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It's a bit more complicated than a single index isn't it? Social mobility varies widely in the US, with the biggest differentiator being domestic value for educ

It's a bit more complicated than a single index isn't it? Social mobility varies widely in the US, with the biggest differentiator being domestic value for education. Time spent studying (not household wealth) is the biggest predictor of SAT scores. SAT scores are the biggest predictor of college/university admission. Admission is the biggest predictor of economic mobility. And the biggest predictor of time spent studying? Domestic value for education. If your parents (rich or poor) care about your education, you'll succeed. If the don't you won't. This is particularly evident when examining the social mobility experienced by children of poor asian immigrants. This is all pretty standard Chicago school stuff. For further reading see the work of Thomas Sowell. This is exactly what I'd expect in a free country. Opportunity is abound, you just have to take the appropriate actions to seize it. Conversely, if you're born into a domestic culture that sets you up for (economic) failure, it's no one's job to intervene. People can of course raise their children in any manner they see fit. > be viscerally revolting I'm not sure why I would. Hunting and fishing is simply no longer a sustainable economic model. I did say "that they came about as a result of a long and brutal process of conquest". But all the people who perpetrated it and suffered it are dead. The question is how to make the best of reality today. Living on a reservation in modern comfort (house, A/C, refrigeration, heating, etc.) is just not economically viable, regardless of how one may feel about it.

shadowgovt 4y ago
> Opportunity is abound, you just have to take the appropriate actions to seize it. It sounds more like you're saying "you just have to luck into having parents who understand this." > Conversely, if you're born into a domestic culture that sets you up for (economic) failure, it's no one's job to intervene. That's terribly cruel and not a way one should structure a just society. And, indeed, bringing the conversation around to the beginning: this is among the reasons we have a public education system in the first place, to attempt to minimize that inherent unfairness. Because sometimes (as you've now observed) parents are wrong, and we have a valid civic interest in a collective process to ameliorate that error and, in so doing, create a citizenry more prepared to inherit the burden of co-governing the country (and, eventually, governing it exclusively when their parents are retired and gone). "What do we do when the parents are just plug-stupid and everyone knows it" is one of the oldest questions in centralized education, and we have multiple overlapping approaches to addressing it (including, of course, the right to pull a child out of school and shoulder the burden of educating them oneself, for good or ill). Your comments regarding reservation life express an incredible ignorance of both the history of reservations and their modern-day structure, and I'm completely disinterested in further conversation with you on that topic. Suffice to say you just don't get it. It would be a useful avenue of study for you to reframe your overall attitude on the inherent virtue of the system you were born (lucked) into.
- thegrimmest 4y ago
  > parents are wrong This whole premise implies that you know what's "right" and "wrong" better than other people. I find it fundamentally abhorrent to impose by beliefs on others in this manner. That is the whole point. Economic success/mobility is only one outcome of many that a child rearing strategy can optimize for. What gives any of us the right to override parental decision making to optimize for this outcome above others? Regarding reservations, I've not seen any factual refutation of any of the points that I made - namely that most of them are fundamentally economically unsustainable no matter how we feel about it. My life experience supports my worldview - I was born into poverty to immigrants who value education and achievement, and am now quite comfortable. This happens all the time.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Societies have collective understandings of what is right and wrong. It is possible for individual parents to be incorrect about those concepts. Our society reserves the authority to deprive parents of access to their children in only extreme cases of danger... But we reserve that authority, yes, because societies have a concept of what is right and wrong. If you can agree it would be morally abhorrent for a society to stand by idly while a parent sets their own child on fire or starves them to death, you can agree that there is such a thing as non-fundamentally-abhorrent imposition of beliefs upon others about morality and their own children. To be clear, the authority to remove a child from parental care is exercised with extreme reservation and would be inappropriate to do so merely if parents are teaching their children "wrong" things. But in the larger question of teaching: my goodness, how do you think we teach people to be good citizens without teaching them at least something, as a society, about "right" and "wrong?" It's nonsense to imagine that's a parent-only responsibility. Of course it's a shared responsibility between parents and everyone else in the child's environment; kids aren't raised in a vacuum, and the position "schools have no business teaching right from wrong" is unimplementable nonsense (mostly dreamt up by people who wish they didn't have to be part of a larger society). Rather, it is parents who have the responsibility to be involved in the educational process so that their children are taught what the parents believe is right (but of course, that introduces the challenge that not everyone will agree, so it's good we have processes in place for that). > My life experience supports my worldview Yes, I have no doubt that the fact you got extremely lucky supports your worldview. That tends to be how that works. The larger trends look more like https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/13/american-dream-broken-upward-mobility-us https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/13/americ...

shadowgovt 4y ago

> Opportunity is abound, you just have to take the appropriate actions to seize it. It sounds more like you're saying "you just have to luck into having parents who understand this." > Conversely, if you're born into a domestic culture that sets you up for (economic) failure, it's no one's job to intervene. That's terribly cruel and not a way one should structure a just society. And, indeed, bringing the conversation around to the beginning: this is among the reasons we have a public education system in the first place, to attempt to minimize that inherent unfairness. Because sometimes (as you've now observed) parents are wrong, and we have a valid civic interest in a collective process to ameliorate that error and, in so doing, create a citizenry more prepared to inherit the burden of co-governing the country (and, eventually, governing it exclusively when their parents are retired and gone). "What do we do when the parents are just plug-stupid and everyone knows it" is one of the oldest questions in centralized education, and we have multiple overlapping approaches to addressing it (including, of course, the right to pull a child out of school and shoulder the burden of educating them oneself, for good or ill). Your comments regarding reservation life express an incredible ignorance of both the history of reservations and their modern-day structure, and I'm completely disinterested in further conversation with you on that topic. Suffice to say you just don't get it. It would be a useful avenue of study for you to reframe your overall attitude on the inherent virtue of the system you were born (lucked) into.

thegrimmest 4y ago
> parents are wrong This whole premise implies that you know what's "right" and "wrong" better than other people. I find it fundamentally abhorrent to impose by beliefs on others in this manner. That is the whole point. Economic success/mobility is only one outcome of many that a child rearing strategy can optimize for. What gives any of us the right to override parental decision making to optimize for this outcome above others? Regarding reservations, I've not seen any factual refutation of any of the points that I made - namely that most of them are fundamentally economically unsustainable no matter how we feel about it. My life experience supports my worldview - I was born into poverty to immigrants who value education and achievement, and am now quite comfortable. This happens all the time.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Societies have collective understandings of what is right and wrong. It is possible for individual parents to be incorrect about those concepts. Our society reserves the authority to deprive parents of access to their children in only extreme cases of danger... But we reserve that authority, yes, because societies have a concept of what is right and wrong. If you can agree it would be morally abhorrent for a society to stand by idly while a parent sets their own child on fire or starves them to death, you can agree that there is such a thing as non-fundamentally-abhorrent imposition of beliefs upon others about morality and their own children. To be clear, the authority to remove a child from parental care is exercised with extreme reservation and would be inappropriate to do so merely if parents are teaching their children "wrong" things. But in the larger question of teaching: my goodness, how do you think we teach people to be good citizens without teaching them at least something, as a society, about "right" and "wrong?" It's nonsense to imagine that's a parent-only responsibility. Of course it's a shared responsibility between parents and everyone else in the child's environment; kids aren't raised in a vacuum, and the position "schools have no business teaching right from wrong" is unimplementable nonsense (mostly dreamt up by people who wish they didn't have to be part of a larger society). Rather, it is parents who have the responsibility to be involved in the educational process so that their children are taught what the parents believe is right (but of course, that introduces the challenge that not everyone will agree, so it's good we have processes in place for that). > My life experience supports my worldview Yes, I have no doubt that the fact you got extremely lucky supports your worldview. That tends to be how that works. The larger trends look more like https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/13/american-dream-broken-upward-mobility-us https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/13/americ...