Is a Hard Life Inherited?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
So, yes, while there are always exceptions, poor families will mostly yield people who will not move away from poverty.
It is as unreasonable to say to those people "move out and get a better job" as to say to a clinically depressed person "oh cheer up, it's all in your head": no, such problems are actually not the problems of attitude and positive thinking, but have external causes and factors (i.e. external to the mind).
One example of such a factor could be poor work habits learned from their parents - but still it's a trait derived from those particular parents. Unless the person sees or learns about "better" work habits somehow, he will in all probability not conclude that is one of his problems all by himself.
The chain of causality from parent's success (or lack thereof) to children's success doesn't only go via the parents direct influence on the children, but probably more through the environment they have the means and foresight to provide.
Yes, my parents were poor and struggling. But they pushed through, made sacrifices and made sure that me and my sister had a good start in life. Free from the burdens that they bore.
To me, the line of responsibility does not cross over a generational boundary. All these individuals that have rough and tough childhoods, are responsible for their own actions. And they're also responsible for not ruining an innocent's or unborn's future by bringing them into this world, and then abandoning them by not doing their best to break the cycle of violence, poverty and lack of education.
It's kind of sad, really. Because at the end of the day, there are a lot of individuals who will always suffer no matter how much we help them (or how much money we throw at them). And then we go ahead, with our noble, but misguided consciences and tell them it's not their fault. Relieving them of the single greatest motivator for their own success, perhaps their last.
Of course not. I'm blaming the children for having inadequate parents and forcing the same on to their own children! Quite a big difference.
So -- success of parents, yes, it's a strong predictor. During formative years, not really relevant.
Be careful reading it though, facts are racist.
When I contrast the image I get by consuming American media and what I witness here, the contrast is astonishing. Social mobility seems to be much more prevalent here than in the states. Of course, the gap between "poors" and "rich" is much smaller. But I can legitimately say that everyone here has a chance to make it. It might be harder for some, but it's rare to really have your head under the water, as I've heard happens often to poor people in the states (too many accounts, both from traditional and social media, too discount as pure fancy).
It's shocking that education is not a right. Here, it costs less than half a month salary to get tuition for a year; and the level is good besides (w.r.t. the states, not saying it couldn't be better).
And in the end? The quality of life is I believe the same here as in most well off places in the states. But the people at the bottom suffer less. That's a win in my book.
That's not to say that things don't need to change or that they have to be this way, but I think it will require more than simply copying Europe.
That's certainly more interesting than just the generic European.
EDIT: I mean: saying that you are of a certain nationality is more specific, and therefore more interesting, than just saying that you are from somewhere on that continent!
"White Male Privilege Squandered On Job At Best Buy
HAMILTON, OH—Despite being the beneficiary of numerous societal advantages and having faced little to no major adversity throughout his life, local man Travis Benton has spent the last four years squandering his white male privilege on a sales floor job at Best Buy, sources confirmed Tuesday. “You can get by with a regular HDMI cable, but if you’re looking at a length longer than 10 feet, I’d go with a gold-tipped one,” said the man dressed in a bright blue polo shirt and pin-on name tag as he continued to fritter away such innate life advantages as greater access to higher education, leniency from the justice system, and favorable treatment from other white males who lead and make hiring decisions at a disproportionately high number of American companies. “The AudioQuest gold-tip is actually the cable I use in my own home entertainment center and it provides excellent audio and video clarity, plus it comes with a full five-year warranty, unlike the 90-day warranty of a bargain brand. For your money, you’re not going to find a better cable.” At press time, the man born into the world’s most affluent and privileged socioeconomic group was spending his 15-minute break silently consuming a sleeve of Donettes purchased out of a vending machine."
http://www.theonion.com/articles/white-male-privilege-squand...
White male privilege is different from the disadvantages low-income people face. There are 50 daily effects of white privilege in McIntosh's original essay, most of which are about how if one is not white then their motivations and successes may often be seen through a lens of their race.
The idea that a white male from a rural, low-income community has the same advantage as a white male from a middle or upper class urban area is weird to me. This is about socioeconomic status, not race. Your Onion quote fails to differentiate, but... it's The Onion, isn't it.
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack: http://amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html
Eloquent or not, I thought that the supplied article was irresponsible and lacked substance.
I sincerely hope that the given name "Travis Benton", is a pseudonym (and that photograph is not of him). If a potential employer has perused this article, it could effect his chances of gaining more suitable or substantial employment.
The article has possibly put "Mr. Benton" at a serious disadvantage in life. If a similar article was published about me I would call up the editor and shoot hell-fire down the phone.
EDIT: This indicates that the original comment [0] is quite opaque.
I used to think tribal divisions are characteristic of the earlier stages of human development. I don't think that's actually true. Humans everywhere live in tribes. In the developed countries people have simply found other characteristics than ethnicity to peek at in our tribal membership classifiers.
Yes, but you should take care to not attribute their definitions of "us" and "them", with the ones you imagine they do. It's all too-popular to assume that they mean "us, wealthy" and "them, lazy entitled leeches".
It could just as well mean something a little more genuine such as "us, hardworking" and "them, mooching off the state/our hardwork".
I'm not saying it's either. But I find that people regularly attribute very mean, hateful and prejudiced motivations to the rich, privileged or those they don't like. Most of the time, it's simply implied in the comments.
Your point stands, though. I seriously doubt anyone's being deliberately mean or hateful. They just genuinely believe that they succeeded on their own merits.
I also think that most definitions of "us" and "them" are usually after-the-fact justifications for including/excluding people from a group. The groups form, then the criteria arise, not vice versa. But I have nothing to back that up. It's just something worth considering when seeing the categorisations people discriminate based on.
4 Things Politicians Will Never Understand About Poor People
http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-politicians-will-never-...
(When I posted the same link before, it generated a large number of responses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6383275)
The ability to work hard (conscientiousness) and intelligence are also heritable to a significant degree. The central supposed conflict between inherited privilege and innate qualities simply doesn't exist because our qualities are inherited[1].
This always surprises me when I read about privilege and related subjects, the fixation on race, sex and, as in this case, class. I can name at least five factors that matter much more for your life outcomes:
1. conscientiousness,
2. being born in or able to move to the first world,
3. intelligence,
4. conscientiousness again,
5. and looks (face symmetry, height).
OK, I cheated a little but conscientiousness really matters a lot. I highly doubt music classes, or library card would crack the top 100. Maybe as a correlate for educated (ie. likely intelligent) parents.
Those used to be heavily influenced by class due to widespread malnutrition but this is now gone from the western world. Which is why we see diminishing returns from investments in education, or any intervention, really.
Let's take truancy and suspension as an example since it was mentioned in the story. Is suspension responsible for kids' later poor educational outcomes? Unlikely[2]:
while suspension is strongly associated with educational outcomes, the relationship is unlikely to be causal, but rather stems from differences in the characteristics of those suspended compared to those not suspended. Moreover, there is no evidence that suspension is associated with larger educational penalties for young people from disadvantaged family backgrounds compared to those from more advantaged family backgrounds
Even in the west you can simply be unlucky but as a society we're bumping against the limits of who we are. I'm not saying that the usual "get married, stay married, take care of your kids, don't inject H, crime doesn't pay" is not a good advice but let's not forget that we're just a bunch of clever apes and perhaps should ease up on the hubris that somehow we should be able to better manage never before seen levels of complexity ("Hey, here are a few steps I came up with!").
One of the things that middle and upper class kids get is good medical care, good nutrition, early intervention for speech problems and endless other things which make it possible for them do sustained work of the sort that pays money. I actually grew up with a lot of advantages. My misfortune is largely being born with the wrong genes as I have a serious genetic disorder. Because I am smart, hard working, and have a long list of other "virtues"/resources, my situation is gradually improving. But it has definitely been a very long haul and an uphill climb -- made all the harder by the fact that many people who are already successful do not take me very seriously. This has helped to keep doors closed for me in ways which I find enormously frustrating.
In addition, if you look, think and talk like the people who can help you get ahead you are more likely to be given the opportunity. On the other hand, if you look, think and talk like people disliked by those who can help you get ahead... well, you have your work cut out for you.
Sure, in a perfect world it is all about hard work and skills. And certainly some find ways around the system or beat the odds. But for the most part, I don't think it is disputable that a hard life is largely heritable. What can/should we do to change this? I don't know that we can and maybe we should but I'm not sure about that. Sometimes there are cultural reasons those who are ahead are ahead. We certainly don't want to lower everything to the lowest common denominator (see the public school system for an example of how not to do things.....).
What motivation is there to do any better?
Because to me the real issue is if a person finds themselves in a less than ideal situation that they look for ways to improve rather than waiting on all of us to figure out how to change the system.
I don't think hostility to the expansion of social welfare programs depends much on one's stance in the debate about the relative importance of different factors of success in life.
The causation runs the other way. It's convenient and pleasant for the successful to think their success is of their own making. It's convenient and extenuating for the less successful to attribute their failures to external factors. We internalize success and externalize failure.
Both arguments are self-serving simplifications of a surely more complex reality.
When the wealthy and successful criticize others for not behaving similarly, they are externalizing their own personal internal heuristic/narrative that they use to compel themselves to take responsibility for the way they spend their time.
In other words, it's not just convenient to take responsibility for one's own success: it's extremely helpful to one's own psychology to do so.
This is great, but even if it's not true, you can approach the issue from a completely selfish, cold-hearted point of view and still arrive at similar conclusions. Poverty is a drain on every aspect of society. If we (the privileged) can figure out how to minimize it, think how much better a place the world would be for ourselves and our children. How much safer would the streets be, how much less tax money would be sucked into prisons, law enforcement, medicare, or various other forms of welfare, how many fewer broken families and unwanted children there would be to contend with.
PG makes a good point when he says that inequality is not intrinsically bad. It's not bad if the quality of life of both the poor and the rich increase. The fact is that it has been shown that the quality of life of the poor has in fact decreased. In this context, the rise of inequality doesn't seem agreeable.
Especially when you consider the source of this inequality: entrepreneurs are not out to eat the poor people's lunch; but if the crisis has shown anything, it's that greed at multiple strategic points in the system (esp. the banking system) had very bad consequences for the people ground by the wheels of said system.
I think it's useful to keep in mind the time at which those essays were written (first half of the 2000s), when such opinion may have been easier to form. I'm curious to know if PG would write the same today.
You can lower the cost of being unsuccessful by expanding the availability of health care for the poor, increasing long-term unemployment benefits or raising the minimum wage, but the middle class doesn't rely on these programs for its success.
There is a lot of legitimate controversy about how much is genetic vs. environmental, but I think it's well-established that your intelligence is pretty much fixed by the time you are old enough to really be held responsible for your own actions.
If you are trying to pitch a safety net as a tool to help people create private-sector success, the angle that you would take is that without a safety net, a single failure can take a long time to recover from. Like being able to crash in mom's basement. If you have a place to sleep, shower, and get career advice and/or interview leads, your periods of unemployment are going to be easier to recover from.
I know after 2001, I made a bad choice; I quit a job when so many of my compatriots were getting fired. I ended up crashing at my parent's place for a while, and pretty quickly got an interview (and a job) through one of my dad's contacts. Imagine how much longer it would have taken me to get back on my feet if instead I became homeless.
Of course, I don't have any good ideas on how the government could replicate that sort of thing for people with parents that are unable or unwilling to contribute spare bedrooms and industry contacts- I'm just giving an example of how a safety net can contribute to long-term success and not just make failure less painful.
Health care, I think, is actually easier to sell on these grounds. It's going to be way more difficult to be successful if you are sick, and especially if you have only an average earning potential, a big medical bill early on can pretty easily take that average income and, say, prevent you from buying a house or otherwise throw up a big obstacle to living your average life.
That's the official party line, at least.
Hard work and intelligence can, to a depressingly large extent, be predicted by the success of your parents.
However, the huge problem that I have with these arguments is that so many successful people are statistical outliers, in terms of hard work, natural talent, ect. They aren't going to follow the average behavior. Lionel Messi is not a good soccer player just because he got lucky. There were millions of people brought up with the same means, but through whatever personal work ethic he has, he's become one of the biggest statistical outliers in soccer. Sure, you could make the case that for "soft skill jobs" like CEO, luck comes into play quite a bit, but for someone like Mark Zuckerberg, he simply would not have gotten lucky if he didn't lock himself in his room and code for 6 hours a day at Phillips Exeter (which is something he actually did, he was very asocial, at least at Exeter). In the end, I think for the same reason OKCupid's match percentage is nearly useless in terms of finding a "soulmate", I think you can't really attribute average statistics to explain why someone was successful, they are both going to be outliers, "black swan events" to borrow from Nassim Taleb.
For example a kid like Zuckerberg (with a dentist father and psychiatrist mother) is going to get get the message "hard work is rewarded" reinforced much more strongly than the son of a blue collar worker who worked hard at low pay for years and then got laid off after a work related injury.
I trust that Zuckerberg, a member of a prominent family in White Plains and a Harvard alum, knows full well that he owes his success to family and university networks. Hard work is for the peones.
Also: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/x/28169...
Zuck figured out that working for free building a way for Harvad men to hobnob with each other was a better use of his time and resources.
Where things get dicey is when you ask the next set of "whys". I.e., "why does this person have such a helpful attitude? why do they have such perseverance?". To what do we attribute these qualities? If it's genes, then it's luck (you can't take credit for your genes). If it's parenting, then it's luck (you can't take credit for your parenting).
Perhaps it's neither genes, nor parenting, but instead "spirit" or "will". So, whence these qualities? The person's "soul"? Something immaterial? Anyone who provides these kinds of answers is necessarily endorsing brain-mind dualism, which (near as anyone can tell) is almost surely false.
Does this mean that everyone can disclaim personal responsibility for their actions? Surely not. Choosing to believe in one's own agency in turn empowers one's own agency. But everyone's believing in a fiction, no matter how necessary or adaptive this fiction happens to be, doesn't render it true.
Professional philosophers might disagree with the certainty of your statement. Certainly, a substantial fraction of them do not agree with pure physicalism (as of a 2009 survey [0]).
I don't think that that's the real argument being presented in the editorial. Rather, it's that for a large portion of humanity, success means overcoming tremendous odds. When your parents sit home and drink 22oz Milwaukee's Best Ice all day, how do you even learn what you need to do to be successful?
If you live in a place with huge unemployment rates, not much to do and little hope for future, you are more likely to start drinking or get into trouble. The effect can be seen when local economy goes down the drain while the people stay in place - problems goes up usually.
To add to it, when people try and fail multiple time, they often give up entirely. Then they are unable to help themselves even if it is actually possible (learned helplessness). If your changes to succeed in whatever you have been trying as young were too low, you might have concluded that there is no point trying anymore.
The overall "temperature" in an area is the mean income of an area. Colder is poorer. You may be able to apply some heat here and there, but any source of heat (money) is drained and attempts to balance out with the ambient cold temperature. And given the expanse of a cold mass, a localized heat source is nary enough to raise the ambient temp by fractions of a degree.
This cold temp is what we would call a blight or distressed neighborhood. The way to fix this is to raise the temperature everywhere by broad injects of money/goods/services.