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Rich Kid, Poor Kid: For 30 Years, Baltimore Study Tracked Who Gets Ahead

190 points by acalmon 12y ago

e40 12y ago
They found that a child's fate is in many ways fixed at birth — determined by family strength and the parents' financial status. This is what is so frustrating about most of the debate in this country. Time and again it comes down to people arguing over laziness and people wanting to be takers. Until we realize the import of the above statement, we'll be trapped in a vicious cycle.
- litewulf 12y ago
  People have a vested interest in thinking their success is the product of their own hard work...
  - binarytrees 12y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
    - thathonkey 12y ago
      Is something different
  - dustcoin 12y ago
    The corollary to this is that people also have a vested interest in thinking their failure is the product of bad luck or circumstances outside of their control.
    - tormeh 12y ago
      Yep. This kind of thinking is actually healthy for our mental health as well.
    - kamaal 12y ago
      One more corollary is that people have a vested interest in thinking their failure is because of other people's successes.
  - bluedino 12y ago
    Most of it is. Your dad can be LeBron James and you can inherit all his genes, physical characteristics, and natural abilities, but if you don't want to practice 4 hours a day, practice while the other players are playing video games, staying up late, drinking beer and eating junk food, you're not going to be successful in basketball. Being born into a better family gives you a better chance but it doesn't guarantee you anything, just like being born into a worse family gives you a worse chance but doesn't completely eliminate the chance of success for you. 90% of it is your effort in either case.
    - thathonkey 12y ago
      > 90% of it is your effort in either case. No, it's not anywhere near 90%. That is a number you pulled out of your ass that is diametrically opposed to every finding from the study described in the article.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - hraedon 12y ago
        Hard to sustain the fiction that people deserve or earned their outcomes if hard work/effort/gumption/ambition doesn't make up the vast majority of the equation. Establishing that most/many people are effectively doomed from birth even in the US takes a lot of the validity out of the "personal responsibility" argument.
    - GrinningFool 12y ago
      "90% of it is your effort in either case." Even so it's not that simple. If you see your parents - and all the 'mature' people in your life - doing things a certain way, then that it is the "right" way. If what they are doing is complaining how they're ont getting what's rightfully there's (vs working to make it something they earn) -- then you're going to believe that too. In order to be able to put in the effort required, you first have to have your eyes opened to the fact that there are better ways of doing things than what you're living with every day. WOrse, you have to accept that the people you've been looking up to may be wrong about important, fundamental things. That hurdle - that awakening to possibility - is so much bigger than any of the rest of the effort required, because people don't generally know what they don't know.
  - happyscrappy 12y ago
    Of course they do. That doesn't mean their success isn't from their hard work. If you are raised in a culture of hard work, it is no surprise that you succeed. If you are raised in a culture of hanging out smoking blunts guess what happens? Immigrants are some of the most astoundingly successful people in the country and they often start with nothing. Victimology is self fulfilling.
    - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
      You miss the point of the article, which is that it's not victimology to understand that social mobility depends on a lot more than talent or hard work, and that you have to be either young or naive to believe that that's all it takes. I'm currently reading a biography of one of the most famous and successful British rock bands. The core of the band met at a famous public school. They had: 1. Spare money to buy instruments and equipment, including vans and cars 2. Plenty of rehearsal opportunities - often in very large country houses or grand cottages where they stayed for free 3. Direct access to successful people in their immediate social circles 4. No immediate financial pressures. (Not that they were rich. But they were never in danger of starving or becoming homeless.) They happened to be very talented. But without those opportunities the talent would not have been enough, and they would have had to join most of their peers in ordinary jobs. Class is a network of opportunities that is denied to outsiders. It's also about learned social confidence within the network. A few 'Well I made it so you can too' anecdotes are beside the point. A few people always do make it, no matter what. The real issue is the number who don't, in spite of best efforts and hard work, and of the talent and hard work wasted in a culture of low social mobility. The failures never appear in Fortune, but they're out there in their millions.
      - happyscrappy 12y ago
        The article states that the two main factors are family and money. I am of the opinion that family is the much more important, and difficult to solve factor but everyone wants to focus on the money. Growing up rich gives advantages for success, but in my opinion growing up middle class makes it much more likely you will be a success, not just slowly squandering your inheritance. It is hard to have a strong work ethic if you don't have to work for anything. The phrase helpless as a rich man's child comes to mind. We should concentrate on helping families stay together.
- ripter 12y ago
  But if it's not laziness that holds people back, then it might not be all the hours and sacrifices I made that contributed to my success. Which means I suffered for nothing. I can see why people don't want to believe it could be fixed at birth.
  - maxxxxx 12y ago
    Maybe success is a combination of factors like birth, hard work and luck? I am always frustrated when people want to reduce an issue to only one contributing factor.
    - tormeh 12y ago
      Yeah, but intelligence, beauty, work ethic and all those other things are inheritable. We can (as always) separate the causes of financial success into genetic and environmental traits. The entirety of one and most of the other is determined at birth. The rest is chance.
    - venaoy 12y ago
      By birth you mean: sex, race, physical attributes, etc?
      - maxxxxx 12y ago
        Correct: sex, race, looks, parents, place of birth and so on
- EduardoBautista 12y ago
  I believe it's because of the education they get at home. It's the reason why many professional NBA players go broke shortly after retirement. Because a lot of them grew up poor, they never learned from their parents how to manage money. I believe success is LARGELY determined by what family you are born into.
  - omegaham 12y ago
    This is really important. I grew up upper-middle class. While I was going to school, my mom stayed at home and my dad worked few enough hours that he could help me with my homework. I learned a lot more than other kids in the same timeframe because I had someone always pushing me to learn more. Now that I'm an adult, I have a lot of opportunities. If I have a question about finances, I can ask my dad. If I ever needed financial help, my parents could help out. If I need advice, support, or even just someone to talk to, my parents are knowledgeable and can help me with pretty much any situation. Not to mention that even if they can't help me, they have a network of similar-minded people who can do so. Poor people don't have that. Education? Go to your shitty school and learn; if you don't understand trig, don't ask me because I never learned it. Finances? I'm in debt up to my eyeballs with payday loans and bad credit cards, don't ask me. Actually, do you have money? I need some right now, son. I get frustrated with people who say, "You just have to work hard and avoid bad decisions." Poor people never learn how to make good decisions, and they do badly as a result.
    - dm2 12y ago
      I envy having that kind of parent/mentor. It's taken me many years to learn basic things on my own, financial responsibility, social skills, the importance of education, discipline, study habits, etc. My parents came home and either sat in front of the TV or laid out by the pool and drank. I was very bored at school and teachers see too many students every day to focus on a few to help. I'm not saying that support was impossible to find, but you had to know where to look, that is something that I didn't learn until much later in life. Most successful people talk about their mentors or how their parents pushed and constantly educated them. That's one of the things I looked for in a wife, the passion to teach children. Laziness and lack of discipline appear to be taught, and it's something that's very difficult to unteach. I remember asking my parents to teach me things like taxes or let me help with the work they brought home, the answer was always "later" or "you wouldn't understand it" or "I don't have time to teach you right now", eventually I stopped asking.
- dm2 12y ago
  Part of the equation is undoubtedly the financial resources kids have access to but you have to also factor in what the parents teach children. If a parent is financially irresponsible and just sits their children in front of the TV to act as a babysitter, the child will have trouble getting ahead in life. I would like to see a study based on the professions of parents rather than their income. Will a parent who is a scientist, engineer, or teacher generally produce a child who is eager to learn? How do mentors affect the outcome of children? Is there a substantial positive result when a child has a mentor that supports them and teaches them the things that they don't learn in school? If so, why aren't mentors encouraged more in society? The concept of a mentor was never even proposed to me until late in college, other than the big brothers/sisters advertisements occasionally seen on TV, and they seemed targeted at the orphaned children or children living with grandparents. Basic financial responsibility and many other basic life skills are simply not taught in school, it's expected to be taught at home. The problem is that many parents do not realize this and fail to ever teach their children anything positive. Children generally think that their parents are the best people in the world and try to imitate everything they do, that's where the cycle happens. Is there any kind of government subsidies for mentors? If someone devotes their entire day to helping out several children, that person should be paid, the parents cannot afford to pay them, who will?
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    >Part of the equation is undoubtedly the financial resources kids have access to but you have to also factor in what the parents teach children. A problem with this type of discussion is that when people lack financial resources, they often also lack other resources that come with financial resources, such as education or parents who had time to teach them anything that they could either use in raising their children or for teaching to their children. >If a parent is financially irresponsible and just sits their children in front of the TV to act as a babysitter I don't see the relation of the first part of the phrase to the last part of this phrase. >Basic financial responsibility and many other basic life skills are simply not taught in school, it's expected to be taught at home. I'm not aware of any relationship between financial responsibility and wealth. Plenty of wealthy people are financially irresponsible, and plenty of poor people are not. You're operating under the capitalist-spiritual assumption that everyone is in the place that they belong because of some intrinsic quality in themselves; therefore if someone is poor, then they are obviously more financially irresponsible than people who are not poor. There are quite a few obvious original sins if you want to consider why a particular family may be poor. Nobody in my family really knew how to read until my grandmothers' generation, and they don't read well now. You could blame that on bad parenting, but it might be more useful to blame that on a society that had no interest in whether they or their parents could read at all, and at one period prevented them from being taught by force of law. Maybe crushing poverty and constant racial discrimination? Anything but 'financial responsibility.'
- justinpaulson 12y ago
  I think the debate is more about HOW we should break the cycle. No one wants people to keep being poor (maybe a very very small minority), but people disagree on how effective welfare (which seems to be what you are advocating) is at breaking that cycle. Maybe better sexual education and access to birth control is the answer? Maybe mandatory parental education is the answer? Should we, as a society, allow children to be born into situations where they will not be properly cared for? We usually see reproduction as a right, but should it be? I don't know if there is really a good answer for that and I honestly don't know how I feel about it. Maybe there are better implementations of welfare that I'm not aware of, but I don't think just throwing money at the problem is going to help anyone.
  - StandardFuture 12y ago
    >Maybe mandatory parental education is the answer? I have to admit that this sounds a bit dystopian (enforcing all parents to attend a class on how they will raise their children). On the other hand, since raising a child is something anyone is allowed to do and child-rearing is far more of an impact on society than even the greatest inventions have been, it seems logical. Certainly, child-rearing is far more of an impact on society than the things we do expect people to spend years in classes getting 'licensed' for. I think this topic is due a thorough and deep discussion. Even if the government is completely unwilling to enforce anything, is it possible that 'social pressure/expectations' can be lifted on parents (without that scenario becoming too burdening or dystopian itself)? Right now it seems that social expectations do exist, but that they are also failing (for at least a large enough percentage of the population). So, I don't know but I am open to everyone's thoughts on the matter. :/
  - willvarfar 12y ago
    Watch any talk by Hans Rosling - this one https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_... for example - and you'll learn that your mixing up cause and effect re affluence and children.
  - sologoub 12y ago
    The study shows the outcomes that are influenced by a large number of variables. It's easy to condense it to rich/poor, but you are simply saying that wealth households, on average have a lot less of the multitude of factors that contribute to bad outcomes. The analysis on the root causes and potential policy/social implications isn't really there in the article. Drugs, violence and parental education are all touched, but it's looked at in the prism of poor vs wealthy. That's basically to say, if a person is wealthy, that person can distance him/herself from societal evils. My personal view of this, is that we need to view drug use as an illness and treat it. Same that we would any other disease that is a threat to society. One could approach drugs like we do viruses - heroin is more akin to ebola in severity, as opposed to pot being more like the common cold (hardly worth the attention, except in kids). Don't have the time to quote exact studies, but anecdotally, I believe there is some evidence that decriminalizing drug use impacts violence quite a bit. From there, you can also use the resources otherwise tied up in the war on drugs to address violent crimes and hopefully develop a rehabilitation program, instead of piling more people in jail. That said, I definitely think that the punishment should fit the crime. In no way should a person who deprived another person of life be allowed to walk free after only a few years... Regardless of excuses or extanuating circumstances.
- ronnier 12y ago
  I always subscribed to my grandfather's words: be honest, work hard, do your best or don't do it at all. It's really paid off for me. I grew up as a child in government run project apartments in Texas. I was able to escape that and do well through hard work. I notice those around me who fail, they tend to: -Party instead of study -abuse drugs and alcohol -spend instead of save -put themselves in situations that lead to bad outcomes -surround themselves with others who are not uplifting nor motivating -desire some level of drama
  - wdewind 12y ago
    But you had a grandfather to give you wise words...
  - craigyk 12y ago
    success = hard work * luck 0.0 < hard work < 1.0 0.0 < luck < inf you should be proud of yourself, but not be so judgemental.... after all you were lucky enough to have a grandfather to serve as a good role model. I'm sure if you examined your life critically you'd find many other instances of luck.
    - Chronic29 12y ago
      Everyone has luck in varying amounts but you cannot control it. The only thing you can control is hard work, so focus on that. Those at the lower rungs of the ladder tend not to work as hard as those at the upper. Both the upper and lower have access to luck so you can remove that form your equation.
  - cm2012 12y ago
    What if your genetics made it much harder for you to not be impulsive?
  - ssmoot 12y ago
    What if 80% of kids that come from a family with a net-worth of $10M go on to be "successful", but only 20% of kids that come from a family with a net-worth of $10K do? You've got a huge disparity. And maybe you can "pull yourself up by your bootstraps". But what about the other 80%? Who are putting in an equal effort to their better funded counterparts and not getting an equal reward?
- threatofrain 12y ago
  I think the problem is only perpetuated by inherited advantages or laziness. But there's also the problem that no matter how fast or smart people become, it's possible that there may only be a few elite positions for every race.
deleted 12y ago
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fred_durst 12y ago
> And by age 28, 41 percent of white men born into low-income families had criminal convictions, compared with 49 percent of the black men from similar backgrounds. Both of those numbers are insanely high. Especially when you realize that in the modern era of online background checks, their future employment options practically drop to zero at that point. By 28 close to half of the men from low income families were essentially unhireable for the rest of their lives. How is that sustainable for a country as a whole?
- mjevans 12y ago
  Welcome to the incarceration nation.
- dfxm12 12y ago
  You're operating under the assumption that men with criminal backgrounds can't get work. Unfortunately some people do discriminate, but not everyone does. There are ways to combat this. 1) we learn that it is OK to hire people with previous criminal convictions 2) we change the prison system to successfully assimilate criminals back into society Probably most importantly: 3) we change drug laws so that holding small amounts of certain drugs becomes a misdemeanor
  - wavefunction 12y ago
    I'd go further and say that holding small amounts of certain drugs becomes legal.
kelukelugames 12y ago
I firmly believe we are products of our upbringing. Here is my personal example. One of my facebook friends is a D-1 college basketball from the 80s. Throughout the years, his updates were about running laps and shooting baskets with his two sons. He groomed them to become basketball players. And no one was surprised when the boys made the varsity team in high school. Replace basketball with programming or financial success. Acquiring a skill is infinitely easier with access to role models.
- nesyt 12y ago
  >One of my facebook friends is a D-1 college basketball from the 80s. Raising kids at all seems like a huge success for a basketball. On topic, I agree - my parents were very frugal and it sure has rubbed off on me.
rayiner 12y ago
Not so surprising punchline: > Just 33 children — out of nearly 800 — moved from the low-income to high-income bracket. And a similarly small number born into low-income families had college degrees by the time they turned 28. What bothers me is not that the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich. That's pretty much the history of the world, and it's unlikely to change any time soon.[1] What bothers me is how people rationalize the very imperfect world we live in. A great example of this is how often people point to outliers in discussing the structural barriers holding back poor kids. It's not rational. Obviously the relevant question is the plight of those with median-ish determination and drive, born into different circumstances. I've worked a little bit with inner city students, and what just kills me is meeting kids who are like 90th percentile of determination and drive. Not the 99.9th percentile kids that will go to Harvard on a free ride despite growing up in the ghetto, but the kids who are a notch below. Those kids are one wrong step away from never making it out of the ghetto. Their counter-parts, born into well-off families, on the other hand, have a great shot at ending up at the upper end of the income spectrum. [1] One of the things that really messes with my brain is how hard I'm trying to make sure my daughter has an unfair advantage in life. Not just in terms of education, etc, but even in terms of expectations and aspirations. How do you tell your kid to work hard so they can be anything they want to be, when you your own circumstances belie that assertion?
- maerF0x0 12y ago
  I wonder if this is just confusing statistics or if its actually unfairness. Ex: if 0.04125 (33/800) people are "high income bracket" then no foul. People growing up in low income families have the same chance of getting rich as the average of the populace.
  - rgbrenner 12y ago
    The answer to your question is here: http://hub.jhu.edu/2014/06/02/karl-alexander-long-shadow-research http://hub.jhu.edu/2014/06/02/karl-alexander-long-shadow-res... Only 33 children moved from birth families in the low-income bracket to the high-income bracket as young adults; if family had no bearing on children's mobility prospects, almost 70 would be expected. And of those who started out well off, only 19 dropped to the low-income bracket, a fourth of the number expected. He compares some of the other stats too.
bane 12y ago
Upward mobility is constantly on my mind. After I was 10, I grew up pretty poor and rural, at one point my family was homeless for a few months and living in a motel. Despite that unpromising beginning, I was able to work my ass off and get comfortably ahead. It's been a tremendous struggle, but I'd be a damn liar if I said I didn't receive help from people from time-to-time, opportunities that helped keep me on an upward path. But also being positioned to take advantage of those opportunities when they appeared was something I like to think was my own doing. I went to school, I worked 100+ hours a week, I applied for better positions and better jobs and fought for pay raises. My mother and father both came from large families and it's interesting how they and all my cousins have turned out. On my father's side, it's pretty apparent that none of the siblings could really stand each other, over the decades they moved all over the country, away from each other, and into wildly different walks of life. They all independently did their own thing and usually ended up in some kind leadership position (foreman, shift manager, etc.) or ended up owning small businesses (with all the risks that entails which is how we ended up homeless). They all grew up in extreme poverty in the mid-west at the end of the great depression. Of them, only my father went to college. But they all became more or less successes if you define success as "able to cover your living expenses while saving some for later". None of them became wildly rich, but all of them share the trait of stubbornness and an unbelievable work ethic. Their kids are all generally doing fine or reasonably successful. No multi-millionaires, but all productive members of society. I'm the first person from this side to get a Masters Degree, but there are a few other college educated folks on that side. Measured by my father's side, I'm a slightly above average, but otherwise typical story. My mother's side is a mixed bag, my grandfather was some kind of salesman and for most of my mother's generation they grew up well fed and cared for. He was a "success" by my earlier definition. But severe mental illness later in life, combined with alcoholism eventually put an end to that and my mother's teenage years was basically a collection of episodes dealing with an increasingly wildly out of control father and a deteriorating home environment. One of my uncles eventually also succumbed to the same kind of madness that took my grandfather, but the rest more or less went on to lead normal lives. But I think, looking at their lives, lots of what they chose to do was a reaction to the home environment they grew up in. One uncle ran away and joined the Army, never to return home again. Another became a minister and married into money. One took a decent blue collar job, moved away from home and worked it until retirement. Later on, they all ended up moving back into the same region in a different state (except for the military man). The kids are mostly a disaster. Rampant alcoholism, drug-use, abusive violent ex-husbands and more. Only one went to college and she dropped out of the work force as soon as she got married right after college. Most of my cousins on my Mother's side hang out together, and all of them party together. At 30, the next oldest cousin, who grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth, has spent his career setting up chairs in hotel ballrooms making slightly better than minimum wage when he works. He went to some community college classes at some point, but eventually spent too much time drunk or drugged out to complete more than a semester. His sister, also born into money, is even worse. At almost 30, she can barely hold down a job for longer than a couple weeks. Co-dependent behavior is a way of life and they all ultimately co-support each other's bad habits. I try to avoid most of my Mother's family at all costs. I stay awake at night terrified I'm suddenly going to start getting phone calls asking for money or a place to crash "for a few days" -- because I know that will turn into a never ending drain on my family and our resources. Measured by my mother's family I'm a wild success story - a single point of light in a dark pit of failure. Ideally, you'd think that my mother's family, with the close family links and the availability of money through one of my uncles would have set them all up. My cousin's parents were all "success" in terms of supporting their families, but yet most of my cousins are objectively life failures. I have people closer than my family in my life, old friends I grew up with. All of us being poor, most of them did not become successes, but it doesn't seem to me that in any case it was as a result of their parents doing more or less for them, but about their own consistently poor life choices. Ones with obvious negative outcomes, but chosen because they provided immediate positive emotional return. In other words, their decision flow chart tests if a choice feels good or not, not if it provides them with a successful outcome. Looking at my mother's family, their co-dependence and substance abuse issues, it appear they're using the same decision making process. One of my drug addled cousins suddenly deciding to stop using drugs, and move away from his group of co-dependent family and friends, and get a decent job, would be a fantastic change in behavior that I'm not aware ever happens with any frequency in reality. It's obvious that becoming successful is complex, but I think parent's financial status is more of a correlation than a causation for future success (even though it might designate a probabilistic cap for how successful a person can become). It seems that good parenting combined with a natural desire to succeed is what happens. But when somebody doesn't have a desire to succeed, it's likely they also won't be good parents. Children pattern after their parents and also inherit the same lack of desire, from both behavior and genetic factors. Nobody has really figured out how to change that central decision point from "does it feel good" to "does it make me successful" with any sort of reliability. It seems to have to come from inside the person somewhere.
krupan 12y ago
"The kids who got a better start — because their parents were married and working — ended up better off. Most of the poor kids from single-parent families stayed poor." So we should be encouraging people to get married, stay married, and stay responsible enough to hold down a job if they are going to raise kids. Not a new idea at all, but that's cool to have a study to back it up.
- msh 12y ago
  But we don't know from the study if marriage is a cause or an effect.
- anon1385 12y ago
  No. http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/confusing-cause-and-effect.html http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/confusing-cause-and...
SnowProblem 12y ago
Nobody chooses which family he/she is born into, and nobody ever will. Each of us is randomly awakened, empty and dumb, on this Earth into a specific family and community outside our choosing, with its own mentors and values. This group will fill us with thoughts for 18 years. So yes, it is unfair that some of us are awakened to find we are poor, without good mentors or educators, and will be hindered for the rest of our lives. Unless society embraces something akin to complete communism or a Brave New World, which to me sounds incredibly boring, this will always be the case. We can't completely solve this issue at an individual level. But the problem is not just an individual problem. The path from rags to riches rarely happens in one generation. Consider the family as an institution that competes with other families for life's rewards. There are going to be differences in values between families with 10M and families with 10K. Each family will prioritize life's rewards differently, whether that be riches, a passionate vocation, strong relationships, travel and experience, etc. When looked at from the unit of the family, why would we not want to financially reward families that acquire riches more than those that don't? As long as we can maintain a balance, where an individual who so strongly wants to escape their birth family and make it on their own can do so, isn't this the right thing to do?
freedom123 12y ago
I will summarize real quick. "Rich" and "Poor" are 2 variable of millions - And no matter how many variables you address you cannot escape one simple fact about "who gets ahead" - "If its important to you, you will find a way, if it is not, you will find an excuse."
- hackuser 12y ago
  > no matter how many variables you address you cannot escape one simple fact about "who gets ahead" - "If its important to you, you will find a way, if it is not, you will find an excuse." Do you have evidence for that? All the evidence I read, including the research discussed in this HN post, says that it depends heavily on where you start, including factors such as family income. Are you saying that children born into poor families or who face other such disadvantages achieve less because they have less willpower than children born into wealthier families? If so, perhaps we should look at the relationship between family income and willpower. EDIT: Minor clarification
- dasil003 12y ago
  This is a good way to think on an individual level: ie. taking control of one's own destiny, but it's not adequate on a statistical/societal level. We know for a fact that there are number of correlating factors to success beyond an individual's ambition/discipline/chutzpah. If we ignore this as a society and the rich people from advantaged backgrounds (ie. the majority) continue to pat themselves on the back for their work ethic, then the growing divide between rich and poor will accelerate and destabilize the very status quo which the self-satisfied rich depend on to maintain their wealth and privilege.
pnathan 12y ago
One thing that I have observed and learned is money management "strategies" or "styles" vary between socioeconomic brackets. E.g., tradespeople don't always futz with stocks; they don't have the appetite for risk and volatility that stocks introduce. Long-term investing tends to be not done (maybe 401(k) or an IRA is used). Some of that is due to a lack of discretionary income, some of that is just culture. When you cross a certain barrier upwards, financial understanding of stocks and so forth increases, and money is leveraged to produce, e.g., use of index funds and their return on investment. Moving downward in the socioeconomic classes and passing another another barrier, money saving becomes less common, and impulse purchases appear to become more common. --- Some of this is definitely familial: I never learned about investments growing up and had to self-teach. That has limited my total financial situation to date. I did, however, learn about self-control, discipline, and self-teaching, which has helped me move forward financially. Another aspect is behavior expectations of the successful - How to comport and present yourself in a way that signals that you are a professional, capable and trustworthy individual? I feel comfortable saying that most anyone from a poor/blue-collar background and who has now made it into the white-collar ranks can join with me in saying that that is a big deal. (n.b., I would totally pony up cash for a local course in So You've Made It Now Past The First Job, Now How Do You Act?)
- bane 12y ago
  > Some of that is due to a lack of discretionary income, some of that is just culture. What's interesting is that you'll find the same group of people often purchase weekly lottery tickets. Which, if added up over time might make a small, but solid stock portfolio.
  - Natsu 12y ago
    It's easy to understand how a lottery ticket might make you rich and hard to understand how unlikely it is to do so. Something close to the reverse of this is true with a portfolio of stocks.
trustfundbaby 12y ago
The researchers found that more affluent white men in the study reported the highest frequency of drug abuse and binge drinking, yet they still had the most upward mobility. "The extent of what we refer to as problem behavior is greatest among whites and less so among African-Americans," Alexander says. "Whites of advantaged background had the highest percentages who did all three of those things — that was binge drinking, any drug use and heavy drug use." ----- interesting
mililani 12y ago
I would like to see a study that follows the kids of poor immigrants. Almost everyone I know who came from poor immigrant families, including my own and my wife's, is doing well. We're all middle to upper middle class now. In fact, my family and relatives were so poor, they literally came to American with zero money. My wife's dad came here with only $50 to his name. It would be interesting to see some statistics on that.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Interesting conversation, and an important one. Re-iterates the importance of family, or group action. In college I volunteered for Big Brothers and met a number of young men for whom the deck was stacked against them. One of the interesting things that correlated with success but I've not seen any definitive studies on it was church membership for the family. The young men were primarily hispanic, first generation, and if their family went to church the church community often helped cushion incidents which were disasters in non-church goers. Mom has to go to the hospital, the kids are fending for themselves, with church membership came folks who could (and would) step in and help. The other part that made a big impression on me was that we also got a large influx of Vietnamese refugees and one family in particular the father told me that he knew his children would be poor like him, but his grand children would not. He was taking a very long view on things which at the tender age of 19 I was left wondering "Am I just a stepping stone toward a more successful clan of kids?" That was sort of the model back then of each generation does better than the last, I've done better than my parents, but lately I haven't felt that this will hold for my kids generation.
morgante 12y ago
I wish we could find a more comprehensive measure of "class" than income, because I think this broader measure has a much larger effect than income itself. Technically speaking, you'd put me in the mobile group. Growing up, my parents never earned more than median wage and were consistently in the bottom third of the income bracket. Thankfully, I've been lucky enough to leap into the top 5%. I'll be buying my dad his first house soon. Yet, I've never felt particularly mobile. My parents were both college-educated, and my aunts/uncles are decidedly (upper) middle class. It was always expected that I'd go to college and succeed in careers. By this measure, I haven't moved at all.
erikb 12y ago
Did I not understand something correctly here? At first the text says people don't get ahead by education and hard work, and then it lists examples of the (few, of course) example who did get ahead and all of them got ahead by hard work and education? Of course most people don't get ahead. We are wired to keep the same level of things we know. If we want to study how to get ahead we must study those few who do get ahead, or at least analyze why the ones not getting ahead didn't get or take their chances. Another point I want to discuss: I grew up in a village where people also live on the lower social end. Only thanks to my mom I was able to get away from there (education and hard work). And I can say that it's not just all unfair to people who end up in the same low situation as their parents (drugs, alcohol, no job, single parents). In fact teachers, social workers, police officers, old people on the street, the super market cashier,... many people try to support them and give them chances. But many people simply don't take the chances. They can choose the math teacher helping them passing the exam in his spare time without pay (and where I come from teachers already work unpaid overtime in their normal jobs), and they can choose to sit all day at the bus stop, get drunk, use drugs, etc. Many simply choose the second option, because they don't know how to think long term. It's not all unfair just because poor people often stay poor. Third point: Assuming my observation is correct, then what can the government do? If people already get chances to work their way up, but they don't take it, what are the options? Force them to not take drugs? Force them to study 6 hours every day? We live in a free country. Hard to convince anybody that this might be a good decision. But if you let people have a free will, to some degree you must accept that people are very lazy.
Shivetya 12y ago
Rich doesn't always mean squat, culture can sink you more and most likely does even in the Baltimore study. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/30/arts/why-are-black-students-lagging.html http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/30/arts/why-are-black-student...
netcan 12y ago
Ironically, one of the books that shaped my ideas on topics like this early on was the fictional 'The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism' by Emmanuel Goldstein in '1984.' Orwell's perspective as a dissident socialist is very unique and made for a lot of nuance. This is one of the places where it shines through, in my opinion. In any case, in 1984-world there is an exam for moving the most talented of the middle classes into the upper class and least talented of the upper class to the middle. I think Orwell's thinking here was a 'keep the dangerous ones on the inside" strategy. But, I think there's another mechanism at work. Release valves and the creation of ambiguity. A member of the underclass with undeniable talent and force of will is very dangerous to the order of things. If there are several of them pushing hard against a glass ceiling then pressure builds up. It also becomes very obvious the the ceiling exists. That's where Malcolm Xs come from. Malcolm X recalls in his autobiography about an incident where he told his teacher he wanted to become a lawyer. The teacher responds that this is "not a realistic goal for a nigger". If he had become a lawyer he might have become one of the (as he saw it) one of those despicable, integration seeking middle class negroes. Blue pills. Hitting a hard ceiling made the existence of the ceiling undeniable and the incredible force of his personality had no other outlet than pushing against this impenetrable ceiling. I don't know if how obvious it was at the time that Malcolm X had the potential in him that he obviously exhibited as an adult. But let's imagine that the 12 year old Malcolm X was a 12 year old version of the 35 year old Malcolm X. A system that embraces that kid, makes him a lawyer. Gives him an outlet whiten it and celebrates him as an example of crossing class barriers or even proof for the non existence of those barriers is a more robust system. BTW, I think it's wrong to read 1984 as a description of a conspiracy. The conspiracy is more of a metaphor, a way of easily explaining how things work. In reality, societies are memoplexes, evolved. To paraphrase Douglas Adams. "A memoplex that survives is a memoplex that survives." They are made up of surviving memes. Memes preventing class movement entirely are likely to bring down the memoplex. I think airtight class distinctions (such as a system of race based slavery) are fundamentally unstable for this reason. There are interesting datapoints in accounts of ancient slavery. The Hebrew Bible describes a system of slavery with ways out existing in the ancient Middle east. Earning freedom. Sabbatical amnesties. Jacob came to Egypt as a slave. He rose to become a sort of chancellor to the Pharaoh. Ancient Greek & Roman systems of slavery had ways for exceptional slaves to earn freedom or even rise in rank within the institution of slavery. If Spatacus' leadership abilities had caused him to be ejected from slavery, his uprising would never have happened. He might have been a general enslaving barbarians and contributing gainfully to the system.

190 points by acalmon 12y ago

e40 12y ago

They found that a child's fate is in many ways fixed at birth — determined by family strength and the parents' financial status. This is what is so frustrating about most of the debate in this country. Time and again it comes down to people arguing over laziness and people wanting to be takers. Until we realize the import of the above statement, we'll be trapped in a vicious cycle.

litewulf 12y ago
People have a vested interest in thinking their success is the product of their own hard work...
- binarytrees 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
  - thathonkey 12y ago
    Is something different
- dustcoin 12y ago
  The corollary to this is that people also have a vested interest in thinking their failure is the product of bad luck or circumstances outside of their control.
  - tormeh 12y ago
    Yep. This kind of thinking is actually healthy for our mental health as well.
  - kamaal 12y ago
    One more corollary is that people have a vested interest in thinking their failure is because of other people's successes.
- bluedino 12y ago
  Most of it is. Your dad can be LeBron James and you can inherit all his genes, physical characteristics, and natural abilities, but if you don't want to practice 4 hours a day, practice while the other players are playing video games, staying up late, drinking beer and eating junk food, you're not going to be successful in basketball. Being born into a better family gives you a better chance but it doesn't guarantee you anything, just like being born into a worse family gives you a worse chance but doesn't completely eliminate the chance of success for you. 90% of it is your effort in either case.
  - thathonkey 12y ago
    > 90% of it is your effort in either case. No, it's not anywhere near 90%. That is a number you pulled out of your ass that is diametrically opposed to every finding from the study described in the article.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - hraedon 12y ago
      Hard to sustain the fiction that people deserve or earned their outcomes if hard work/effort/gumption/ambition doesn't make up the vast majority of the equation. Establishing that most/many people are effectively doomed from birth even in the US takes a lot of the validity out of the "personal responsibility" argument.
  - GrinningFool 12y ago
    "90% of it is your effort in either case." Even so it's not that simple. If you see your parents - and all the 'mature' people in your life - doing things a certain way, then that it is the "right" way. If what they are doing is complaining how they're ont getting what's rightfully there's (vs working to make it something they earn) -- then you're going to believe that too. In order to be able to put in the effort required, you first have to have your eyes opened to the fact that there are better ways of doing things than what you're living with every day. WOrse, you have to accept that the people you've been looking up to may be wrong about important, fundamental things. That hurdle - that awakening to possibility - is so much bigger than any of the rest of the effort required, because people don't generally know what they don't know.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  Of course they do. That doesn't mean their success isn't from their hard work. If you are raised in a culture of hard work, it is no surprise that you succeed. If you are raised in a culture of hanging out smoking blunts guess what happens? Immigrants are some of the most astoundingly successful people in the country and they often start with nothing. Victimology is self fulfilling.
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
    You miss the point of the article, which is that it's not victimology to understand that social mobility depends on a lot more than talent or hard work, and that you have to be either young or naive to believe that that's all it takes. I'm currently reading a biography of one of the most famous and successful British rock bands. The core of the band met at a famous public school. They had: 1. Spare money to buy instruments and equipment, including vans and cars 2. Plenty of rehearsal opportunities - often in very large country houses or grand cottages where they stayed for free 3. Direct access to successful people in their immediate social circles 4. No immediate financial pressures. (Not that they were rich. But they were never in danger of starving or becoming homeless.) They happened to be very talented. But without those opportunities the talent would not have been enough, and they would have had to join most of their peers in ordinary jobs. Class is a network of opportunities that is denied to outsiders. It's also about learned social confidence within the network. A few 'Well I made it so you can too' anecdotes are beside the point. A few people always do make it, no matter what. The real issue is the number who don't, in spite of best efforts and hard work, and of the talent and hard work wasted in a culture of low social mobility. The failures never appear in Fortune, but they're out there in their millions.
    - happyscrappy 12y ago
      The article states that the two main factors are family and money. I am of the opinion that family is the much more important, and difficult to solve factor but everyone wants to focus on the money. Growing up rich gives advantages for success, but in my opinion growing up middle class makes it much more likely you will be a success, not just slowly squandering your inheritance. It is hard to have a strong work ethic if you don't have to work for anything. The phrase helpless as a rich man's child comes to mind. We should concentrate on helping families stay together.
ripter 12y ago
But if it's not laziness that holds people back, then it might not be all the hours and sacrifices I made that contributed to my success. Which means I suffered for nothing. I can see why people don't want to believe it could be fixed at birth.
- maxxxxx 12y ago
  Maybe success is a combination of factors like birth, hard work and luck? I am always frustrated when people want to reduce an issue to only one contributing factor.
  - tormeh 12y ago
    Yeah, but intelligence, beauty, work ethic and all those other things are inheritable. We can (as always) separate the causes of financial success into genetic and environmental traits. The entirety of one and most of the other is determined at birth. The rest is chance.
  - venaoy 12y ago
    By birth you mean: sex, race, physical attributes, etc?
    - maxxxxx 12y ago
      Correct: sex, race, looks, parents, place of birth and so on
EduardoBautista 12y ago
I believe it's because of the education they get at home. It's the reason why many professional NBA players go broke shortly after retirement. Because a lot of them grew up poor, they never learned from their parents how to manage money. I believe success is LARGELY determined by what family you are born into.
- omegaham 12y ago
  This is really important. I grew up upper-middle class. While I was going to school, my mom stayed at home and my dad worked few enough hours that he could help me with my homework. I learned a lot more than other kids in the same timeframe because I had someone always pushing me to learn more. Now that I'm an adult, I have a lot of opportunities. If I have a question about finances, I can ask my dad. If I ever needed financial help, my parents could help out. If I need advice, support, or even just someone to talk to, my parents are knowledgeable and can help me with pretty much any situation. Not to mention that even if they can't help me, they have a network of similar-minded people who can do so. Poor people don't have that. Education? Go to your shitty school and learn; if you don't understand trig, don't ask me because I never learned it. Finances? I'm in debt up to my eyeballs with payday loans and bad credit cards, don't ask me. Actually, do you have money? I need some right now, son. I get frustrated with people who say, "You just have to work hard and avoid bad decisions." Poor people never learn how to make good decisions, and they do badly as a result.
  - dm2 12y ago
    I envy having that kind of parent/mentor. It's taken me many years to learn basic things on my own, financial responsibility, social skills, the importance of education, discipline, study habits, etc. My parents came home and either sat in front of the TV or laid out by the pool and drank. I was very bored at school and teachers see too many students every day to focus on a few to help. I'm not saying that support was impossible to find, but you had to know where to look, that is something that I didn't learn until much later in life. Most successful people talk about their mentors or how their parents pushed and constantly educated them. That's one of the things I looked for in a wife, the passion to teach children. Laziness and lack of discipline appear to be taught, and it's something that's very difficult to unteach. I remember asking my parents to teach me things like taxes or let me help with the work they brought home, the answer was always "later" or "you wouldn't understand it" or "I don't have time to teach you right now", eventually I stopped asking.
dm2 12y ago
Part of the equation is undoubtedly the financial resources kids have access to but you have to also factor in what the parents teach children. If a parent is financially irresponsible and just sits their children in front of the TV to act as a babysitter, the child will have trouble getting ahead in life. I would like to see a study based on the professions of parents rather than their income. Will a parent who is a scientist, engineer, or teacher generally produce a child who is eager to learn? How do mentors affect the outcome of children? Is there a substantial positive result when a child has a mentor that supports them and teaches them the things that they don't learn in school? If so, why aren't mentors encouraged more in society? The concept of a mentor was never even proposed to me until late in college, other than the big brothers/sisters advertisements occasionally seen on TV, and they seemed targeted at the orphaned children or children living with grandparents. Basic financial responsibility and many other basic life skills are simply not taught in school, it's expected to be taught at home. The problem is that many parents do not realize this and fail to ever teach their children anything positive. Children generally think that their parents are the best people in the world and try to imitate everything they do, that's where the cycle happens. Is there any kind of government subsidies for mentors? If someone devotes their entire day to helping out several children, that person should be paid, the parents cannot afford to pay them, who will?
- pessimizer 12y ago
  >Part of the equation is undoubtedly the financial resources kids have access to but you have to also factor in what the parents teach children. A problem with this type of discussion is that when people lack financial resources, they often also lack other resources that come with financial resources, such as education or parents who had time to teach them anything that they could either use in raising their children or for teaching to their children. >If a parent is financially irresponsible and just sits their children in front of the TV to act as a babysitter I don't see the relation of the first part of the phrase to the last part of this phrase. >Basic financial responsibility and many other basic life skills are simply not taught in school, it's expected to be taught at home. I'm not aware of any relationship between financial responsibility and wealth. Plenty of wealthy people are financially irresponsible, and plenty of poor people are not. You're operating under the capitalist-spiritual assumption that everyone is in the place that they belong because of some intrinsic quality in themselves; therefore if someone is poor, then they are obviously more financially irresponsible than people who are not poor. There are quite a few obvious original sins if you want to consider why a particular family may be poor. Nobody in my family really knew how to read until my grandmothers' generation, and they don't read well now. You could blame that on bad parenting, but it might be more useful to blame that on a society that had no interest in whether they or their parents could read at all, and at one period prevented them from being taught by force of law. Maybe crushing poverty and constant racial discrimination? Anything but 'financial responsibility.'
justinpaulson 12y ago
I think the debate is more about HOW we should break the cycle. No one wants people to keep being poor (maybe a very very small minority), but people disagree on how effective welfare (which seems to be what you are advocating) is at breaking that cycle. Maybe better sexual education and access to birth control is the answer? Maybe mandatory parental education is the answer? Should we, as a society, allow children to be born into situations where they will not be properly cared for? We usually see reproduction as a right, but should it be? I don't know if there is really a good answer for that and I honestly don't know how I feel about it. Maybe there are better implementations of welfare that I'm not aware of, but I don't think just throwing money at the problem is going to help anyone.
- StandardFuture 12y ago
  >Maybe mandatory parental education is the answer? I have to admit that this sounds a bit dystopian (enforcing all parents to attend a class on how they will raise their children). On the other hand, since raising a child is something anyone is allowed to do and child-rearing is far more of an impact on society than even the greatest inventions have been, it seems logical. Certainly, child-rearing is far more of an impact on society than the things we do expect people to spend years in classes getting 'licensed' for. I think this topic is due a thorough and deep discussion. Even if the government is completely unwilling to enforce anything, is it possible that 'social pressure/expectations' can be lifted on parents (without that scenario becoming too burdening or dystopian itself)? Right now it seems that social expectations do exist, but that they are also failing (for at least a large enough percentage of the population). So, I don't know but I am open to everyone's thoughts on the matter. :/
- willvarfar 12y ago
  Watch any talk by Hans Rosling - this one https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_... for example - and you'll learn that your mixing up cause and effect re affluence and children.
- sologoub 12y ago
  The study shows the outcomes that are influenced by a large number of variables. It's easy to condense it to rich/poor, but you are simply saying that wealth households, on average have a lot less of the multitude of factors that contribute to bad outcomes. The analysis on the root causes and potential policy/social implications isn't really there in the article. Drugs, violence and parental education are all touched, but it's looked at in the prism of poor vs wealthy. That's basically to say, if a person is wealthy, that person can distance him/herself from societal evils. My personal view of this, is that we need to view drug use as an illness and treat it. Same that we would any other disease that is a threat to society. One could approach drugs like we do viruses - heroin is more akin to ebola in severity, as opposed to pot being more like the common cold (hardly worth the attention, except in kids). Don't have the time to quote exact studies, but anecdotally, I believe there is some evidence that decriminalizing drug use impacts violence quite a bit. From there, you can also use the resources otherwise tied up in the war on drugs to address violent crimes and hopefully develop a rehabilitation program, instead of piling more people in jail. That said, I definitely think that the punishment should fit the crime. In no way should a person who deprived another person of life be allowed to walk free after only a few years... Regardless of excuses or extanuating circumstances.
ronnier 12y ago
I always subscribed to my grandfather's words: be honest, work hard, do your best or don't do it at all. It's really paid off for me. I grew up as a child in government run project apartments in Texas. I was able to escape that and do well through hard work. I notice those around me who fail, they tend to: -Party instead of study -abuse drugs and alcohol -spend instead of save -put themselves in situations that lead to bad outcomes -surround themselves with others who are not uplifting nor motivating -desire some level of drama
- wdewind 12y ago
  But you had a grandfather to give you wise words...
- craigyk 12y ago
  success = hard work * luck 0.0 < hard work < 1.0 0.0 < luck < inf you should be proud of yourself, but not be so judgemental.... after all you were lucky enough to have a grandfather to serve as a good role model. I'm sure if you examined your life critically you'd find many other instances of luck.
  - Chronic29 12y ago
    Everyone has luck in varying amounts but you cannot control it. The only thing you can control is hard work, so focus on that. Those at the lower rungs of the ladder tend not to work as hard as those at the upper. Both the upper and lower have access to luck so you can remove that form your equation.
- cm2012 12y ago
  What if your genetics made it much harder for you to not be impulsive?
- ssmoot 12y ago
  What if 80% of kids that come from a family with a net-worth of $10M go on to be "successful", but only 20% of kids that come from a family with a net-worth of $10K do? You've got a huge disparity. And maybe you can "pull yourself up by your bootstraps". But what about the other 80%? Who are putting in an equal effort to their better funded counterparts and not getting an equal reward?
threatofrain 12y ago
I think the problem is only perpetuated by inherited advantages or laziness. But there's also the problem that no matter how fast or smart people become, it's possible that there may only be a few elite positions for every race.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

fred_durst 12y ago

> And by age 28, 41 percent of white men born into low-income families had criminal convictions, compared with 49 percent of the black men from similar backgrounds. Both of those numbers are insanely high. Especially when you realize that in the modern era of online background checks, their future employment options practically drop to zero at that point. By 28 close to half of the men from low income families were essentially unhireable for the rest of their lives. How is that sustainable for a country as a whole?

mjevans 12y ago
Welcome to the incarceration nation.
dfxm12 12y ago
You're operating under the assumption that men with criminal backgrounds can't get work. Unfortunately some people do discriminate, but not everyone does. There are ways to combat this. 1) we learn that it is OK to hire people with previous criminal convictions 2) we change the prison system to successfully assimilate criminals back into society Probably most importantly: 3) we change drug laws so that holding small amounts of certain drugs becomes a misdemeanor
- wavefunction 12y ago
  I'd go further and say that holding small amounts of certain drugs becomes legal.

kelukelugames 12y ago

I firmly believe we are products of our upbringing. Here is my personal example. One of my facebook friends is a D-1 college basketball from the 80s. Throughout the years, his updates were about running laps and shooting baskets with his two sons. He groomed them to become basketball players. And no one was surprised when the boys made the varsity team in high school. Replace basketball with programming or financial success. Acquiring a skill is infinitely easier with access to role models.

nesyt 12y ago
>One of my facebook friends is a D-1 college basketball from the 80s. Raising kids at all seems like a huge success for a basketball. On topic, I agree - my parents were very frugal and it sure has rubbed off on me.

rayiner 12y ago

Not so surprising punchline: > Just 33 children — out of nearly 800 — moved from the low-income to high-income bracket. And a similarly small number born into low-income families had college degrees by the time they turned 28. What bothers me is not that the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich. That's pretty much the history of the world, and it's unlikely to change any time soon.[1] What bothers me is how people rationalize the very imperfect world we live in. A great example of this is how often people point to outliers in discussing the structural barriers holding back poor kids. It's not rational. Obviously the relevant question is the plight of those with median-ish determination and drive, born into different circumstances. I've worked a little bit with inner city students, and what just kills me is meeting kids who are like 90th percentile of determination and drive. Not the 99.9th percentile kids that will go to Harvard on a free ride despite growing up in the ghetto, but the kids who are a notch below. Those kids are one wrong step away from never making it out of the ghetto. Their counter-parts, born into well-off families, on the other hand, have a great shot at ending up at the upper end of the income spectrum. [1] One of the things that really messes with my brain is how hard I'm trying to make sure my daughter has an unfair advantage in life. Not just in terms of education, etc, but even in terms of expectations and aspirations. How do you tell your kid to work hard so they can be anything they want to be, when you your own circumstances belie that assertion?

maerF0x0 12y ago
I wonder if this is just confusing statistics or if its actually unfairness. Ex: if 0.04125 (33/800) people are "high income bracket" then no foul. People growing up in low income families have the same chance of getting rich as the average of the populace.
- rgbrenner 12y ago
  The answer to your question is here: http://hub.jhu.edu/2014/06/02/karl-alexander-long-shadow-research http://hub.jhu.edu/2014/06/02/karl-alexander-long-shadow-res... Only 33 children moved from birth families in the low-income bracket to the high-income bracket as young adults; if family had no bearing on children's mobility prospects, almost 70 would be expected. And of those who started out well off, only 19 dropped to the low-income bracket, a fourth of the number expected. He compares some of the other stats too.

bane 12y ago

Upward mobility is constantly on my mind. After I was 10, I grew up pretty poor and rural, at one point my family was homeless for a few months and living in a motel. Despite that unpromising beginning, I was able to work my ass off and get comfortably ahead. It's been a tremendous struggle, but I'd be a damn liar if I said I didn't receive help from people from time-to-time, opportunities that helped keep me on an upward path. But also being positioned to take advantage of those opportunities when they appeared was something I like to think was my own doing. I went to school, I worked 100+ hours a week, I applied for better positions and better jobs and fought for pay raises. My mother and father both came from large families and it's interesting how they and all my cousins have turned out. On my father's side, it's pretty apparent that none of the siblings could really stand each other, over the decades they moved all over the country, away from each other, and into wildly different walks of life. They all independently did their own thing and usually ended up in some kind leadership position (foreman, shift manager, etc.) or ended up owning small businesses (with all the risks that entails which is how we ended up homeless). They all grew up in extreme poverty in the mid-west at the end of the great depression. Of them, only my father went to college. But they all became more or less successes if you define success as "able to cover your living expenses while saving some for later". None of them became wildly rich, but all of them share the trait of stubbornness and an unbelievable work ethic. Their kids are all generally doing fine or reasonably successful. No multi-millionaires, but all productive members of society. I'm the first person from this side to get a Masters Degree, but there are a few other college educated folks on that side. Measured by my father's side, I'm a slightly above average, but otherwise typical story. My mother's side is a mixed bag, my grandfather was some kind of salesman and for most of my mother's generation they grew up well fed and cared for. He was a "success" by my earlier definition. But severe mental illness later in life, combined with alcoholism eventually put an end to that and my mother's teenage years was basically a collection of episodes dealing with an increasingly wildly out of control father and a deteriorating home environment. One of my uncles eventually also succumbed to the same kind of madness that took my grandfather, but the rest more or less went on to lead normal lives. But I think, looking at their lives, lots of what they chose to do was a reaction to the home environment they grew up in. One uncle ran away and joined the Army, never to return home again. Another became a minister and married into money. One took a decent blue collar job, moved away from home and worked it until retirement. Later on, they all ended up moving back into the same region in a different state (except for the military man). The kids are mostly a disaster. Rampant alcoholism, drug-use, abusive violent ex-husbands and more. Only one went to college and she dropped out of the work force as soon as she got married right after college. Most of my cousins on my Mother's side hang out together, and all of them party together. At 30, the next oldest cousin, who grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth, has spent his career setting up chairs in hotel ballrooms making slightly better than minimum wage when he works. He went to some community college classes at some point, but eventually spent too much time drunk or drugged out to complete more than a semester. His sister, also born into money, is even worse. At almost 30, she can barely hold down a job for longer than a couple weeks. Co-dependent behavior is a way of life and they all ultimately co-support each other's bad habits. I try to avoid most of my Mother's family at all costs. I stay awake at night terrified I'm suddenly going to start getting phone calls asking for money or a place to crash "for a few days" -- because I know that will turn into a never ending drain on my family and our resources. Measured by my mother's family I'm a wild success story - a single point of light in a dark pit of failure. Ideally, you'd think that my mother's family, with the close family links and the availability of money through one of my uncles would have set them all up. My cousin's parents were all "success" in terms of supporting their families, but yet most of my cousins are objectively life failures. I have people closer than my family in my life, old friends I grew up with. All of us being poor, most of them did not become successes, but it doesn't seem to me that in any case it was as a result of their parents doing more or less for them, but about their own consistently poor life choices. Ones with obvious negative outcomes, but chosen because they provided immediate positive emotional return. In other words, their decision flow chart tests if a choice feels good or not, not if it provides them with a successful outcome. Looking at my mother's family, their co-dependence and substance abuse issues, it appear they're using the same decision making process. One of my drug addled cousins suddenly deciding to stop using drugs, and move away from his group of co-dependent family and friends, and get a decent job, would be a fantastic change in behavior that I'm not aware ever happens with any frequency in reality. It's obvious that becoming successful is complex, but I think parent's financial status is more of a correlation than a causation for future success (even though it might designate a probabilistic cap for how successful a person can become). It seems that good parenting combined with a natural desire to succeed is what happens. But when somebody doesn't have a desire to succeed, it's likely they also won't be good parents. Children pattern after their parents and also inherit the same lack of desire, from both behavior and genetic factors. Nobody has really figured out how to change that central decision point from "does it feel good" to "does it make me successful" with any sort of reliability. It seems to have to come from inside the person somewhere.

krupan 12y ago

"The kids who got a better start — because their parents were married and working — ended up better off. Most of the poor kids from single-parent families stayed poor." So we should be encouraging people to get married, stay married, and stay responsible enough to hold down a job if they are going to raise kids. Not a new idea at all, but that's cool to have a study to back it up.

msh 12y ago
But we don't know from the study if marriage is a cause or an effect.
anon1385 12y ago
No. http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/confusing-cause-and-effect.html http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/confusing-cause-and...

SnowProblem 12y ago

Nobody chooses which family he/she is born into, and nobody ever will. Each of us is randomly awakened, empty and dumb, on this Earth into a specific family and community outside our choosing, with its own mentors and values. This group will fill us with thoughts for 18 years. So yes, it is unfair that some of us are awakened to find we are poor, without good mentors or educators, and will be hindered for the rest of our lives. Unless society embraces something akin to complete communism or a Brave New World, which to me sounds incredibly boring, this will always be the case. We can't completely solve this issue at an individual level. But the problem is not just an individual problem. The path from rags to riches rarely happens in one generation. Consider the family as an institution that competes with other families for life's rewards. There are going to be differences in values between families with 10M and families with 10K. Each family will prioritize life's rewards differently, whether that be riches, a passionate vocation, strong relationships, travel and experience, etc. When looked at from the unit of the family, why would we not want to financially reward families that acquire riches more than those that don't? As long as we can maintain a balance, where an individual who so strongly wants to escape their birth family and make it on their own can do so, isn't this the right thing to do?

freedom123 12y ago

I will summarize real quick. "Rich" and "Poor" are 2 variable of millions - And no matter how many variables you address you cannot escape one simple fact about "who gets ahead" - "If its important to you, you will find a way, if it is not, you will find an excuse."

hackuser 12y ago
> no matter how many variables you address you cannot escape one simple fact about "who gets ahead" - "If its important to you, you will find a way, if it is not, you will find an excuse." Do you have evidence for that? All the evidence I read, including the research discussed in this HN post, says that it depends heavily on where you start, including factors such as family income. Are you saying that children born into poor families or who face other such disadvantages achieve less because they have less willpower than children born into wealthier families? If so, perhaps we should look at the relationship between family income and willpower. EDIT: Minor clarification
dasil003 12y ago
This is a good way to think on an individual level: ie. taking control of one's own destiny, but it's not adequate on a statistical/societal level. We know for a fact that there are number of correlating factors to success beyond an individual's ambition/discipline/chutzpah. If we ignore this as a society and the rich people from advantaged backgrounds (ie. the majority) continue to pat themselves on the back for their work ethic, then the growing divide between rich and poor will accelerate and destabilize the very status quo which the self-satisfied rich depend on to maintain their wealth and privilege.

pnathan 12y ago

One thing that I have observed and learned is money management "strategies" or "styles" vary between socioeconomic brackets. E.g., tradespeople don't always futz with stocks; they don't have the appetite for risk and volatility that stocks introduce. Long-term investing tends to be not done (maybe 401(k) or an IRA is used). Some of that is due to a lack of discretionary income, some of that is just culture. When you cross a certain barrier upwards, financial understanding of stocks and so forth increases, and money is leveraged to produce, e.g., use of index funds and their return on investment. Moving downward in the socioeconomic classes and passing another another barrier, money saving becomes less common, and impulse purchases appear to become more common. --- Some of this is definitely familial: I never learned about investments growing up and had to self-teach. That has limited my total financial situation to date. I did, however, learn about self-control, discipline, and self-teaching, which has helped me move forward financially. Another aspect is behavior expectations of the successful - How to comport and present yourself in a way that signals that you are a professional, capable and trustworthy individual? I feel comfortable saying that most anyone from a poor/blue-collar background and who has now made it into the white-collar ranks can join with me in saying that that is a big deal. (n.b., I would totally pony up cash for a local course in So You've Made It Now Past The First Job, Now How Do You Act?)

bane 12y ago
> Some of that is due to a lack of discretionary income, some of that is just culture. What's interesting is that you'll find the same group of people often purchase weekly lottery tickets. Which, if added up over time might make a small, but solid stock portfolio.
- Natsu 12y ago
  It's easy to understand how a lottery ticket might make you rich and hard to understand how unlikely it is to do so. Something close to the reverse of this is true with a portfolio of stocks.

trustfundbaby 12y ago

The researchers found that more affluent white men in the study reported the highest frequency of drug abuse and binge drinking, yet they still had the most upward mobility. "The extent of what we refer to as problem behavior is greatest among whites and less so among African-Americans," Alexander says. "Whites of advantaged background had the highest percentages who did all three of those things — that was binge drinking, any drug use and heavy drug use." ----- interesting

mililani 12y ago

I would like to see a study that follows the kids of poor immigrants. Almost everyone I know who came from poor immigrant families, including my own and my wife's, is doing well. We're all middle to upper middle class now. In fact, my family and relatives were so poor, they literally came to American with zero money. My wife's dad came here with only $50 to his name. It would be interesting to see some statistics on that.

deleted 12y ago
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ChuckMcM 12y ago

Interesting conversation, and an important one. Re-iterates the importance of family, or group action. In college I volunteered for Big Brothers and met a number of young men for whom the deck was stacked against them. One of the interesting things that correlated with success but I've not seen any definitive studies on it was church membership for the family. The young men were primarily hispanic, first generation, and if their family went to church the church community often helped cushion incidents which were disasters in non-church goers. Mom has to go to the hospital, the kids are fending for themselves, with church membership came folks who could (and would) step in and help. The other part that made a big impression on me was that we also got a large influx of Vietnamese refugees and one family in particular the father told me that he knew his children would be poor like him, but his grand children would not. He was taking a very long view on things which at the tender age of 19 I was left wondering "Am I just a stepping stone toward a more successful clan of kids?" That was sort of the model back then of each generation does better than the last, I've done better than my parents, but lately I haven't felt that this will hold for my kids generation.

morgante 12y ago

I wish we could find a more comprehensive measure of "class" than income, because I think this broader measure has a much larger effect than income itself. Technically speaking, you'd put me in the mobile group. Growing up, my parents never earned more than median wage and were consistently in the bottom third of the income bracket. Thankfully, I've been lucky enough to leap into the top 5%. I'll be buying my dad his first house soon. Yet, I've never felt particularly mobile. My parents were both college-educated, and my aunts/uncles are decidedly (upper) middle class. It was always expected that I'd go to college and succeed in careers. By this measure, I haven't moved at all.

erikb 12y ago

Did I not understand something correctly here? At first the text says people don't get ahead by education and hard work, and then it lists examples of the (few, of course) example who did get ahead and all of them got ahead by hard work and education? Of course most people don't get ahead. We are wired to keep the same level of things we know. If we want to study how to get ahead we must study those few who do get ahead, or at least analyze why the ones not getting ahead didn't get or take their chances. Another point I want to discuss: I grew up in a village where people also live on the lower social end. Only thanks to my mom I was able to get away from there (education and hard work). And I can say that it's not just all unfair to people who end up in the same low situation as their parents (drugs, alcohol, no job, single parents). In fact teachers, social workers, police officers, old people on the street, the super market cashier,... many people try to support them and give them chances. But many people simply don't take the chances. They can choose the math teacher helping them passing the exam in his spare time without pay (and where I come from teachers already work unpaid overtime in their normal jobs), and they can choose to sit all day at the bus stop, get drunk, use drugs, etc. Many simply choose the second option, because they don't know how to think long term. It's not all unfair just because poor people often stay poor. Third point: Assuming my observation is correct, then what can the government do? If people already get chances to work their way up, but they don't take it, what are the options? Force them to not take drugs? Force them to study 6 hours every day? We live in a free country. Hard to convince anybody that this might be a good decision. But if you let people have a free will, to some degree you must accept that people are very lazy.

Shivetya 12y ago

Rich doesn't always mean squat, culture can sink you more and most likely does even in the Baltimore study. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/30/arts/why-are-black-students-lagging.html http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/30/arts/why-are-black-student...

netcan 12y ago

Ironically, one of the books that shaped my ideas on topics like this early on was the fictional 'The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism' by Emmanuel Goldstein in '1984.' Orwell's perspective as a dissident socialist is very unique and made for a lot of nuance. This is one of the places where it shines through, in my opinion. In any case, in 1984-world there is an exam for moving the most talented of the middle classes into the upper class and least talented of the upper class to the middle. I think Orwell's thinking here was a 'keep the dangerous ones on the inside" strategy. But, I think there's another mechanism at work. Release valves and the creation of ambiguity. A member of the underclass with undeniable talent and force of will is very dangerous to the order of things. If there are several of them pushing hard against a glass ceiling then pressure builds up. It also becomes very obvious the the ceiling exists. That's where Malcolm Xs come from. Malcolm X recalls in his autobiography about an incident where he told his teacher he wanted to become a lawyer. The teacher responds that this is "not a realistic goal for a nigger". If he had become a lawyer he might have become one of the (as he saw it) one of those despicable, integration seeking middle class negroes. Blue pills. Hitting a hard ceiling made the existence of the ceiling undeniable and the incredible force of his personality had no other outlet than pushing against this impenetrable ceiling. I don't know if how obvious it was at the time that Malcolm X had the potential in him that he obviously exhibited as an adult. But let's imagine that the 12 year old Malcolm X was a 12 year old version of the 35 year old Malcolm X. A system that embraces that kid, makes him a lawyer. Gives him an outlet whiten it and celebrates him as an example of crossing class barriers or even proof for the non existence of those barriers is a more robust system. BTW, I think it's wrong to read 1984 as a description of a conspiracy. The conspiracy is more of a metaphor, a way of easily explaining how things work. In reality, societies are memoplexes, evolved. To paraphrase Douglas Adams. "A memoplex that survives is a memoplex that survives." They are made up of surviving memes. Memes preventing class movement entirely are likely to bring down the memoplex. I think airtight class distinctions (such as a system of race based slavery) are fundamentally unstable for this reason. There are interesting datapoints in accounts of ancient slavery. The Hebrew Bible describes a system of slavery with ways out existing in the ancient Middle east. Earning freedom. Sabbatical amnesties. Jacob came to Egypt as a slave. He rose to become a sort of chancellor to the Pharaoh. Ancient Greek & Roman systems of slavery had ways for exceptional slaves to earn freedom or even rise in rank within the institution of slavery. If Spatacus' leadership abilities had caused him to be ejected from slavery, his uprising would never have happened. He might have been a general enslaving barbarians and contributing gainfully to the system.