The thing that frustrates me the most about this situation is the waste of human capital this represents for society. Now, I'm a firm believer that society is advanced mostly by a small minority of highly talented individuals - the intelligent, creative, charismatic, and hardworking few change the game for everyone else.
Now, what happens when those rare talents are born into the cycle of poverty? What lessons do they learn? Too often, their talents just get them into trouble. They find themselves caught up in crime, addiction, and the other short-term thinking failures of poverty, and thus unable to express their talent. Worse, society simply expects nothing of them. They have no role models, and they have no external motivations to be and do better.
Even those who can do better often simply escape, leaving the culture of their birth behind. Frankly, I did that. I was raised about one step above what southerners call "white trash". My father, a tremendously intelligent and charismatic man, was constantly lured by petty crime and get-rich-quick ideas, and wasted his life. His interactions with the wealthy men he worked for generated feelings not of admiration and example, but contempt. To this day, when I'm not sure what to do about a situation, I think of what he would have done, and do the opposite. And he took a big step up himself - I remember visiting my grandfather's farm in rural Kentucky as a child. I didn't notice the lack of electricity or running water at the time. I notice it now. My father escaped sharecropping, but he never escaped his own demons.
I see the effects of those escapes now in my sister's life. She loves living in the rural south, but is constantly brought down by the ignorance and awful habits of her neighbors. Everyone in her area (southern Virginia) who has any brains simply moves away. What's left are the addicts, the fools, and the spiteful. Sure, it's beautiful there, but I don't see how she can stand living around people with so little ambition. I do, however, see how she suffers in poverty and hopelessness.
Me, I got up and left. I made a good career for myself, living in a nice safe neighborhood in a beautiful city, making a good income in a safe field, raising my kids safe from the things that got me as a child. I can't imagine going back to that life.
But oh, so many lost souls. So much talent put to waste in jail or in the grave. This is what we allow poverty to do to our society.
I can relate. Dad died when I was 13, Mom and 3 kids moved to a single-wide in rural Florida. I was buried in books and calculators from the time I could walk to the library, but I had no positive role models. I had no idea of the value or importance of the PSAT and SAT, I had no idea what I would do once I graduated from High School. I lucked into the local community college offering scholarships for the top of the local HS graduating class, lucked into a moonlighting GE engineer teaching a programming (Fortran!) class, then started to work toward a State university, a Fortune 500 job, and a career as a software developer rather than a cook/kitchen manager like I might have been. I married a HS guidance counselor who by both trade and passion wants to give kids a vision for what they could have and don't see... and I have much the same vision. My real career dream, beyond getting to be a software developer, is to help even one kid short-circuit the journey I took to realizing their potential.
"who by both trade and passion wants to give kids a vision for what they could have and don't see"
There's definitely a huge need for this- but I think for everyone, not necessarily just those in poverty. From my middle class home town, most people I was familiar with from elementary school seem to be working at restaurants and the like. I could have definitely used a mentor to help me see the possibilities that my parents weren't familiar with. Now that I'm finally developing the self-awareness necessary to really go somewhere (hopefully) I've tried to think on how to help kids realize their potential, but in such a way as to be scalable. While maybe apps could help with self-esteem, it's probably not possible at this point to replace the knowledge and experience of a good mentor with a standalone information system.
I know the frustration I've experienced, so I can only imagine what it's got to be like coming from less- props to you for making it.
"There's definitely a huge need for this- but I think for everyone, not necessarily just those in poverty."
Absolutely. My wife works across the economic range, and there are opportunities everywhere. I've given talks at her school career days about software development, but that's certainly not the right fit for everyone (though perhaps everyone should at least try a little.) I do think that online forums open up worlds of experience and ideas that weren't as accessible in the past - like a vast library, perhaps a bit poorly edited. I think there's a key place for - coaches/mentors/counselors/teachers/friends - I don't know the best term - to help people adapt knowledge and ideas to their own interests, experiences and ambitions. I suspect the really great relationships like this don't scale. Someone might say 'Khan Academy', but I think the best situations are probably more like Y Combinator, and that looks more like a traditional classroom than it does an app. I say let 1000 flowers bloom... any attempt to lend a hand up to someone is to be valued.
> "Now, I'm a firm believer that society is advanced mostly by a small minority of highly talented individuals - the intelligent, creative, charismatic, and hardworking few change the game for everyone else."
I think my idea is consistent with both the Great Man theory and its critics. I'm concerned that, due to the negative impacts of poverty and other social failure modes, we're preventing the formation of Great Men (and Great Women - one of the grand social ills that we've only halfway addressed is sexism).
Most people will "squander" their time in the sense that they'll never accomplish anything that contributes meaningfully to society. That's totally okay. Like beat said, society is advanced mostly by a small minority of highly talented individuals.
What's not okay is when members of this small minority, who have the potential to do great things, instead remain stuck in poverty.
The fact that people like you can escape is very encouraging: it means we still have class mobility -- if you've got the skills and work ethic, you can be born into the lower class and quickly rise above that.
Don't kid yourself. There's a wide gulf between a worldview based on a few anecdotal successes and the more realistic picture emerging from a flood of statistics, which not only show the rarity of mobility, but indicate that it's declining - esp. for those unfortunate enough to be born at the bottom.
Yes, people can win Olympic Gold (we're not competing against robots yet), but very few will and those who do will have to make extraordinary sacrifices. So yes, give them credit. But don't - whatever you do - look at people who haven't managed to keep their heads about water, and think "well, this one guy made it against all odds and you didn't, so you must be a lazy, stupid human."
That may be fair (if harsh) in a supportive world where it takes rare talent to fail. But it's a monstrous attitude in a world where the opposite is so clearly the case.
Financially successful doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as being financially "successful relative to the rest of the population", for what it's worth.
No, not quickly, on the contrary, there's an inverse relationship:
"...the United States and United Kingdom had the lowest intergenerational vertical social mobility ..."
"...Studies have also found "a clear negative relationship" between income inequality and intergenerational mobility.[27] Countries with low levels of inequality such as Denmark, Norway and Finland had some of the greatest mobility, while the two countries with the high level of inequality -- Chile and Brazil—had some of the lowest mobility. A 2012 graph plotting the relationship between inequality and mobility in the United States and twelve other developed countries has been dubbed "The Great Gatsby Curve"[27][28][29]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility#Country_compari...
Well, if prisons were busy handing out guns, shovels, and grappling hooks to every prisoner, even begging the prisoners to take them, and the prisoners just ignored them, then I think your analogy would fit.
I went to a public school in a poor neighborhood, and very well-meaning teachers were trying to give students the tools to break out of poverty. Except for the Asians (who do routinely break out), the kids of most cultural groups were more likely to laugh in the teachers' faces! It was pretty disgusting to watch, really.
In my experience, those who were smart, grabbed every break-out tool that was offered to them, and were lucky enough to stay in decent health throughout their youth, all managed to escape the poverty.
It's true that getting crippled or bedridden in your teens or 20s can make it harder to escape both from prison and from poverty, and that's totally out of your control, but there is plenty that you can actually do to improve your chances, and 99% of young people (that I've seen) did none of it.
"The fact that people like you can escape is very encouraging: it means we still have class mobility"
Sorry, my analogy is perfectly apt. Your argument was that the fact that there were survivors means there is mobility, but in no way is that reasoning sound. You must compare the number who thrive to the number who don't, or else your methodology is terribly compromised.
Of course, now (but not before) you've started to do that, albeit in the rather unscientific method of, people who know who fit your judgment of certain criteria. There are various other cognitive biases at play here, e.g. fundamental attribution error.
But even if we were to pretend that you, unlike anyone else, could somehow accurately judge the reality of the situation based on your childhood memories, take a look at the criteria you mentioned. You had to include "were lucky enough to stay in decent health" - as if health was merely determined by luck, and not wealth! Access to doctors, medicine, and quality food are not distributed evenly in society.
You, just like me and everyone else, don't have anywhere near the ability to draw reasonable conclusions about class mobility (or lack thereof) as methodological research. But please don't go promoting fallacious thinking by saying things like "the fact that you survived means we have mobility." It means no such thing.
Skills and work ethic are learned behaviors. You're technically correct that those things can help you rise above, but you're missing the point that environment is the key factor.
We still have class mobility, to a degree. Not enough of a degree, which is my concern. My daughter, who is 20, is concerned that society is actually going backwards, and there's less opportunity for her generation than for previous generations.
Pretty harsh. I'd bet the shirt you are wearing was made by a hard working person you consider not important enough to matter, yet worth taking a shirt from.
How "advanced" is a society without shirts? I tend to think the idea that some people "advance society" is bull. Society advances as a whole or not at all.
Comments
The thing that frustrates me the most about this situation is the waste of human capital this represents for society. Now, I'm a firm believer that society is advanced mostly by a small minority of highly talented individuals - the intelligent, creative, charismatic, and hardworking few change the game for everyone else.
Now, what happens when those rare talents are born into the cycle of poverty? What lessons do they learn? Too often, their talents just get them into trouble. They find themselves caught up in crime, addiction, and the other short-term thinking failures of poverty, and thus unable to express their talent. Worse, society simply expects nothing of them. They have no role models, and they have no external motivations to be and do better.
Even those who can do better often simply escape, leaving the culture of their birth behind. Frankly, I did that. I was raised about one step above what southerners call "white trash". My father, a tremendously intelligent and charismatic man, was constantly lured by petty crime and get-rich-quick ideas, and wasted his life. His interactions with the wealthy men he worked for generated feelings not of admiration and example, but contempt. To this day, when I'm not sure what to do about a situation, I think of what he would have done, and do the opposite. And he took a big step up himself - I remember visiting my grandfather's farm in rural Kentucky as a child. I didn't notice the lack of electricity or running water at the time. I notice it now. My father escaped sharecropping, but he never escaped his own demons.
I see the effects of those escapes now in my sister's life. She loves living in the rural south, but is constantly brought down by the ignorance and awful habits of her neighbors. Everyone in her area (southern Virginia) who has any brains simply moves away. What's left are the addicts, the fools, and the spiteful. Sure, it's beautiful there, but I don't see how she can stand living around people with so little ambition. I do, however, see how she suffers in poverty and hopelessness.
Me, I got up and left. I made a good career for myself, living in a nice safe neighborhood in a beautiful city, making a good income in a safe field, raising my kids safe from the things that got me as a child. I can't imagine going back to that life.
But oh, so many lost souls. So much talent put to waste in jail or in the grave. This is what we allow poverty to do to our society.
I can relate. Dad died when I was 13, Mom and 3 kids moved to a single-wide in rural Florida. I was buried in books and calculators from the time I could walk to the library, but I had no positive role models. I had no idea of the value or importance of the PSAT and SAT, I had no idea what I would do once I graduated from High School. I lucked into the local community college offering scholarships for the top of the local HS graduating class, lucked into a moonlighting GE engineer teaching a programming (Fortran!) class, then started to work toward a State university, a Fortune 500 job, and a career as a software developer rather than a cook/kitchen manager like I might have been. I married a HS guidance counselor who by both trade and passion wants to give kids a vision for what they could have and don't see... and I have much the same vision. My real career dream, beyond getting to be a software developer, is to help even one kid short-circuit the journey I took to realizing their potential.
"who by both trade and passion wants to give kids a vision for what they could have and don't see"
There's definitely a huge need for this- but I think for everyone, not necessarily just those in poverty. From my middle class home town, most people I was familiar with from elementary school seem to be working at restaurants and the like. I could have definitely used a mentor to help me see the possibilities that my parents weren't familiar with. Now that I'm finally developing the self-awareness necessary to really go somewhere (hopefully) I've tried to think on how to help kids realize their potential, but in such a way as to be scalable. While maybe apps could help with self-esteem, it's probably not possible at this point to replace the knowledge and experience of a good mentor with a standalone information system.
I know the frustration I've experienced, so I can only imagine what it's got to be like coming from less- props to you for making it.
Absolutely. My wife works across the economic range, and there are opportunities everywhere. I've given talks at her school career days about software development, but that's certainly not the right fit for everyone (though perhaps everyone should at least try a little.) I do think that online forums open up worlds of experience and ideas that weren't as accessible in the past - like a vast library, perhaps a bit poorly edited. I think there's a key place for - coaches/mentors/counselors/teachers/friends - I don't know the best term - to help people adapt knowledge and ideas to their own interests, experiences and ambitions. I suspect the really great relationships like this don't scale. Someone might say 'Khan Academy', but I think the best situations are probably more like Y Combinator, and that looks more like a traditional classroom than it does an app. I say let 1000 flowers bloom... any attempt to lend a hand up to someone is to be valued.
> "Now, I'm a firm believer that society is advanced mostly by a small minority of highly talented individuals - the intelligent, creative, charismatic, and hardworking few change the game for everyone else."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory
I think my idea is consistent with both the Great Man theory and its critics. I'm concerned that, due to the negative impacts of poverty and other social failure modes, we're preventing the formation of Great Men (and Great Women - one of the grand social ills that we've only halfway addressed is sexism).
Plenty of people born into well-off families squander their time, life and fall victim to the same ails as the lower classes.
Most people will "squander" their time in the sense that they'll never accomplish anything that contributes meaningfully to society. That's totally okay. Like beat said, society is advanced mostly by a small minority of highly talented individuals.
What's not okay is when members of this small minority, who have the potential to do great things, instead remain stuck in poverty.
The fact that people like you can escape is very encouraging: it means we still have class mobility -- if you've got the skills and work ethic, you can be born into the lower class and quickly rise above that.
Don't kid yourself. There's a wide gulf between a worldview based on a few anecdotal successes and the more realistic picture emerging from a flood of statistics, which not only show the rarity of mobility, but indicate that it's declining - esp. for those unfortunate enough to be born at the bottom.
Yes, people can win Olympic Gold (we're not competing against robots yet), but very few will and those who do will have to make extraordinary sacrifices. So yes, give them credit. But don't - whatever you do - look at people who haven't managed to keep their heads about water, and think "well, this one guy made it against all odds and you didn't, so you must be a lazy, stupid human."
That may be fair (if harsh) in a supportive world where it takes rare talent to fail. But it's a monstrous attitude in a world where the opposite is so clearly the case.
The number of people that can win an Olympic Gold is arbitrarily fixed. The number of people that can become financially successful isn't.
And yet, for the last 30 years, the number of those who are successful relative to the rest of the population has suffered sharp decline.
Do you honestly not know this? Or are you simply the sort of person who just doesn't mind?
Relative mobility has remained flat and absolute mobility has increased.
http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/mobility_trends.pdf
Not actually the point I was making but an interesting paper nonetheless.
When I said "relative" I meant "relative to the population as a whole", not "relative to the members of one's class from prior generations."
Financially successful doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as being financially "successful relative to the rest of the population", for what it's worth.
No, not quickly, on the contrary, there's an inverse relationship:
"...the United States and United Kingdom had the lowest intergenerational vertical social mobility ..."
"...Studies have also found "a clear negative relationship" between income inequality and intergenerational mobility.[27] Countries with low levels of inequality such as Denmark, Norway and Finland had some of the greatest mobility, while the two countries with the high level of inequality -- Chile and Brazil—had some of the lowest mobility. A 2012 graph plotting the relationship between inequality and mobility in the United States and twelve other developed countries has been dubbed "The Great Gatsby Curve"[27][28][29] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility#Country_compari...
PEW report: http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/12/selling-out-over-long-term-...
U. Bekerley.edu / NYTimes feature: http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/features/20130726_upward_mobili...
I guess the fact that some people have successfully escaped from prison means that prisoners are really free, right?
Your reasoning is lousy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Well, if prisons were busy handing out guns, shovels, and grappling hooks to every prisoner, even begging the prisoners to take them, and the prisoners just ignored them, then I think your analogy would fit.
I went to a public school in a poor neighborhood, and very well-meaning teachers were trying to give students the tools to break out of poverty. Except for the Asians (who do routinely break out), the kids of most cultural groups were more likely to laugh in the teachers' faces! It was pretty disgusting to watch, really.
In my experience, those who were smart, grabbed every break-out tool that was offered to them, and were lucky enough to stay in decent health throughout their youth, all managed to escape the poverty.
It's true that getting crippled or bedridden in your teens or 20s can make it harder to escape both from prison and from poverty, and that's totally out of your control, but there is plenty that you can actually do to improve your chances, and 99% of young people (that I've seen) did none of it.
"The fact that people like you can escape is very encouraging: it means we still have class mobility"
Sorry, my analogy is perfectly apt. Your argument was that the fact that there were survivors means there is mobility, but in no way is that reasoning sound. You must compare the number who thrive to the number who don't, or else your methodology is terribly compromised.
Of course, now (but not before) you've started to do that, albeit in the rather unscientific method of, people who know who fit your judgment of certain criteria. There are various other cognitive biases at play here, e.g. fundamental attribution error.
But even if we were to pretend that you, unlike anyone else, could somehow accurately judge the reality of the situation based on your childhood memories, take a look at the criteria you mentioned. You had to include "were lucky enough to stay in decent health" - as if health was merely determined by luck, and not wealth! Access to doctors, medicine, and quality food are not distributed evenly in society.
You, just like me and everyone else, don't have anywhere near the ability to draw reasonable conclusions about class mobility (or lack thereof) as methodological research. But please don't go promoting fallacious thinking by saying things like "the fact that you survived means we have mobility." It means no such thing.
Skills and work ethic are learned behaviors. You're technically correct that those things can help you rise above, but you're missing the point that environment is the key factor.
We still have class mobility, to a degree. Not enough of a degree, which is my concern. My daughter, who is 20, is concerned that society is actually going backwards, and there's less opportunity for her generation than for previous generations.
Pretty harsh. I'd bet the shirt you are wearing was made by a hard working person you consider not important enough to matter, yet worth taking a shirt from.
They're talking about advancing society, not replacing a t-shirt. You're having a separate discussion.
How "advanced" is a society without shirts? I tend to think the idea that some people "advance society" is bull. Society advances as a whole or not at all.
I agree that society advances itself together, however I don't think that shirts are necessary for a society to be considered "Advanced".