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This reminds of a line from 30 Rock by Jack Donaghy: "Diversity is the engine that drives this country. We are an immigrant nation! The first generation works

This reminds of a line from 30 Rock by Jack Donaghy: "Diversity is the engine that drives this country. We are an immigrant nation! The first generation works their fingers to the bone making things, the next generation goes to college and innovates new ideas, the third generation... snowboards and takes improv classes." Feels like one of those things that we all thought was true.

mc32 7y ago
That echoes the three generation rule of wealth: http://www.honolulumagazine.com/Live-Wellthy/October-2018/Why-It-Takes-Just-3-Generations-for-Some-to-Lose-Their-Family-Fortune/ http://www.honolulumagazine.com/Live-Wellthy/October-2018/Wh...
rayiner 7y ago
John Adams said something similar, though he meant it in the opposite way: "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." Relatedly, Michael Hopf: "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times."
- oblio 7y ago
  How do you define weak and strong, though?
  - dpark 7y ago
    You don’t get to the meat of a statement like that by subjecting it to semantic analysis.
    - oblio 7y ago
      I do. That statement is a platitude.
      - dpark 7y ago
        You know what “strong” and “weak” mean. Should we also define what constitutes “hard times”? Or what “men” are? If you have an issue with the statement, just say it. Don’t hide your criticism behind supposed ambiguity.
        oblio 7y ago
        Ok, easy, I've seen this statement used several times to criticize younger generations because things were harder "back in my day". I think that in aggregate, generations are more or less the same, so I don't agree with it.
        tathougies 7y ago
        > Ok, easy, I've seen this statement used several times to criticize younger generations because things were harder "back in my day". Except for some very specific times in history, it is almost universally true that the older generation had harder times. Human progress is -- in the grand scheme of things -- a march towards much easier lives.
        watwut 7y ago
        Those very specific periods are quite often. For huge amount of world population, it is right now.
        tathougies 7y ago
        Huge, but much smaller than before.
        tasuki 7y ago
        Today, most people have much easier lives than their parents. The amount of material comfort most are enjoying is frankly staggering.
  - dx87 7y ago
    I think of it as resiliance to adversity. If someone has had a comparatively easy life, they'll probably have a harder time dealing with difficult situations. The problem is that everything is relative, so people may not see their life as easy, even if it is compared to most people. For example, I used to work with someone who was raised by wealthy parents, went to super exclusive private schools, and had multiple college degrees paid for by their parents. They didn't think they had an easy life though, because their parents only had a couple million dollars in the bank, and his classmates were mostly old money with 10s or 100s of millions in the bank, so they wouldn't hang out with him because he was "poor". The good thing is that resliance is like a muscle and can be strengthened, people just need to leave their comfort zone occasionally.
    - HarryHirsch 7y ago
      people just need to leave their comfort zone occasionally It would be nice if that happened, though. You tell your students, 75 % of whom have no grasp of 8th-grade math, that they have been cheated out of an education and that consequently they now need to work twice as hard. But instead of knuckling down they all march off to the Dean to complain. Of course the Dean enables the underperformance. You can't frame "easy life" only in terms of money, "easy life" also means coasting through an underperforming school and never having to face reality.
      - acephal 7y ago
        Analytics driven education is the worst thing to happen to education.
  - GuiA 7y ago
    This quote is often used as a dog whistle by far right groups. In their definition, “weak” is caring about others, providing services to citizens like healthcare and education etc. “Strong” is then the Trumpian ideal of a successful self made business man who takes no nonsense from no one and gets things done regardless of their snowflake feelings (sic).
    - rayiner 7y ago
      So? I find the quote very compelling as someone from a family of immigrants. My cousins left Bangladesh as children. Their parents left professional jobs to take service jobs (“hard times”). But the kids worked hard, majored in engineering, science, business, medicine, and accounting (“strong men and women”), and secured professional jobs for themselves (“good times”). I see the next generation being bombarded with ideas to make them weak. Culture that emphasizes personal fulfillment, pernicious individualism, hedonism, rebelling against authority, etc. And I’m profoundly afraid of the “weak men and women” that might follow in the next generation.
      - Apocryphon 7y ago
        Quotations, like any other meme, do not exist in a vacuum, and are sometimes taken up by ideologies to justify different agendas. It's fine to like a quote for the value it resonates with oneself, but you can't ignore that it also exists within a larger culture- http://tiny.cc/pinojz http://tiny.cc/pinojz
        wutbrodo 7y ago
        Yes, you can. Those who get hysterical about which other people might believe the same things are actively ceding control of that message to them (the "Hitler was a vegetarian!!" problem)
  - tropo 7y ago
    It's many things. People raised in the Great Depression went on to win a huge war and build a very comfortable life. By modern standards, they weren't complainers. The enemy was brutally killed without holding back and without caring about diverse values or culture. Men went off to near-certain death, often volunteering to do so. Later, the weak men couldn't properly finish a war. Vietnam was winnable, but that didn't happen by choice. The weak men were unwilling to sacrifice even mere comfort for their own nation, so they did things like outsourcing to cut costs. The weak men couldn't say "NO" to the lazy who wanted help, so the culture of hard work was lost. Everybody got coddled. Accommodations turned high school graduation into a participation trophy at best. Standards eroded.
    - peatmoss 7y ago
      > Later, the weak men couldn't properly finish a war. Vietnam was winnable, but that didn't happen by choice. The weak men were unwilling to sacrifice even mere comfort for their own nation, so they did things like outsourcing to cut costs. This ignores some complex geopolitics of not drawing a nuclear superpower in to open conflict with us.
- umutisik 7y ago
  Also Voltaire quote: “History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.”
  - acephal 7y ago
    Also Aristotle: you can't do philosophy without solving all the other necessities and knowledges (he meant math, etc) first.
- theandrewbailey 7y ago
  See also: The Strauss–Howe generational theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
- Tyr42 7y ago
  I have a rebuttal on the quote, as it applies to the Romans in particular. Where the author goes into how people in "hard times" still get stomped by the Romans more often than not. And people use that myth as a way to make political arguments about decadence. I'm not doing it justice, just take a look. https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/ https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
mistrial9 7y ago
in a class-less society, where competition for cash is the elevator to wealth, high-pollution industry, treachery and predatory lending moves classes while "arts" does nothing.. These comments make it sound like "soft" people rightfully lose their chance at wealth, this is over-generalized, and badly so. People who build a social and artistic fabric, and do no harm, get run over by others with no social allegiance and a thirst for one result. to strain this tangent further, it seems evident that industry and under-priced oil destroyed local craft, and the Internet and an entertainment-economy, has crushed fine arts practice in locale after locale.
- lanternslight 7y ago
  Different priorities means different outcomes.
  - homonculus1 7y ago
    The point is that we should align incentives to priorities that generate positive outcomes.
majos 7y ago
I learned about a similar concept in my high school world history class of all places. Except that was for nomadic traders in north Africa and the Arabian peninsula. The first generation could traipse endlessly across the desert and build a fortune. The second generation could maintain it. The third generation couldn't. The phrase was "losing the desert", though Googling indicates this isn't a common term after all.

mc32 7y ago

That echoes the three generation rule of wealth: http://www.honolulumagazine.com/Live-Wellthy/October-2018/Why-It-Takes-Just-3-Generations-for-Some-to-Lose-Their-Family-Fortune/ http://www.honolulumagazine.com/Live-Wellthy/October-2018/Wh...

rayiner 7y ago

John Adams said something similar, though he meant it in the opposite way: "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." Relatedly, Michael Hopf: "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times."

oblio 7y ago
How do you define weak and strong, though?
- dpark 7y ago
  You don’t get to the meat of a statement like that by subjecting it to semantic analysis.
  - oblio 7y ago
    I do. That statement is a platitude.
    - dpark 7y ago
      You know what “strong” and “weak” mean. Should we also define what constitutes “hard times”? Or what “men” are? If you have an issue with the statement, just say it. Don’t hide your criticism behind supposed ambiguity.
      - oblio 7y ago
        Ok, easy, I've seen this statement used several times to criticize younger generations because things were harder "back in my day". I think that in aggregate, generations are more or less the same, so I don't agree with it.
        tathougies 7y ago
        > Ok, easy, I've seen this statement used several times to criticize younger generations because things were harder "back in my day". Except for some very specific times in history, it is almost universally true that the older generation had harder times. Human progress is -- in the grand scheme of things -- a march towards much easier lives.
        watwut 7y ago
        Those very specific periods are quite often. For huge amount of world population, it is right now.
        tathougies 7y ago
        Huge, but much smaller than before.
        tasuki 7y ago
        Today, most people have much easier lives than their parents. The amount of material comfort most are enjoying is frankly staggering.
- dx87 7y ago
  I think of it as resiliance to adversity. If someone has had a comparatively easy life, they'll probably have a harder time dealing with difficult situations. The problem is that everything is relative, so people may not see their life as easy, even if it is compared to most people. For example, I used to work with someone who was raised by wealthy parents, went to super exclusive private schools, and had multiple college degrees paid for by their parents. They didn't think they had an easy life though, because their parents only had a couple million dollars in the bank, and his classmates were mostly old money with 10s or 100s of millions in the bank, so they wouldn't hang out with him because he was "poor". The good thing is that resliance is like a muscle and can be strengthened, people just need to leave their comfort zone occasionally.
  - HarryHirsch 7y ago
    people just need to leave their comfort zone occasionally It would be nice if that happened, though. You tell your students, 75 % of whom have no grasp of 8th-grade math, that they have been cheated out of an education and that consequently they now need to work twice as hard. But instead of knuckling down they all march off to the Dean to complain. Of course the Dean enables the underperformance. You can't frame "easy life" only in terms of money, "easy life" also means coasting through an underperforming school and never having to face reality.
    - acephal 7y ago
      Analytics driven education is the worst thing to happen to education.
- GuiA 7y ago
  This quote is often used as a dog whistle by far right groups. In their definition, “weak” is caring about others, providing services to citizens like healthcare and education etc. “Strong” is then the Trumpian ideal of a successful self made business man who takes no nonsense from no one and gets things done regardless of their snowflake feelings (sic).
  - rayiner 7y ago
    So? I find the quote very compelling as someone from a family of immigrants. My cousins left Bangladesh as children. Their parents left professional jobs to take service jobs (“hard times”). But the kids worked hard, majored in engineering, science, business, medicine, and accounting (“strong men and women”), and secured professional jobs for themselves (“good times”). I see the next generation being bombarded with ideas to make them weak. Culture that emphasizes personal fulfillment, pernicious individualism, hedonism, rebelling against authority, etc. And I’m profoundly afraid of the “weak men and women” that might follow in the next generation.
    - Apocryphon 7y ago
      Quotations, like any other meme, do not exist in a vacuum, and are sometimes taken up by ideologies to justify different agendas. It's fine to like a quote for the value it resonates with oneself, but you can't ignore that it also exists within a larger culture- http://tiny.cc/pinojz http://tiny.cc/pinojz
      - wutbrodo 7y ago
        Yes, you can. Those who get hysterical about which other people might believe the same things are actively ceding control of that message to them (the "Hitler was a vegetarian!!" problem)
- tropo 7y ago
  It's many things. People raised in the Great Depression went on to win a huge war and build a very comfortable life. By modern standards, they weren't complainers. The enemy was brutally killed without holding back and without caring about diverse values or culture. Men went off to near-certain death, often volunteering to do so. Later, the weak men couldn't properly finish a war. Vietnam was winnable, but that didn't happen by choice. The weak men were unwilling to sacrifice even mere comfort for their own nation, so they did things like outsourcing to cut costs. The weak men couldn't say "NO" to the lazy who wanted help, so the culture of hard work was lost. Everybody got coddled. Accommodations turned high school graduation into a participation trophy at best. Standards eroded.
  - peatmoss 7y ago
    > Later, the weak men couldn't properly finish a war. Vietnam was winnable, but that didn't happen by choice. The weak men were unwilling to sacrifice even mere comfort for their own nation, so they did things like outsourcing to cut costs. This ignores some complex geopolitics of not drawing a nuclear superpower in to open conflict with us.
umutisik 7y ago
Also Voltaire quote: “History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.”
- acephal 7y ago
  Also Aristotle: you can't do philosophy without solving all the other necessities and knowledges (he meant math, etc) first.
theandrewbailey 7y ago
See also: The Strauss–Howe generational theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
Tyr42 7y ago
I have a rebuttal on the quote, as it applies to the Romans in particular. Where the author goes into how people in "hard times" still get stomped by the Romans more often than not. And people use that myth as a way to make political arguments about decadence. I'm not doing it justice, just take a look. https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/ https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

mistrial9 7y ago

in a class-less society, where competition for cash is the elevator to wealth, high-pollution industry, treachery and predatory lending moves classes while "arts" does nothing.. These comments make it sound like "soft" people rightfully lose their chance at wealth, this is over-generalized, and badly so. People who build a social and artistic fabric, and do no harm, get run over by others with no social allegiance and a thirst for one result. to strain this tangent further, it seems evident that industry and under-priced oil destroyed local craft, and the Internet and an entertainment-economy, has crushed fine arts practice in locale after locale.

lanternslight 7y ago
Different priorities means different outcomes.
- homonculus1 7y ago
  The point is that we should align incentives to priorities that generate positive outcomes.

majos 7y ago

I learned about a similar concept in my high school world history class of all places. Except that was for nomadic traders in north Africa and the Arabian peninsula. The first generation could traipse endlessly across the desert and build a fortune. The second generation could maintain it. The third generation couldn't. The phrase was "losing the desert", though Googling indicates this isn't a common term after all.