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In America, Where You're Born Is Correlated With How Far You'll Go In Life

• jdminhbg 13y ago
  In Slate Headlines, Correlation Is Causation.
  • rayiner 13y ago
    Ah yes, the causation must run the other way: where you go in life has a huge impact on where you were born.
    • jdminhbg 13y ago
      There are more than two directions.
      • deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
    • thaumasiotes 13y ago
      Let's recall four standard reasons for a correlation of two variables: (1) Coincidence. One rose over some time period, and the other also rose over the same period, despite being completely unrelated. (The world murder rate has been going down, and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have been going up. This is a negative correlation.) (2) A causes B. (Cigarette smokers display lung cancer at elevated rates) (3) B causes A. (Cigarette smokers display lung cancer at elevated rates) (4) Root cause. Some other phenomenon causes both A and B. (Children in homes containing books display intelligence at elevated rates) This should be obvious, but arguing against option (2) doesn't mean arguing for option (3).
      • rayiner 13y ago
        What's a concrete example of (4) in this context that doesn't reduce trivially to (3)?
        • GeneralMayhem 13y ago
          Both are caused by good parenting.
          • rayiner 13y ago
            Good parenting causes you to be born outside the southeast?
            • kenj0418 13y ago
              Well, I thank my mother all the time for moving north several years before I was born. But I'm pretty sure the comment was referring to "Children in homes containing books display intelligence at elevated rates" not the overall article.
        • thaumasiotes 13y ago
          Well, I can't actually produce a number for this, but how would you feel about a correlation between first digit of US zip code and incidence of Tay-Sachs disease? Note: Tay-Sachs is something that happens to Jews, and Jews are concentrated in New York. Does the zip code connection satisfy your demand of "in this context"?
          • rayiner 13y ago
            My point is that "where you were born" is a broader term than "the zip code where you were born." Obviously your zip code doesn't cause anything. But your zip code determines things like what the schools are like in the area, what the income demographics are like in the area, etc. When people say "where you were born determines where you end up" they're referring to that larger definition of "where you were born" not literally your zip code. That's what makes many versions of (4) collapse into (3). Though I think your Tay-Sachs example is one that arguably does not.
  • minikites 13y ago
    "Correlation is not causation but it sure is a hint."
• wf 13y ago
  I'm sure some of you saw it because it's on page two (and linked in the article)-- but the New York Times has imo a much better article on this: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-income-ladder-location-matters.html?hp&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-incom...
  • anishkothari 13y ago
    Thanks for linking to the NYT article, much better than the Slate one. IMO access to efficient public transportation has an outsized impact on people's ability to move up the economic ladder.
    • twoodfin 13y ago
      How does that theory jibe with some of the best mobility results being concentrated in places like Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota and North Texas?
      • wf 13y ago
        I'm not an economist but I do wonder if the reasons some of those places have higher mobility is because the previous generation in those areas have relatively low income jobs (i.e. mostly agriculture) and many of the current generation have a "gotta get out of here" mentality leading them to better paying opportunities elsewhere. I know I felt that way living in the mid-west in early high school. I'd like to see a map of how many of these income reporters moved away from their locales and to where and also what professions they picked up.
        • twoodfin 13y ago
          The mobility those regions demonstrate is better than average for all income classes, and those income classes are defined nationally, not locally. Of course, that "gotta get out of here" feeling isn't limited to lower income kids, so it could be a factor. Certainly it's typically good for your earnings if you're willing to move where you can make more money. But then why isn't upstate New York dark blue? (Sorry, upstate New York!)
• tokenadult 13y ago
  I think the article's headline point is true for me in one odd way. I grew up in suburban Minneapolis, Minnesota, and by chance the school district where I grew up had mandatory foreign language instruction (German) for all elementary school pupils in grades four, five, and six. (One member of the district staff was a German refugee who came over to the United States after World War II. She set up German classes delivered over the Twin Cities educational TV station, now a PBS affiliate station, and at the appointed hour, television sets in elementary classrooms all over the school district were tuned to her instructional programs. I think the school district also made an effort to hire new elementary teachers who had had some German during their higher education.) My German is nicht so gut, but this early exposure to foreign language study (few Americans begin study of a second language before secondary school) got me started in the process of understanding what it takes to learn another language. Our school district had the usual mix of French, Spanish, or more German in junior high (I continued with German, a heritage language in my family) and added Russian in senior high, which I took. So when I went into university and tried out the Chinese major program, I was sufficiently successful to keep going in that major subject. Quite a few of my classmates from my school district studied interesting languages like Arabic and ancient Nahuatl and linguistics while in university, and several aspired to become, and at least one became, foreign service officers. So in this simple manner a difference in the local schools in my town propelled the mobility to new places of many of the alumni.
  • minimax 13y ago
    few Americans begin study of a second language before secondary school Are you sure about that? I grew up in Texas and I remember taking Spanish in elementary school.
    • vinbreau 13y ago
      I went to school in S.E. Texas. We had French and Spanish in high school, nothing else. The French class was solid, but the Spanish class was lame, all we did was crossword puzzles and word exercises. I took it for two years and did not learn the language due to the poor instruction. I knew schools in the bigger nearby cities sometimes had German, but not my school. Also, the foreign languages were not mandatory classes. There was no incentive or push to learn a second language, most adults in my area thought it was useless and that students should be focusing on agriculture and not foreign languages. As such my high school had: Agriculture, Horticulture, Cosmetology, Auto-Shop, Animal Husbandry, landscaping.. but no focus on foreign languages or science beyond the basics.
• thehme 13y ago
  Can't even load page to play/est map. ugh.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• mmuro 13y ago
  Terrible title. It's not where you are born; it's where you grow up.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • akjj 13y ago
    Where you're born has a large and statistically significant impact on where you grow up.
• patrickaljord 13y ago
  On planet Earth, Where You're Born Has a Huge Impact on How Far You'll Go In Life.
• ianstallings 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure this rings true for the whole world and not just America. I moved from a coal mining town when I was young to washington DC and it increased our family wealth significantly and impacted my life in a very good way. If I had stayed in that coal mining town I would probably have done okay but the opportunities would have been much less. Now I'm in NYC specifically for the opportunities. I'm here to make a great living and then one day skip town with my chest full of gold.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• jurassic 13y ago
  In the white trash southern town where I grew up being a teacher at $35k/yr is considered one of the better jobs available. Military service is the best option for young men who want to provide a living wage to their families, especially since no education is required. A few dozen doctors and dentists and veterinarians make bank and live like kings (not really joking... think giant sailboats docked at their beach mansions with 4 car garages), but a big part of the problem is that there is no middle class. There's a huge chasm between $35k and $350k, with no opportunities. In a community that is that poor even entrepreneurship seems like an impossible choice. How can you make money in that community when nobody has got 2 pennies to rub together? Another problem is that the culture does not value those things which empower young people to rise. Even among the top 5% of my high school class, I knew people who turned down full tuition scholarships to the flagship state university because they wanted to follow God and marry a nice boy from their church, or needed to stay home to help care and provide for members of their family. It's traditional and tribal, and looking off toward the horizon and going away for fancy schooling just doesn't rank highly on most peoples' priorities. In a community where many kids' parents attended the same high schools and the grandparents are local, wanting to leave is considered odd. The only reason I'm not still there today is that for some reason, as a nerd and social outcast, I rejected that path from an early age and my top priority out of high school was to get the hell out. School was hell, but I consider myself fortunate not to be working minimum wage jobs and living in a trailer park like two of my siblings.
  • zwieback 13y ago
    Do you go back to your home town and, if so, what reaction do you get from smart kids that decided to stay?
    • jurassic 13y ago
      I do go back to see my family and one teacher who had a big impact on me, but I'm not really good friends with anyone who stayed anymore. I came out to one of my oldest friends at Christmas, and they told me if I didn't leave my partner of 4 years and give up the gay lifestyle that I would burn in hell for eternity. This lecture was delivered in a crowded restaurant, with about a dozen people looking on. At one point in college I wrote an editorial for my hometown paper and the minibio was something along the lines of "ABC High School Valedictorian, Class of 200X, and current MIT student"; as a result the comments were all incredibly nasty and irrelevant to the content of the article, along the lines of "Who does this liberal/atheist bitch think she is?" The only positive comments were from old people saying "Wow, I've never seen anybody under 30 submit a piece to the paper." Truthfully, in person people are usually a lot more gentle (southern hospitality and all), but there's definitely an undercurrent of resentment after initial pleasantries. Sometimes it can be really awkward when I reciprocate their "It's so good to see you, and how are you doing?" and get a really depressing story back. (Got knocked up, laid off, foreclosed, etc.) Even people in my own family can be hostile. It feels like I can never give anybody any advice, ever, because "they can't all live perfect lives" like me. It sucks.
• lifeformed 13y ago
  What's the deal with North Dakota? It's not the first place I think of when I hear "Land of Opportunity".
  • rdouble 13y ago
    Oil fracking.
  • blinkingled 13y ago
    Oil/Gas jobs?
  • bane 13y ago
    I believe it's the oil industry.
• kenster07 13y ago
  You can replace "In America" with "In Any Country."
• beat 13y ago
  As someone born in the bottom fifth who worked up into the top fifth, a big part of it is actively escaping childhood culture and that culture's expectations. When I grew up, I didn't know anyone wealthy or successful - I met them when I was an adult. Good role models are critical for kids' sense of scope and possibility. Then again, as a political liberal, I tend to say an un-liberal thing when talking about income distribution... income isn't distributed evenly, but neither is talent. Mediocre people don't advance society. They tend to stay where they started (which explains a lot of management mediocrity - some are born into positions of privilege, but lack the talent to do anything with it but maintain the status quo). The way to maximize success for society as a whole is to maximize the opportunity of its most talented members, by eliminating cultural and social barriers to success.
  • bane 13y ago
    > As someone born in the bottom fifth who worked up into the top fifth, a big part of it is actively escaping childhood culture and that culture's expectations. When I grew up, I didn't know anyone wealthy or successful - I met them when I was an adult. Good role models are critical for kids' sense of scope and possibility. I don't think I could have said it better. I too grew up relatively poor, in a hick area 30 minutes outside of the nearest white trash town, lumber yard, dying steel mill and trailer park. I never even conceived that I would be able to obtain the life I have now, not even by half. Outside of my school teachers, I knew exactly one person with a college degree (my father) who spent most of his life dealing with family members who attacked him for having one ("so Mr. College, do you want to join us for a family dinner, or are you too good for it?" was a common thread). The available options to me were so limited, and going elsewhere involved so much more money than I had, it was inconceivable that I would have a life other than what I had seen. I managed to pull myself up just enough to realize I didn't want to work low-paid hourly jobs and drive discount used cars for the rest of my life and enrolled in the local Community College to try and learn a trade. As it so happens, my wife grew up in a newly wealthy family (her almost entirely uneducated father made a boat load during a housing boom in his native country), and simply "knew" how to operate in the upper-middle class. I met her while she was studying English at the same College as an international student (with the insane international student tuition paid for out of her own pocket). She simply had the cognitive tools to know how to make good money management decisions, how to buy things and haggle for good value, how to represent herself (even as a foreigner) so she'd end up paying the middle-class price for things instead of the poor person's price for things (one of the first lessons I learned, turns out it's cheaper to be richer): An example: I grew up where everyone around me bought used cars, some junk, some okay, all had expensive maintenance issues within the first year or two...but it's just what people did. The redneck with 20 cars in his yard? That's because he figures he can by 3 cars at $100 a piece and cannibalize (with hundreds of his own labor hours on top of any extra parts he needs to buy) them to make one good car he can drive for a couple months. My wife was able to demonstrate that people like my parents, were spending on average, much more per mile over the life of their used car than we would if we bought a cheap new car with a reputation for high reliability. I still drive that same car 11 years later. My current cost per mile, even with high gas prices, is something like $.18 a mile. My parents spend something like $.50-.60 per mile. And on and on and on. It was an entirely new way of looking at the world that simply never occurred to me or it appears anybody else around me. Recently, one of my old friends from my hometown was up in a fit that a sweet lease he has on a basement apartment is going to be up in 2 years. This was a problem because he couldn't figure out how to afford the higher rental price that the market had gone to in the last 5 years and thought he might have to move out of state (another strange compunction I'll get to in a minute). I asked him, "wouldn't you be making more money via raises or a new job by then?". "I'm not qualified to get any of the jobs around here, the closest one I could find required at least an Associates Degree or a Certification." So given a 2 year lead, it never occurred to him that he could simply solve his entire issue by getting some education or a couple of quick certificates out of the way. Worse, and I've found this as very common where I come from, pointing out these simple facts generates lots of very aggressive resistance. The other strange obsession I've found is the "solution" some find in poor areas or "chasing expenses down". This means that, stuck in a job that's paid the same for the last 10 years, and costs rising, they can no longer afford to stay in their home areas. So the solution is to move to an area that has a lower cost of living -- of course without regard for the lack of jobs. They try and and "chase" down expenses. This is of course opposite of moving to an expensive city, making much more money only to have it gobbled up by very high living expenses...except in an expensive city, the opportunity to keep moving up ahead of the rising expense curve actually exists. You can't chase down expenses forever, eventually you find yourself in an area with no jobs and miles and miles of endless 4th hand trailer homes and no opportunity to chase expenses down even further. Being poor without access to what people with money actually do with their money (and how they come about that money) is very very hard for a young person to figure a way out of on their own. It's why poverty is systemic in many areas and the examples that are shown: boxers, basketball players, drug dealers, etc. are the ones kids gravitate towards because that's all they can see.
• saosebastiao 13y ago
  I deleted a previous comment because I didn't accurately convey my thoughts, but I'm hoping this is more accurate. My hometown is one of the cheapest, yet most uneducated and violent cities in all of California. There was a huge class divide amongst my peers, none of whom were rich; Some could afford to move elsewhere, and others couldn't. Of those that couldn't, I would say approximately 20-30% are in prison, and the rest are stuck in <$10/hr jobs probably for the rest of their lives. Of those who could move elsewhere (not rich, mind you, just well-to-do enough to move to a different city in CA, like say Sacramento or San Bernadino), most have decent middle class blue collar jobs (~$40k). About 10% of the group that was better off ended up going to college, and I would count myself amongst maybe 5 people (out of a class of ~400) that have truly jumped class barriers. When you can only afford to live in one place, you are limited by the options of that one place. Even tiny increments in income/wealth open up exponentially greater opportunities, for the sole reason that they allow you to move elsewhere. For this reason, I concur 100% with Yglesias' theory: Housing regulation and laws, which have a disproportionate effect on housing affordability, are a huge impediment to class mobility. Seattle, I hope you shape up before you turn into San Francisco. Thankfully, I can afford to live here, but my presence in Seattle is crowding out people that are exactly like me from 2-3 years ago. Accommodate them and build new housing, or you will cause their demise.
  • kyllo 13y ago
    Unfortunately, the big reason why Seattle is getting so expensive is just because there are lucrative jobs to be had here. Same reason why Silicon Valley is so expensive, but still on a smaller scale at this point. I think we're going to see more and more of this: the cities with a lot of jobs getting very expensive to live in, and the cities with fewer job opportunities staying flat or even getting cheaper--because their economies are dying. So, unless your income is very high, to avoid having your income canceled out by the local costs, you will either need to find a rare high-paying job in a low-jobs, low-cost city, or find rare low-cost housing in a high-jobs, high-cost city. Not that this isn't already the case--just saying, I think America's "jobless recovery" is going to make this effect more extreme in the near future.
    • 13y ago
• epmatsw 13y ago
  I'm not sure if the lack upward mobility in the South is a result of our economic landscape. It plausible that it's due to the lingering effects of segregation and the fact that the vast majority of our bottom 20% are African Americans while the majority of the top 20% are Caucasian. This map and a map of the distribution of the African American population in the South correspond so well it's a little disheartening. http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/moneybox/2013/07/22/metro_area_mobility_where_you_re_born_drives_how_far_you_go/mobility%20map.png.CROP.article568-large.png http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/moneybox/2013/0... http://prisca.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Percent_Black-2000-plankton-box.png http://prisca.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Percent_Black-20... http://prisca.me/political-plankton-the-left-behind/ http://prisca.me/political-plankton-the-left-behind/
  • Zigurd 13y ago
    59 comments and this is the only one with the word "black." Race still matters, very much.
  • beat 13y ago
    I think you'd see the same distribution in the North, though. Reminds me of a joke about the difference between white Southerners and white Northerners... the southerners don't care if blacks are around, so long as they aren't uppity. Northerners don't care if they're uppity, as long as they're not around.
• noonespecial 13y ago
  The good part about America is that it's correlation, not causation. The bad part is we seem to be sliding down that hill.
• pnathan 13y ago
  One thing that I think bears study and consideration is the attitudes towards moving. One of my chief remembrances from my collegiate/high school years is that some students would simply not want to move somewhere else to get a job: they wanted to be near family, even if that destroyed their chances at a decent job. I hypothesize that willingness to leave location correlates strongly with income mobility.
• knerd1 13y ago
  Misleading headline. The study is more accurately paraphrased as 'where you grow up.' The authors found little difference between those who moved when they were young from a low mobility area to a high mobility area. I would love to see a deeper investigation into how mixed-income neighborhoods positively impact mobility. It's a relevant point when discussing housing subsidies and future infrastructure projects. Many of the low mobility families in the NYT article have no car or only one car. In modern cities which depend almost exclusively on private-car transportation, this is a serious obstacle to higher wages.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• wittysense 13y ago
  How pitifully insignificant and uninteresting this headline is. Is it [strongly] or [weakly] correlated ? You can say, "On Earth, Where You're Born..." I mean, c'mon. This is comparable to evolutionists telling us there's a genetic basis behind why we find sex satisfying. "Big Data needs an Einstein"
• buf 13y ago
  I never believe in the odds. I was born in a farm town in Oklahoma where I spent 25 years. Then I moved to California, built a billion dollar company, earned a small fortune, and now I'm running a company in London.
• jessriedel 13y ago
  As I predicted when I opened this thread, the top 5 comments are anecdotal personal stories.
• fingerprinter 13y ago
  I can't help but feel that this is about a couple of things: 1. education 2. income 3. influence I've travelled and lived all over the world. It always struck me odd that the poorer places in the world always seem to value religion over education (my perception), and it creates a nasty cycle where the majority of people don't/can't better themselves. I saw this first hand in the southern US where it was always God #1, everything else (including education, which in my view is super important) #2. You would be amazed at the things people would give up if they thought "God" told them to. I haven't studied the interaction of the three things above, so this is just my observations, but if you have a strong influencer at a young age, that influencer has a dramatic effect on the trajectory of your life. If that person pushes you to education, likely you'll be ok. Though it goes both ways. If the influencer pushes you away from education (for whatever reason), your life situation could end up very differently. I was very lucky to have a non-religious teacher mother who pushed education above all else. I didn't know college "was optional". In my family, it wasn't. Not b/c I think college is necessary; I don't by any means. It was her thinking and pushing that molded me in a certain direction. Even though I grew up in the northeast US, I saw super religious families who pushed their kids away from education. Those kids are now in the their 30s and 40s and have lost most of their lives to "god".
  • Loughla 13y ago
    It isn't just God (in whatever form that takes). It can be family, it can be a job, it can be a farm. It doesn't have to be God. I think the big take away is that education should be the number one priority. In my situation, my parents pushed either college/university or a trade school. The military wasn't an option (Father, dear, had a terrible time with Vietnam), and getting a job straight out of high school was out as well. I genuinely believe that the attitude of --you'll go somewhere and study to do something, no matter what-- is what really counts in kids' lives. Yes, it's much, much, much easier for the ones who have money and cultural capital; but it's the lessons of do anything with your life that seem to impact harder.
  • joshuacc 13y ago
    As a bit of a counterpoint, I'm originally from rural Mississippi and was raised by very religious parents who would absolutely say that God should be #1. But this didn't translate into devaluing education. Instead they viewed it as their religious duty to give their children the very best education they could so that we could make a positive difference in the world. "You would be amazed at the things people would give up if they thought "God" told them to." I wouldn't be surprised at all. My parents made tremendous sacrifices to provide their children with a better life because they believed God wanted them to. On the flip side, I have often seen people making poor decisions and attributing the decision to what they believed God wanted them to do. However, I don't think it is at all obvious that this is caused by their belief in God. It seems more likely to me that in the absence of belief in God, they would make similarly poor decisions but give different justifications.
• bluedino 13y ago
  I don't understand why people in terrible positions stay where they are. I realize it takes at least some money to move, you need a way to get where you're going and you need money when you get there to eat and have a place to stay, but previous generations were much more mobile than we are now. My grandparents constantly re-located to where the work was. They did construction so they'd move to where a big hurricane hit, since they'd be busy for a few years. People from the south flocked to the mid-west for factory jobs in the middle of the last century. But this generation, and the previous generation, are content with just sitting on their asses. People are content to stay put after losing a job. Why move, they're getting an unemployment check? And it's not even people who own a home and don't wish to move. It irks me when people say, "I can't find a job here." Change where here is! Beg, borrow, or steal a couple hundred bucks and hop a Greyhound out to the oil fields. Do something.
  • jarek 13y ago
    > My grandparents constantly re-located to where the work was. So... how often have you moved to where the work was?
  • mercer 13y ago
    Could you show some evidence that previous generations were more mobile? I'm not disputing it, but I'm inclined to think we're not much more or less mobile than previous generations...
• gyardley 13y ago
  This bottom-quintile to top-quintile measurement is annoying. A 'low mobility' area could be largely due to less upwardly-mobile poor or less downwardly-mobile affluent, and thanks to the researchers' weak choice of metric it's impossible to tell which.
• fistofjohnwayne 13y ago
  A note to anyone reading this who's living in the red zones, feeling discouraged. It's going to be hard. You'll have to seize every opportunity and work as hard as you can with each one because you don't have the money to buy second chances. You'll have to work twice as hard to get a quarter of the distance. You'll have to say goodbye to those that stayed behind because almost everyone will stay. You're going to have survivor's guilt. Your religion will evolve so please don't sacrifice any opportunities over the beliefs you hold today. If you stay strong, work hard and have a lot of luck you can make it out.
• Arjuna 13y ago
  I was born and grew up in WV. As many of you know, it is a poor state. We grew up on powdered milk. Most of my ancestors either went into chemical production (a local term from where I grew up is the "Chemical Valley", although most of that production and associated jobs are gone now) or slipped into the mines to work black gold [1]. We didn't have a lot, and there was no way that we could afford a computer. However, from a young age, I knew that I wanted to get into something called computer programming, as it was called in some books that I had checked out from the library. I was amazed that there was this "machine" that you could give instructions, which would cause it to display graphics and text on a TV, or play sounds from the TV's speaker. So, for as long as I can remember, I have always had an interest in computers. It seems like only yesterday that I was out cutting lawns in the summer or shoveling snow in the winter so that I could earn enough lumber to buy a Commodore 64 [2], which was a king's ransom for a young lad in the early 80s. "You want to buy a... computer?", is what I remember my parents saying, in the most puzzling tone, when I indicated my intentions to them. It was a reasonable response at the time, since most people where I lived didn't know what a computer was. Fortunately, I must have done a good job of explaining just exactly why someone would want to use a computer (much less own one), because my request was granted. Like all of our travels, this was a family event; all of us loaded up in the car (a timeless 1974 AMC Gremlin [3] — those that remember the car will recall that the maximum setting on the air conditioning dial read, "Desert use only") and drove down to the bank, where I withdrew enough money to purchase the single-most expensive item that I would ever purchase as an adolescent. I didn't have enough for the Datasette [4] (much less the 1541 [5]), so I would write programs and leave the computer on. I would stay up late, teaching myself to program by reading the Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide [6]. Of course, my computer use quickly started showing up in the monthly power bill, and my dad started checking in with me every night, to make sure that I had turned the computer off. That was of course very difficult, because I had to manually write the programs down so that I could type them in again later. I eventually saved up enough for the Datasette, and finally even a 1541. The rest is history. I know I'm discussing an "N=1" anecdote, but I've personally found that life is what you make it, no matter where you come from or your background. If you are willing to make it happen, you can make it happen; it's all up to you. On that topic, one of my favorite quotes is by Vince Lombardi [7]: "A man can be as great as he wants to be. If you believe in yourself and have the courage, the determination, the dedication, the competitive drive, and if you are willing to sacrifice the little things in life and pay the price for the things that are worthwhile, it can be done." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMC_Gremlin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMC_Gremlin [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1541 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1541 [6] http://www.commodore.ca/manuals/c64_programmers_reference/c64-programmers_reference.htm http://www.commodore.ca/manuals/c64_programmers_reference/c6... [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince_Lombardi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince_Lombardi Edit: Thank you all for your replies. I am very lucky to have identified, early on, what I like and to have the good fortunate that it became something more in my life. I agree that there is a mix of luck, desire, work and opportunity-seizing that must come into play, in order to assist in an individual's attempt at making a dream turn into reality. I stand corrected... "obstacle1" and "jshen" are correct... I've made the mistake of extrapolating a single experience to all cases across the board. And, as "mkr-hn" pointed out, we don't live in a vacuum... so many factors and people come into play in our lives.
• known 13y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_ceiling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_ceiling
• jaehoony 13y ago
  At least they are born in America, instead of some third world country. In the eyes of an immigrant like me, top 80% have no one else to blame but themselves.
• MikeCapone 13y ago
  > In America, Where You're Born Is Correlated With How Far You'll Go In Life I think you can replace "In America" by "On Earth" and that'll still be accurate. Just being born in America is a pretty big win compared to being born, say, in Rwanda.
• gonzo 13y ago
  There are only 48 states shown on the map. Why?