I'm not sure if most of the commentators here are joking or just being too subtly sarcastic, but truly the best predictor of a person's success is the success of his parents during his formative years. It's not a hard-coded rule, but it's statistics: if, given two persons of equal age, gender and health, you would have to bet how they turn out, your best bet would be to look at their parents and assume the same will happen to them, and not to give them an IQ test and draw a conclusion from there (on average, everyone has an average IQ).
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.
Nitpick (since I don't dispute your main point): Parents aren't the sole source of influence in a person's formative years. Kindergarten, neighborhood, peer group, school are just as if not more influential. In fact, some promising ways to inject higher quality human capital than some families are able to provide on their own rely on those other channels.
What do you think best predict what kind of neighborhood someone grows up in, what kind of kindergarten that can be afforded, peers someone has a chance get to know and what schools they will attend?
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.
The article says that improving material standards hasn't improved problems with drugs/jobs/jail/family. And then immediately suggests improvements to material standards as a remedy.
But at what point do we draw the line of responsibility? There are many examples of poor/struggling people that made the best of what they had and made sure that their children had a good start in life.
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.
You were lucky enough to have parents who pushed through and made sacrifices. Not everyone is so lucky. That is exactly the point the article is making. You're blaming the children for having inadequate parents.
Even if responsibility lands on the individual, rather than background circumstances, it's still reasonable to try to figure out how to break the cycle, isn't it? It's possible to hold someone guilty, and still have empathy.
"It's possible to hold someone guilty, and still have empathy."
Of course, that's called charity! And is probably a very integral part of the progress of our society. But, let's be honest, most people when they discuss these topics simply dismiss responsibility from the injured/suffering party and are very quick to offload it onto society.
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.
If you don't believe in dualistic free will, then responsibility lies entirely with factors beyond the control of the poor, thus there can be no personal blame.
Way to blame the victim. So bully does something, causes a fight, parental figure sees and intervenes... and finally, blames both of them for the resulting fight, compelling them both to take responsibility and fix the mess. That's horrible, I hope you didn't get beaten(child-abused) if you refused to clean up the mess.
From an European (Belgian, if you're interested) perspective, it's borderline shocking that these questions are so hotly debated.
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.
These are all good points, but it's also important to realize that American and European populations are very different in regards to constituency (you touched on this a bit with your point about the rich-poor gap). So a simple drop-in-place European substitute isn't likely to be as effective as it might seem.
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.
> From an European (Belgian, if you're interested)
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!
Don't know why you are getting downvoted, it's a fair point. Belgium is known for welfare; however, I think that most countries in western Europe do not fall very far. I don't really know much about the situation in eastern Europe (say everything east of Germany, excluding Scandinavia).
I'm going to post a recent Onion article. It shares some of my thoughts on the subject matter far more eloquently than my own words ever could.
"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."
Can you write your thoughts more directly? I don't understand what you're trying to say.
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.
> I'm going to post a recent Onion article. It shares some of my thoughts on the subject matter far more eloquently than my own words ever could.
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.
Many successful people will resent contributing to the welfare of the not-so-successful regardless of who is to blame for the misfortune of the latter. It's yet another instance of the tribal mentality dividing people into "us" and "them". We generally find it easier to empathize with those who are like us and perceived to belong to the same group.
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.
"Many successful people will resent contributing to the welfare of the not-so-successful regardless of who is to blame for the misfortune of the latter. It's yet another instance of the tribal mentality dividing people into "us" and "them"."
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.
I like that the "them" in both cases is "lazy". The "us" group, on the other hand, nicely changes from "wealthy" to, essentially, "deservedly wealthy". I'm fairly certain they believe the latter, but is it so surprising that from the outside people see the former?
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.
ONE delusion common among America’s successful people is that they triumphed just because of hard work and intelligence.
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!").
FWIW: I have intelligence and conscientiousness. What I don't have is physical stamina and mental focus. I was one of the trop three students of my graduating high school class. I have yet to have a successful paid career (I was a homemaker for a long time and full time mom and I was successful at those things but I am now divorced).
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.
Having the right connections helps as well. No matter what your skill set is, if you know people who know people through your school, social group, church etc. it makes opportunities easier to come by.
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.....).
The message I get from these articles is if you have failed at life it wasn't because of your own decisions.
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.
Sometimes you're so busy looking for ways to survive that improvement doesn't really even enter into it. Also, I'd imagine the whole "being poor sucks" would provide motivation to do better. Finally your embedded assumption that somehow being "motivated to do better" will fix the problem (ie it's their fault).
> Yet many are oblivious of their own advantages, and of other people’s disadvantages. The result is [...] partly explaining the hostility to state expansion of Medicaid, to long-term unemployment benefits, or to raising the minimum wage to keep up with inflation.
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.
It's not just convenient and pleasant: just like everyone, those who are successful recognize the impact of their own decisions and behavior on a moment to moment basis. They succeed when they try hard, forego immediate pleasure for delayed gratification, and in a disciplined way execute on a particular plan.
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.
I haven't read this particular essay, but I've read those on wealth and income inequality from Hackers & Painters, and those seems rather similar from what I've skimmed.
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.
What about the middle class thing where EVERYONE thinks they're middle class? If you ask some one who makes 30k they'll say they're middle class. If you ask some one who makes 130k they'll say the same thing.
Isn't success in the United States better explained by hard work and intelligence?
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.
>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 their success.
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.
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.
Many times people whose family were poor don't have access to the opportunities when they are young to make a better a better life for themselves when they are older.
I hate the argument that boils down success to just being lucky. A person's success in life is due to many things like environment, opportunity, intelligence, and work ethic. Positive increases in those things are going to increase the odds of success, so I do agree with the rest of the author's arguments that the poor are at a disadvantage usually coming from a bad environment and an area that lacks much opportunity. Unfortunately the US government seems to be geared to taking care of the old rather than enriching the lives of the young.
>I hate the argument that boils down success to just being lucky
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?
It also goes other way round. Just as bad behavior cause economical problems, economical problems cause social and behavioral problems.
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.
I agree. There are hundreds of millions of people born into the American middle class. There are tens of millions of people born into the "global 1%". On average, the richer are going to better, because you average out all other factors, like work ethic. So if I'm "floating" through life, putting in the average work into everything I do, I think it's pretty obvious that I'm going to benefit from having rich parents to save me from the random pitfalls that I may fall into.
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.
It is certainly true that productively developing a valuable skill set will set you apart from the vast majority. With a few helpful insights, the right attitude, and an ability to quickly overcome obstacles, you will be an exceptional person, without a doubt. If you assign credit for success to a person's attitude and perseverance, then certainly "luck" had little to do with it.
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.
You are taking the concept of luck to a place where it has no meaning. Everyone alive is lucky Earth exists, that it did not get wiped out by an asteroid, that the climate is habitable, etc. In a world where everything is determined by just luck, the countries with the most people would have the most successful people. We can clearly see that is not true, the world's richest list is not dominated by the Chinese and Indians even though they contain a vast amount of the world's population.
> brain-mind dualism, which (near as anyone can tell) is almost surely false.
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]).
So, what? Do you think the universe is deterministic (I'm guessing from your remark about brain-mind dualism)? Then doesn't that settle it - everything that happens to you is by chance, i.e. luck (if circumstances are fortunate)?
But isn't work ethic largely a product of "luck" based factors?
Namely intelligence (figuring out the link and steps required between working hard for low pay now and having a larger payoff later) and environmental factors.
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.
a kid like Zuckerberg (with a dentist father and psychiatrist mother) is going to get get the message "hard work is rewarded" reinforced
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.
Well, it's both. The smart part is working out where to apply one's limited capacity for work hard. Zuck could have followed in the footsteps of many college students (including many rich ones who don't need the money) and learnt work ethic by working hard at Mcdonalds during his time at Harvard.
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.
There are also plenty of soccer players who worked hard, trained as much as they could and did not became famous players. The same goes for any well developed sport. Hard work is a must, but so is the right body type, support in make difference age and, well, luck.
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.