6 ms·

Most politicians come from the middle class, so I'd wager most of them attended public school. The most predictive stat for educational attainment is household

Most politicians come from the middle class, so I'd wager most of them attended public school. The most predictive stat for educational attainment is household income and parental educational attainment, so if you want to fix education, you need to fix income inequality.

throwaway66920 7y ago
Source? I haven’t heard that before. It’s certainly not true for anyone in congress or upwards.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  Parental income and education are both heritable for the same reason height and hair colour are heritable. Grandparent is directionally correct although the effect of parental education on child education is almost entirely mediated by IQ and Conscientiousness. So people who were middle and upper class in their home country but come to richer countries have children who achieve similar success in their new country even if they end up owning a dry cleaners because they can’t really speak English. > The heritability of conscientiousness facets and their relationship to IQ and academic achievement https://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273.long https://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273.long > Genetic research has shown that intelligence makes a major contribution to the heritability of educational achievement. However, we show that other broad domains of behavior such as personality and psychopathology also account for genetic influence on GCSE scores beyond that predicted by intelligence. Together with intelligence, these domains account for 75% of the heritability of GCSE scores. > The high heritability of educational achievement reflects many genetically influenced traits, not just intelligence https://genepi.qimr.edu.au/contents/p/staff/CV448.pdf https://genepi.qimr.edu.au/contents/p/staff/CV448.pdf > Our findings confirmed positive associations between IQ and the facets of Competence and Dutifulness (ranging 0.11–0.27), with academic achievement showing correlations of 0.27 and 0.15 with these same facets and 0.15 with Deliberation. All conscientiousness facets were influenced by genes (broad sense heritabilities ranging 0.18–0.49) and unique environment, but common environment was judged unimportant.
  - throwaway66920 7y ago
    I meant the claim that most politicians are middle class. That being said... I’m no genetic expert but I’m pretty sure these papers are garbage. They keep referring to genetic influences but as far as I can tell, do not use any genome data. It’s true that twins share genes. That doesn’t mean that is the only thing they share. There’s incredible potential for confounding effects.
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      > They keep referring to genetic influences but as far as I can tell, do not use any genome data. It’s true that twins share genes. That doesn’t mean that is the only thing they share. There’s incredible potential for confounding effects. The difference and similarities between fraternal and identical twins and non twin siblings are a huge part of why twin studies are so powerful for discerning heritability. Fraternal and identical twins differ by genes but not environment so you can get a decent estimate of heritability from that alone. If you want polygenic risk scores for academic achievement it’s an active area of research. > Predicting educational achievement from DNA https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2016107?fbclid=IwAR2Hv8EpgxY9iZiSFebneX4OfM6zXoRUGAHnflmkUqdfxZaGHdGWEf9dAH8 https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2016107?fbclid=IwAR2Hv8Epg... > A genome-wide polygenic score (GPS), derived from a 2013 genome-wide association study (N=127,000), explained 2% of the variance in total years of education (EduYears). In a follow-up study (N=329,000), a new EduYears GPS explains up to 4%. Here, we tested the association between this latest EduYears GPS and educational achievement scores at ages 7, 12 and 16 in an independent sample of 5825 UK individuals. We found that EduYears GPS explained greater amounts of variance in educational achievement over time, up to 9% at age 16, accounting for 15% of the heritable variance. This is the strongest GPS prediction to date for quantitative behavioral traits. Individuals in the highest and lowest GPS septiles differed by a whole school grade at age 16. Furthermore, EduYears GPS was associated with general cognitive ability (~3.5%) and family socioeconomic status (~7%). There was no evidence of an interaction between EduYears GPS and family socioeconomic status on educational achievement or on general cognitive ability. These results are a harbinger of future widespread use of GPS to predict genetic risk and resilience in the social and behavioral sciences.
- topkai22 7y ago
  It probably is, although I can’t quickly find a direct source. The “middle class” is extremely broad in the US, encompassing like 60-70% (or more) of the population, with the lower class taking up 20-30% and the upper class taking 1-10% (these things aren’t well defined). It would be shocking if most Congress critters were coming from such a small upper class. Some evidence- since 1952, 5 presidents could be said to coming from the upper class (Kennedy, 2 bushes, Johnson, Trump) and 7 came from middle to lower class backgrounds. I also saw an article (which I can't find right now) that while top private colleges were disproportionately represented in congress, the majority of members still did their undergrad at state schools or die not attain an undergrad degree.
- amyjess 7y ago
  FWIW, most people in politics are in state and local government. Congress is a drop in the bucket.
hnburnsy 7y ago
[PDF] Education and Wealth: Correlation Is Not Causation In Sum: Education and Wealth Are Correlated But Causal Link May Be Weak https://www.stlouisfed.org/.../emmonseducationandwealthsiuc-100715 https://www.stlouisfed.org/.../emmonseducationandwealthsiuc-...
- mattrp 7y ago
  What is correlated is parental expectations regardless of socioeconomic status.
wayoutthere 7y ago
> Most politicians come from the middle class I very seriously doubt this is true. It may have been at one time, but people in the middle class today are too busy making ends meet to have time for politics. Obama was a huge outlier in modern politics. > ... so I'd wager most of them attended public school. This is no guarantee either; suburban school districts are disproportionately wealthy relative to urban districts. And in every urban city center I’ve lived in, even middle class (white) people end up putting their kids in Catholic school (or something similar).
- notfromhere 7y ago
  Congress is economically diverse to a point (https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/every-member-congress-wealth-one-chart https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/every-member-congress...) I'd still wager a majority went to public school, which are still government-run even if they are in nice suburbs.
  - opencl 7y ago
    95% of them are millionaires, it is ludicrous to call that economically diverse or middle class. Even if they went to public schools they likely went to some of the nicest public schools in the country.
    - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      The linked article says that only about half of them are millionaires. Do you have another source of information you're pulling from?
      - Retric 7y ago
        The source uses a rather disingenuous means of calculating net worth, such as counting home loans as debts but ignoring the value of their home as an asset. Resulting in for example a negative 17 million net worth for the owner of a dairy business. The first non millionaire listed was ted cruse: https://www.opensecrets.org/personal-finances/net-worth?cid=N00033085 https://www.opensecrets.org/personal-finances/net-worth?cid=... However, that looks like a multimillionaire to me.
asdkhadsj 7y ago
Depends on how you view fixing income inequality, I would imagine. For example, I don't think you could simply give the poor loads of money and suddenly their kids do well in school. Personally, I view it as an education problem first and foremost. I think the incoming inequality is a red herring, and people are focusing on the wrong problem. Yes, fixing income inequality is required. Yes, fixing income inequality would improve education to a degree - but my contention is that people merely having money won't help the broken education system. Not everyone can go to private schools. Furthermore, "giving people money" in college tuition has been part of the problem in driving prices unrealistically high and reinforcing predatory systems. In my view, focus on education first. More educated people make smart financial decisions. Educated people make better decisions about their life, risk assessment, and quality of life. Educated people raise better children. Educated people are more difficult to fool in blind party politics and do-nothing politicians/systems. Luckily we can do both, education and inequality, but I don't think we can or should expect to ever fix income inequality without at least in tandem fixing education. We need capable humans, and education is the only way to do it; I think.
- eropple 7y ago
  > I think the incoming inequality is a red herring, and people are focusing on the wrong problem. I grew up moderately well-to-do and attended public school in a lower- to middle-class area. Most people's parents were doing "okay"; some obviously weren't. What has stuck out to me is that the folks who I am least surprised to see having a rough time of it as adults, twelve or so years on, are the people I distinctly remember coming to school in way-past-their-prime clothes or not having money for lunch at school. Which is to say that the idea that it's a "red herring" may be well-meaning but is pretty clearly not true. We know that parental income and stability (and they are interrelated) factor heavily into both educational success and generational affluence. Kids don't learn when they're hungry and they don't learn when they're afraid everybody else is judging them for being poor and having shitty clothes.
- osdiab 7y ago
  Fixing income inequality != "giving people money", and great teachers still can't help a ton if the kids they're teaching have precarious backgrounds. Regardless, as you mentioned, we need to do both; but based on the research out there and my intuition, my inclination is that lacking income strikes lower on Maslow's hierarchy, and as such probably takes a certain degree of precedence as a prerequisite for benefiting from a stronger education system; and that some classes of money problems can be addressed in more sweeping, efficient way than improving education, which involves a great deal of training and waiting.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
There's another obvious way: simply remove the parents from the equation. All children become wards of the state and are fed, schooled, housed, and clothed by the same standard. Shuffle them around the nation frequently to get exposure to the varying cultural differences. May as well provide some military training as part of PE, why not. No one seriously considers this of course, but it does have obvious advantages, even for parents. No one has to worry about supporting their child or sending it to college, managing care while working two jobs, or any of that. The children are raised by professional child-rearers instead of amateurs. Nepotism would cease to be a serious concern. There'd be a real shot at actual meritocracy. And obviously there are some disadvantages, but I hardly need to spell those out. Like many things it is not so much a solution as a tradeoff between sets of problems. As a society, we have chosen our current set of problems over the alternative.
- derefr 7y ago
  It’s an interesting hypothetical. Even in a world where people went for it, I’d worry about the implementation, though—for I don’t know of a single example of a country where wards of the state (i.e. children in orphanages or “in the foster system”) have even average educational attainment or lifetime salary growth. Governments—even the very nice ones that top the OCED indices—don’t seem to be very good at producing educated, productive wards. (Which is strange, actually, because the outcomes are completely different for kids that go through most governments’ military academies. Maybe no government is held to a standard where it needs to take the civic education of wards seriously; but is motivated to train the members of its military regardless of extrinsic motivation?)
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    > Governments—even the very nice ones that top the OCED indices—don’t seem to be very good at producing educated, productive wards. I think this is in large part due to the simultaneous existence of children raised in the traditional fashion, often by the politicians crafting the system for the wards. A generous imagination would suppose that when the entire society relies on the system and is itself a product of that system, there'd be higher incentive to make it effective.
dxbydt 7y ago
> The most predictive stat for educational attainment is household income and parental educational attainment There is weak correlation with income & a stronger correlation with parental educational attainment. If you club them up & say "most predictive stat"...not such a good idea. The marginal Rsqs are quite different. > so if you want to fix education, you need to fix income inequality. Heh heh. This doesn't follow. At all. Yes, high income inequality is recipe for all sorts of ill-will, and maybe education is affected as well. But maybe you should regress inequality with edu attainment & see what you get. You may be surprised.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Indeed. If you want to fix childrens' education, fix the parents' view of, and commitment to, education.
achenatx 7y ago
you can google this About 23% of senators/house went to a private high school. General population has about 10% in private school https://www.privateschoolreview.com/blog/where-did-the-115th-senate-go-to-high-school https://www.privateschoolreview.com/blog/where-did-the-115th... https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/where-did-the-members-of-the-115th-house-of-representatives-go-to-school https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/where-did-the-member...
mattrp 7y ago
Yes let’s just base our policies on gross and highly inaccurate generalizations and then fix the remedy on a formula that confuses asset wealth with regular income. Ps, I absolutely hated middle school.
microcolonel 7y ago
I didn't say politicians generally, I'm talking about the qualified set of politicians who have not attended a public school. Barack Obama for example, who has responded authoritatively to questions on the matter despite clearly never having read the relevant literature (or maybe he was just lying, or maybe it was some combination of ignorance and deceit).

throwaway66920 7y ago

Source? I haven’t heard that before. It’s certainly not true for anyone in congress or upwards.

barry-cotter 7y ago
Parental income and education are both heritable for the same reason height and hair colour are heritable. Grandparent is directionally correct although the effect of parental education on child education is almost entirely mediated by IQ and Conscientiousness. So people who were middle and upper class in their home country but come to richer countries have children who achieve similar success in their new country even if they end up owning a dry cleaners because they can’t really speak English. > The heritability of conscientiousness facets and their relationship to IQ and academic achievement https://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273.long https://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273.long > Genetic research has shown that intelligence makes a major contribution to the heritability of educational achievement. However, we show that other broad domains of behavior such as personality and psychopathology also account for genetic influence on GCSE scores beyond that predicted by intelligence. Together with intelligence, these domains account for 75% of the heritability of GCSE scores. > The high heritability of educational achievement reflects many genetically influenced traits, not just intelligence https://genepi.qimr.edu.au/contents/p/staff/CV448.pdf https://genepi.qimr.edu.au/contents/p/staff/CV448.pdf > Our findings confirmed positive associations between IQ and the facets of Competence and Dutifulness (ranging 0.11–0.27), with academic achievement showing correlations of 0.27 and 0.15 with these same facets and 0.15 with Deliberation. All conscientiousness facets were influenced by genes (broad sense heritabilities ranging 0.18–0.49) and unique environment, but common environment was judged unimportant.
- throwaway66920 7y ago
  I meant the claim that most politicians are middle class. That being said... I’m no genetic expert but I’m pretty sure these papers are garbage. They keep referring to genetic influences but as far as I can tell, do not use any genome data. It’s true that twins share genes. That doesn’t mean that is the only thing they share. There’s incredible potential for confounding effects.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    > They keep referring to genetic influences but as far as I can tell, do not use any genome data. It’s true that twins share genes. That doesn’t mean that is the only thing they share. There’s incredible potential for confounding effects. The difference and similarities between fraternal and identical twins and non twin siblings are a huge part of why twin studies are so powerful for discerning heritability. Fraternal and identical twins differ by genes but not environment so you can get a decent estimate of heritability from that alone. If you want polygenic risk scores for academic achievement it’s an active area of research. > Predicting educational achievement from DNA https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2016107?fbclid=IwAR2Hv8EpgxY9iZiSFebneX4OfM6zXoRUGAHnflmkUqdfxZaGHdGWEf9dAH8 https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2016107?fbclid=IwAR2Hv8Epg... > A genome-wide polygenic score (GPS), derived from a 2013 genome-wide association study (N=127,000), explained 2% of the variance in total years of education (EduYears). In a follow-up study (N=329,000), a new EduYears GPS explains up to 4%. Here, we tested the association between this latest EduYears GPS and educational achievement scores at ages 7, 12 and 16 in an independent sample of 5825 UK individuals. We found that EduYears GPS explained greater amounts of variance in educational achievement over time, up to 9% at age 16, accounting for 15% of the heritable variance. This is the strongest GPS prediction to date for quantitative behavioral traits. Individuals in the highest and lowest GPS septiles differed by a whole school grade at age 16. Furthermore, EduYears GPS was associated with general cognitive ability (~3.5%) and family socioeconomic status (~7%). There was no evidence of an interaction between EduYears GPS and family socioeconomic status on educational achievement or on general cognitive ability. These results are a harbinger of future widespread use of GPS to predict genetic risk and resilience in the social and behavioral sciences.
topkai22 7y ago
It probably is, although I can’t quickly find a direct source. The “middle class” is extremely broad in the US, encompassing like 60-70% (or more) of the population, with the lower class taking up 20-30% and the upper class taking 1-10% (these things aren’t well defined). It would be shocking if most Congress critters were coming from such a small upper class. Some evidence- since 1952, 5 presidents could be said to coming from the upper class (Kennedy, 2 bushes, Johnson, Trump) and 7 came from middle to lower class backgrounds. I also saw an article (which I can't find right now) that while top private colleges were disproportionately represented in congress, the majority of members still did their undergrad at state schools or die not attain an undergrad degree.
amyjess 7y ago
FWIW, most people in politics are in state and local government. Congress is a drop in the bucket.

hnburnsy 7y ago

[PDF] Education and Wealth: Correlation Is Not Causation In Sum: Education and Wealth Are Correlated But Causal Link May Be Weak https://www.stlouisfed.org/.../emmonseducationandwealthsiuc-100715 https://www.stlouisfed.org/.../emmonseducationandwealthsiuc-...

mattrp 7y ago
What is correlated is parental expectations regardless of socioeconomic status.

wayoutthere 7y ago

> Most politicians come from the middle class I very seriously doubt this is true. It may have been at one time, but people in the middle class today are too busy making ends meet to have time for politics. Obama was a huge outlier in modern politics. > ... so I'd wager most of them attended public school. This is no guarantee either; suburban school districts are disproportionately wealthy relative to urban districts. And in every urban city center I’ve lived in, even middle class (white) people end up putting their kids in Catholic school (or something similar).

notfromhere 7y ago
Congress is economically diverse to a point (https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/every-member-congress-wealth-one-chart https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/every-member-congress...) I'd still wager a majority went to public school, which are still government-run even if they are in nice suburbs.
- opencl 7y ago
  95% of them are millionaires, it is ludicrous to call that economically diverse or middle class. Even if they went to public schools they likely went to some of the nicest public schools in the country.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    The linked article says that only about half of them are millionaires. Do you have another source of information you're pulling from?
    - Retric 7y ago
      The source uses a rather disingenuous means of calculating net worth, such as counting home loans as debts but ignoring the value of their home as an asset. Resulting in for example a negative 17 million net worth for the owner of a dairy business. The first non millionaire listed was ted cruse: https://www.opensecrets.org/personal-finances/net-worth?cid=N00033085 https://www.opensecrets.org/personal-finances/net-worth?cid=... However, that looks like a multimillionaire to me.

asdkhadsj 7y ago

Depends on how you view fixing income inequality, I would imagine. For example, I don't think you could simply give the poor loads of money and suddenly their kids do well in school. Personally, I view it as an education problem first and foremost. I think the incoming inequality is a red herring, and people are focusing on the wrong problem. Yes, fixing income inequality is required. Yes, fixing income inequality would improve education to a degree - but my contention is that people merely having money won't help the broken education system. Not everyone can go to private schools. Furthermore, "giving people money" in college tuition has been part of the problem in driving prices unrealistically high and reinforcing predatory systems. In my view, focus on education first. More educated people make smart financial decisions. Educated people make better decisions about their life, risk assessment, and quality of life. Educated people raise better children. Educated people are more difficult to fool in blind party politics and do-nothing politicians/systems. Luckily we can do both, education and inequality, but I don't think we can or should expect to ever fix income inequality without at least in tandem fixing education. We need capable humans, and education is the only way to do it; I think.

eropple 7y ago
> I think the incoming inequality is a red herring, and people are focusing on the wrong problem. I grew up moderately well-to-do and attended public school in a lower- to middle-class area. Most people's parents were doing "okay"; some obviously weren't. What has stuck out to me is that the folks who I am least surprised to see having a rough time of it as adults, twelve or so years on, are the people I distinctly remember coming to school in way-past-their-prime clothes or not having money for lunch at school. Which is to say that the idea that it's a "red herring" may be well-meaning but is pretty clearly not true. We know that parental income and stability (and they are interrelated) factor heavily into both educational success and generational affluence. Kids don't learn when they're hungry and they don't learn when they're afraid everybody else is judging them for being poor and having shitty clothes.
osdiab 7y ago
Fixing income inequality != "giving people money", and great teachers still can't help a ton if the kids they're teaching have precarious backgrounds. Regardless, as you mentioned, we need to do both; but based on the research out there and my intuition, my inclination is that lacking income strikes lower on Maslow's hierarchy, and as such probably takes a certain degree of precedence as a prerequisite for benefiting from a stronger education system; and that some classes of money problems can be addressed in more sweeping, efficient way than improving education, which involves a great deal of training and waiting.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

There's another obvious way: simply remove the parents from the equation. All children become wards of the state and are fed, schooled, housed, and clothed by the same standard. Shuffle them around the nation frequently to get exposure to the varying cultural differences. May as well provide some military training as part of PE, why not. No one seriously considers this of course, but it does have obvious advantages, even for parents. No one has to worry about supporting their child or sending it to college, managing care while working two jobs, or any of that. The children are raised by professional child-rearers instead of amateurs. Nepotism would cease to be a serious concern. There'd be a real shot at actual meritocracy. And obviously there are some disadvantages, but I hardly need to spell those out. Like many things it is not so much a solution as a tradeoff between sets of problems. As a society, we have chosen our current set of problems over the alternative.

derefr 7y ago
It’s an interesting hypothetical. Even in a world where people went for it, I’d worry about the implementation, though—for I don’t know of a single example of a country where wards of the state (i.e. children in orphanages or “in the foster system”) have even average educational attainment or lifetime salary growth. Governments—even the very nice ones that top the OCED indices—don’t seem to be very good at producing educated, productive wards. (Which is strange, actually, because the outcomes are completely different for kids that go through most governments’ military academies. Maybe no government is held to a standard where it needs to take the civic education of wards seriously; but is motivated to train the members of its military regardless of extrinsic motivation?)
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  > Governments—even the very nice ones that top the OCED indices—don’t seem to be very good at producing educated, productive wards. I think this is in large part due to the simultaneous existence of children raised in the traditional fashion, often by the politicians crafting the system for the wards. A generous imagination would suppose that when the entire society relies on the system and is itself a product of that system, there'd be higher incentive to make it effective.

dxbydt 7y ago

> The most predictive stat for educational attainment is household income and parental educational attainment There is weak correlation with income & a stronger correlation with parental educational attainment. If you club them up & say "most predictive stat"...not such a good idea. The marginal Rsqs are quite different. > so if you want to fix education, you need to fix income inequality. Heh heh. This doesn't follow. At all. Yes, high income inequality is recipe for all sorts of ill-will, and maybe education is affected as well. But maybe you should regress inequality with edu attainment & see what you get. You may be surprised.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Indeed. If you want to fix childrens' education, fix the parents' view of, and commitment to, education.

achenatx 7y ago

you can google this About 23% of senators/house went to a private high school. General population has about 10% in private school https://www.privateschoolreview.com/blog/where-did-the-115th-senate-go-to-high-school https://www.privateschoolreview.com/blog/where-did-the-115th... https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/where-did-the-members-of-the-115th-house-of-representatives-go-to-school https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/where-did-the-member...

mattrp 7y ago

Yes let’s just base our policies on gross and highly inaccurate generalizations and then fix the remedy on a formula that confuses asset wealth with regular income. Ps, I absolutely hated middle school.

microcolonel 7y ago

I didn't say politicians generally, I'm talking about the qualified set of politicians who have not attended a public school. Barack Obama for example, who has responded authoritatively to questions on the matter despite clearly never having read the relevant literature (or maybe he was just lying, or maybe it was some combination of ignorance and deceit).