11 ms·

I grew up in a small town in the Midwest and one thing I've noticed is income stratification has had an impact. It used to be more prevalent for your police of

by tcbawo 9y ago

I grew up in a small town in the Midwest and one thing I've noticed is income stratification has had an impact. It used to be more prevalent for your police officer, postman, waitress, or hairdresser to be able to afford to live in your town. Their kids would go to school with your kids, or you might go to the same church. But a lot more families struggle while others have done very well. I see a huge disparity in incomes (even within my extended family). This is amplified by the perception that many achieved this by luck or without hard work. Unfortunately, I think that makes people much less likely to empathize with each other.

analog31 9y ago
Oddly enough, I'm the first to admit that I've achieved my level of income by luck, and without hard work. I was lucky to have two educated parents, their wealth to fall back on, and an affluent, healthy environment to grow up in. My parents paid for my undergraduate education, and the government paid for my graduate degree. I "work" in a nice office, by playing with equations and gadgets, and talking to people. Meanwhile I see people doing actual physical work, and even emotionally hard work such as teachers, police, etc. And it is virtually assured by our society that they will be less affluent than me, despite working a lot harder.
- throwaway399 9y ago
  I guess my history is almost opposite while achieving similar results. However, I get bunched in the same group and expected to feel privileged and guilty. I grew up in another country and went to end of junior + high school in a US school in the inner city where nobody studied in my class except for me. 65% of the class never graduated. My parents, although very educated in our home country never paid for school and worked very bad jobs initially here such as postal service worker and person who poses census questions. Although I never did particularly well in school in my home country, I did extremely well in the US because everyone else wasn't doing anything. I was ranked 10th in a graduating class of 900 students and did well on the SATs except for the English section. However, I got into many fights to protect my image in school or things would have gotten worse for me there. This resulted in not being able to get into decent colleges since for whatever reason that is reflected on your "record". Finally, this apathetic behavior of my classmates and friends transformed me a little and i did poorly first couple of years of college. However, impending struggles with job market made me get back to studying. I took more loans to pay for my undergrad + masters and graduated with a decent GPA + research. Then got a job in software and now almost finished paying off loans. Let me describe what high school life is like in inner city public high schools: People growing up in inner cities are treated like animals in the cafeteria and elsewhere. There are police officers with guns. There are literal metal bars on the windows and only plastic utensils are allowed in cafeteria. Fights happen where everyone jumps on the tables and cheers on. There are metal chains on doors for students not to escape midway during school day. There are metal detectors at the entrance in case students bring guns. You can go to the bathroom during class only 5 times in 6 months. You are taught how to add fractions in grade 10 math class. Guidance counselors never help you and always try to do the least amount of work possible. I had to talk to the principal to make them let me take a math test to test out of elementary school math. Had to switch math classes to get a math teacher to let me go to a math olympiad. The experience for me closely matched what American movies would show prisons are like. The students themselves think "nerds" are incredibly uncool and the coolest people are rappers + sports stars. I think median amount of time people spent doing homework there is about 0 seconds. Almost everyone constantly talks during class and you can barely hear the teacher. After escaping this circus, I'm expected to feel sympathy for some of the people who were my classmates. So while I still think I got lucky in terms of intelligence, the solution to this problem is to change the culture. For example, in my old country, there is literally no commonly used word for "nerds" and people who get good grades are considered cool. Additionally, going to college for vast majority of students especially those who come from high schools like mine is a waste of time. There should be trade schools. There should be a major high school reform. People who act like prisoners should be put in some sort of boarding school so they stop poisoning the well for others. People who participate in a fight by the virtue of being attacked by others shouldn't get detentions. It should be explained to their parents that this behavior is completely not OK. Media should stop idolizing singers + sports players. In fact, MTV programming should be completely remade into a subtle pro-education propaganda channel. Cancer like Jerry Springer et al should be canceled. It is totally possible to graduate from these high schools and do well. The problem is not money, but culture. Privilege has _nothing_ to do with it since tons of people in much much poorer countries with schools that have a lot fewer funds do a lot better. I feel like most people don't understand what American education/school culture is really like in inner cities and what students are really like who go there. Here are a couple of movies that somewhat match my experience: The Class (2008) - French film but similar (milder) situation. Kids (1995) - Very accurate but little to do with education.
  - pm90 9y ago
    I'm very sorry to hear the trying circumstances in your youth... but I'm very glad that you did manage to break out of it and be successful. The solutions you suggest to changing culture will unfortunately definitely not work. If its one thing I've noticed, its that if you try to ban something it drives it underground and makes it even "cooler". I don't know what the solution is, but changing the culture like that just isn't valuable. There is also this fact that a lot of people who grew up in better circumstances (including myself and most of my friends) just never get to meet, interact with and understand people who grew up in tough cultures like you did.
    - tcbawo 9y ago
      I think you touched upon my original sentiment and that intimated by several others, which is that parents look out for their children and try to put them in the best situation. This is why we see competition to move into the best school districts, pricing many hard working and worthy families out. Unfortunately, we see this played out in irrational and societally negative ways like white flight. As a society, we lack role models which do not derive from a promotional/capitalistic agenda (ie. sports stars, musicians). Clustering people by socioeconomic status probably only serves to further deprive lesser privileged children of role models. There is no easy answer. Some solutions are known, but NIMBY is a powerful force.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - rayiner 9y ago
    > I was ranked 10th in a graduating class of 900 students and did well on the SATs except for the English section. Being born one or two standard deviations away from median on the intelligence scale is a whole lot of luck and privilege. > The problem is not money, but culture. Privilege has _nothing_ to do with it since tons of people in much much poorer countries with schools that have a lot fewer funds do a lot better. My dad was born in a village in Bangladesh, but raised my brother and I in an upper middle class household in the US. He's the first to admit that he got lucky. Had he been born as someone of average intelligence, or not had parents who made education a priority, or he hadn't had extremely fortuitous timing in his career, he'd still be in Bangladesh. I'm pretty successful myself and I'd count myself doubly lucky. Had I been born in a village in Bangladesh, I'd have failed out of the rigid unforgiving school system. (I skated by in US K-12 based purely on test-taking ability.) Hell I'd probably be doing manual labor there instead of being a white collar professional in the US.
- hueving 9y ago
  Physical effort has no (and should not have) a bearing on how much you are paid. Work smarter, not harder. A society doesn't advance if everyone spends all day digging ditches with spoons.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    You'd be surprised how fast a society can collapse if it's left to wannabe Einsteins and Feynmans and Elon Musks and nobody is there to dig ditches, clean the garbage and work the assembly line. Or how better a society would be without tons of well paid white collar jobs (advertisers for one).
    - andai 9y ago
      But how am I supposed to know what to buy!
      - coldtea 9y ago
        It's sarcasm I know, but: 1) Detailed specs by the manufacturer (that have to be valid or get large fines -- e.g. regarding speaker frequency response, or drug side effects, or cosmetics effectiveness, etc.). 2) Reviews by the media 3) Reviews by laymen 4) Word of mouth
    - humanrebar 9y ago
      > nobody is there to dig ditches Nobody shovels horse feces or lights lamps anymore. Also, these problems (not enough ditch diggers) are solved by just paying people more for that kind of work. Culturally we think that managers up the chain deserve to get paid more and more, but if there's a shortage of people scrubbing toilets, maybe the person with clean fingernails merely cutting paychecks doesn't necessarily warrant a higher market rate.
  - ue_ 9y ago
    Eh, maybe. Marx's idea of the socially necessary labour time fits into this quite well, as he wrote in Capital vol. 1: Some people might think that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it, the more idle and unskilful the labourer, the more valuable would his commodity be, because more time would be required in its production. The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour power. The total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour power of society, and takes effect as such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary. The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time. The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value. However it's worth noting that Marxian economics does not propose that people are paid according to the value they produce, but rather the amount required for the worker to reproduce his labour-power commodity (this is what he actually sells), so the question of payment at least from the Marxian perspective becomes moot.
- unsigner 9y ago
  Being born to two educated parents is not luck on your part, but well deserved reward for a long, concerted effort on theirs. You're not a random happening on a clean slate; you're just the latest offshoot of a family.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
    Maybe there is a philosophical divide between us, but this argument sounds really weird to me. From his/her point of view, of course being born to educated parents is luck, if not what else is it? We don't have any choice or any influence on the matter of who we are born to, and we cannot change it with our effort or lack of it. The fact that from their parents' point of view it's not luck, because they worked for it, strikes me as irrelevant in this context. It can be relevant in a societal context but the post you reply to was talking about the success of an individual and how it can come just by luck, without that individual working especially hard for it.
    - slavik81 9y ago
      What isn't luck? I only am who I am today because of a combination of nature and nurture. My genes and my environment defined who I am. I had no control over either of those things. I mean, if I was born on Steve Job's birthday, with Steve Job's genes, to Steve Job's parents, presumably I would be Steve Jobs. From that perspective, it's pure luck I'm not a billionaire. And, similarly, pure luck that I'm not literally Hitler.
      - andai 9y ago
        Do we make our own destiny, or does our destiny make us?
        jimnotgym 9y ago
        Both, with some effort i could get good a poker. Some games I will lose no matter what because you can only play the hand you are dealt
vixen99 9y ago
Class divergence is the topic of 'Coming Apart' by Charles Murray.
gumby 9y ago
I definitely see this in Palo Alto! Even 15 years ago PA had a lower median income than most surrounding towns; cops and firefighters etc could grow up attending Paly (high school) and live in town. There was an aggressive effort to maintain Section 8 housing and a more mixed population. But since the real estate interests took over the city counsel that has all collapsed. The SRO housing has been converted to expensive boutique hotels, and a greater "I've got mine jack" attitude has taken hold. There are few blue collar folks who can afford to live in town any more.

by tcbawo 9y ago

analog31 9y ago

Oddly enough, I'm the first to admit that I've achieved my level of income by luck, and without hard work. I was lucky to have two educated parents, their wealth to fall back on, and an affluent, healthy environment to grow up in. My parents paid for my undergraduate education, and the government paid for my graduate degree. I "work" in a nice office, by playing with equations and gadgets, and talking to people. Meanwhile I see people doing actual physical work, and even emotionally hard work such as teachers, police, etc. And it is virtually assured by our society that they will be less affluent than me, despite working a lot harder.

throwaway399 9y ago
I guess my history is almost opposite while achieving similar results. However, I get bunched in the same group and expected to feel privileged and guilty. I grew up in another country and went to end of junior + high school in a US school in the inner city where nobody studied in my class except for me. 65% of the class never graduated. My parents, although very educated in our home country never paid for school and worked very bad jobs initially here such as postal service worker and person who poses census questions. Although I never did particularly well in school in my home country, I did extremely well in the US because everyone else wasn't doing anything. I was ranked 10th in a graduating class of 900 students and did well on the SATs except for the English section. However, I got into many fights to protect my image in school or things would have gotten worse for me there. This resulted in not being able to get into decent colleges since for whatever reason that is reflected on your "record". Finally, this apathetic behavior of my classmates and friends transformed me a little and i did poorly first couple of years of college. However, impending struggles with job market made me get back to studying. I took more loans to pay for my undergrad + masters and graduated with a decent GPA + research. Then got a job in software and now almost finished paying off loans. Let me describe what high school life is like in inner city public high schools: People growing up in inner cities are treated like animals in the cafeteria and elsewhere. There are police officers with guns. There are literal metal bars on the windows and only plastic utensils are allowed in cafeteria. Fights happen where everyone jumps on the tables and cheers on. There are metal chains on doors for students not to escape midway during school day. There are metal detectors at the entrance in case students bring guns. You can go to the bathroom during class only 5 times in 6 months. You are taught how to add fractions in grade 10 math class. Guidance counselors never help you and always try to do the least amount of work possible. I had to talk to the principal to make them let me take a math test to test out of elementary school math. Had to switch math classes to get a math teacher to let me go to a math olympiad. The experience for me closely matched what American movies would show prisons are like. The students themselves think "nerds" are incredibly uncool and the coolest people are rappers + sports stars. I think median amount of time people spent doing homework there is about 0 seconds. Almost everyone constantly talks during class and you can barely hear the teacher. After escaping this circus, I'm expected to feel sympathy for some of the people who were my classmates. So while I still think I got lucky in terms of intelligence, the solution to this problem is to change the culture. For example, in my old country, there is literally no commonly used word for "nerds" and people who get good grades are considered cool. Additionally, going to college for vast majority of students especially those who come from high schools like mine is a waste of time. There should be trade schools. There should be a major high school reform. People who act like prisoners should be put in some sort of boarding school so they stop poisoning the well for others. People who participate in a fight by the virtue of being attacked by others shouldn't get detentions. It should be explained to their parents that this behavior is completely not OK. Media should stop idolizing singers + sports players. In fact, MTV programming should be completely remade into a subtle pro-education propaganda channel. Cancer like Jerry Springer et al should be canceled. It is totally possible to graduate from these high schools and do well. The problem is not money, but culture. Privilege has _nothing_ to do with it since tons of people in much much poorer countries with schools that have a lot fewer funds do a lot better. I feel like most people don't understand what American education/school culture is really like in inner cities and what students are really like who go there. Here are a couple of movies that somewhat match my experience: The Class (2008) - French film but similar (milder) situation. Kids (1995) - Very accurate but little to do with education.
- pm90 9y ago
  I'm very sorry to hear the trying circumstances in your youth... but I'm very glad that you did manage to break out of it and be successful. The solutions you suggest to changing culture will unfortunately definitely not work. If its one thing I've noticed, its that if you try to ban something it drives it underground and makes it even "cooler". I don't know what the solution is, but changing the culture like that just isn't valuable. There is also this fact that a lot of people who grew up in better circumstances (including myself and most of my friends) just never get to meet, interact with and understand people who grew up in tough cultures like you did.
  - tcbawo 9y ago
    I think you touched upon my original sentiment and that intimated by several others, which is that parents look out for their children and try to put them in the best situation. This is why we see competition to move into the best school districts, pricing many hard working and worthy families out. Unfortunately, we see this played out in irrational and societally negative ways like white flight. As a society, we lack role models which do not derive from a promotional/capitalistic agenda (ie. sports stars, musicians). Clustering people by socioeconomic status probably only serves to further deprive lesser privileged children of role models. There is no easy answer. Some solutions are known, but NIMBY is a powerful force.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- rayiner 9y ago
  > I was ranked 10th in a graduating class of 900 students and did well on the SATs except for the English section. Being born one or two standard deviations away from median on the intelligence scale is a whole lot of luck and privilege. > The problem is not money, but culture. Privilege has _nothing_ to do with it since tons of people in much much poorer countries with schools that have a lot fewer funds do a lot better. My dad was born in a village in Bangladesh, but raised my brother and I in an upper middle class household in the US. He's the first to admit that he got lucky. Had he been born as someone of average intelligence, or not had parents who made education a priority, or he hadn't had extremely fortuitous timing in his career, he'd still be in Bangladesh. I'm pretty successful myself and I'd count myself doubly lucky. Had I been born in a village in Bangladesh, I'd have failed out of the rigid unforgiving school system. (I skated by in US K-12 based purely on test-taking ability.) Hell I'd probably be doing manual labor there instead of being a white collar professional in the US.
hueving 9y ago
Physical effort has no (and should not have) a bearing on how much you are paid. Work smarter, not harder. A society doesn't advance if everyone spends all day digging ditches with spoons.
- coldtea 9y ago
  You'd be surprised how fast a society can collapse if it's left to wannabe Einsteins and Feynmans and Elon Musks and nobody is there to dig ditches, clean the garbage and work the assembly line. Or how better a society would be without tons of well paid white collar jobs (advertisers for one).
  - andai 9y ago
    But how am I supposed to know what to buy!
    - coldtea 9y ago
      It's sarcasm I know, but: 1) Detailed specs by the manufacturer (that have to be valid or get large fines -- e.g. regarding speaker frequency response, or drug side effects, or cosmetics effectiveness, etc.). 2) Reviews by the media 3) Reviews by laymen 4) Word of mouth
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    > nobody is there to dig ditches Nobody shovels horse feces or lights lamps anymore. Also, these problems (not enough ditch diggers) are solved by just paying people more for that kind of work. Culturally we think that managers up the chain deserve to get paid more and more, but if there's a shortage of people scrubbing toilets, maybe the person with clean fingernails merely cutting paychecks doesn't necessarily warrant a higher market rate.
- ue_ 9y ago
  Eh, maybe. Marx's idea of the socially necessary labour time fits into this quite well, as he wrote in Capital vol. 1: Some people might think that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it, the more idle and unskilful the labourer, the more valuable would his commodity be, because more time would be required in its production. The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour power. The total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour power of society, and takes effect as such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary. The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time. The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value. However it's worth noting that Marxian economics does not propose that people are paid according to the value they produce, but rather the amount required for the worker to reproduce his labour-power commodity (this is what he actually sells), so the question of payment at least from the Marxian perspective becomes moot.
unsigner 9y ago
Being born to two educated parents is not luck on your part, but well deserved reward for a long, concerted effort on theirs. You're not a random happening on a clean slate; you're just the latest offshoot of a family.
- Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
  Maybe there is a philosophical divide between us, but this argument sounds really weird to me. From his/her point of view, of course being born to educated parents is luck, if not what else is it? We don't have any choice or any influence on the matter of who we are born to, and we cannot change it with our effort or lack of it. The fact that from their parents' point of view it's not luck, because they worked for it, strikes me as irrelevant in this context. It can be relevant in a societal context but the post you reply to was talking about the success of an individual and how it can come just by luck, without that individual working especially hard for it.
  - slavik81 9y ago
    What isn't luck? I only am who I am today because of a combination of nature and nurture. My genes and my environment defined who I am. I had no control over either of those things. I mean, if I was born on Steve Job's birthday, with Steve Job's genes, to Steve Job's parents, presumably I would be Steve Jobs. From that perspective, it's pure luck I'm not a billionaire. And, similarly, pure luck that I'm not literally Hitler.
    - andai 9y ago
      Do we make our own destiny, or does our destiny make us?
      - jimnotgym 9y ago
        Both, with some effort i could get good a poker. Some games I will lose no matter what because you can only play the hand you are dealt

vixen99 9y ago

Class divergence is the topic of 'Coming Apart' by Charles Murray.

gumby 9y ago

I definitely see this in Palo Alto! Even 15 years ago PA had a lower median income than most surrounding towns; cops and firefighters etc could grow up attending Paly (high school) and live in town. There was an aggressive effort to maintain Section 8 housing and a more mixed population. But since the real estate interests took over the city counsel that has all collapsed. The SRO housing has been converted to expensive boutique hotels, and a greater "I've got mine jack" attitude has taken hold. There are few blue collar folks who can afford to live in town any more.