8 ms·

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

by 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.

by e40 12y ago

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.