Not to distract from the important content of this piece - which I simply can't devote any attention to in the middle of my workday, lest I ruminate for the next few hours - but for those interested in its development, here's a dev diary: https://bigcharts.substack.com/p/behind-the-scene-this-is-a-...
...my takeaway is a little different than what is in the commentary box (for the year 2017 in particular). The distribution of incomes don't actually look that different, to my eye.
If this is the grand reveal -- showing that childhood heavily influences future financial mobility -- it's not super obvious. I mean, yes, there seem to be a bit of a skew towards low earners in the bottom tranche -- but really it looks like the group that has had some astounding headwinds is kinda sorta doing about the same as the 'no adverse experiences' group? That is amazing as well!
It'd be nice to be able to get to the underlying data more easily, and drill into see the statistical conclusions. The horizontal bands not being of even length doesn't help either.
Edit: I don't think I was correctly taking into account the "no data" group, which makes the skew much more obvious (that the "many adverse experience" group has substantially lower earning power). I wish that the horizontal groups were of the same length, and the "no data" group was simply removed. I think that would make a transformative difference in terms of actually being able to understand this visually and intuitively.
Edit 2: Also how amazing is it that this study got done! The link to the study is very hard to find on this site, and also is wrong. The correct link (I think anyway) is https://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy97.htm
The visualizations suggested the differences were very marginal. Some people with no adverse experiences struggle; some with many adverse experiences thrive; and while the reverse is more often true there appear to be other factors more strongly determining outcomes.
I noticed that too... the effects didn't look nearly as dramatic from the visuals as the text would make me believe.
The exception was health, that was a much more dramatic correlation than income/etc. It reminds me of a study recently of homelessness in California, and people made a big deal about housing availability and affordability as the prime factor, but seemed to ignore the very notable health correlation in that study.
> If this is the grand reveal -- showing that childhood heavily influences future financial mobility -- it's not super obvious. I mean, yes, there seem to be a bit of a skew towards low earners in the bottom tranche -- but really it looks like the group that has had some astounding headwinds is kinda sorta doing about the same as the 'no adverse experiences' group?
This was my takeaway as well. My expectation was that the longitudinal study would show that bad experiences compound much more dramatically over time than the video appears to suggest.
Another issue I have with the presentation is that I had to keep pausing and carefully considering what each slide was saying, because the first several slides start by
- categorizing people according to whether they had bad experiences or not,
- arranging them spatially in one big group on the "bad experiences" axis,
- and coloring them according to the severity / occurrence.
So now my brain thinks "okay, warmer colors mean more/worse childhood experiences. got it.", but then all the following slides
- categorize people on lots of different dimensions (income, health, etc)
- but always grouped spatially by no/some/many bad experiences
- color them according to the dimension being measured
- some of them are arranged spatially in reverse order compared to the
legend, see 4:50 in the linked video / the slide on "general health"
So the entire time, I'm fighting my brain which is telling me "warmer colors -> bad experiences".
I wonder if it would be clearer if the measurement slides were instead grouped / arranged spatially by outcomes and colored according to the childhood experiences.
edit: it's ugly as heck but this is kind of what I mean:
Like I said, it's ugly, I obviously just copy/pasted regions around, but it should get across the idea that this would make it easier to see the proportions of each measurement class (income bucket, health bucket, etc) according to childhood experiences.
A large proportion of the time -- I hesitate to say "most" but that is my inclination -- the people making these visualizations have an agenda, and it's usually increased funding for their pet cause. So any time you're looking at this sort of thing especially when they're making broad over-arching generalizations (more "trauma" as a child makes life harder) it's important to read critically, interrogate the validity and bias of sources, and try to see if and where they may be skewing things with visualizations, omitting or lessening the perceived impact of damning data that disagrees with them, and/or making things that agree with their point more prominent than they probably should be. I usually don't even try to figure out what their "pet cause" may be before doing any of that because I don't want my own implicit biases to influence me more than they already do.
It's hard to be sure but I also think several of the folks earning the most as adults came from the "bottom" tier with the most adverse childhood experiences.
Less kids in households that don't want them. This is a pipeline problem. Intentional children only. Hard topic to cover online, nuance and emotions on the topic.
> I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but something has to change.
You're a good person doing necessary work. There aren't enough humans doing it, but it matters to who you're helping.
It would also help if more people that are doing marginal work could receive a wage that they felt secure with. Money is one of the biggest stressors for couples and families.
I do not disagree. But it will take years, if not decades, for labor rights and organizing to improve the situation you mention. Preventing unwanted children takes less time and effort, tragic as it is to type out.
I don't understand how to practically make this work.
There's a strong case to be made that a minimum wage helps people whose value approaches the minimum while hurting people above or below (e.g. $12 and $18 wages in an unlimited market both round to $15 with a minimum, while someone who only produces $7 of value is no longer employable). Similarly with cash infusions - giving people more money is inflationary.
Nobody wants to live in a world where people are trying to participate in society and failing. That's truly heartbreaking.
At the same time, naive solutions (decide a "living wage" and force people to pay it, set up and enforce rent control, give out stimulus payments) seem to have a lot of second-order effects/unintended consequences without actually solving the problems they're meant to solve.
I don't think it works if we're narrowly focused just on wages, but I don't know why that has to be the only focus. If we as a society want to support people having a baseline quality of life, then let's pay for it together rather than pushing it all on employers.
>If we as a society want to support people having a baseline quality of life, then let's pay for it together rather than pushing it all on employers.
Baseline quality of life isn't decided just by pay. I find that society doesn't support people having a baseline quality of life when it comes to areas other than pay, so it makes me question the motives of society in the case of pay.
My personal position is to abolish the minimum wage and update the tax scale with negative tax rates that support a reasonable quality of life at all income levels. The market will find its own balance for what a true minimum wage is in that environment (and not have weird perverse incentives like you state).
Yes, this is UBI. But phrased as a tax cut makes it politically viable (at least in the US).
One of the classic unintended consequences of social welfare is making someone at the bottom unwilling to work. We saw this during the pandemic when people in formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local restaurants?)
I'm curious to see an example scale that would continue to incentivize social behavior the whole way up the chain - avoiding the "oh I don't want to make $100 more dollars because I'm in a sweet spot now and bad things happen at $99."
You can certainly argue that many of the current disincentives are bugs in the bureaucracy. I'd like to see a proposal for the UBI tax scale you describe that doesn't have any bugs (that is, bumps in the distribution where people are afraid to reach for state C from state A, because the intermediary state B is worse than A).
We should not make it more than $1000 per month. Very few would choose to be poor. It would put a lot of pressure on companies to pay decent wages, though.
$1000/month is $12,000/year. Thats far far below poverty levels. It needs to be enough that people can choose to supplement in order to engage with luxury consumption. If people are forced to supplement to just survive, then we need to maintain the minimum wage and a whole host of other weird baggage.
The 2024 FPL figure is $15060 + 5380 per additional person family member past the first. $12k/head/year comes up a bit short for an individual, but it's not that far off—expenses involved in holding down a job probably actually account for the difference anyway.
It also becomes clearly tenable with households of more than 1. Supporting a family of 2-3 on $24k-36k is like, yep, I've met married international grad students. Of course they'll spring for supplemental income where available, but as a baseline it is tenuously "enough".
The goal can't be to solve every desperation case. But if the program wouldn't allow individuals living in dangerous and exploitative situations to confidently leave them (financially) Id argue the program was a failure
Very much agreed that there should be no cliffs. Every dollar earned should at minimum increase your usable cash flow by at least X amount no matter where you are in the income distribution and other tax incentive phase space
> One of the classic unintended consequences of social welfare is making someone at the bottom unwilling to work. We saw this during the pandemic when people in formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local restaurants?)
I remember this, the cash assistance gave people back their time to focus on starting their own businesses, pursuing self-education, taking care of their kids, etc. It was fully apparent to me that these low-wage jobs effectively trapped people by sucking up all the time they had for self-improvement.
> We saw this during the pandemic when people in formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local restaurants?)
Unwilling to work or temporarily not desperate to stay alive? How many receiving assistance were still working, just doing it less?
The only studies on outcomes I recall is that a lot of kids were no longer experiencing food insecurity.
That "classic unintended consequence" was specifically tested many times in UBI context, and study after study doesn't find it in any noticeable amount.
In any case, given how badly broken the current system is, surely it's at least worth a try?
It is important that this is based on all income levels equally. Yes, some will pay back that money in taxes, but the important part is keeping the amount equal. It would be even more effective if you gave them a monthly check (even if you would eventually take it all back via a consumption tax on people earning more). A ~25% national sales tax should be sufficient to cover a UBI program. (We should still have an income tax, though.) Furthermore, a consumption tax would decrease unnecessary spending since you can target only new products and not used products to encourage people to reduce, reuse, and recycle.
If UBI is encoded as a negative tax rate at low income levels, it no longer really makes sense to talk about it as applying to all income levels equally. It naturally gets distributed as
1) A check (issued by Social Security service?) if income is less than X
2) Less of your paycheck being withheld if your income is greater than X (or more if you're significantly above X, depending on how this gets funded)
We have a tax rate with negative tax rates at the low end of the scale. For sketchy social policy/political tenability reasons it doubles as a child subsidy and phases in up to a nominal amount of preexisting so-called earned income, but functionally that's what the earned income tax credit is.
Expansion of the EITC program is fairly well-regarded among economists and has been historically quite popular! We should do more of it!
I have a family member that is severely disabled. She used to be on a program where the government would supplement her wages - she worked at Jack in the Box, where her employer would pay like $3/hr and the government would top that up to $10/hr.
Now that program is gone and minimum wage for fast food is $20/hr. She simply cannot perform $20/hr worth of work, so she's unemployed (and living on government assistance).
The previous arrangement was fantastic because the work gave her a purpose and something to do all day, and she contributed to society while saving the government money. Now she stays home and watches TV endlessly.
This has informed my ideas - I think supplementing minimum wages could be a better alternative to UBI (with some exceptions).
There's usually carveouts for people with certain disabilities. It allows companies to pay them below the minimum wage. I would be surprised if that was abolished with the increase in minimum wage.
> someone who only produces $7 of value is no longer employable
This is the wrong model. You're using a worker's wage to describe their productivity, and a big reason for the mess we're in is that wages stopped increasing with productivity fifty years ago. (search "wages productivity graph")
This feels like you're nitpicking the language, not the thinking.
Imagine someone's contribution to a business increases revenue by $1000 and the total cost to employ that person for the same period is $800. Do you think most businesses would go "nope, we only hire highly leveraged people who produce $2000 in revenue"?
There are inefficiencies in scale (like communication/bookkeeping overhead) that might disincentivize a business from growing, but generally speaking, I think it's fine to model decisions as rational cost/benefit ones.
Workers who are only "worth it" at some wage. Nobody is going to pay you a million dollars to go sell a hundred dollars worth of stuff. If the value you can earn on the market is sufficiently lower than what someone is allowed to pay, they simply won't hire you. That's bad for everyone.
Except an employee's contribution isn't static, while their cost is.
$7.25 x 8 hours = $58 for the day. However what they create is based on output, which for most businesses, varies day by day along with their sales.
A McDonald's could sell 500 burgers in one day at one location, but only 300 at another. In this case the employee at the larger restaurant generates 2/5 more value than the employee at the smaller one, even if both can output at the same speed and quality. So, in reality, the employee at the larger restaurant is being exploited by 2/5 more than the employee at the smaller location. Which also means the employee at the smaller location is getting paid more for doing 2/5 less work than an equally capable employee.
Profits are multiplicative yet unpredictable, while labor is static and predictable.
Comparing someone's wage to the value they produce is a fine way for a company to decide whether to hire someone, but I didn't think that was the question you were trying to answer, was it? Perhaps I misunderstood, but I thought you were asking something like, what policy would help people who are at the margins, which is an economy-wide question that can't be answered from one employer's perspective. Workers may only be "worth it" at some wage, at some point in time, but that wage is subject to supply and demand just like everything else. A policy intervention like raising the minimum wage will alter that supply/demand curve.
For example, suppose janitors all make the minimum wage. If we increase it, there might be some company at the margin that will go without janitorial services, but most companies will pay their janitors the new wage, which (from the "a worker costs $X and produces $Y" model's perspective) will look a lot like the nation's janitors suddenly started producing more value. Ergo, it's not to say that that model is wrong, just that it's not useful in answering a question like should we increase the minimum wage.
A rather low hanging fruit is smoothing out welfare cliffs so poor people don't feel stuck in an position of a local maximum of utility near the bottom. The problem is that these initiatives are very complicated, and you get more public support just blindly throwing money at the problem.
The real issue is that a few people have accumulated a lot of wealth and property, and they use it as a tool to extract even more money. It's basically the late stage capitalism money vacuum hoovering up everything. In the past the only levers we had against this were breaking up firms and enforcing anti-monopoly and preventing capital from even entering certain parts of our economy. We could, for example, ban private equity companies from buying houses and healthcare companies, break up national monopolies into regional companies, and eliminate a lot of the consolidation that has traditionally enhanced the bargaining power of the company owner against the employees.
In the short term it would make a lot of stuff less efficient, but when people talk about "efficiency" they really mean driving costs down and driving income up. So we really don't want an efficient capitalist economy, we want a capitalist economy that is just efficient enough to meet our needs while not being so efficient that a few people can exploit that efficiency and run away with our things.
Are you suggesting that humanity will die out so long as only willing, intentional parents have children? That is an interesting thesis and conclusion to come to (total fertility rate = 0 vs somewhere between 0 and 2.1 [replacement rate]).
We should empower people who want children to succeed, and empower people who don't want children to never have them. What happens after that, we can solve for.
I think many people have a misunderstanding of what lower fertility means. Imagine a country has a fertility rate of 1. It doesn't seem that bad because it's pretty close to replacement. But fertility is an exponential system. So a fertility rate of means that each following generation (~20 years) will be half as large as the one that came before it (the formula is simply a ratio of fertility_rate/2). So you won't see any problem at all until the first generation to have low fertility starts to die. At that point you suddenly start seeing a rapid exponential effect. Every ~20 years (the size of a generation) your population size will be decreasing by 50% !!! And this never stops until you go extinct (which won't take particularly long), or start having children again.
It's easy to imagine 'oh we'll just fix it if it becomes a serious problem like that' but imagine the state of society when that starts happening. All markets/consumption will be decreasing by 50% every 20 years, there will be a very upside down population pyramid where the overwhelming majority of the population will be elderly and need care, so forth and so on. Japan, for instance, hasn't even hit the worst of it yet. Their fertility plummeted about 40 years ago. So their 'final stage' is yet still about 20 years away. Today are the good times for Japan, relative to what they have ahead of them.
Given most of the Western world can't maintain a remotely stable fertility rate in the current situation, doing something that would likely quite substantially lower it even further is indeed speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!
Current global population is ~8 billion. Momentum will take us to ~10 billion by 2100. Will it be a challenge to manage this rapid population decline and attempting to provide real, meaningful community support [1] and social systems [2] to potential parents to encourage them to have children (in order to raise the total fertility rate to a steady state level)? Certainly, without any doubt or hesitation. We spent up a credit card balance of sorts with a ballooning global population, that debt will need to be paid back in various ways. But extinction? Hardly.
> imagine the state of society when that starts happening
The state of my own personal society is my apartment costs $1000 more than it did two years ago and my food costs about 25-30% more than it did two years ago. I definitely wouldn't consider having another kid, nor would I encourage my own to have one.
Absolutely understandable, yet it also leads to a somewhat odd and undesirable reality. The problems you're talking about are ones that we inflicted upon ourselves, owing largely due to poor systems (and societies) enabling the turds of society rise to the top.
So what will the systems and societies of tomorrow look like? Every child born tomorrow is basically just a lottery roll against all people having children today. And today you have vast numbers of intelligent, educated, conscientious, and far thinking individuals are simply removing themselves from the gene pool; that lottery roll for the children of tomorrow is looking less and less pleasant.
There's this irony that the sort of mindset that might consciously make the decision to not have children is the exact sort that should be raising a family 1800s style, if we want a better world. Maybe there's just something about successful urbanization that ultimately causes societies to reboot. The Roman Empire also faced a major fertility crisis in its final years.
We understand the implications, but I would not want anyone to bring forth children that are unwanted, thus bringing more unhappiness into those parents' lives (and their surrounding community).
Our society needs to treat children as a gift and not just "thoughts and prayers" about raising them.
> I think many people have a misunderstanding of what lower fertility means. Imagine a country has a fertility rate of 1. It doesn't seem that bad because it's pretty close to replacement.
That's not even close to replacement. It's somewhere above 2 (often cited as 2.1, but it may be more like 2.04 in times of peace) for it to be replacement. If you could magically make fertility be that number, population increases would only come as a matter of life expectancy increase.
1 actually implies some sort of high-speed demographic implosion that will wreck an economy within a single human lifetime.
> It's easy to imagine 'oh we'll just fix it if it becomes a serious problem like that'
If it takes 30 years to recognize the problem, then one generation has already aged out of ever possibly being able to fix the problem, and the next generation is getting too old to be able to fix it (unless you can do so instantly). You've only got a few generations at a given time that can fix it.
> Japan, for instance, hasn't even hit the worst of it yet. Their fertility plummeted about 40 years ago.
There are fewer people living in Japan today, than there were a year ago. They didn't leave to go elsewhere. They died. And it will be like that every year until there are zero Japanese left. They have been functionally extinct for a few years now, though they may not know it yet.
> it even further is indeed speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!
There haven't been distinct, compartmentalized civilizations on Earth for over a century at this point. There's only the one civilization. And, if it dies, there likely won't be another. Who had "can't be bothered to fuck" on their Fermi's Paradox bingo card?
Saying society is going to collapse due to population decline is about as absurd as saying society will collapse due to overpopulation.
What will end up happening is that some groups will maintain replacement fertility levels or higher, and some groups won't, but we'll trend towards an equilibrium, or flop between too little fertility and too much fertility. Either way we won't go extinct unless we explicitly kill each other.
It depends on what you mean by society. If you mean the entire world, then of course I agree with you. But cultures and societies do go extinct, quite regularly. The Roman Empire, most notably, also had a fertility collapse in their final years. And by the end Rome itself had just become a facsimile of what was once the greatest city of the greatest empire in the world.
So, for instance, many people don't realize that right now is still the good times for Japan. Here [1] is their population pyramid. It currently still looks kinda-sorta pyramidish. But in ~20 years, their population pyramid will be completely and wholly upside down. And their population, economy, and everything else will fall into complete collapse. They'll be losing about half of their population each 20 years at that point. No culture can survive this. This will be made even more true by the fact that it will likely trigger a vicious cycle where the massively skewed age ratios, collapsing economy, and other issues will further reduce fertility.
Even if it was the case, would it be a problem? What is more important, having less humans being happy or more humans having a crappy life. Why should specie survival be more important than overall happiness of those that would have lived?
This is a tangent, but when in the world did "happiness" become a desirable metric? If you think about it, it's really quite absurd. Happiness is a brief liminal state that should be triggered by relatively infrequent events. It is not a normal, nor desirable, default state.
Contentedness, satisfaction, at-peace, and so on - there endlessly more rational, logical, desirable, and attainable things to aim for. Yet everybody always says happy. Maybe this even goes some way towards explaining the plummeting mental state of the West at large. If one sets their life goal towards happiness, then they're ironically certain to end up unhappy, unsatisfied, and discontented.
You are happy to receive good news, or for something to turn out well, or whatever else. But it is not a resting state. It's a liminal state. Contentedness, by contrast, is a resting state. You can awake contented, fall asleep contented, and spend your days contented. You may rarely, if ever, experience happiness - yet find yourself able to find satisfaction in life nonetheless.
By contrast a pitiful, depressed, self loathing individual, can experience happiness as much as anybody else. But he is most certainly not content nor satisfied. Perhaps a junky would be another example. A junky certainly experiences happiness when his poison enters his veins, yet he almost certainly is far from content or satisfied.
No, the words just have extremely different meanings. A child opens a Christmas present and starts rejoicing - nobody would claim 'Ah, look at him - he's so content!' One could even take this a step further to add that children, in general, cannot be content.
Contentedness is not happiness. And happiness is most certainly not contentedness. They're are just entirely different states of being.
First, it's important to understand that words mean what people tend to use them to mean.
Second, "happy" and "happiness" subsume numerous meanings. You're picking one, and as I and others have, at times, done with many other words, trying to restrict the world to only that meaning.
Perhaps a more similar word to your meaning would be "joy"? It seems more generally restricted to descriptions of brief periods, in common usage.
If I were simply restricting the meaning, then the examples I am offering would mean you could use happy or e.g. contentedness interchangeably, or at least doing so wouldn't sound ridiculous. Yet I'm sure you're realizing by now that you cannot! For another example - a stern and disciplined person, who is rather dour of character, could be completely contented, but it would be illogical to call this person "happy", however you might want to define the term.
The words are simply not synonyms, or even particularly close to being synonyms.
Agreed that affirmative happiness is very hard to think about as a target.
But I find that most people, when they say that, actually mean reduction of suffering. That's easier to quantify--but still quite difficult, like most quantities in social research.
Do you not then run into other problems? For instance I find that lifting brings an immense amount of contentedness, yet it's essentially hours upon hours of self inflicted suffering and pain. The same is true of family. Somebody raising a 2 year old could describe it in many ways, but reduction of suffering would not be one. Such things greatly contribute to this sense of contentedness and satisfaction.
You can change up the emotions on the topic pretty quickly if you change the framing to "intentional sex only" rather than "intentional children only," even though the former accomplishes the latter.
It's fun, because you can get virtually everyone to agree that people should only have sex they mean to have, but as soon as you suggest they should only have sex when all parties involved have carefully and accurately assessed the risk of pregnancy, you're a killjoy.
You can select a dropdown at the end for "Parenting style" which divides the groups by number of parents involved. This seems to be the strongest correlator of any of the data shown.
Studies of identical twins raised apart, like MISTRA, show remarkable similarities in life outcomes and big five personality traits. There's a big genetic component, and the time spent with parents is dwarfed by time spent with others once they start school, so the role of parenting style on life outcomes would have to have a significant outsized effect compared to all other life experiences.
If I recall correctly, absent neglect or abuse, parental influence doesn't matter as much as people think.
MISTRA is a citation, it's a well-known name, just Google the study. Also:
1. TFA article talked only about correlations, because that's all they have.
2. Genetics influences all of TFA factors as well.
3. TFA discussed "adverse experiences", "parents involved" and "family risk scores". Guess what I said: parenting really only has a significant effect in cases of neglect and abuse. Sounds like we agree.
"Just Google it" - really? I have no doubt MISTRA exists, but demonstrating specifically where and how a study proves your point is something else entirely.
The core assertion that parental involvement doesn't matter much as long as they're not abusive is pretty absurd regardless, but I'll leave the Googling of studies showing why as an exercise for you.
The tl;dr is that if you fall into the cohort that could likely adopt a child, your parenting decisions aren’t going to make much of an impact, beyond affecting your kid’s memories of their childhood and their relationship with you. And that doesn’t mean parents should become apathetic, but that it’s better to care about expressing warmth and kindness instead of stressing about achievement.
Basically children in bad situations need just one reliable person who believes in them in their lives.
What it does is making them realize that it’s not them who are doing something wrong but that their surroundings are flawed. The problem begins when children start to believe everything is their own fault.
> What it does is making them realize that it’s not them who are doing something wrong but that their surroundings are flawed. The problem begins when children start to believe everything is their own fault.
This is only tangentially related, but I think your point is critically important. Relatively recently I did ketamine infusion therapy for depression, and it was life changing for me. Ketamine is a "dissociative", and one thing that it seriously helped me do was separate my "self" from my depression, which I've never really been able to do before despite decades of trying through therapy. That is, now that I see depression as a chronic condition I have (say perhaps analogous to people that have to deal with migraines), as opposed to something that I am at my core, it makes it much, much less scary and threatening to me.
In my experience, I've noticed that the people who I think of as the most successful (both from a society-wide and personal perspective) have the clearest view of what is their control and what they can accomplish, and also what is not. A huge benefit of this is that when they see an obstacle that some person could potentially overcome, even if it would be very, very difficult, they tend to think "Heck, why not me?" And when they do hit setbacks because of the unpredictability of the world, they don't take it personally, they just tend to think "Well, the world is chaotic - is this new problem something that can reasonably be overcome?" I contrast with a mindset I had for a long time (which a large part I think was a consequence of being bullied) that if I put a lot of effort into something and just didn't succeed, it was fundamentally because I wasn't "good enough", so why bother trying that hard at something else as I'm likely not going to be good enough there either.
Very true. Self-confidence and grit are immensely important in overcoming or even just rationalizing the obstacles of life, doing so in an almost logical way without letting a person's self-defeating emotions or perceived shortcomings get in the way. It's such a huge divider and it singularly is based on what kind of adult(s) that person had in their life when they were young.
No. They can see that there are other ways of living by watching their peers or random people on the street.
But they need somebody to make them understand that it’s not them who are destroying the relationship with their surroundings and their chance for being happy but the other way around.
Some children in bad situations understand that without guidance but they are rare.
Learned helplessness can also afflict adults, especially those who are not accustomed to dealing with computers. I get that quite a bit, and it's not just older people. Young people who have only used tablets, phones, and Chromebooks also are affected. YMMV
In the wise words of the late child psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, Professor Emeritus of Human Development and Psychology at Cornell:
In order to develop – intellectually emotionally, socially and morally – a child requires participation in progressively more complex reciprocal activity on a regular basis over an extended period in the child's life, with one or more persons with whom the child develops a strong, mutual, irrational, emotional attachment and who is committed to the child's well-being and development, preferably for life. (Bronfenbrenner, 1991, p. 2)
Or paraphrased by him:
“Every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her.”
How do you volunteer at the local school? My wife and I are both passionate about and interested in improving children’s lives, but not super sure how best to do it outside of donations and big brother big sister-type programs.
As an aside, maybe it’s because I’m inexperienced, but I’m finding it surprisingly hard to get connected with a group to help people that isn’t a highly specific cause like religion, LGBTQ, children of certain races, etc.??? Is it just me? I am clearly very ignorant about all this
I would like to volunteer as well, but it would have to be outside of home and school since I live in Texas. I would like to help young people learn to cope with being LGBTQ+, ADD, and other things, but I don't think parents would appreciate it.
Why? Helping kids develop study skills would help with adhd, helping kids deal with bullying would help with lgbtq issues. I can’t see how that would be harmful.
>I’m finding it surprisingly hard to get connected with a group to help people that isn’t a highly specific cause like religion, LGBTQ, children of certain races, etc.
I recently started volunteering at my county’s animal shelter. The experience has been very rewarding.
Where I live the superintendent and local groups formed a task-force style intervention and looped in local volunteers.
The scale of the problem is most visible through 'special ed' allocation. Once a program for kids with learning challenges, it now also encompasses what are essentially behavioral problems.
Kids don't get kicked out of school for throwing raging tantrums or hitting teachers - they get placed into programs designed to keep them in school. (If that's what life is like at school, imagine what life is like at home.)
Same but here with Chrome on Android. I also get scrolling freezing in places so I am forced to reload the page (and then graphics disappear).
The article would have been vastly more readable if it was plain html with static embedded images and without any custom scroll/touch event handling - then one would easily be able to scroll around in it, search text, and view charts uncorrupted by javascript bugs.
I am sure the author is proud of their nytimes-like data visualization project, but in this case, the visualization makes the result in every way worse.
I normally love the Pudding (getting a pitch accepted would be a high point in my career) but this one is hard to read. So many of the screens give you different colored groups whose sizes are hard to compare.
I thought I just wasn't understanding the visualizations. Glad it wasn't just me.
It also wasn't very clear to me what I was supposed to be noticing in the visualizations that was related to whatever text was currently popped up. In the end I just watched the youtube video that was linked to at the very beginning and it made everything much clearer to me.
Also, the visualization let you think that all the leftmost teenagers are the same ones stacking the bad things. That might be true, but I doubt it is. The part around Highschool was especially unclear.
Are they the same teenagers getting all the bad stuff. That would be plausible but not to the extend the visual displays I guess.
In other news, I hate that trend of scrolling to animate to get content.
I stumbled across this on youtube last night and closed it halfway through when I realized the visualizations didn't make any sense. Clearly a lot of work went into this, how does something so confusing get made?
I scroll and I scroll but the page doesn't budge. I come to my senses: "aha, I get it! For the last few minutes I've been aimlessly scrolling in search of content and all the people around me in the train must have seen me do it with the same crooked posture and lifeless expression of a modern day teenager on their phone! This is me, the teenager! I have been the victim of a piece of performance art!"
Then I realized it simply doesn't work properly on my phone's Chrome...
Oh, is that the issue with all of this scroll-jacking bullshit web design lately? I'm not using the Designer's Choice mobile platform, so my experience just sucks? NYTimes is one of the worst offenders.
I like the message, but I feel like this is bad data visualization. The width of each group of people is not the same, so it's somewhat meaningless to visually compare groups without being able to see the raw percentages. For example, the "Many Adverse Experiences" group is stretched to be longer than the other groups so that proportionally fewer people in that group appear to be a larger proportion than the same proportion would be in other groups because they're not as wide.
Also, the visualization doesn't update well when scrolling back and forth; and the grouping is bad -- "bullied" is listed as an adverse condition, but is also shown as a separate grouping; and the way it's displayed for "Seen someone shot with a gun" is backwards, implying that the vast majority have seen that. Too bad, because it otherwise seems like an interesting study.
Social sciences is not value-free. In reality the most important indicator of "at-risk" is previous involvement with social services and mental health professionals. Usually because these experiences tend to be so bad that the kids involved start to hide problems, or even attack anyone involved with social services. And THEN they get into a negative spiral. It is not the first time they get into a negative spiral, except now their experiences with mental help are so incredibly negative they fight to remain in the negative spiral, sometimes to the point of physical violence.
Likewise, these professionals hide that almost all experiences kids have with social services are negative for the kids. Now I suppose you could say the above is an example of that, but really, it goes further. Kids seek help with homework, and only get berated by someone that couldn't do the homework themselves ...
Studies keep pointing out that social services is exactly the wrong approach. What makes teachers, and social professionals good is excellent subject knowledge, combined with basic psychology. NOT the other way around. And in practice every mental help professional I've ever seen thinks they know what to do, and when pushed fail to produce even basic psychological facts, or outright deny them. I like to think you can explain this that when push comes to shove our minds are trying to solve problems in the real world.
The majority of mental problems are someone failing to solve real world problems, and repeatedly failing to influence the outcome. A little bit of psychology is needed to get them to try again ... and a LOT of knowledge of the real world is need to make sure the outcome is different.
I think you're reading it right.
They have the color key correct but the key for which side is seen vs not seen is incorrect.
It should be
<--Seen someone shot ... Not seen someone shot-->
Agreed. Spent a couple minutes trying to figure out how I was reading it wrong for several of the categories - sometimes it is correct, but often it is not.
Came here to say similar - making the page extremely wide helps a big by making the rows more similar but ideally consistent scale and number of rows should be maintained so we can see a column-to-column width comparison of the data points.
I thought the visualization was awful. Prose and some (non-animated) charts would do a much better job, and suit scrolling/scanning back and forth much better.
I'm torn. On the one hand, I agree with your remarks. On the other hand, I strongly appreciate the attention to detail in:
- Actually keeping individual datapoints all the time, clickable and with full details, and just moving them around to form different charts;
- Making the icons consistent with data - based on a few random instances I checked, the person's body shape and hairstyle correlated to biometric parameters in the data set.
I don't even think that the message is likeable. "Oh no they don't go to college!" is schoolmarmish and patronizing. "College is for everyone!" and "you're not really an adult until you're 25!" have done an awful lot of societal harm.
As a college non-graduate, I think that is leveraging the strong data that for most people a college degree is a huge net benefit is reasonable.
As someone who was once <25, I think that version of me is stupid in a wide variety of ways. I hear you that it can be negative to divide things that way, but it seems reasonable to say “after you are either a non college graduate with a number of years of experience or a college graduate with ~2 years of post-college experience.
I hear you, though, it’s hard to sort people into buckets.
> As a college non-graduate, I think that is leveraging the strong data that for most people a college degree is a huge net benefit is reasonable.
As another college non-graduate (although I'm currently going back to school). Have we ever figured out which way causation goes on this one? Does college actually have that much benefit, or do people who are motivated tend to go to college more?
As another college non-graduate that has friends that are graduates and non-graduates the graduates tend to live more fulfilled lives, regardless of income level.
People with support to go to college are more likely to go to college, less about motivation.
I think there needs to be more support for students failing/dropping out of college.
The visualization is a good iteration on trying to get complex papers distilled into a digestible format. That was nice.
I'm not super sure how I feel about the message though as it operates on a handful of really big presumptions. I'll share my own bias to save everyone the tldr on where I'm coming from: I'm a parent advocate. I think the nuclear family is the backbone to society and that much, if not every, societal ill can be linked to the destruction of the nuclear family. Parents matter, and I agree with the general conclusion that we need to focus TREMENDOUS effort into raising children in a loving and safe way. If you are still reading, consider also that I'm a 3rd generation son of Mexican immigrants. I grew up in a lower economic class background in Los Angeles county during the 90s. I grew up shoulder to shoulder with many of the people included in this study.
The first is that it's somehow a bad thing not to go to college. The trades by now are a known lucrative path with significant upward mobility, especially as we consider entrepreneurship. This is, in my experience, hand in hand with a lot of cultural practices that just doesn't get captured in these types of sociological studies. I can personally attest to the increased risk tolerance that a lot of cultures have towards starting a business or joining a labor based trade. Food trucks, car washes, detailing services, maid services, laundromats, dry cleaning businesses, convenience market franchises. In the privacy of your own head, and without fear of judgement from your HN peers, I invite you to honestly consider the ethnicity of the people who own these businesses. See my point? The mobility is there. These aren't "bad" lives. They're different. These people also have different standards of living. Most people who are immigrants or 2nd to 3rd generation of those immigrants don't want a multi-hundred thousand dollar life. Just speaking from personal experience here, most lower class migrants see the prospect of making that much money in America as foreign and unsafe. Maybe this furthers the point that not everyone should or can be a doctor/lawyer/FAANG-engineer.
The second presumption is that "abuse" or "adverse experiences" is able to be categorized by the researcher's definition. Again, we're dealing with people of different cultures who have different standards for living. We're overlaying our own "refined" terminology of what constitutes "abuse" or "danger" to them and drawing conclusions. Worse yet, we're saying that those same conclusions are correlated to the conditions that they experienced, regardless of how they themselves would classify it.
"High risk" is a highly contestable term, especially as the diversity of subjects increases. Maybe it's a good thing that mom divorced the man who was never around. Maybe mom was sleeping around and dad found out? Maybe mom remarried because dad died. Either way, non-intact households are being labelled "high risk" in a general sense.
"Being held back" as a bad thing is contestable. Some kids fall in that weird Nov-December enrollment period and make it through by being the oldest kid in their class. This isn't typically a good thing. The threat of being held back a grade is also encouraging for those who take their schooling seriously. Should it ever happen, its a serious kick in the pants for kids to wake up and take this seriously.
"Suspension", again any type of school based discipline, is seen as a adverse event. Suspension protects the children of the school, it notifies the parents of the suspended that there is a __real__ problem with your child, and provides a significant deterrent from bad behavior. It's wild to me that anyone would think of suspension as a noteworthy heuristic for adverse experiences.
Thanks to anyone who made it this far, even those that will disagree.
> The second presumption is that "abuse" or "adverse experiences" is able to be categorized by the researcher's definition. Again, we're dealing with people of different cultures who have different standards for living. We're overlaying our own "refined" terminology of what constitutes "abuse" or "danger" to them and drawing conclusions. Worse yet, we're saying that those same conclusions are correlated to the conditions that they experienced, regardless of how they themselves would classify it.
I think in this case, it seems they did pretty well. They're not lumping in "people failed to use their pronouns" into it, but things like gun violence, violent crime, and bullying. Some kids might be made of tougher material and shrug that off better, but even for them if that's not an adverse experience, I don't know what could be. It seems like the researchers are using an appropriately conservative definition.
> Maybe it's a good thing that mom divorced the man who was never around.
Yeh, but now we're confusing propaganda that was designed to encourage women to leave abusers for something of statistical significance about another matter entirely. If there are more men who would have made the kids' lives better than there are men so dangerous it's good they were separated from their children, then it doesn't matter that some are bad. The fact that the father has divorced and is out of the picture puts them at a higher risk of poor outcomes.
> The fact that the father has divorced and is out of the picture puts them at a higher risk of poor outcomes.
Hundred percent agree on this point. My concession was that it's not always beneficial that the parents stay joined nor is it deterministic that a single father or mother is strictly worse off than an intact family with an abusive/negligent/not present parent. Ideally none would divorce, but we can't factor for that.
> Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often… Swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you? or Act in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt?
seems pretty clear to me, regardless of if something is considered okay in one culture but not in another, the question is was the experience humiliating, not did X happen, where X could be considered not humiliating in one culture and not in another.
That's an excellent observation. When I wrote this I was looking for the questions/heuristics from the study that produced these statistics. I couldn't find much. Do you happen to have a link by any chance? I'm sure others would find it helpful as well.
I know that the author is trying to argue that minorities are at higher risk for bad outcomes, but it feels intellectually dishonest to use the same colors for white and rich, or black and poor. If white people can be poor and black people can be rich, you can't overload the color to reinforce your bias.
Plus, that whole section seemed to be sorted in an incoherent way.
Agreed, not least because:
- area-based visualizations make the effect hard to distinguish; bar charts or data clouds with numbers and confidence intervals would have been way more immediate.
- the colors make the negative group (usually) more visually prominent, since it has higher contrast with the background, exacerbating the area-estimation problem. (e.g. me wondering, "are there more overweight pink people as a fraction of pink people?")
I understand the motivation of trying to (literally) humanize the data points, but it would have been much more successful if there were vertical groupings as well as horizontal ones.
Right now it's 3 buckets + colors, but you could literally make it monochrome, make it an actual grid, then you could see which cells are completely empty, which is impactful.
We really do love pudding.cool[1]- I'd never bothered to go look at what it's actually all about till today, and you should too if you've not, because it wasn't exactly as I expected: https://pudding.cool/about/ - these people seem great, we should probably support them. I noticed they have a Patreon if you're feeling generous[2].
Their mission statement is disingenuous, to say the least, and I sensed it as soon as I started the current post. Here is the mission statement, in bold, and in this form, great, I'd be all for it:
The Pudding explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays. We’re not chasing current events or clickbait.
Then we scroll down a bit and see that, in fact, they are not taking a fresh, objective look at issues, but are strongly committed to one side of the culture war, the progressive left:
"We believe in journalism that denounces false equivalence, one that can explicitly say Black Lives Matter"
"We strive for our journalism to be one of key making, not gate keeping, and we won't shy away from stories that tackle racism, sexism, and classism head on."
"We're a small group that operates as a collective rather than hierarchical team."
Just clicking randomly shows a (to me) unexpectedly low age for first sex. If I understand right, the people in here were born in 1984, so they are younger than me (late Gen-X), and i keep hearing that Millennials are having less sex than all previous generations, but these numbers look on the young side. Sampling 11 across cohorts I got a median of 15, which is lower than I found for one all-generations measure I found[1]
[edit]
Finally got to the end where I can sort by various metrics and found a median of 17/16/15 for low/medium/high ACEs score, which is slightly closer to what I expected.
Also reading the "millennials are having less sex" articles, they mostly focus on people born in the early '90s, so the tail-end of millennials.
> i keep hearing that Millennials are having less sex than all previous generations
This article is about a longitudinal study; it follows "Alex" who was age 13 in 1997, i.e. born in 1984.
US teen birth rates have been falling a lot - 61 births per 1000 in 1991 fell to ~48 births per 1000 in 2002 (When Alex would have been 18) and continued falling to just 13.9 births per 1000 today according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/259518/birth-rate-among-...
You have probably heard reports that teenagers are having less sex today. The teen birth rate would seem to clearly show that. But "millenials" aren't teenagers any more, they're 30-40 year olds.
That is an 8 year old article. Nearly half a generation ago. That article would how he comparing generation Z to older generations (assuming the focus was still on the average 20 something year old).
The article refers specifically to people aged 20-24 in 2016, but the headline just says "Millennials".
I, a millennial, was 30 by then.
My younger brother, a millennial, was only 23.
Millennials are people who were born between 1981 and 1996. Some millennials were having sex when other millennials were toddlers. I would call it poor reporting to call out a 15-year wide cohort when the research being reported spans a narrow 4 of those years.
Why are some statistics awkwardly phrased in terms of "per 1000", "per 10k", "per 100k", etc. when we have a perfectly good shorthand for that?
13.9 per 1000 is 1.39%.
Just to be clear, this is not directed at parent, because it is phrased that way on the web page they cited. I'm just hoping someone here has the answer.
I remember reading somewhere that people, on average, understand integer ratios better than they understand percentages. As in you you write 283 out of 10,000 vs. 2.83% and then ask comprehension questions the former shows much better comprehension.
As a side note, I have personally encountered large number of adults who are unable to restate a percentage as a fraction, and even the idea that a percentage represents a fractional value is foreign to them.
The animation is dominating the narrarive rather than assisting it. I (as many I assume) just want to skim the information and find myself stuck waiting for things to load or pathfinding algorithms to work. People keep flipping side to side needlessly also. Sometimes I'd just prefer flat 2d diagrams.
I can't believe I had to scroll down that far to find someone who had the same experience as I. Scrolling degenerated to 1 fps on an up-to-date Firefox. I didn't have a chance to follow the story.
Everything can't have a TL;DR. Well, it can, but it loses the essence, the meaning. I saw the animations, I read the text, I interacted with the page, and felt touched. I understood the message the author is trying to convey. I liked the execution.
Fair enough. I think I was just reacting to the "watch the video" suggestion which is a continuous source of irritation to me especially in the complicated video game word (e.g., Paradox games).
Anyone else notice how those with the most adverse experiences were both more likely to be depressed and more likely to be happy "all of the time" for the past month?
Is this a flaw in the data? What is the causal explanation for this?
Challenges with emotional regulation was my first thought.
I imagine children who grow up in stable environments can better regulate their mood as they can return to a caring parent who will soothe them when they're emotionally dysregulated, compared to those in instable environments.
This might lead to the highs being higher and the lows being lower, a stretching of the bell curve.
I noticed that the no adverse group had very few people who said they were happy most of the time. I think this could come down to the weight of debt and maintaining a "stable" lifestyle. The more adverse effect group is probably generally lower income and less likely to have a lot of debt.
Maybe high achievers can never get enough...whatever...to be content, and will always seek to define themselves not by looking at what they have, but by looking at what they don't have (yet).
Apparently GPA distribution is less affected by adverse experiences. So doing college admissions based on GPA sounds more fair than affirmative action. Some people from disadvantaged groups also say they would rather be admitted on merit alone because it is more reliable in the long run, but they don't get this choice.
Problem is, GPA is incredibly subjective across different schools, hence the need for standardized testing. Do you rank someone that has a 3.5 at a boarding school where they were taking college level math classes at Princeton as less qualified than someone that has a 4.0 at a school where half the students aren't literate?
Agree. The place I went to HS had a 4.0 grading scale. There was no other high school in my town. Several towns over, their school district decided that AP classes should get weighted grades, putting me at a comparative disadvantage within the same curriculum.
I watched the video. Maybe I am not understanding the visuals, but it looked like the narrator's conclusions do not actually match the data. He is trying to make an argument that poor kids need extra help or they will have a rough life. But the data seems to show that over the last 20 years, people from all background types are likely to experience bad things.
Granted the last 20 years has been pretty awful, with 9/11, various wars, and other things. So I'm not really sure if I can take anything away from the video.
Yeah I saw the same thing in the shape of what was presented. The proportions are roughly the same in the visualization, it's just that most people had some or many adverse experiences. But what I see is that in my generation your home life didn't matter as much. I agree that we need to move as many kids as possible out of the "adverse experiences" category but I don't think this data supports that.
The last 20 years have been really really awful for everyone I went to school with.
> The proportions are roughly the same in the visualization
They're not, though? E.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKv1Mixv0Hk&t=278s — note that the final bar is also shorter, so really you need to elongate it a bit in your mind (and compress the bar above it): the proportion of the "many adverse experiences" group is definite greater than the other two. (I wish they'd've just labelled the %'age on the screen, made the bar lengths equal — I have a lot of issues with the data visualization here, but none severe enough that they defeat the core point of the video.)
Edit: okay, I've counted the miniature people on this chart. For this specific example, they are: no adverse exp.: 7 aff, 109 total; some adversity: 16 aff, 239 total; many adverse exp.: 24 aff, 152 total. In percentages, that's "No adverse experiences" → 6.4% victims of crime, "Some adverse experiences" → 6.7% victims of crime, "Many adverse experiences" → 15.8%. The last group is more than double the other two. (The first two, in this example are equal; but the visualization also roughly shows that.)
I'm willing to bet poverty is really what is leading, everything else is a spurious correlation. If you're poor you probably live in a more dangerous area, are in a significantly worse situation to study, need money right now so need to get a job asap after school - or even during school, etc etc. I wish we could easily check this from the data.
First, … I don't think I dig the visualization done. These are essentially like bar-pie charts (whatever you call a bar, split into segments, each segment representing a % of a whole), but many of the "bars" are not of the same length, which makes visual comparison of the subsegments tricky.
> But the data seems to show that over the last 20 years, people from all background types are likely to experience bad things.
But that adverse backgrounds are more likely to experience those things. Take "Happy person in the last month" at 2021 (the final outcome, essentially): the "many adverse experiences" group is unhappier. "General health" is the same. "Victim of crime" is the same. I think "Annual income" shows the same as the rest, but I think this is also the hardest graph to read.
I.e., it's not that people from all backgrounds aren't adversely affected by bad things, it's that people from adverse childhoods are disproportionately affected.
But it's not that, since the bars are different thicknesses, and that changes the horizontal scale of each bar. These are some of the hardest to interpret charts I've seen in a long time.
The animations are misleading too. When the people run around on the page, you can't tell if they're changing color or not. It gives the impression that every individual in the study ends up being the same color in each scenario, which clearly isn't true.
They even through in a non-sequitur jab at Trump for good measure. This is what happens when you use ideology to read and interpret data rather than the other way around.
The following is the full passage. It has Trump's as well as other president‘s (Reagan, Clinton) quotes as evidence for a certain kind of responsibility rhetoric. I think it is neither non-sequitur nor ideological but judge for yourself:
> It's 2015.
> In one year, the US will elect Donald Trump as president – a man who constantly insults poor people and calls them "morons."
> This generation grew up hearing presidents say similar things. Ronald Reagan said people go hungry because of "a lack of knowledge," and that people are homeless "by choice." Bill Clinton said "personal responsibility" is the way to overcome poverty. We grew up in a country where most people believed the top reason for poverty was drug abuse, and half of Americans blamed poor people for being poor.
Also, weirdly, it seems that the years following Trump's election, the people in the group did better, made more money, etc. So I'm not clear on how presidents being demeaning to people is relevant. That's not to say it's alright for them to do so, just, seems like a strange interjection when everything else is talking about the data itself.
FWIW, and as someone who's been through it, that's a really disempowering belief for people who have already experienced it or who are currently living through it.
Life involves many profound challenges, most of which are unfairly distributed. Learning to overcome the challenges that one faces and turn them into novel opportunities and perspectives is the constructive way of looking at it.
There are enough of these challenges that we as a society don't need to encourage them and can work to eradicate or minimize many, but this fatalist view (as indeed gets said countless times) doesn't help the people who already faced it or who will in the coming decades.
And of course, this is not just limited to poverty.
> There are enough of these challenges that we as a society don't need to encourage them and can work to eradicate or minimize many, but this fatalist view (as indeed gets said countless times) doesn't help the people who already faced it or who will in the coming decades.
At an individual level, a fatalist view is definitely incredibly harmful. But at that doesn't mean we shouldn't work to counter it at a systemic level.
That's exactly what's said in what you quoted, even so far as putting the emphasis on societal effort by mentioning it first, so clearly I don't disagree :)
I've been through it as well, not as in severe poverty, but definitely to the degree where what you can do in life is very limited and ...
>that's a really disempowering belief
... for me at least, it had the complete opposite effect. When you're young and particularly a teenager, you want to do as much cool things as possible (not just fun, but also things like profiling yourself to end up in a good career, make money, etc), plenty of times this does not happen if you're not privileged enough, and then most of the time people blame this on themselves, maybe I wasn't that smart, maybe I wasn't that disciplined, blah blah.
Sometimes "you just didn't have enough money" is an acceptable answer, it takes the blame out of yourself and it gives you an objective to pursue. Note: this last phrase could definitely be misinterpreted and strawman-ed to death, so I'll clarify on both points:
* It takes the blame out of yourself ... in a healthy way; most likely you are just good enough or are as good as all the other people that are already doing what you want to do. Money could well be the only limiting factor and, if this happens to be the case, you're actually lucky in the sense that is much easier to "just get some money" than to actually nurture and develop an ability that you don't have.
* It gives you a (clear and focused) objective to pursue. Money is not everything but once you identify this as the limiting factor in your life, you can become laser-focused on acquiring said wealth and things just get easier down the road. Anecdote from me: I was once a plane trip short (out of money) from enrolling on a nice PhD in a different country than mine; that, of course, got me very frustrated and sad, but after that my only purpose for a short while was to make money, I went on to work and live frugally (by choice!) and after a year I had saved up a significant wad of cash, this put me in a position where I could not only afford the plane ticket towards any PhD program I wanted, but also afford at least 6-8 months of life anywhere I wanted in the world, so I could just go to places and explore and make a decision about that when I was comfortable about it. Also that small cycle of "set up goal", "work towards it", "execute", gave a lot of meaning to my life at the time and it's a framework that is very useful to master going forward in life.
I appreciate your perspective! But learning to recognize that not all lives can find a path to the same place and that you should stay focused on your own opportunities and wellness, seems a far cry from internalizing that "poverty fucks you up".
In fact, I'd say it's almost the opposite. You don't sound fucked by poverty, honestly. You seem more grounded and capable than many people who had far more privileges, and it sounds like your experiences ended up playing a positive contribution to that even if you wouldn't want to inflict those experiences on anyone else.
It actually seems like it's the behaviors of other poor people, which those in poverty cannot escape, that "fucks people up." It's not privation. It's proximity to violence and abuse (both of which are highly correlated with -- note: not demonstrated to be caused by -- poverty).
There's a pretty good, evidence backed system of childhood suffering, its an adverse childhood experience score. And yep its all about personal experiences.
I feel bad for Alex but it seemed like a pretty impressive percentage of people with very adverse childhoods ended up being happy. The graph didn't make it seem like his outcome was typical.
It also looked like the claimed racial disparity wasn't very pronounced?
If you actually take the percentage, it's like 30-50% more likely to have the worse outcome the worse your adverse background gets.
But on the chart, it's only like an extra line of kids. The absolute number increases don't look like much, but the percentage increase is very high. I think the authors could have done a much better job at highlighting that.
Maybe but you can't teach a Labrador algebra no matter how many treats you feed it. These are aggregate effects of low IQ genetic traits as they play out over generations in our capitalist society. The trauma is a consequence of poverty and bad parenting which is because of low IQ. And don't call me racist. Ask why there was no IQ test line up amongst all that visualized data
Population scale trauma exposure and bad parenting is a result of poverty, social structures, and sometimes wars and conflicts, not something predetermined by genetics.
The IQs of adopted children have next to nothing to do with their environments, and much more to do with the IQs of their birth parents. IQ in general is very strongly heritable. There are several adoption and twin studies that have demonstrated this effect, e.g.:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8513766/
Trauma (physical and emotional) causing reduction in IQ is totally compatible with IQ being in part heritable.
Regarding race/ethnicity correlations from the paper you posted:
"(McGue et al., 2007; Miller et al., 2012). McGue et al. (2007) reported minimal ethnicity effects in the SIBS sample at intake, which we largely replicate in the current follow-up assessment. While rearing family socioeconomic status and polygenic scores were both moderately higher among Asian offspring (Cohen’s = d .36–.46; p < .01 ), no measure of cognitive ability differed significantly between offspring of different ethnicities. See SI Table S6 for these and other comparisons, along with a discussion of their relevance."
Also, the children in that study have not been victims of trauma (or the study has not considered and controlled for it), so it says nothing about that factor in eventual IQ of the individuals studied.
Low IQ doesn't "cause" poverty. Poverty is highly multivariate, and likely dominated by factors having nothing to do with IQ, like structural inequities in health/education access and historical lack of access to asset ownership, and exclusion from access to other vehicles of economic advancement.
Of course low IQ can cause poverty. Someone with below 70 IQ is going to have a much harder time finding gainful employment than someone with 100 IQ. A college degree is huge for escaping poverty, and the average US college graduate has an IQ of 113.
I agree that it's multivariate, and I'm open to the possibility that it is primarily another factor (although you haven't supported that claim), but it's absurd to conclude from that that low IQ does not cause poverty. People with learning disabilities have a much harder time finding success in the modern world, and I'm bewildered that I even have to say so.
Is not the same as "people who are poor are that way because they disproportionately are genetically predisposed to have low IQs", which is the gist of the original comment I replied to.
The discussion also isn't about intellectually disabled people (who fall into a separate category with specific legal protections).
Ah, okay. My initial intent was to call out the different evidentiary standards between your own position and the opposition- it was enough for you to rule out low IQ leading to trauma by showing that childhood trauma leads to low IQ, but it was insufficient when someone pointed to evidence that genetics are the primary cause of IQ differences because it was still compatible with your position.
I was quite surprised with your response and that should have triggered a more charitable reading; I can see now that you were quite obviously not saying what I interpreted. My apologies.
Besides, low IQ is associated with worse life outcomes even if, as you say, low EQ is most strongly associated with the same. They're not mutually exclusive.
This is the exact question that this research tries to portray from a data perspective.
The narrative is trying to make a claim that nurture is significant.
The stats of this research essentially says "slicing the data in a way that highlights differing qualities of nurture shows that nurture has an impact".
But it crucially doesn't isolate nurture from nature (which is admittedly very difficult). It doesn't show if the nature side (IQ in this instance) has significant overlaps with the nurture or not.
So ultimately we are left guessing.
I bet if you did, you would see that IQ indeed is also significant, and the narrative can tell a different story. That's the thing about stats and narratives. They tell a story and leave a bunch of stuff out, so you have to evaluate it yourself.
My takeaway is that nurture may play a role, but is not the only thing that determines outcome. Eyeballing the end results, being in the worst category of nurture makes the odds worse for you, not 90/10 worse, but probably closer to 65/35.
> Granted the last 20 years has been pretty awful, with 9/11, various wars, and other things.
This might be a side trail, but you can find at least as much awful - probably quite a bit more - in any previous 20 year period. (Iraq War? How about two world wars? Financial crisis... Great Depression? 9/11 and fear of terrorists? Cold war and fear of global annihilation? etc)
That's kind of my takeaway. Nearly all of the visualizations did not show substantial differences between the groups. I was always surprised at how many kids with high numbers of adverse events were in the top group, and vice versa.
I feel like it also doesn't draw enough attention to perhaps one of the biggest factors: marriage, and its effect on one's choices.
It's quite possible I'm seeing a bunch of housewives with no income that had no adverse experiences, and they're making it look like adverse events aren't as impactful as they otherwise would be. Or maybe the data references household income, but then I'm looking at visualizations of little people that are more realistically representing a person AND whoever they're married to.
Kind of cool, but the conclusion was completely backwards.
The final line of the study was "So he is our collective responsibility. They all are.", but the entire study was about how the home environment affects your outcomes. I guess their conclusion is that if an individual does a bad job raising their kids, it is societies fault.
I think the idea is that "only support your family" harms everyone. The example, Alex, has 2 kids, works manual labor to earn poverty wages, and is depressed. Which one of the types of teen do you think his kids will be?
The common refrain is "then he shouldn't have had kids" but unless you're going to create an authoritarian state people will always have kids (and restricting kids went awfully for China anyway).
I think social and individual expectations are a big part of this. Why is Alex depressed? If they had 20k more a year, would they be happier, or just 2 steps ahead on and empty hedonistic treadmill. Alex now has a new mustang, but is still depressed and fails as a parent.
I think it would be interesting to see the relative impact of a 2 parent + low risk home vs income, and I think there is a lot lost when people assume every variable reduces to income.
What about Alex when they have low income, but a healthy home life? What about Alex when they have higher income, but a shit home life?
Money actually does buy happiness, despite what the wealthy would like you to believe.
It is very likely that yes, he would in fact be happier with an extra 20k a year.
You don't know he'd have a new mustang; that's just you projecting. He might put the extra 20k a year into savings for his kid's education - I know that feeling like I'm setting my kids up for future success makes me happy.
Money buys happiness, up to a point. It's like a pretty linear increase in happiness to some spot somewhere above median income (I forget, something like 1.5x median income). After that, it has very little impact on happiness, if at all.
> Money actually does buy happiness, despite what the wealthy would like you to believe.
Individual happiness and being a good parent (which contributes to breaking the cycle) don't necessarily intersect as much as you think, or at least it's based on the individual.
Some people's happiness is only marginally related to how well their kids are doing (as evident by rise in single-parent households), so the 20k may contribute essentially 0 to the long term solution.
> You don't know he'd have a new mustang; that's just you projecting.
If I don't know, then you don't know either. You're taking the other good extreme and presenting is at fact. The reality is somewhere in the middle.
There are plenty of pre-industrialized peoples that smoked tobacco, drank alcohol, and did drugs recreationally. Were they too on hedonistic treadmills?
It's funny how Americans love to brag about how they have the freedom to do whatever and pay less tax, but then turn around and treat their poor like fools if they live in any way that doesn't resemble soviet-era russia.
This is the same thing boomers do when they tell millennials to stop eating avocado toast to pay their school loans.
> It's funny how Americans love to brag about how they have the freedom to do whatever and pay less tax, but then turn around and treat their poor like fools if they live in any way that doesn't resemble soviet-era russia.
You have things quite backwards, the stereotype of USSR and it's successor is large amounts of vodka and mindlessly wrestling bears. The USA added an amendment to their constitution banning the sale of alcohol and took a while to get repealed.
> This is the same thing boomers do when they tell millennials to stop eating avocado toast to pay their school loans.
> the stereotype of USSR and it's successor is large amounts of vodka and mindlessly wrestling bears
also lines for bread and austerity, that's what I mean
> I think citing internet memes is not a good plan.
while that example is memified, this is still a commonly held belief that I see reiterated almost daily (of course they're poor, they're buying iPhones! for example)
You can certainly go into debt to get your foot onto that treadmill. You can live with your parents and spend the entire $40k on entertainment. The exact figure of the income barely matters. FOMO and consumerist culture almost ensures that everyone is participating.
The companies are certainly happy to take your money, regardless of how hard it will be to pay back.
Convincing people that their problems are outside of their control and that the only way to solve them is to vote a certain way is also a form of authoritarianism. If you aren't to blame for your own life that implies you have no control over it.
Statistically most people born into poverty stay there. Do you think most of them aren't trying? Conversely, do you thing most people born wealthy have to put as much effort into staying wealthy?
There are a number of systemic barriers, one of the big ones mentioned in this demonstration is education.
If we had equal baseline access to education, housing, healthcare, and food... then sure, if people stayed impoverished I might begin to agree with you.
We're not even close in our current state so "you're in control of your own life" is a completely ignorant argument.
There should be an Internet law for the phenomenon of taking systemic or statistical analyses personally and then dismissing them on that basis. It’s so common and always just results in a mess of people commenting past each other.
That it’s possible to work one’s way out of poverty or to maintain a healthy weight through willpower or what have you is simply irrelevant when talking policy. Its only possible role is to dismiss the problem or discourage action. The reverse is also true: that a system could hypothetically make it easier for one to succeed is irrelevant to the individual who’s trying to decide what to do to improve their life in the system that currently exists.
I guess all those guys that lost to Lance Armstrong over the years should have played their hands better? Being born wealthy is essentially economic doping.
I feel like when people start talking about money like this they're being intentionally illogical.
>Statistically most people born into poverty stay there.
That simply isn't true. Look at the data on economic mobility, and the vast majority of people born in the bottom 20% leave the bottom 20%.
Outcomes obviously aren't random, but are far from deterministic.
For example, this article puts the number at 63% leaving the bottom 20%. 80% would require that there are no impacts whatsoever from every factor correlated with poverty
That data is paywalled, but I've got some conflicting sources:
> Rates of relative intergenerational mobility in the U.S. appear to have been flat for decades
> Most Americans born in 1940 ended up better off, in real terms, than their parents at the same age. Only half of those of those born in 1980 have surpassed their parent’s family income
Also worth mentioning that the mean income for the second quintile is only ~$40k — it's still ~$30k off from the middle quintile... so we're not talking anything close to the american dream here either way. We're talking multiple generations at best for a small percentage of the lower quintile to reach the middle.
>Only half of those of those born in 1980 have surpassed their parent’s family income
If you are talking about relative economic mobility, more than half of people cant end up in the top half by definition. Only 50 percent of people can improve in social class- and 50% of people have to go down in social class to make that happen. Of course I understand that the case is different if you are talking about nominal income. The biggest Issues there is that it is calculated using household income, and the number of adults/household has gone down quite a bit in the US. The last Issue I would point out is that these metrics rarely include transfer payments, which for the lowest quintile have gone up quite a bit.
Saying that problems are completely outside of someone's control or completely their own fault is a false dichotomy. Reality is usually somewhere in the middle, especially in studies like this one on teenagers. Everyone's situation is shaped by a mix of personal choices and the world around them. It's not just about blaming people or the system; it’s about seeing how both play a role. Voting is one way to make a difference, but it’s not the only way—people have a lot of ways to shape their lives.
> Convincing people that their problems are outside of their control and that the only way to solve them is to vote a certain way is also a form of authoritarianism
Yes, systemic poverty can only be solved politically. That is just the nature of a systemic problem. I am pretty sure encouraging people to be active in the political process of which voting is a small but important part is the opposite of authoritarianism.
> If you aren't to blame for your own life that implies you have no control over it.
Yes. Bitter pill to swallow but that is the reality. We are mostly defined by nature and nurture and we can't choose with which genetics we are born with or our upbringing and if we will have adverse childhood experiences.
The circle of influence most people have over their own life is very tiny, especially the lower they are on the ladder.
The ideology of personal responsibility is propagated to justify the current status quo and block political change that would help poor people.
I would say that the circle of influence people have is by far the most impactful on their happiness and that of their family. The individual choice to try meth or not will vastly outweigh any genetic or environmental factor on personal outcome. Beating ones children is much more influential than your socioeconomic class.
No a mount of political action can compensate for dissolution of individual responsibilities.
Ideally, they are complementary, but they can easily be antagonists.
Teach a generation of juveniles that they have no agency, and their individual efforts and work, and they will never succeed.
> I would say that the circle of influence people have is by far the most impactful on their happiness and that of their family.
This is factually wrong. Otherwise there wouldn't be such a strong correlation between socioeconomic class and later success in life.
> The individual choice to try meth or not will vastly outweigh any genetic or environmental factor on personal outcome.
Drug use and poverty wouldn't be so strongly linked if that were a free choice.
Maybe you should tell all the drug addicts to just not do drugs. Problem solved.
Are you telling people with depression to "just snap out of it" as well? Drug addiction is a serious medical illness. It requires a whole support network of people to cure in most cases.
> Teach a generation of juveniles that they have no agency, and their individual efforts and work, and they will never succeed.
You empower them by teaching them that it a systemic issue, that it is NOT their fault. That they can organize together and lift each other up. Individuals are weak, groups are strong.
Individual responsibility only works for the rich. Collective responsibility is what breaks the cycle of violence of poverty. It takes a village to raise a kid after all.
You may see correlations between socioeconomic class, but they are still by far weaker than correlations with Individual behavior and choice, which is my point.
Telling someone not to be born poor isn't actionable advice. Telling them their chance of success is 1000% better if they don't do drugs IS actionable advice. Telling them to live in misery and wait for the collective to solve a social problem in decades isn't actionable or useful advice either.
>You empower them by teaching them that it a systemic issue, that it is NOT their fault.
It is a big difference between a higher statistical risk factor isn't your fault, and telling them their choices and behavior have no impact.
Individual responsibility and effort is the foundation of collective responsibility. You can't have collective action with personal action. It isn't one or the other. The boat won't move if there is individual responsibility to paddle.
Everyone and their dog knows not to do drugs. Still people do. This is not actionable advice.
Knowing about the effects of poverty means knowing more about yourself. Understanding yourself leads to being able to take more effective actions increasing the control you have over your life.
You seem to think it is about victim mindset vs whatever you toxic middle-class self help "individual responsibility" thing is. Real change can only happen once you understand and accept yourself, including being a victim of circumstance and birth. After that there can there be healing and proper action.
> Telling them to live in misery and wait for the collective to solve a social problem in decades isn't actionable or useful advice either.
That is not the point. The point is for them to educate themselves on the issues they are facing, to politically organize, to organize in the neighborhood, to help each other out and ideally become leaders and role-models in their community. It starts with seeking help and community, not trying to lift yourself up by your bootstraps which often is not realistic.
> Individual responsibility and effort is the foundation of collective responsibility. You can't have collective action with personal action. It isn't one or the other. The boat won't move if there is individual responsibility to paddle.
Yes, obviously collective responsibility includes a form of individual responsibility. They only work together when your are poor.
It seems like we actually agree on more than it seems, even if we disagree on the value of a victim mindset and the necessity of adopting victim in-group identity.
Of course I agree with having ones eyes open to their personal circumstance and challenges, as well as the value of giving and receiving help to others. However, I do think it is ironic that you think people have the agency to help others more and become leaders, but not have the agency to help themselves.
Circling back to drugs, this is akin to becoming a sobriety advocate, but not trying to get sober. You say everyone knows not to do drugs, but from what I know, hopelessness, self-hate, and self-delusion is a key difference between those who become addicts and those that dont.
I think that exaggerated messaging about statistical disadvantage does more harm than good if it is uncoupled from the message about statistical advantage of personal action (e.g. you may be 2x more likely to end up poor if born poor, but you are 10x more likely to escape if you stay sober and go to college). these numbers are obviously made up, but literature overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that personal behaviors have more impact than group statistics and environmental circumstances. Of course personal choices like staying in school or smoking meth have huge impacts on your personal life!
Incomplete messaging of this is harmful because people need to understand and believe there is an actionable path to a better life in order to try. Hopelessness and despair are real barriers that need to be acknowledged.
You brought up depression earlier, and while I dont tell people to "snap out of it", it is also true that almost nobody overcomes depression without the belief that their actions CAN have improve their depression, and that there is a path to improvement. It is central and fundamental to rehabilitation. Most of depression therapy boils down to convincing people improvement is possible, and teaching them how to do it. A therapist may be a crucial help that makes the difference, but the patient still has to do 99% of the work.
Being born into a situation where your problems are minor is a great way to be ignorant of how systemic issues affect people.
If a child shows up to school every day unfed for breakfast and without lunch money, right-wing states have decided that somehow their kid not having food is a motivational issue for the parent. And their solution for when a distracted, hungry student is unable to focus in class is to bring back corporal punishment and post religious texts in classrooms.
If it were merely a motivational issue for parents, then the child would already be fed. The political situation that made the most sense for the school district in which I grew up, which is a bright red area that is also a public education stronghold, was to dip into the budget to ensure that all kids got breakfast and lunch if they wanted it. That way it can't be framed as a political issue.
The issue was never about the benefit, it was about the race and class of people who received it.
Same thing with work. We have age-based workplace discrimination laws precisely because a class of workers who are over the age of 50 have been discriminated against due to their age and in lieu of other concerns. Those problems are outside of their control. Most people with 20+ year careers are unemployed for reasons that have nothing to do with performance, and they can't help what age they are.
This isn't authoritarianism. It's basic common sense.
I honestly think that the sorts of experiences that break kids are things like parents breaking up, not 'not having the newest toy' or 'not going on vacation'. In the sense that material poverty can cause family stress, I completely agree. I fully support programs to feed kids, provide medical insurance, etc. I even support it for adults. I'm just not sure how any of that at the end of the day is going to fix daddy cheating. Unless you're suggesting a crackdown on prostitution and/or making adultery a crime again (in which case sure! as a social conservative, I'm down)... but good luck getting that passed today!
I guess I can see this conclusion if you start from a position that all families are nothing but isolated, self-interested atoms in the world. Rather than, you know, a part of society!
The take-home for me was that as parents, or future parents, here are some things we can do to make the child have a greater chance at success. None of these are doorways to success, but they make it easier for success to happen with those conditions present, as well as the inverse.
I think the core message is that a child's life is strongly determined by his family life/environment, it's not just a personal choice to succeed or to fail.
So if we want people to have better outcomes, we need to help better family lives/environments (and lives in general) to break the cycle, and not just give them basic education. Also, the family is just a group of individuals that probably themselves have come from poor conditions: this means there's hope of breaking the cycle.
It shows that family/environment influences life outcomes (it should be obvious); it's not conclusive (in establishing causation), it does show a correlation. I really think it's almost obvious this is true, but it's important reinforcing with data nonetheless.
So you can break (or weaken) the cycle if you improve those conditions, and this improvement propagates.
> It shows that family/environment influences life outcomes
Not to nitpick but this statement implies causation (family environment causes life outcome) which you contradict right after.
Sorry to sound obtuse, but, I asked because it may seem obvious to you, but it's not so obvious to me that there will be much improvement. I've seen data that indicates that outcomes are not changed (much) when those early interventions / "investments" are made. There is _an_ improvement, but not to the level people expect. Like a person's height, access to high quality food will only do so much; some people are just going to have short stature however much money you invest into making sure they have access to nutritious meals.
In the presentation it talked about college, even a short amount, can give better outcomes.
But the presentation was more of an overview of the issue, and I don't think it's fair to argue that, because it doesn't go deeply into every data point, that it's not valid. It more about bring awareness to the issues, and grounds for further research.
Responsibility doesn't imply fault. For example we all have a collective responsibility to protect and improve our environment, even though none of us created it and none of us caused any of its problems.
If a society has a trend line of poor home environments then I think the society is in some sense at fault for fostering poor home environments. This doesn't and shouldn't take away from the individual's responsibility for raising kids.
But home environments exist in a specific social context that effect how people think they should foster a good home environment. We've lost a lot of societal knowledge and experience around good family structures since probably the 60s. As a society we have definitely encouraged, especially the lower income bands, to outsource it to schools and institutions. That is going to have an effect.
Under President Johnson, government funding began to incentivize single (predominantly black) mothers not to marry the father of their children. IMO this had disastrous effects on our urban centers. Before the social welfare solutions of the Johnson era, 25% of black children were born without two parents. Now the number is nearly 75%, and the effect on young men has been tragic, in a way that affects the whole community.
In health care, sometimes we help the body fix the problem, and sometimes we "just" treat symptoms.
It's ... probably not a good idea for the government to try to fix families. Any interventions must be very carefully considered.
But some of the symptoms can be helped out relatively easily.
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I also think the author(s) may have a different perspective on responsibility, fault, and blame. I feel like blame is something that our minds do for us so we can stop thinking about a problem - to fix things you have to look past the blame.
I don't think that "fault", which I take as implying blame, had anything to do with the presentation. I interpreted it as very neutral in that respect. Maybe I'm misinterpreting it?
I do think it touches on how everyone is exposed to adverse outcomes, whatever category they are in. And I agree that it's a collective responsibility, although the presentation does a poor job of arguing the "collective responsibility" point.
It also begs the question of nature vs. nurture. If researchers won't take this seriously, then nobody should take their findings seriously. It's almost impossible to untangle, "single-fatherhood leads to bad outcomes because kids need a father figure in the house" from, "single-fatherhood leads to worse outcomes because the type of person who would abandon their children is likely more impulsive and less conscientious than average and those traits are heritable."
Fair point in theory and I'm not familiar with the literature, but I'd guess at least some researchers have studied ways of controlling for this: eg, looking at cases where father dies early and mother does not remarry, single mothers who adopt or do artificial insemination, etc.
Yes, my (limited) understanding of the literature is that this is exactly what they do. You don’t see the same single-fatherhood effects when looking at the children of widows, for example.
Maybe you missed some of the bits in the middle? Like how education is a greater boon to the people who can't afford it and that the cost of it has increased over time.
Yeah, I'm tired of being told that it's all our responsibility, but we get none of the agency. My mother was a teacher in the inner city. There were kids our whole family fell in love with, and frankly, my mother knew what was best for them, and for a few would have been willing to even take them in. But, alas, they had to go home to their abusive parent. I am in no way advocating for forced separation, but it's hard to experience these things first hand and then be told it's all our responsibility.
I mean.. I agree that we are responsible for each other. However, for other things in life I'm responsible for, like my car, my property, and even my government, I am given a direct say. Imagine if you were forced to take responsibility for a car, except you were never allowed to drive it and it was made freely available to every teenage boy at the local high school. What responsibility could you possible have? What does it even mean to say you're responsible for something you have no control over?
A good priest once told me in confession when I confessed feeling upset that I couldn't help the homeless, the destitute, etc, and he properly identified the problem was that there's only one Saviour and I'm not him. And I feel that sagacious advice is applicable here. What are we possibly to do in this situation other than the unthinkable?
Previous progressive movements have indeed advocated for the removal of children in bad environments, and indeed many of these 'worked', but they're highly criticized (rightly, I guess) today.
>>> He'll be bullied at school. He'll be held back a few grades. He won't go to college.
I dont even know where to start with this.
1. The whole anti bullying campaign that we now have two and a half decades of in schools has backfired spectacularly. This feels like "well DARE didn't work, we need to put this money somewhere else". We tell kids dont bully people, but if you defend yourself in a fight everyone gets suspended because of zero tolerance... it is obscene.
2. College? Really? We stripped schools of anything that was vocational, or practical. What happened to shop and home economics... and the computer labs that got many of us started are long gone. Meanwhile we're short on plumbers, welders and all sorts of middle skill jobs...
Note: that there are now middle skill jobs (trained professionals but not college) that not only make more than those with degrees, they will do better over the course of their life because they dont have massive debt.
Alex has a shitty home life, but we under fund public schools and then rob kids for college (and we dont need more college grads).
> We stripped schools of anything that was vocational, or practical. What happened to shop and home economics... and the computer labs that got many of us started are long gone. Meanwhile we're short on plumbers, welders and all sorts of middle skill jobs...
I completely agree. The hollowing out of the education system in response to NCLB and the relentless drive for "data" and "standards" is why a lot of people no longer graduate from high school with any life skills.
>but if you defend yourself in a fight everyone gets suspended because of zero tolerance... it is obscene.
Zero tolerance, in it's current meaning, is stupid. But the original concept was great: if anything happens, then you respond to it. "Respond to it" including things like sitting down and talking about it, without necessarily issuing any punishments whatsoever.
Who cares about zero tolerance rules tho, just simply ignore them on the parent and adult level. My nephew was getting bullied and we told him the kid bullying him was simply just mad at his own home life and to ignore him. We also told him that if the bully attacked him first, he has 100% the right to punch him back.
Well well well, the bully cornered him in the school bathroom and attacked him. My nephew punched him in the face. my nephew got made into a legend at school and got suspended.
Guess who doesn't get bullied anymore? Violence works.
You can’t say that you can just not care about zero tolerance. I was the nephew in a similar story and was probably held back from membership in the National Honor Society because of the timing of the suspension, worsening my college applications.
> that there are now middle skill jobs (trained professionals but not college) that not only make more than those with degrees, they will do better over the course of their life because they dont have massive debt.
I don’t believe this. My first and second hand experience is that sure, there are some people who work blue collar and get paid better than $DESKJOB, but those are typically from wealthy households that can help them financially so they can ascend to owner.
If you are poor and start working in the trades it’s the status quo to be completely taken advantage of with no real opportunities. Expect to end each day beat-up and exhausted, with very little energy to take care of yourself. This is the poverty trap.
Blue collar is chock full of sociopath owners who actively lie, exploit, steal from, and emotionally manipulate their employees.
I couldn't agree more regarding college education. Speaking as a member of the highschool graduating class of 2015, the pressure on every single child to go directly into college was insane. Even the mere act of telling an adult that you weren't interested in college could get you referred to a school counselor or called into an impromptu parent-teacher meeting. During my senior year, I was personally pulled out of class to discuss this topic on five separate occasions. I happened to be an unusually stubborn kid, but even I eventually caved and pre-enrolled at a local college.
Naturally, I almost immediately flunked out of the program. Who wouldn't quit something making them miserable when they didn't even want to do it in the first place? I was one of the lucky ones, actually... Many like-minded cohorts in my graduating class wasted years of time and money with nothing to show for it. They deserved adults who'd help pair them with the pathways that best suited their individual talents and risk tolerances -- not some blindly optimistic, cookiecutter college-for-all solution.
What about you, dear reader? Perhaps you're responsible for teenagers of your own... can you say with certainty that the adults in their lives have given them consistently honest and thorough conversations about the paths before them? I bet some parents would accuse me of being totally full of shit right about now... That's fine, I'm not some nostradomus bringing news of impending doom -- I only want the next generation to have things better than I did. If nothing else, it doesn't hurt to entertain the idea, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITwNiZ_j_24
Great site. However, I think there's much more interesting things one could visualize from the same dataset.
I'll go out on a limb (these days?) and say that nothing is more influential when growing up than what your parents teach you. That alone transcends all other negative/positive effects considered (health, income, "have you seen someone getting shot", ...).
I see the study does account for parents present or not but I would've liked to read a similar story in which this is the categorical control.
The other one "classic" correlation of interest is race vs. all the other variables, but I can understand why they didn't want to initiate yet another flamewar.
>But in 2022, the average cost for first-time college students living in campus was $36,000 – nearly $10,000 higher than a decade prior. It's made college inaccessible for kids who need it most.
College kids do not need to live on campus, most people in this country live within commuting distance of a community college or university. It may not be a top rated university, but it will always be one that teaches skills kids need to build a life. You do not NEED to pay anywhere near $36,000 for college, and stating it as a necessity is misleading. The point that the author misses is that the subject, Alex, would have easily qualified for free tuition at his local community college or university, and most likely a scholarship or grant would have paid his living expenses while attending as well, based solely on his economic and ethnic background and not his grades. The only missing piece was someone to tell him how to do it, or someone to encourage him to do it. This is generally what people mean when they say that poor people lack the knowledge to get themselves out of poverty.
>Over the last few years, his annual income was around $20,000. He has struggled with his weight for much of his adult life, and it affects his overall health.
It is worth noting that the poorest in the USA struggle with eating too much, not too little. This is at least a silver lining that we should not ignore. Many countries in the world, poor people are starving.
>In one year, the US will elect Donald Trump as president – a man who constantly insults poor people and calls them "morons."
As part of this paragraph, the author links to an extremely partisan article which does not even try to hide its bias. It quotes something that Donald Trump said back in a 1999 interview. I don't love Trump and wouldn't vote for him, but I think the author's point about him is stretched quite a bit and was unnecessary for the overall point he's trying to make.
In the end, the main takeaway from this article seems to me to be that you can justify any bad decisions or bad outcomes in your life by blaming your childhood trauma. With such a worldview how can one ever better themselves? It seems such a self-defeating way to look at things, if you never blame yourself for your bad decisions how can you ever learn how to make better decisions?
I know that if I personally lived my life blaming my childhood trauma for problems I've had, that I would still be poor to this day.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 396 ms ] thread...my takeaway is a little different than what is in the commentary box (for the year 2017 in particular). The distribution of incomes don't actually look that different, to my eye.
If this is the grand reveal -- showing that childhood heavily influences future financial mobility -- it's not super obvious. I mean, yes, there seem to be a bit of a skew towards low earners in the bottom tranche -- but really it looks like the group that has had some astounding headwinds is kinda sorta doing about the same as the 'no adverse experiences' group? That is amazing as well!
It'd be nice to be able to get to the underlying data more easily, and drill into see the statistical conclusions. The horizontal bands not being of even length doesn't help either.
Edit: I don't think I was correctly taking into account the "no data" group, which makes the skew much more obvious (that the "many adverse experience" group has substantially lower earning power). I wish that the horizontal groups were of the same length, and the "no data" group was simply removed. I think that would make a transformative difference in terms of actually being able to understand this visually and intuitively.
Edit 2: Also how amazing is it that this study got done! The link to the study is very hard to find on this site, and also is wrong. The correct link (I think anyway) is https://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy97.htm
The exception was health, that was a much more dramatic correlation than income/etc. It reminds me of a study recently of homelessness in California, and people made a big deal about housing availability and affordability as the prime factor, but seemed to ignore the very notable health correlation in that study.
This was my takeaway as well. My expectation was that the longitudinal study would show that bad experiences compound much more dramatically over time than the video appears to suggest.
Another issue I have with the presentation is that I had to keep pausing and carefully considering what each slide was saying, because the first several slides start by
So now my brain thinks "okay, warmer colors mean more/worse childhood experiences. got it.", but then all the following slides So the entire time, I'm fighting my brain which is telling me "warmer colors -> bad experiences".I wonder if it would be clearer if the measurement slides were instead grouped / arranged spatially by outcomes and colored according to the childhood experiences.
edit: it's ugly as heck but this is kind of what I mean:
their slide: https://snap.philsnow.io/2024-04-16T10-16-25.uifh7bss3d5f66b...
proposed rearrangement + recoloring: https://snap.philsnow.io/2024-04-16T10-45-19.n7ft281jipgv3tx...
Like I said, it's ugly, I obviously just copy/pasted regions around, but it should get across the idea that this would make it easier to see the proportions of each measurement class (income bucket, health bucket, etc) according to childhood experiences.
It's hard to be sure but I also think several of the folks earning the most as adults came from the "bottom" tier with the most adverse childhood experiences.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8237477/
I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but something has to change.
> I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but something has to change.
You're a good person doing necessary work. There aren't enough humans doing it, but it matters to who you're helping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...
https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2024/04/08/steven-le... | https://archive.today/m3zl0 ("Steven Levitt and John Donohue defend a finding made famous by “Freakonomics”")
There's a strong case to be made that a minimum wage helps people whose value approaches the minimum while hurting people above or below (e.g. $12 and $18 wages in an unlimited market both round to $15 with a minimum, while someone who only produces $7 of value is no longer employable). Similarly with cash infusions - giving people more money is inflationary.
Nobody wants to live in a world where people are trying to participate in society and failing. That's truly heartbreaking.
At the same time, naive solutions (decide a "living wage" and force people to pay it, set up and enforce rent control, give out stimulus payments) seem to have a lot of second-order effects/unintended consequences without actually solving the problems they're meant to solve.
I don't think we put enough money behind it today, but the Earned Income Tax Credit is designed to do this while minimizing the disincentives for people to work. https://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-the-earned-incom...
Baseline quality of life isn't decided just by pay. I find that society doesn't support people having a baseline quality of life when it comes to areas other than pay, so it makes me question the motives of society in the case of pay.
Yes, this is UBI. But phrased as a tax cut makes it politically viable (at least in the US).
One of the classic unintended consequences of social welfare is making someone at the bottom unwilling to work. We saw this during the pandemic when people in formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local restaurants?)
I'm curious to see an example scale that would continue to incentivize social behavior the whole way up the chain - avoiding the "oh I don't want to make $100 more dollars because I'm in a sweet spot now and bad things happen at $99."
You can certainly argue that many of the current disincentives are bugs in the bureaucracy. I'd like to see a proposal for the UBI tax scale you describe that doesn't have any bugs (that is, bumps in the distribution where people are afraid to reach for state C from state A, because the intermediary state B is worse than A).
It also becomes clearly tenable with households of more than 1. Supporting a family of 2-3 on $24k-36k is like, yep, I've met married international grad students. Of course they'll spring for supplemental income where available, but as a baseline it is tenuously "enough".
I remember this, the cash assistance gave people back their time to focus on starting their own businesses, pursuing self-education, taking care of their kids, etc. It was fully apparent to me that these low-wage jobs effectively trapped people by sucking up all the time they had for self-improvement.
Unwilling to work or temporarily not desperate to stay alive? How many receiving assistance were still working, just doing it less?
The only studies on outcomes I recall is that a lot of kids were no longer experiencing food insecurity.
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2021/09/22/food-insecuritys-lo...
In any case, given how badly broken the current system is, surely it's at least worth a try?
1) A check (issued by Social Security service?) if income is less than X
2) Less of your paycheck being withheld if your income is greater than X (or more if you're significantly above X, depending on how this gets funded)
Expansion of the EITC program is fairly well-regarded among economists and has been historically quite popular! We should do more of it!
Now that program is gone and minimum wage for fast food is $20/hr. She simply cannot perform $20/hr worth of work, so she's unemployed (and living on government assistance).
The previous arrangement was fantastic because the work gave her a purpose and something to do all day, and she contributed to society while saving the government money. Now she stays home and watches TV endlessly.
This has informed my ideas - I think supplementing minimum wages could be a better alternative to UBI (with some exceptions).
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/39-14c-subminim...
This is the wrong model. You're using a worker's wage to describe their productivity, and a big reason for the mess we're in is that wages stopped increasing with productivity fifty years ago. (search "wages productivity graph")
Imagine someone's contribution to a business increases revenue by $1000 and the total cost to employ that person for the same period is $800. Do you think most businesses would go "nope, we only hire highly leveraged people who produce $2000 in revenue"?
There are inefficiencies in scale (like communication/bookkeeping overhead) that might disincentivize a business from growing, but generally speaking, I think it's fine to model decisions as rational cost/benefit ones.
Workers who are only "worth it" at some wage. Nobody is going to pay you a million dollars to go sell a hundred dollars worth of stuff. If the value you can earn on the market is sufficiently lower than what someone is allowed to pay, they simply won't hire you. That's bad for everyone.
$7.25 x 8 hours = $58 for the day. However what they create is based on output, which for most businesses, varies day by day along with their sales.
A McDonald's could sell 500 burgers in one day at one location, but only 300 at another. In this case the employee at the larger restaurant generates 2/5 more value than the employee at the smaller one, even if both can output at the same speed and quality. So, in reality, the employee at the larger restaurant is being exploited by 2/5 more than the employee at the smaller location. Which also means the employee at the smaller location is getting paid more for doing 2/5 less work than an equally capable employee.
Profits are multiplicative yet unpredictable, while labor is static and predictable.
For example, suppose janitors all make the minimum wage. If we increase it, there might be some company at the margin that will go without janitorial services, but most companies will pay their janitors the new wage, which (from the "a worker costs $X and produces $Y" model's perspective) will look a lot like the nation's janitors suddenly started producing more value. Ergo, it's not to say that that model is wrong, just that it's not useful in answering a question like should we increase the minimum wage.
In the short term it would make a lot of stuff less efficient, but when people talk about "efficiency" they really mean driving costs down and driving income up. So we really don't want an efficient capitalist economy, we want a capitalist economy that is just efficient enough to meet our needs while not being so efficient that a few people can exploit that efficiency and run away with our things.
We should empower people who want children to succeed, and empower people who don't want children to never have them. What happens after that, we can solve for.
It's easy to imagine 'oh we'll just fix it if it becomes a serious problem like that' but imagine the state of society when that starts happening. All markets/consumption will be decreasing by 50% every 20 years, there will be a very upside down population pyramid where the overwhelming majority of the population will be elderly and need care, so forth and so on. Japan, for instance, hasn't even hit the worst of it yet. Their fertility plummeted about 40 years ago. So their 'final stage' is yet still about 20 years away. Today are the good times for Japan, relative to what they have ahead of them.
Given most of the Western world can't maintain a remotely stable fertility rate in the current situation, doing something that would likely quite substantially lower it even further is indeed speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/29/baby-boomtown-...
[2] https://ifstudies.org/blog/pro-natal-policies-work-but-they-...
The state of my own personal society is my apartment costs $1000 more than it did two years ago and my food costs about 25-30% more than it did two years ago. I definitely wouldn't consider having another kid, nor would I encourage my own to have one.
So what will the systems and societies of tomorrow look like? Every child born tomorrow is basically just a lottery roll against all people having children today. And today you have vast numbers of intelligent, educated, conscientious, and far thinking individuals are simply removing themselves from the gene pool; that lottery roll for the children of tomorrow is looking less and less pleasant.
There's this irony that the sort of mindset that might consciously make the decision to not have children is the exact sort that should be raising a family 1800s style, if we want a better world. Maybe there's just something about successful urbanization that ultimately causes societies to reboot. The Roman Empire also faced a major fertility crisis in its final years.
Our society needs to treat children as a gift and not just "thoughts and prayers" about raising them.
Western civilization was always a good idea, never achieved, and they have had their day
That's not even close to replacement. It's somewhere above 2 (often cited as 2.1, but it may be more like 2.04 in times of peace) for it to be replacement. If you could magically make fertility be that number, population increases would only come as a matter of life expectancy increase.
1 actually implies some sort of high-speed demographic implosion that will wreck an economy within a single human lifetime.
> It's easy to imagine 'oh we'll just fix it if it becomes a serious problem like that'
If it takes 30 years to recognize the problem, then one generation has already aged out of ever possibly being able to fix the problem, and the next generation is getting too old to be able to fix it (unless you can do so instantly). You've only got a few generations at a given time that can fix it.
> Japan, for instance, hasn't even hit the worst of it yet. Their fertility plummeted about 40 years ago.
There are fewer people living in Japan today, than there were a year ago. They didn't leave to go elsewhere. They died. And it will be like that every year until there are zero Japanese left. They have been functionally extinct for a few years now, though they may not know it yet.
> it even further is indeed speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!
There haven't been distinct, compartmentalized civilizations on Earth for over a century at this point. There's only the one civilization. And, if it dies, there likely won't be another. Who had "can't be bothered to fuck" on their Fermi's Paradox bingo card?
What will end up happening is that some groups will maintain replacement fertility levels or higher, and some groups won't, but we'll trend towards an equilibrium, or flop between too little fertility and too much fertility. Either way we won't go extinct unless we explicitly kill each other.
So, for instance, many people don't realize that right now is still the good times for Japan. Here [1] is their population pyramid. It currently still looks kinda-sorta pyramidish. But in ~20 years, their population pyramid will be completely and wholly upside down. And their population, economy, and everything else will fall into complete collapse. They'll be losing about half of their population each 20 years at that point. No culture can survive this. This will be made even more true by the fact that it will likely trigger a vicious cycle where the massively skewed age ratios, collapsing economy, and other issues will further reduce fertility.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#/media/F...
Contentedness, satisfaction, at-peace, and so on - there endlessly more rational, logical, desirable, and attainable things to aim for. Yet everybody always says happy. Maybe this even goes some way towards explaining the plummeting mental state of the West at large. If one sets their life goal towards happiness, then they're ironically certain to end up unhappy, unsatisfied, and discontented.
Could you explain to me how this is not another name for happiness?
You are happy to receive good news, or for something to turn out well, or whatever else. But it is not a resting state. It's a liminal state. Contentedness, by contrast, is a resting state. You can awake contented, fall asleep contented, and spend your days contented. You may rarely, if ever, experience happiness - yet find yourself able to find satisfaction in life nonetheless.
By contrast a pitiful, depressed, self loathing individual, can experience happiness as much as anybody else. But he is most certainly not content nor satisfied. Perhaps a junky would be another example. A junky certainly experiences happiness when his poison enters his veins, yet he almost certainly is far from content or satisfied.
Contentedness is not happiness. And happiness is most certainly not contentedness. They're are just entirely different states of being.
Second, "happy" and "happiness" subsume numerous meanings. You're picking one, and as I and others have, at times, done with many other words, trying to restrict the world to only that meaning.
Perhaps a more similar word to your meaning would be "joy"? It seems more generally restricted to descriptions of brief periods, in common usage.
The words are simply not synonyms, or even particularly close to being synonyms.
Happiness is not a metric, cannot be measured, and is one of the most important things
Despite it being unmeasurable we know that economic security increases it
But I find that most people, when they say that, actually mean reduction of suffering. That's easier to quantify--but still quite difficult, like most quantities in social research.
It's fun, because you can get virtually everyone to agree that people should only have sex they mean to have, but as soon as you suggest they should only have sex when all parties involved have carefully and accurately assessed the risk of pregnancy, you're a killjoy.
If I recall correctly, absent neglect or abuse, parental influence doesn't matter as much as people think.
1. TFA article talked only about correlations, because that's all they have.
2. Genetics influences all of TFA factors as well.
3. TFA discussed "adverse experiences", "parents involved" and "family risk scores". Guess what I said: parenting really only has a significant effect in cases of neglect and abuse. Sounds like we agree.
The core assertion that parental involvement doesn't matter much as long as they're not abusive is pretty absurd regardless, but I'll leave the Googling of studies showing why as an exercise for you.
And these two books have good, if somewhat redundant surveys of the research:
- No Two Alike: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1099821
- Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10266902
The tl;dr is that if you fall into the cohort that could likely adopt a child, your parenting decisions aren’t going to make much of an impact, beyond affecting your kid’s memories of their childhood and their relationship with you. And that doesn’t mean parents should become apathetic, but that it’s better to care about expressing warmth and kindness instead of stressing about achievement.
Basically children in bad situations need just one reliable person who believes in them in their lives.
What it does is making them realize that it’s not them who are doing something wrong but that their surroundings are flawed. The problem begins when children start to believe everything is their own fault.
I call it "Bastard's Syndrome"
This is only tangentially related, but I think your point is critically important. Relatively recently I did ketamine infusion therapy for depression, and it was life changing for me. Ketamine is a "dissociative", and one thing that it seriously helped me do was separate my "self" from my depression, which I've never really been able to do before despite decades of trying through therapy. That is, now that I see depression as a chronic condition I have (say perhaps analogous to people that have to deal with migraines), as opposed to something that I am at my core, it makes it much, much less scary and threatening to me.
In my experience, I've noticed that the people who I think of as the most successful (both from a society-wide and personal perspective) have the clearest view of what is their control and what they can accomplish, and also what is not. A huge benefit of this is that when they see an obstacle that some person could potentially overcome, even if it would be very, very difficult, they tend to think "Heck, why not me?" And when they do hit setbacks because of the unpredictability of the world, they don't take it personally, they just tend to think "Well, the world is chaotic - is this new problem something that can reasonably be overcome?" I contrast with a mindset I had for a long time (which a large part I think was a consequence of being bullied) that if I put a lot of effort into something and just didn't succeed, it was fundamentally because I wasn't "good enough", so why bother trying that hard at something else as I'm likely not going to be good enough there either.
Speculative. I rather think that it shows them that there are other ways of living and that they have agency to get there.
But they need somebody to make them understand that it’s not them who are destroying the relationship with their surroundings and their chance for being happy but the other way around.
Some children in bad situations understand that without guidance but they are rare.
My experience is it's the opposite and you need to overcome learned helplessness and understand that you can change your life.
Are there any good studies that could tell us which of us is correct?
In the wise words of the late child psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, Professor Emeritus of Human Development and Psychology at Cornell:
In order to develop – intellectually emotionally, socially and morally – a child requires participation in progressively more complex reciprocal activity on a regular basis over an extended period in the child's life, with one or more persons with whom the child develops a strong, mutual, irrational, emotional attachment and who is committed to the child's well-being and development, preferably for life. (Bronfenbrenner, 1991, p. 2)
Or paraphrased by him:
“Every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her.”
Teachers and volunteers are how I was able to find a better life. What you're doing matters.
As an aside, maybe it’s because I’m inexperienced, but I’m finding it surprisingly hard to get connected with a group to help people that isn’t a highly specific cause like religion, LGBTQ, children of certain races, etc.??? Is it just me? I am clearly very ignorant about all this
I recently started volunteering at my county’s animal shelter. The experience has been very rewarding.
The scale of the problem is most visible through 'special ed' allocation. Once a program for kids with learning challenges, it now also encompasses what are essentially behavioral problems.
Kids don't get kicked out of school for throwing raging tantrums or hitting teachers - they get placed into programs designed to keep them in school. (If that's what life is like at school, imagine what life is like at home.)
[edit]
I scrolled all the way to the top and then back down and it seems to have resolved the issue.
The article would have been vastly more readable if it was plain html with static embedded images and without any custom scroll/touch event handling - then one would easily be able to scroll around in it, search text, and view charts uncorrupted by javascript bugs.
I am sure the author is proud of their nytimes-like data visualization project, but in this case, the visualization makes the result in every way worse.
It also wasn't very clear to me what I was supposed to be noticing in the visualizations that was related to whatever text was currently popped up. In the end I just watched the youtube video that was linked to at the very beginning and it made everything much clearer to me.
In other news, I hate that trend of scrolling to animate to get content.
It's the same cohort of people all the way through and each little character moves according to the survey they filled out each year
Title appears.
I start scrolling.
Nothing happens.
I scroll and I scroll but the page doesn't budge. I come to my senses: "aha, I get it! For the last few minutes I've been aimlessly scrolling in search of content and all the people around me in the train must have seen me do it with the same crooked posture and lifeless expression of a modern day teenager on their phone! This is me, the teenager! I have been the victim of a piece of performance art!"
Then I realized it simply doesn't work properly on my phone's Chrome...
Well done.
Likewise, these professionals hide that almost all experiences kids have with social services are negative for the kids. Now I suppose you could say the above is an example of that, but really, it goes further. Kids seek help with homework, and only get berated by someone that couldn't do the homework themselves ...
Studies keep pointing out that social services is exactly the wrong approach. What makes teachers, and social professionals good is excellent subject knowledge, combined with basic psychology. NOT the other way around. And in practice every mental help professional I've ever seen thinks they know what to do, and when pushed fail to produce even basic psychological facts, or outright deny them. I like to think you can explain this that when push comes to shove our minds are trying to solve problems in the real world.
The majority of mental problems are someone failing to solve real world problems, and repeatedly failing to influence the outcome. A little bit of psychology is needed to get them to try again ... and a LOT of knowledge of the real world is need to make sure the outcome is different.
- Actually keeping individual datapoints all the time, clickable and with full details, and just moving them around to form different charts;
- Making the icons consistent with data - based on a few random instances I checked, the person's body shape and hairstyle correlated to biometric parameters in the data set.
At the top of each section header (No adverse, Some adverse, ect.) they could include a section count + percentage of each category they're showing.
As someone who was once <25, I think that version of me is stupid in a wide variety of ways. I hear you that it can be negative to divide things that way, but it seems reasonable to say “after you are either a non college graduate with a number of years of experience or a college graduate with ~2 years of post-college experience.
I hear you, though, it’s hard to sort people into buckets.
As another college non-graduate (although I'm currently going back to school). Have we ever figured out which way causation goes on this one? Does college actually have that much benefit, or do people who are motivated tend to go to college more?
People with support to go to college are more likely to go to college, less about motivation.
I think there needs to be more support for students failing/dropping out of college.
I'm not super sure how I feel about the message though as it operates on a handful of really big presumptions. I'll share my own bias to save everyone the tldr on where I'm coming from: I'm a parent advocate. I think the nuclear family is the backbone to society and that much, if not every, societal ill can be linked to the destruction of the nuclear family. Parents matter, and I agree with the general conclusion that we need to focus TREMENDOUS effort into raising children in a loving and safe way. If you are still reading, consider also that I'm a 3rd generation son of Mexican immigrants. I grew up in a lower economic class background in Los Angeles county during the 90s. I grew up shoulder to shoulder with many of the people included in this study.
The first is that it's somehow a bad thing not to go to college. The trades by now are a known lucrative path with significant upward mobility, especially as we consider entrepreneurship. This is, in my experience, hand in hand with a lot of cultural practices that just doesn't get captured in these types of sociological studies. I can personally attest to the increased risk tolerance that a lot of cultures have towards starting a business or joining a labor based trade. Food trucks, car washes, detailing services, maid services, laundromats, dry cleaning businesses, convenience market franchises. In the privacy of your own head, and without fear of judgement from your HN peers, I invite you to honestly consider the ethnicity of the people who own these businesses. See my point? The mobility is there. These aren't "bad" lives. They're different. These people also have different standards of living. Most people who are immigrants or 2nd to 3rd generation of those immigrants don't want a multi-hundred thousand dollar life. Just speaking from personal experience here, most lower class migrants see the prospect of making that much money in America as foreign and unsafe. Maybe this furthers the point that not everyone should or can be a doctor/lawyer/FAANG-engineer.
The second presumption is that "abuse" or "adverse experiences" is able to be categorized by the researcher's definition. Again, we're dealing with people of different cultures who have different standards for living. We're overlaying our own "refined" terminology of what constitutes "abuse" or "danger" to them and drawing conclusions. Worse yet, we're saying that those same conclusions are correlated to the conditions that they experienced, regardless of how they themselves would classify it.
"High risk" is a highly contestable term, especially as the diversity of subjects increases. Maybe it's a good thing that mom divorced the man who was never around. Maybe mom was sleeping around and dad found out? Maybe mom remarried because dad died. Either way, non-intact households are being labelled "high risk" in a general sense.
"Being held back" as a bad thing is contestable. Some kids fall in that weird Nov-December enrollment period and make it through by being the oldest kid in their class. This isn't typically a good thing. The threat of being held back a grade is also encouraging for those who take their schooling seriously. Should it ever happen, its a serious kick in the pants for kids to wake up and take this seriously.
"Suspension", again any type of school based discipline, is seen as a adverse event. Suspension protects the children of the school, it notifies the parents of the suspended that there is a __real__ problem with your child, and provides a significant deterrent from bad behavior. It's wild to me that anyone would think of suspension as a noteworthy heuristic for adverse experiences.
Thanks to anyone who made it this far, even those that will disagree.
I think in this case, it seems they did pretty well. They're not lumping in "people failed to use their pronouns" into it, but things like gun violence, violent crime, and bullying. Some kids might be made of tougher material and shrug that off better, but even for them if that's not an adverse experience, I don't know what could be. It seems like the researchers are using an appropriately conservative definition.
> Maybe it's a good thing that mom divorced the man who was never around.
Yeh, but now we're confusing propaganda that was designed to encourage women to leave abusers for something of statistical significance about another matter entirely. If there are more men who would have made the kids' lives better than there are men so dangerous it's good they were separated from their children, then it doesn't matter that some are bad. The fact that the father has divorced and is out of the picture puts them at a higher risk of poor outcomes.
Hundred percent agree on this point. My concession was that it's not always beneficial that the parents stay joined nor is it deterministic that a single father or mother is strictly worse off than an intact family with an abusive/negligent/not present parent. Ideally none would divorce, but we can't factor for that.
> Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often… Swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you? or Act in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt?
seems pretty clear to me, regardless of if something is considered okay in one culture but not in another, the question is was the experience humiliating, not did X happen, where X could be considered not humiliating in one culture and not in another.
https://www.acesaware.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/ACE-Que...
Plus, that whole section seemed to be sorted in an incoherent way.
I understand the motivation of trying to (literally) humanize the data points, but it would have been much more successful if there were vertical groupings as well as horizontal ones.
Right now it's 3 buckets + colors, but you could literally make it monochrome, make it an actual grid, then you could see which cells are completely empty, which is impactful.
This is usually the case for most stories published in The Pudding.
[1]https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2]https://www.patreon.com/thepudding
The Pudding explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays. We’re not chasing current events or clickbait.
Then we scroll down a bit and see that, in fact, they are not taking a fresh, objective look at issues, but are strongly committed to one side of the culture war, the progressive left:
"We believe in journalism that denounces false equivalence, one that can explicitly say Black Lives Matter"
"We strive for our journalism to be one of key making, not gate keeping, and we won't shy away from stories that tackle racism, sexism, and classism head on."
"We're a small group that operates as a collective rather than hierarchical team."
[edit]
Finally got to the end where I can sort by various metrics and found a median of 17/16/15 for low/medium/high ACEs score, which is slightly closer to what I expected.
Also reading the "millennials are having less sex" articles, they mostly focus on people born in the early '90s, so the tail-end of millennials.
1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1802108/
This article is about a longitudinal study; it follows "Alex" who was age 13 in 1997, i.e. born in 1984.
US teen birth rates have been falling a lot - 61 births per 1000 in 1991 fell to ~48 births per 1000 in 2002 (When Alex would have been 18) and continued falling to just 13.9 births per 1000 today according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/259518/birth-rate-among-...
You have probably heard reports that teenagers are having less sex today. The teen birth rate would seem to clearly show that. But "millenials" aren't teenagers any more, they're 30-40 year olds.
1: https://www.cnn.com/2016/08/02/health/millennials-less-sex-t...
I, a millennial, was 30 by then.
My younger brother, a millennial, was only 23.
Millennials are people who were born between 1981 and 1996. Some millennials were having sex when other millennials were toddlers. I would call it poor reporting to call out a 15-year wide cohort when the research being reported spans a narrow 4 of those years.
13.9 per 1000 is 1.39%.
Just to be clear, this is not directed at parent, because it is phrased that way on the web page they cited. I'm just hoping someone here has the answer.
As a side note, I have personally encountered large number of adults who are unable to restate a percentage as a fraction, and even the idea that a percentage represents a fractional value is foreign to them.
Please add a TL;DR here as well. Some of us never want to watch the video instead.
Just as you, I don't like (much) watching videos.
Is this a flaw in the data? What is the causal explanation for this?
It could be people with more adverse experiences are less likely to take care in answering survey questions
I imagine children who grow up in stable environments can better regulate their mood as they can return to a caring parent who will soothe them when they're emotionally dysregulated, compared to those in instable environments.
This might lead to the highs being higher and the lows being lower, a stretching of the bell curve.
Granted the last 20 years has been pretty awful, with 9/11, various wars, and other things. So I'm not really sure if I can take anything away from the video.
The last 20 years have been really really awful for everyone I went to school with.
They're not, though? E.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKv1Mixv0Hk&t=278s — note that the final bar is also shorter, so really you need to elongate it a bit in your mind (and compress the bar above it): the proportion of the "many adverse experiences" group is definite greater than the other two. (I wish they'd've just labelled the %'age on the screen, made the bar lengths equal — I have a lot of issues with the data visualization here, but none severe enough that they defeat the core point of the video.)
Edit: okay, I've counted the miniature people on this chart. For this specific example, they are: no adverse exp.: 7 aff, 109 total; some adversity: 16 aff, 239 total; many adverse exp.: 24 aff, 152 total. In percentages, that's "No adverse experiences" → 6.4% victims of crime, "Some adverse experiences" → 6.7% victims of crime, "Many adverse experiences" → 15.8%. The last group is more than double the other two. (The first two, in this example are equal; but the visualization also roughly shows that.)
> But the data seems to show that over the last 20 years, people from all background types are likely to experience bad things.
But that adverse backgrounds are more likely to experience those things. Take "Happy person in the last month" at 2021 (the final outcome, essentially): the "many adverse experiences" group is unhappier. "General health" is the same. "Victim of crime" is the same. I think "Annual income" shows the same as the rest, but I think this is also the hardest graph to read.
I.e., it's not that people from all backgrounds aren't adversely affected by bad things, it's that people from adverse childhoods are disproportionately affected.
A percentage stacked bar chart
The animations are misleading too. When the people run around on the page, you can't tell if they're changing color or not. It gives the impression that every individual in the study ends up being the same color in each scenario, which clearly isn't true.
> It's 2015.
> In one year, the US will elect Donald Trump as president – a man who constantly insults poor people and calls them "morons."
> This generation grew up hearing presidents say similar things. Ronald Reagan said people go hungry because of "a lack of knowledge," and that people are homeless "by choice." Bill Clinton said "personal responsibility" is the way to overcome poverty. We grew up in a country where most people believed the top reason for poverty was drug abuse, and half of Americans blamed poor people for being poor.
(The article has links to the quotes.)
Those are awful things, but I suspect they don’t affect kids in the same way that poverty and violence does.
Poverty fucks people up like no other thing, sometimes for life.
Life involves many profound challenges, most of which are unfairly distributed. Learning to overcome the challenges that one faces and turn them into novel opportunities and perspectives is the constructive way of looking at it.
There are enough of these challenges that we as a society don't need to encourage them and can work to eradicate or minimize many, but this fatalist view (as indeed gets said countless times) doesn't help the people who already faced it or who will in the coming decades.
And of course, this is not just limited to poverty.
At an individual level, a fatalist view is definitely incredibly harmful. But at that doesn't mean we shouldn't work to counter it at a systemic level.
>that's a really disempowering belief
... for me at least, it had the complete opposite effect. When you're young and particularly a teenager, you want to do as much cool things as possible (not just fun, but also things like profiling yourself to end up in a good career, make money, etc), plenty of times this does not happen if you're not privileged enough, and then most of the time people blame this on themselves, maybe I wasn't that smart, maybe I wasn't that disciplined, blah blah.
Sometimes "you just didn't have enough money" is an acceptable answer, it takes the blame out of yourself and it gives you an objective to pursue. Note: this last phrase could definitely be misinterpreted and strawman-ed to death, so I'll clarify on both points:
* It takes the blame out of yourself ... in a healthy way; most likely you are just good enough or are as good as all the other people that are already doing what you want to do. Money could well be the only limiting factor and, if this happens to be the case, you're actually lucky in the sense that is much easier to "just get some money" than to actually nurture and develop an ability that you don't have.
* It gives you a (clear and focused) objective to pursue. Money is not everything but once you identify this as the limiting factor in your life, you can become laser-focused on acquiring said wealth and things just get easier down the road. Anecdote from me: I was once a plane trip short (out of money) from enrolling on a nice PhD in a different country than mine; that, of course, got me very frustrated and sad, but after that my only purpose for a short while was to make money, I went on to work and live frugally (by choice!) and after a year I had saved up a significant wad of cash, this put me in a position where I could not only afford the plane ticket towards any PhD program I wanted, but also afford at least 6-8 months of life anywhere I wanted in the world, so I could just go to places and explore and make a decision about that when I was comfortable about it. Also that small cycle of "set up goal", "work towards it", "execute", gave a lot of meaning to my life at the time and it's a framework that is very useful to master going forward in life.
In fact, I'd say it's almost the opposite. You don't sound fucked by poverty, honestly. You seem more grounded and capable than many people who had far more privileges, and it sounds like your experiences ended up playing a positive contribution to that even if you wouldn't want to inflict those experiences on anyone else.
I feel bad for Alex but it seemed like a pretty impressive percentage of people with very adverse childhoods ended up being happy. The graph didn't make it seem like his outcome was typical.
It also looked like the claimed racial disparity wasn't very pronounced?
Maybe the visualizations are just bad.
If you actually take the percentage, it's like 30-50% more likely to have the worse outcome the worse your adverse background gets.
But on the chart, it's only like an extra line of kids. The absolute number increases don't look like much, but the percentage increase is very high. I think the authors could have done a much better job at highlighting that.
I realize that this is a taboo subject, but how much of that is nature and how much is nurture?
Low IQ is associated with worse life outcomes, and it's not exactly a problem you can fix by throwing money and resources at it.
You have the primary direction of causality between trauma and IQ reversed. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=childhood+trauma+and+IQ...
Population scale trauma exposure and bad parenting is a result of poverty, social structures, and sometimes wars and conflicts, not something predetermined by genetics.
Regarding race/ethnicity correlations from the paper you posted:
"(McGue et al., 2007; Miller et al., 2012). McGue et al. (2007) reported minimal ethnicity effects in the SIBS sample at intake, which we largely replicate in the current follow-up assessment. While rearing family socioeconomic status and polygenic scores were both moderately higher among Asian offspring (Cohen’s = d .36–.46; p < .01 ), no measure of cognitive ability differed significantly between offspring of different ethnicities. See SI Table S6 for these and other comparisons, along with a discussion of their relevance."
Also, the children in that study have not been victims of trauma (or the study has not considered and controlled for it), so it says nothing about that factor in eventual IQ of the individuals studied.
I agree that it's multivariate, and I'm open to the possibility that it is primarily another factor (although you haven't supported that claim), but it's absurd to conclude from that that low IQ does not cause poverty. People with learning disabilities have a much harder time finding success in the modern world, and I'm bewildered that I even have to say so.
Is not the same as "people who are poor are that way because they disproportionately are genetically predisposed to have low IQs", which is the gist of the original comment I replied to.
The discussion also isn't about intellectually disabled people (who fall into a separate category with specific legal protections).
I was quite surprised with your response and that should have triggered a more charitable reading; I can see now that you were quite obviously not saying what I interpreted. My apologies.
In fact it is EQ - emotional intelligence - and not IQ that predicts positive life outcomes most strongly.
Among many others.
Even in health and longevity: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.01...
Besides, low IQ is associated with worse life outcomes even if, as you say, low EQ is most strongly associated with the same. They're not mutually exclusive.
The narrative is trying to make a claim that nurture is significant.
The stats of this research essentially says "slicing the data in a way that highlights differing qualities of nurture shows that nurture has an impact".
But it crucially doesn't isolate nurture from nature (which is admittedly very difficult). It doesn't show if the nature side (IQ in this instance) has significant overlaps with the nurture or not.
So ultimately we are left guessing.
I bet if you did, you would see that IQ indeed is also significant, and the narrative can tell a different story. That's the thing about stats and narratives. They tell a story and leave a bunch of stuff out, so you have to evaluate it yourself.
My takeaway is that nurture may play a role, but is not the only thing that determines outcome. Eyeballing the end results, being in the worst category of nurture makes the odds worse for you, not 90/10 worse, but probably closer to 65/35.
This might be a side trail, but you can find at least as much awful - probably quite a bit more - in any previous 20 year period. (Iraq War? How about two world wars? Financial crisis... Great Depression? 9/11 and fear of terrorists? Cold war and fear of global annihilation? etc)
I feel like it also doesn't draw enough attention to perhaps one of the biggest factors: marriage, and its effect on one's choices.
It's quite possible I'm seeing a bunch of housewives with no income that had no adverse experiences, and they're making it look like adverse events aren't as impactful as they otherwise would be. Or maybe the data references household income, but then I'm looking at visualizations of little people that are more realistically representing a person AND whoever they're married to.
The final line of the study was "So he is our collective responsibility. They all are.", but the entire study was about how the home environment affects your outcomes. I guess their conclusion is that if an individual does a bad job raising their kids, it is societies fault.
The common refrain is "then he shouldn't have had kids" but unless you're going to create an authoritarian state people will always have kids (and restricting kids went awfully for China anyway).
I think it would be interesting to see the relative impact of a 2 parent + low risk home vs income, and I think there is a lot lost when people assume every variable reduces to income.
What about Alex when they have low income, but a healthy home life? What about Alex when they have higher income, but a shit home life?
It is very likely that yes, he would in fact be happier with an extra 20k a year.
You don't know he'd have a new mustang; that's just you projecting. He might put the extra 20k a year into savings for his kid's education - I know that feeling like I'm setting my kids up for future success makes me happy.
Supposedly, based on some studies.
Kill Alex's parents, and rape them as a child, addict them to meth, and 20k wont fix that.
This article and data is in desperate need of a Analysis of variance for the different factors.
Individual happiness and being a good parent (which contributes to breaking the cycle) don't necessarily intersect as much as you think, or at least it's based on the individual.
Some people's happiness is only marginally related to how well their kids are doing (as evident by rise in single-parent households), so the 20k may contribute essentially 0 to the long term solution.
> You don't know he'd have a new mustang; that's just you projecting.
If I don't know, then you don't know either. You're taking the other good extreme and presenting is at fact. The reality is somewhere in the middle.
Is that what you're saying?
Sometimes it is one beer and cigarette to the next, sometimes it's one sailboat and handbag to the next.
It's funny how Americans love to brag about how they have the freedom to do whatever and pay less tax, but then turn around and treat their poor like fools if they live in any way that doesn't resemble soviet-era russia.
This is the same thing boomers do when they tell millennials to stop eating avocado toast to pay their school loans.
Yes.
> It's funny how Americans love to brag about how they have the freedom to do whatever and pay less tax, but then turn around and treat their poor like fools if they live in any way that doesn't resemble soviet-era russia.
You have things quite backwards, the stereotype of USSR and it's successor is large amounts of vodka and mindlessly wrestling bears. The USA added an amendment to their constitution banning the sale of alcohol and took a while to get repealed.
> This is the same thing boomers do when they tell millennials to stop eating avocado toast to pay their school loans.
I think citing internet memes is not a good plan.
also lines for bread and austerity, that's what I mean
> I think citing internet memes is not a good plan.
while that example is memified, this is still a commonly held belief that I see reiterated almost daily (of course they're poor, they're buying iPhones! for example)
The companies are certainly happy to take your money, regardless of how hard it will be to pay back.
There are a number of systemic barriers, one of the big ones mentioned in this demonstration is education.
If we had equal baseline access to education, housing, healthcare, and food... then sure, if people stayed impoverished I might begin to agree with you.
We're not even close in our current state so "you're in control of your own life" is a completely ignorant argument.
You really think it is ignorant to believe you have control over your life? What do you do just lay on the floor and wait for things to wash over you?
That it’s possible to work one’s way out of poverty or to maintain a healthy weight through willpower or what have you is simply irrelevant when talking policy. Its only possible role is to dismiss the problem or discourage action. The reverse is also true: that a system could hypothetically make it easier for one to succeed is irrelevant to the individual who’s trying to decide what to do to improve their life in the system that currently exists.
I feel like when people start talking about money like this they're being intentionally illogical.
That simply isn't true. Look at the data on economic mobility, and the vast majority of people born in the bottom 20% leave the bottom 20%.
Outcomes obviously aren't random, but are far from deterministic.
For example, this article puts the number at 63% leaving the bottom 20%. 80% would require that there are no impacts whatsoever from every factor correlated with poverty
https://www.wsj.com/articles/upward-mobility-income-quintile...
> Rates of relative intergenerational mobility in the U.S. appear to have been flat for decades
> Most Americans born in 1940 ended up better off, in real terms, than their parents at the same age. Only half of those of those born in 1980 have surpassed their parent’s family income
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/raj-chetty-in-14-charts-b...
Also worth mentioning that the mean income for the second quintile is only ~$40k — it's still ~$30k off from the middle quintile... so we're not talking anything close to the american dream here either way. We're talking multiple generations at best for a small percentage of the lower quintile to reach the middle.
If you are talking about relative economic mobility, more than half of people cant end up in the top half by definition. Only 50 percent of people can improve in social class- and 50% of people have to go down in social class to make that happen. Of course I understand that the case is different if you are talking about nominal income. The biggest Issues there is that it is calculated using household income, and the number of adults/household has gone down quite a bit in the US. The last Issue I would point out is that these metrics rarely include transfer payments, which for the lowest quintile have gone up quite a bit.
Yes, systemic poverty can only be solved politically. That is just the nature of a systemic problem. I am pretty sure encouraging people to be active in the political process of which voting is a small but important part is the opposite of authoritarianism.
> If you aren't to blame for your own life that implies you have no control over it.
Yes. Bitter pill to swallow but that is the reality. We are mostly defined by nature and nurture and we can't choose with which genetics we are born with or our upbringing and if we will have adverse childhood experiences.
The circle of influence most people have over their own life is very tiny, especially the lower they are on the ladder.
The ideology of personal responsibility is propagated to justify the current status quo and block political change that would help poor people.
No a mount of political action can compensate for dissolution of individual responsibilities.
Ideally, they are complementary, but they can easily be antagonists.
Teach a generation of juveniles that they have no agency, and their individual efforts and work, and they will never succeed.
This is factually wrong. Otherwise there wouldn't be such a strong correlation between socioeconomic class and later success in life.
> The individual choice to try meth or not will vastly outweigh any genetic or environmental factor on personal outcome.
Drug use and poverty wouldn't be so strongly linked if that were a free choice.
Maybe you should tell all the drug addicts to just not do drugs. Problem solved.
Are you telling people with depression to "just snap out of it" as well? Drug addiction is a serious medical illness. It requires a whole support network of people to cure in most cases.
> Teach a generation of juveniles that they have no agency, and their individual efforts and work, and they will never succeed.
You empower them by teaching them that it a systemic issue, that it is NOT their fault. That they can organize together and lift each other up. Individuals are weak, groups are strong.
Individual responsibility only works for the rich. Collective responsibility is what breaks the cycle of violence of poverty. It takes a village to raise a kid after all.
Telling someone not to be born poor isn't actionable advice. Telling them their chance of success is 1000% better if they don't do drugs IS actionable advice. Telling them to live in misery and wait for the collective to solve a social problem in decades isn't actionable or useful advice either.
>You empower them by teaching them that it a systemic issue, that it is NOT their fault.
It is a big difference between a higher statistical risk factor isn't your fault, and telling them their choices and behavior have no impact.
Individual responsibility and effort is the foundation of collective responsibility. You can't have collective action with personal action. It isn't one or the other. The boat won't move if there is individual responsibility to paddle.
Knowing about the effects of poverty means knowing more about yourself. Understanding yourself leads to being able to take more effective actions increasing the control you have over your life.
You seem to think it is about victim mindset vs whatever you toxic middle-class self help "individual responsibility" thing is. Real change can only happen once you understand and accept yourself, including being a victim of circumstance and birth. After that there can there be healing and proper action.
> Telling them to live in misery and wait for the collective to solve a social problem in decades isn't actionable or useful advice either.
That is not the point. The point is for them to educate themselves on the issues they are facing, to politically organize, to organize in the neighborhood, to help each other out and ideally become leaders and role-models in their community. It starts with seeking help and community, not trying to lift yourself up by your bootstraps which often is not realistic.
> Individual responsibility and effort is the foundation of collective responsibility. You can't have collective action with personal action. It isn't one or the other. The boat won't move if there is individual responsibility to paddle.
Yes, obviously collective responsibility includes a form of individual responsibility. They only work together when your are poor.
Of course I agree with having ones eyes open to their personal circumstance and challenges, as well as the value of giving and receiving help to others. However, I do think it is ironic that you think people have the agency to help others more and become leaders, but not have the agency to help themselves.
Circling back to drugs, this is akin to becoming a sobriety advocate, but not trying to get sober. You say everyone knows not to do drugs, but from what I know, hopelessness, self-hate, and self-delusion is a key difference between those who become addicts and those that dont.
I think that exaggerated messaging about statistical disadvantage does more harm than good if it is uncoupled from the message about statistical advantage of personal action (e.g. you may be 2x more likely to end up poor if born poor, but you are 10x more likely to escape if you stay sober and go to college). these numbers are obviously made up, but literature overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that personal behaviors have more impact than group statistics and environmental circumstances. Of course personal choices like staying in school or smoking meth have huge impacts on your personal life!
Incomplete messaging of this is harmful because people need to understand and believe there is an actionable path to a better life in order to try. Hopelessness and despair are real barriers that need to be acknowledged.
You brought up depression earlier, and while I dont tell people to "snap out of it", it is also true that almost nobody overcomes depression without the belief that their actions CAN have improve their depression, and that there is a path to improvement. It is central and fundamental to rehabilitation. Most of depression therapy boils down to convincing people improvement is possible, and teaching them how to do it. A therapist may be a crucial help that makes the difference, but the patient still has to do 99% of the work.
If a child shows up to school every day unfed for breakfast and without lunch money, right-wing states have decided that somehow their kid not having food is a motivational issue for the parent. And their solution for when a distracted, hungry student is unable to focus in class is to bring back corporal punishment and post religious texts in classrooms.
If it were merely a motivational issue for parents, then the child would already be fed. The political situation that made the most sense for the school district in which I grew up, which is a bright red area that is also a public education stronghold, was to dip into the budget to ensure that all kids got breakfast and lunch if they wanted it. That way it can't be framed as a political issue.
The issue was never about the benefit, it was about the race and class of people who received it.
Same thing with work. We have age-based workplace discrimination laws precisely because a class of workers who are over the age of 50 have been discriminated against due to their age and in lieu of other concerns. Those problems are outside of their control. Most people with 20+ year careers are unemployed for reasons that have nothing to do with performance, and they can't help what age they are.
This isn't authoritarianism. It's basic common sense.
Another point is that if you're not thriving as an adult, it could be because of the experiences you had when you were a kid.
So if we want people to have better outcomes, we need to help better family lives/environments (and lives in general) to break the cycle, and not just give them basic education. Also, the family is just a group of individuals that probably themselves have come from poor conditions: this means there's hope of breaking the cycle.
So you can break (or weaken) the cycle if you improve those conditions, and this improvement propagates.
Not to nitpick but this statement implies causation (family environment causes life outcome) which you contradict right after.
Sorry to sound obtuse, but, I asked because it may seem obvious to you, but it's not so obvious to me that there will be much improvement. I've seen data that indicates that outcomes are not changed (much) when those early interventions / "investments" are made. There is _an_ improvement, but not to the level people expect. Like a person's height, access to high quality food will only do so much; some people are just going to have short stature however much money you invest into making sure they have access to nutritious meals.
But the presentation was more of an overview of the issue, and I don't think it's fair to argue that, because it doesn't go deeply into every data point, that it's not valid. It more about bring awareness to the issues, and grounds for further research.
But home environments exist in a specific social context that effect how people think they should foster a good home environment. We've lost a lot of societal knowledge and experience around good family structures since probably the 60s. As a society we have definitely encouraged, especially the lower income bands, to outsource it to schools and institutions. That is going to have an effect.
It's ... probably not a good idea for the government to try to fix families. Any interventions must be very carefully considered.
But some of the symptoms can be helped out relatively easily.
---
I also think the author(s) may have a different perspective on responsibility, fault, and blame. I feel like blame is something that our minds do for us so we can stop thinking about a problem - to fix things you have to look past the blame.
The government has been actively working to break families for years through economic policies that encourage single mothers to raise children on their own: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-biggest-root-cause-of-crime...
I do think it touches on how everyone is exposed to adverse outcomes, whatever category they are in. And I agree that it's a collective responsibility, although the presentation does a poor job of arguing the "collective responsibility" point.
I mean.. I agree that we are responsible for each other. However, for other things in life I'm responsible for, like my car, my property, and even my government, I am given a direct say. Imagine if you were forced to take responsibility for a car, except you were never allowed to drive it and it was made freely available to every teenage boy at the local high school. What responsibility could you possible have? What does it even mean to say you're responsible for something you have no control over?
A good priest once told me in confession when I confessed feeling upset that I couldn't help the homeless, the destitute, etc, and he properly identified the problem was that there's only one Saviour and I'm not him. And I feel that sagacious advice is applicable here. What are we possibly to do in this situation other than the unthinkable?
Previous progressive movements have indeed advocated for the removal of children in bad environments, and indeed many of these 'worked', but they're highly criticized (rightly, I guess) today.
I dont even know where to start with this.
1. The whole anti bullying campaign that we now have two and a half decades of in schools has backfired spectacularly. This feels like "well DARE didn't work, we need to put this money somewhere else". We tell kids dont bully people, but if you defend yourself in a fight everyone gets suspended because of zero tolerance... it is obscene.
2. College? Really? We stripped schools of anything that was vocational, or practical. What happened to shop and home economics... and the computer labs that got many of us started are long gone. Meanwhile we're short on plumbers, welders and all sorts of middle skill jobs...
Note: that there are now middle skill jobs (trained professionals but not college) that not only make more than those with degrees, they will do better over the course of their life because they dont have massive debt.
Alex has a shitty home life, but we under fund public schools and then rob kids for college (and we dont need more college grads).
I completely agree. The hollowing out of the education system in response to NCLB and the relentless drive for "data" and "standards" is why a lot of people no longer graduate from high school with any life skills.
Zero tolerance, in it's current meaning, is stupid. But the original concept was great: if anything happens, then you respond to it. "Respond to it" including things like sitting down and talking about it, without necessarily issuing any punishments whatsoever.
Well well well, the bully cornered him in the school bathroom and attacked him. My nephew punched him in the face. my nephew got made into a legend at school and got suspended.
Guess who doesn't get bullied anymore? Violence works.
I don’t believe this. My first and second hand experience is that sure, there are some people who work blue collar and get paid better than $DESKJOB, but those are typically from wealthy households that can help them financially so they can ascend to owner.
If you are poor and start working in the trades it’s the status quo to be completely taken advantage of with no real opportunities. Expect to end each day beat-up and exhausted, with very little energy to take care of yourself. This is the poverty trap.
Blue collar is chock full of sociopath owners who actively lie, exploit, steal from, and emotionally manipulate their employees.
Naturally, I almost immediately flunked out of the program. Who wouldn't quit something making them miserable when they didn't even want to do it in the first place? I was one of the lucky ones, actually... Many like-minded cohorts in my graduating class wasted years of time and money with nothing to show for it. They deserved adults who'd help pair them with the pathways that best suited their individual talents and risk tolerances -- not some blindly optimistic, cookiecutter college-for-all solution.
What about you, dear reader? Perhaps you're responsible for teenagers of your own... can you say with certainty that the adults in their lives have given them consistently honest and thorough conversations about the paths before them? I bet some parents would accuse me of being totally full of shit right about now... That's fine, I'm not some nostradomus bringing news of impending doom -- I only want the next generation to have things better than I did. If nothing else, it doesn't hurt to entertain the idea, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITwNiZ_j_24
Isn't the US in the top of funding per student? I think if anything we over fund public schools.
Teacher Pay?
Class room size?
Hours of education?
We may WASTE more money on students than other countries but in these metrics were behind and our below average everything makes that apparent.
I'll go out on a limb (these days?) and say that nothing is more influential when growing up than what your parents teach you. That alone transcends all other negative/positive effects considered (health, income, "have you seen someone getting shot", ...).
I see the study does account for parents present or not but I would've liked to read a similar story in which this is the categorical control.
The other one "classic" correlation of interest is race vs. all the other variables, but I can understand why they didn't want to initiate yet another flamewar.
College kids do not need to live on campus, most people in this country live within commuting distance of a community college or university. It may not be a top rated university, but it will always be one that teaches skills kids need to build a life. You do not NEED to pay anywhere near $36,000 for college, and stating it as a necessity is misleading. The point that the author misses is that the subject, Alex, would have easily qualified for free tuition at his local community college or university, and most likely a scholarship or grant would have paid his living expenses while attending as well, based solely on his economic and ethnic background and not his grades. The only missing piece was someone to tell him how to do it, or someone to encourage him to do it. This is generally what people mean when they say that poor people lack the knowledge to get themselves out of poverty.
>Over the last few years, his annual income was around $20,000. He has struggled with his weight for much of his adult life, and it affects his overall health.
It is worth noting that the poorest in the USA struggle with eating too much, not too little. This is at least a silver lining that we should not ignore. Many countries in the world, poor people are starving.
>In one year, the US will elect Donald Trump as president – a man who constantly insults poor people and calls them "morons."
As part of this paragraph, the author links to an extremely partisan article which does not even try to hide its bias. It quotes something that Donald Trump said back in a 1999 interview. I don't love Trump and wouldn't vote for him, but I think the author's point about him is stretched quite a bit and was unnecessary for the overall point he's trying to make.
In the end, the main takeaway from this article seems to me to be that you can justify any bad decisions or bad outcomes in your life by blaming your childhood trauma. With such a worldview how can one ever better themselves? It seems such a self-defeating way to look at things, if you never blame yourself for your bad decisions how can you ever learn how to make better decisions?
I know that if I personally lived my life blaming my childhood trauma for problems I've had, that I would still be poor to this day.