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Possible, but decreasingly likely. The US is now one of the countries where your success in life is most fully determined by your family background. e.g. it's

Possible, but decreasingly likely. The US is now one of the countries where your success in life is most fully determined by your family background. e.g. it's in the bottom third of the OECD for income mobility, and the absolute worst in the OECD for how much your family background determines your educational success https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobility/ https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi... https://www.oecd.org/centrodemexico/medios/44582910.pdf https://www.oecd.org/centrodemexico/medios/44582910.pdf

vinceguidry 8y ago
These statistics all measure the wrong things. Let me tell you a story of two families. My step-dad was thrust into a parenting role over his siblings, a sister and a brother at an early age. The brother died early, in a train accident. My step-dad married my mother and they're still together, over 20 years later. His sister is on her second marriage. My aunt's family is constantly teetering on the edge of poverty, having obliterated their family's nest egg over decades of stupid decisions. Our family clawed our way out of low class through pragmatic saving. Stupid decisions are what make the difference between affluence and poverty in the US. You can have all the money in the world and still be broke. The capacity to make stupid decisions largely comes from childhood. It's the emotional makeup of a household that mostly determines what children are like when they get older. If you grow up in America feeling neglected and abused, you're going to go through strings of bad relationships and that's just going to be your life. I call America's brand of poverty "emotional poverty." Food on the table, roof over your head, cable TV and video games for entertainment, all things people in other parts of the world can't reliably have, in the US pretty much come out of the tap like water. Even homeless people here have cell phones. No, what's missing here is emotional warmth. People in the US just can't figure out for some reason how to treat each other well. They eat, but they don't live. If you're lucky enough to avoid emotional poverty, then you can join America's middle class. If not, you'll fritter away all the money you ever make. It's got nothing to do with how much money your family has and everything to do with how they treat each other. No statistic could possibly capture this reality.
- UncleMeat 8y ago
  At scale, these differences even out. The statistics don't capture individual behavior. They capture large trends. That's a feature not a bug.
- dannypgh 8y ago
  1. This reply seems like "forget hard data, here are two anecdotes" which seems like a poor approach if you're trying to convince [good] engineers. 2. 62.9% of the world has cell phones. The global median income is likely less than $5,000 and it seems difficult to reconcile the two without many poor people - and not just in the US- owning cell phones. More to the point, do you know how hard it is to get a job or a house without a phone? Cell phones are very hard to do without in this age, especially if you're homeless. 3. Education should help to ensure people can make better decisions, but access to decent education is terribly unequal in the US, so kids attending schools in poor districts are even less likely to learn what they need to get ahead. You're ignoring structural issues if you think people are just making "stupid decisions" and ignore the facts about inequality of education.
  - vinceguidry 8y ago
    1. If engineers don't value stories as valid for exploring and explaining reality, then they'll be doomed to lamp posting forever. 2. You're just making my point for me. 3. The access to secondary education that Americans have in is unparalleled anywhere else except in certain parts of Europe. It's been our collective obsession for decades, the subject of intense policy initiatives all over the nation. There's no political will to improve prisons, but an initiative to expand student loan funding will always be approved. Anybody can take on $X0,000 in uncancelable debt to obtain a college degree with. The reason they can't follow through and actually improve their lives with it runs along emotional poverty lines. We can't educate our way out of this problem.
    - dannypgh 8y ago
      Re: #1 the original statistics presented show that in the US, there's a stronger correlation between individual income and parental income than in most OECD countries. You've claimed this is "measuring the wrong thing" but it isn't clear to me why you think that, or what we should be measuring instead. Re: #3 The real inequality of opportunity isn't in secondary education, it's in primary (K-12) education. I went to a public highschool in a well-off suburb that had high participation in AP programs and sent the overwhelming majority of the student body to college. A couple of miles away in the city, the high school struggled to retrain accreditation.

vinceguidry 8y ago

These statistics all measure the wrong things. Let me tell you a story of two families. My step-dad was thrust into a parenting role over his siblings, a sister and a brother at an early age. The brother died early, in a train accident. My step-dad married my mother and they're still together, over 20 years later. His sister is on her second marriage. My aunt's family is constantly teetering on the edge of poverty, having obliterated their family's nest egg over decades of stupid decisions. Our family clawed our way out of low class through pragmatic saving. Stupid decisions are what make the difference between affluence and poverty in the US. You can have all the money in the world and still be broke. The capacity to make stupid decisions largely comes from childhood. It's the emotional makeup of a household that mostly determines what children are like when they get older. If you grow up in America feeling neglected and abused, you're going to go through strings of bad relationships and that's just going to be your life. I call America's brand of poverty "emotional poverty." Food on the table, roof over your head, cable TV and video games for entertainment, all things people in other parts of the world can't reliably have, in the US pretty much come out of the tap like water. Even homeless people here have cell phones. No, what's missing here is emotional warmth. People in the US just can't figure out for some reason how to treat each other well. They eat, but they don't live. If you're lucky enough to avoid emotional poverty, then you can join America's middle class. If not, you'll fritter away all the money you ever make. It's got nothing to do with how much money your family has and everything to do with how they treat each other. No statistic could possibly capture this reality.

UncleMeat 8y ago
At scale, these differences even out. The statistics don't capture individual behavior. They capture large trends. That's a feature not a bug.
dannypgh 8y ago
1. This reply seems like "forget hard data, here are two anecdotes" which seems like a poor approach if you're trying to convince [good] engineers. 2. 62.9% of the world has cell phones. The global median income is likely less than $5,000 and it seems difficult to reconcile the two without many poor people - and not just in the US- owning cell phones. More to the point, do you know how hard it is to get a job or a house without a phone? Cell phones are very hard to do without in this age, especially if you're homeless. 3. Education should help to ensure people can make better decisions, but access to decent education is terribly unequal in the US, so kids attending schools in poor districts are even less likely to learn what they need to get ahead. You're ignoring structural issues if you think people are just making "stupid decisions" and ignore the facts about inequality of education.
- vinceguidry 8y ago
  1. If engineers don't value stories as valid for exploring and explaining reality, then they'll be doomed to lamp posting forever. 2. You're just making my point for me. 3. The access to secondary education that Americans have in is unparalleled anywhere else except in certain parts of Europe. It's been our collective obsession for decades, the subject of intense policy initiatives all over the nation. There's no political will to improve prisons, but an initiative to expand student loan funding will always be approved. Anybody can take on $X0,000 in uncancelable debt to obtain a college degree with. The reason they can't follow through and actually improve their lives with it runs along emotional poverty lines. We can't educate our way out of this problem.
  - dannypgh 8y ago
    Re: #1 the original statistics presented show that in the US, there's a stronger correlation between individual income and parental income than in most OECD countries. You've claimed this is "measuring the wrong thing" but it isn't clear to me why you think that, or what we should be measuring instead. Re: #3 The real inequality of opportunity isn't in secondary education, it's in primary (K-12) education. I went to a public highschool in a well-off suburb that had high participation in AP programs and sent the overwhelming majority of the student body to college. A couple of miles away in the city, the high school struggled to retrain accreditation.