I always think how consistent these finding are with Judith Rich Harris' group socialization hypotheses. The notion that is the hard to measure variance that exists in the community and peer groups that make the biggest difference to human outcomes (after genetics of course).
I have been a NYT commenter for years. I just try ro make people mad. I am a subscriber.
So in the comments section for the last few months went by the handle *Dasha's Longhouse" . Totally can't post. Not sure if it is Dasha or Longhouse, but good on us, we are winning.
You're winning because you can't comment on NYT? Lol. Sometimes it seems like conservatives don't even know what winning looks like anymore, which makes sense given that they've been losing for centuries.
I used to think this too. According to Jordan Peterson the cognitive science literature says below some IQ (83) there is basically no useful job you can handle.
I recall the laws of living from a George Will column and I think Will cited several sources. 1. Graduate high school. 2. No children out of wedlock. 3. No marriage and no children before age 21.
Of the individuals who observe the three laws, around 90% exceed the poverty line. Of the individuals who do not observe the three laws, around 90% are at poverty or below.
I don't remember Will referencing criminality specifically but obviously it's huge. All sorts of costs and lost opportunities pile up with a criminal conviction.
This formula is pretty silly. First of all, these statistics exclude significant segments of the poor population, the majority of poor people are people outside the labor market, such as the elderly, children, caretakers and students. Also, this formula, to the extent that it works, is just telling people not to add extra people to the household without extra contribution, so, for example, the reason a single parent is more likely to be poor is that in this situation you have the child who doesn't earn market income and the absence of another parent to add to the household income, but if you were to add a non-working adult without any income to the household the effect would be the same.
Those are transient poor. I, too, was poor once as a student living on .99 cent frozen pizzas. I delayed marriage and children until I acquired a marketable skillset. At the end of my days I will probably be poor again.
What we are trying to do with the laws of living is give people simple, clear-cut advice so they can avoid poverty in their prime years and the taxpayers aren't having to shovel welfare to able-bodied adults.
The periodic Chetty pieces have the same tone as those internet ads/youtube videos with titles like "lose belly fat with this one weird trick!" I lack any sort of ability or interest in diving deep into data to identify errors with a study, but Chetty's tendency to promote the idea that places rather than the people that live there (and their behavior) drive socio-economic outcomes is pretty obtuse and very obvious to a casual reader.
It is a common blind spot for smarter lefties however. My spouse has a colleague that is a dyed in the wool Dem who moved out of the urban core when she started a family to relocate to a high income GOP stronghold suburb. She plays up the latest great initiative the city rolls out while bemoaning the politics of her area and chalks up to yawning chasm between the two in terms of quality of life to "resources."
Lol. Obviously it's hard to be honest with yourself when your social standing or sense of self depends on holding one set of views that you personally do not adhere to in real life behavior.
What exactly is the hypocrisy here? The fact that this person moved to a suburb? Democrats win the majority of the suburban vote now. If she thinks that the city has a lower quality of life because of some nebulous idea about resources, and that it has nothing to do with the people living in it, then she is wrong, but that is not hypocrisy.
Anyway, Raj Chetty's work is interesting, and it may be true that there is such a thing as best practices across communities, so it would be interesting to see what is working and what is not working, but one problem is that it is difficult to control for relevant factors like hereditary human capital, and it is politically incorrect to do so. Some low-income White and Asian communities may have reasonably high human capital waiting to be passed on, which would explain why their children succeed more, that is something that has to be controlled for.
Another problem is these local idiosyncrasies, as Sailer points out with Charlotte, North Carolina. It's just very unlikely that leaders in Charlotte created incredible programs that solved many of their problems in just a few years, it's much more likely that the local economic situation changed, as Sailer says.
"Children who grow up in thriving environments — with good health and nutrition, high-quality education and housing, stable families and positive social influences — are much better positioned to achieve success later in life."
WOW thank god for Harvard or no one would have ever figured this out.
Why do upscale liberals make easy things sound so difficult? (I mean I know why, bc no one gets tenure speaking plainly and no one rises in the modern Academy by pointing out the Emperor's nudity.)
I tell my upscale liberal friends the same thing all the time: Just preach what you practice!
Tell all your sacred cows how you raise your precious Kaylees and Kaydens: all homework must be done and checked before bedtime; reading books and studying are mandatory, and every report card is looked forward to like a jury verdict; college applications and acceptances are as important to the family as an Oscar nomination is to a starlet; then of course: graduate high school, do your best to graduate college, and don't get married or have kids till you have a job and some money. I promise you there is not a single earnest egalitarian Brooklynite who doesn't follow this regime to the letter.
Oh but then I remember: upscale liberals don't necessarily want their sacred cows to achieve, they first and foremost want public credit for being their saviors. Whatever happens outside of that doesn't register.
I noticed that line too. While some of those items (eg education) could be improved by a determined campaign but it’s hard to see how one could create “stable families.”
We know of very little that works to change behavior in this way, but we do know that policing and incarceration works to reduce crime, so this should be done much more intensively.
I had a friend who lived in Chicago and she did research about how to get her kids into the best public schools. Even with that, she failed and had to send her kids to private school. She had a housekeeper who was hispanic (Puerto Rican maybe) who lived somewhat nearby and she had a kid the same age as my friend's kid. My friend gave the house keeper all this research she had done. It was a step by step guide to get her kid into the best public school. The housekeeper said thanks and proceeded to not follow up or take any action at all.
The state will never be able to overcome parents prefer to make excuses rather than make an effort.
Part of the education problem is that parents think they can drop off their kids at the front door of the school and it's solely the teachers' job to ensure their child is learning and developing. I even hear middle class suburban parents complain about their kids' educational struggles but I rarely hear them working with their own children.
I guess although when I was a kid I don't know that parents were so involved with the details. They just had differing ideas on how hard to push the kids. I could have been a straight A grind in all the honors and AP classes but I was more interested in learning specific things than the letter grades. Most of the other kids in the classes had different ideas and wanted all A's. It might have been internal or it might have been demanding parents. I don't think any of our parents were, e.g., reviewing our calculus homework and helping teach
As for teaching specific concepts, I meant more in the elementary and middle schools. Nevertheless, even parents without the knowledge or know-how to each calculus and chemistry or even English can be engaged parents who push their kids to work hard, learn and do the best they can. No education or money needed to do this. Just effort and determination.
The best way to create an opportunity economy for all Americans is to import people from a foreign culture into a small community, thus creating new opportunities.
The increased demand for housing grows the value of local real estate, creating opportunities for property owners.
New cultures bring original ways of dining, with outdoor barbecues and exotic dishes enhancing the local culinary scene and bringing unique eating opportunities for all.
Novel forms of disease bring learning opportunities to medical professionals, challenging them to quickly diagnose and treat a diverse population with equity.
New cultural norms bring opportunities to law enforcement to ignore obsolete laws and regulations and develop advanced forms of community service.
"An opportunity economy prioritizes equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcomes."
As if that were the only choice. What is really wanted is a society, and an economy, that fits the human material that actually exists: in which anyone, not just the gifted and the talented, who works hard and plays be the rules can realistically look forward to a rich and fulfilling life.
It should make even a charitable observer perhaps put on hold the Hosannas for Mr Chetty if he’s willing to write a piece that specious for the NYT.
Not only do all his proposed policies have obvious confounding factors, but it simply doesn’t stand to reason that a few minor civic programs can materially alter a sociological phenomenon as momentous as “class mobility” so quickly (and likely not at all).
The only people who could possibly believe it are the hopelessly out of touch and, of course, Federal bureaucrats for whom it seems explicitly written.
Equality of opportunity is an ephemeral goal. I cringe every time I hear a conservative harp about it as an alternative to affirmative action. Millennia of generations have toiled, sacrificed, saved, invested, crossed oceans, and built businesses and nations in order to pass them on to their posterity and give them a leg up in life.
Once pure equality of opportunity is made the goal the only logical outcome is a totalitarian state and the destruction of the nuclear family. Think Brave New World, but with children ripped from the arms of their mothers instead of artificial wombs and incubators. Who would even bother having children under such circumstances?
And what would be the effects on the economy and society? A greatly reduced toiling, sacrificing, saving, investing and venture building. Why plant a tree if it won’t mature in your lifetime?
Equal justice, immunities, and privileges under law should be our goal. Anything else is a violation of the Constitution and inconsistent with human nature.
Funny how they are focusing on equality of opportunity while being actively hostile to the actual creation of new opportunities. Ask any small business owner in California how the regulation and taxation affects opportunities. But Harris will give you a 50K income tax deduction if you start a new business? What income are you deducting that from in your first year of business?
Greenwich, Connecticut is in CT, not CN!
Signed, a CT resident
I always think how consistent these finding are with Judith Rich Harris' group socialization hypotheses. The notion that is the hard to measure variance that exists in the community and peer groups that make the biggest difference to human outcomes (after genetics of course).
I have been a NYT commenter for years. I just try ro make people mad. I am a subscriber.
So in the comments section for the last few months went by the handle *Dasha's Longhouse" . Totally can't post. Not sure if it is Dasha or Longhouse, but good on us, we are winning.
Doesn’t NYT get all comments? I occasionally comment there.
You're winning because you can't comment on NYT? Lol. Sometimes it seems like conservatives don't even know what winning looks like anymore, which makes sense given that they've been losing for centuries.
I remember being told definitively, many years ago, that virtually all people of all races can avoid poverty by doing three things:
1) Don't commit crimes.
2) Don't have children out of wedlock.
3) Do graduate from high school.
No guarantee of riches, of course, but a guarantee of avoiding poverty. Can anyone confirm this as being accurate?
I believe George Will used to pound that message.
that might also be one of the things that got Amy Wax in trouble.
Is called the Success Formula (or maybe bourgeois values)?
think is in here somewhere:
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/10/solving-the-poor
I used to think this too. According to Jordan Peterson the cognitive science literature says below some IQ (83) there is basically no useful job you can handle.
I recall the laws of living from a George Will column and I think Will cited several sources. 1. Graduate high school. 2. No children out of wedlock. 3. No marriage and no children before age 21.
Of the individuals who observe the three laws, around 90% exceed the poverty line. Of the individuals who do not observe the three laws, around 90% are at poverty or below.
I don't remember Will referencing criminality specifically but obviously it's huge. All sorts of costs and lost opportunities pile up with a criminal conviction.
This formula is pretty silly. First of all, these statistics exclude significant segments of the poor population, the majority of poor people are people outside the labor market, such as the elderly, children, caretakers and students. Also, this formula, to the extent that it works, is just telling people not to add extra people to the household without extra contribution, so, for example, the reason a single parent is more likely to be poor is that in this situation you have the child who doesn't earn market income and the absence of another parent to add to the household income, but if you were to add a non-working adult without any income to the household the effect would be the same.
Those are transient poor. I, too, was poor once as a student living on .99 cent frozen pizzas. I delayed marriage and children until I acquired a marketable skillset. At the end of my days I will probably be poor again.
What we are trying to do with the laws of living is give people simple, clear-cut advice so they can avoid poverty in their prime years and the taxpayers aren't having to shovel welfare to able-bodied adults.
Instead of don't commit crimes as #1, I think it was work full-time.
The periodic Chetty pieces have the same tone as those internet ads/youtube videos with titles like "lose belly fat with this one weird trick!" I lack any sort of ability or interest in diving deep into data to identify errors with a study, but Chetty's tendency to promote the idea that places rather than the people that live there (and their behavior) drive socio-economic outcomes is pretty obtuse and very obvious to a casual reader.
It is a common blind spot for smarter lefties however. My spouse has a colleague that is a dyed in the wool Dem who moved out of the urban core when she started a family to relocate to a high income GOP stronghold suburb. She plays up the latest great initiative the city rolls out while bemoaning the politics of her area and chalks up to yawning chasm between the two in terms of quality of life to "resources."
Lefties are hypocrite: never knew!
Lol. Obviously it's hard to be honest with yourself when your social standing or sense of self depends on holding one set of views that you personally do not adhere to in real life behavior.
What exactly is the hypocrisy here? The fact that this person moved to a suburb? Democrats win the majority of the suburban vote now. If she thinks that the city has a lower quality of life because of some nebulous idea about resources, and that it has nothing to do with the people living in it, then she is wrong, but that is not hypocrisy.
Anyway, Raj Chetty's work is interesting, and it may be true that there is such a thing as best practices across communities, so it would be interesting to see what is working and what is not working, but one problem is that it is difficult to control for relevant factors like hereditary human capital, and it is politically incorrect to do so. Some low-income White and Asian communities may have reasonably high human capital waiting to be passed on, which would explain why their children succeed more, that is something that has to be controlled for.
Another problem is these local idiosyncrasies, as Sailer points out with Charlotte, North Carolina. It's just very unlikely that leaders in Charlotte created incredible programs that solved many of their problems in just a few years, it's much more likely that the local economic situation changed, as Sailer says.
"Children who grow up in thriving environments — with good health and nutrition, high-quality education and housing, stable families and positive social influences — are much better positioned to achieve success later in life."
WOW thank god for Harvard or no one would have ever figured this out.
Why do upscale liberals make easy things sound so difficult? (I mean I know why, bc no one gets tenure speaking plainly and no one rises in the modern Academy by pointing out the Emperor's nudity.)
I tell my upscale liberal friends the same thing all the time: Just preach what you practice!
Tell all your sacred cows how you raise your precious Kaylees and Kaydens: all homework must be done and checked before bedtime; reading books and studying are mandatory, and every report card is looked forward to like a jury verdict; college applications and acceptances are as important to the family as an Oscar nomination is to a starlet; then of course: graduate high school, do your best to graduate college, and don't get married or have kids till you have a job and some money. I promise you there is not a single earnest egalitarian Brooklynite who doesn't follow this regime to the letter.
Oh but then I remember: upscale liberals don't necessarily want their sacred cows to achieve, they first and foremost want public credit for being their saviors. Whatever happens outside of that doesn't register.
Right, back in 2000 Shelby Steele wrote that whites want blacks as mascots.
His book "White Guilt" should be required reading.
I noticed that line too. While some of those items (eg education) could be improved by a determined campaign but it’s hard to see how one could create “stable families.”
We know of very little that works to change behavior in this way, but we do know that policing and incarceration works to reduce crime, so this should be done much more intensively.
I had a friend who lived in Chicago and she did research about how to get her kids into the best public schools. Even with that, she failed and had to send her kids to private school. She had a housekeeper who was hispanic (Puerto Rican maybe) who lived somewhat nearby and she had a kid the same age as my friend's kid. My friend gave the house keeper all this research she had done. It was a step by step guide to get her kid into the best public school. The housekeeper said thanks and proceeded to not follow up or take any action at all.
The state will never be able to overcome parents prefer to make excuses rather than make an effort.
Part of the education problem is that parents think they can drop off their kids at the front door of the school and it's solely the teachers' job to ensure their child is learning and developing. I even hear middle class suburban parents complain about their kids' educational struggles but I rarely hear them working with their own children.
I guess although when I was a kid I don't know that parents were so involved with the details. They just had differing ideas on how hard to push the kids. I could have been a straight A grind in all the honors and AP classes but I was more interested in learning specific things than the letter grades. Most of the other kids in the classes had different ideas and wanted all A's. It might have been internal or it might have been demanding parents. I don't think any of our parents were, e.g., reviewing our calculus homework and helping teach
As for teaching specific concepts, I meant more in the elementary and middle schools. Nevertheless, even parents without the knowledge or know-how to each calculus and chemistry or even English can be engaged parents who push their kids to work hard, learn and do the best they can. No education or money needed to do this. Just effort and determination.
The best way to create an opportunity economy for all Americans is to import people from a foreign culture into a small community, thus creating new opportunities.
The increased demand for housing grows the value of local real estate, creating opportunities for property owners.
New cultures bring original ways of dining, with outdoor barbecues and exotic dishes enhancing the local culinary scene and bringing unique eating opportunities for all.
Novel forms of disease bring learning opportunities to medical professionals, challenging them to quickly diagnose and treat a diverse population with equity.
New cultural norms bring opportunities to law enforcement to ignore obsolete laws and regulations and develop advanced forms of community service.
This is Science, and anyone questioning it is spreading dangerous misinformation.
"An opportunity economy prioritizes equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcomes."
As if that were the only choice. What is really wanted is a society, and an economy, that fits the human material that actually exists: in which anyone, not just the gifted and the talented, who works hard and plays be the rules can realistically look forward to a rich and fulfilling life.
It should make even a charitable observer perhaps put on hold the Hosannas for Mr Chetty if he’s willing to write a piece that specious for the NYT.
Not only do all his proposed policies have obvious confounding factors, but it simply doesn’t stand to reason that a few minor civic programs can materially alter a sociological phenomenon as momentous as “class mobility” so quickly (and likely not at all).
The only people who could possibly believe it are the hopelessly out of touch and, of course, Federal bureaucrats for whom it seems explicitly written.
So, have mutant genes that make you smarter than your family and peers don't count?
Equality of opportunity is an ephemeral goal. I cringe every time I hear a conservative harp about it as an alternative to affirmative action. Millennia of generations have toiled, sacrificed, saved, invested, crossed oceans, and built businesses and nations in order to pass them on to their posterity and give them a leg up in life.
Once pure equality of opportunity is made the goal the only logical outcome is a totalitarian state and the destruction of the nuclear family. Think Brave New World, but with children ripped from the arms of their mothers instead of artificial wombs and incubators. Who would even bother having children under such circumstances?
And what would be the effects on the economy and society? A greatly reduced toiling, sacrificing, saving, investing and venture building. Why plant a tree if it won’t mature in your lifetime?
Equal justice, immunities, and privileges under law should be our goal. Anything else is a violation of the Constitution and inconsistent with human nature.
Funny how they are focusing on equality of opportunity while being actively hostile to the actual creation of new opportunities. Ask any small business owner in California how the regulation and taxation affects opportunities. But Harris will give you a 50K income tax deduction if you start a new business? What income are you deducting that from in your first year of business?