see what effects of home environment on genetically identical young people as they grow up might be.

For behavior genetic studies on fruit flies, direct gene manipulation is considered ethical, and quite harsh environmental tests, tests that would never be considered ethical for mice, are also used. For mice, they can be bred into inbred strains in which every individual for generation after generation is all but identical, and can also be given gene "knockouts" through genetic engineering technology, and the environments can be varied by systematic controlled experiments rather than the haphazardly varying experiences of human beings.

I discuss issues related to this research every week during the school year at my alma mater university with some of the world's leading experts on human behavior genetics.[2] This is a fascinating area of research, and there is always more to learn. Some of the more puzzling questions will probably only get answers as more researchers from varied postgraduate educational background collaborate on conducting continued research.

[1] http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674055469

[2] http://www.psych.umn.edu/research/areas/pib/

I don't suppose anyone knows if there is any ethical review required for experiments on fruit flies?

And, follow up question, at what level (higher or lower than fruit flies) are experimenters allowed to proceed experimenting on life forms without an ethics review.

I used to work in a fly lab. As far as I know, there are no ethical reviews required for insect studies.

I know that animal welfare and ethics reviews are required for mice, rats and other small mammals, but I don't know where a formal line is drawn.

Vertebrates.

And octopuses

I have always wondered: don't adopted children provide another natural experiment, on a much larger scale than the (presumably quite rare) cases of identical twins reared apart?

You don't even have to hope there was another child of the same parents who wasn't sent for adoption (although that would certainly help) - simply control for socioeconomic status and everything, and see what the "intervention" of moving a child to an upper middle class family changes. Or not?

This reminds me of an episode of Curb'd where Larry David is under the impression that he was switched at birth and isn't really Jewish.

This made him giddy and broke imaginary bonds that were the source of his real personal flaws. It was hilarious.

Made me think of the following though experiment: what if we randomly shuffled all babies at birth?

That's an idea. It made me think of philosopher John Rawls' concept of the Veil of Ignorance: what would we all want the world to look like if our place in it was up to chance? How would we write the law of society if we had no way of knowing our place in it?

There add numerous Sci-Fi novels and short stories that this pops up in. One I can think of off the top of my head is The Giver where children are carried by women who have that job and are then assigned to a family unit.

People would rebel with tremendous violence against it. Either you would have a total revolution, or a dual system, where the elites had a separate set of rules for themselves. Probably the latter.

I don't know why but I have a feeling women would be more against it than men.

I'm lead to believe the bond that a mother has for the child that grew inside her for 9 months is something a man can never truly understand. I just asked my wife what she'd do if she found out our 3yr-old daughter wasn't biologically ours. She said she'd keep this child AND fight to get our biological one as well. I said, as painful as it'd be, I'd prefer to give up our current child and get our biological one....

I remember a great science fiction novel, Dancers in the afterglow by Jack L Chalker, (well, it was great when I was in Grade 6) that had people meeting and randomly shuffling their own personalities/experiences with someone else after reaching adulthood. And then, after they had memorized and picked up the new personality, doing it again with someone else.

That's almost like what happens in the sci-fi series Farscape with the peacekeepers. They aren't ever supposed to know their parents, instead they are all raised in orphanages.

And that reminds me of Plato's Republic, in which children are separated from the parents and then brought up by others. The intention being to create ties to the community rather than parental lineage, so that the whole community is one big family.

It doesn't matter who you are. Success seems to be shaped entirely by your environment.

Not entirely. Look at Oprah. But on a general level, yes.

Exception or the rule?

Based on a single 1-in-a billion anecdote, yes. It certainly does seem that way.

The odds of this natural experiment happening at all were quite low, but surely you don't mean to imply that the outcome we have observed would be very unlikely to occur again if the experiment was repeated. I would expect many of the results to be similar to this (in the hypothetical situation where this unethical experiment was done numerous times). Our environments shape us immensely.

The fact that he even got a settlement made me laugh. Being brought up poor is now fair consideration for compensation? I hope every poor person sues the rich for the kleptocracy they have constructed. Oh wait, only the rich can do that. Carry on. But before you leave, I'd like to toast to kleptocracy; never have so few been given so much for doing so little. To plopping out of the right vagina, my friends.

Once I was the King of Spain… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Spain_(song)

> The story has also reignited the nature vs. nurture debate, with, as Lucy points out, many people saying that "this is proof positive that it doesn't matter what your background is, nature cannot overcome nurture, and people who are born into poverty are doomed to stay there."

"With...many people saying that 'this is proof positive...'" is bullshit. You don't have many people saying exactly that. I don't think you even have one person saying exactly that, other than Lucy. Many people? Which people, and where? In Japan? In America? Did you count them? Weasel words, trying to lend credibility to the Lucy's claim that this is proof positive (!) that nature cannot overcome nurture (!). Third clause of this whopper: people who are born into poverty are doomed to stay there. Wow. You know, I'm not altogether sure that the prince-born pauper is actually poor. Going by what we know, he has a job as a truck driver, which is more than can be said for his mother, who was on welfare, and formally poor. He simply couldn't go to high school or college. In other words, he moved up a bit in life, though granted, not much.

And as rayiner pointed out, this is a single data point. It proves nothing.

Now, what if it did prove exactly that nature cannot overcome nurture? This would mean so much! Suddenly, so much of the progressive agenda would be validated! It would truly be bigotry, and literally nothing else, that was responsible for minorities in perpetual plight. It would truly be sexism, and literally nothing else, that was responsible for how many fewer women are CEO's. It would be a rallying cry for the communists of the world to unite against the pure, distilled evil that etcetera.

There's no dearth of evidence showing that, for instance, parental wealth correlates with educational success of children. And then there's a loads of evidence showing that educational outcomes correlate with lifetime earnings.

Have you even tried looking for these citations? It's hard to believe you didn't find them because there is no shortage of published research on this topic. Here's the first link I picked off google scholar: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2673145

How about you provide citations for the case that you are making?

The correlations you present don't inform the nature v nurture debate at all.

The pro-nature side would simply contend that wealth correlates with more advantageous genetics and that the success of their prodigy mostly has to do with the genetics they pass down, and less to do with the economic advantages presented to them

Maybe I didn't make it very clear but I was responding to daniel-cussen's sarcastic comments about "the progressive agenda".

The pro-nature side would simply contend that wealth correlates with more advantageous genetics

Seems like this is easily testable by looking at the distinction in, say, educational outcomes between "old" and "new" money. Are you aware of any citations supporting this hypothesis?

You sound pretty angry. Lucy's claims, true or not, clearly struck a nerve with you. I think even if she did have more data you'd find someway to discredit it. You could have easily just shown the very real examples of rich people from poor origins, but you didn't do that. You jumped straight from poor Japanese man in Japan to minorities & women. Probably because Lucy's comments directly conflict with your world-view and opinions of minorities & women and that's what offended you.

What do you think of the following articles? Do you find their implications as disturbing as Lucy's claims?

"Poor people, generally, make bad decisions—bad in the sense of their long-term physical, mental and financial welfare. But their bad decisions aren't the reason for their poverty. They're caused by it."

@http://killermartinis.kinja.com/why-i-make-terrible-decision....

"Growing up poor is bad for your brain"

@http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/growing-up-poor-is-bad-for-....

  Louis: Looking good, Billy Ray!
  Billy Ray: Feeling good, Louis!

Twist: Pauper guy is Satoshi.

Re-twist: Pauper guy's landlord is the real estate company the other guy runs.

Triple-twist: Property manager woman working for real estate guy is shared love interest, leaves other guy for pauper guy.

Quadruple-twist: They all wind up friends, throwing in city life and moving to the countryside.

Quintuple-twist: The woman winds up working for a country hospital. In closing, she is presented with an opportunity to switch two look-alike babies that have just been delivered...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com