In Sunday's Boston Globe Drake Bennett describes new thinking from George Washington University professor Charles Karelis, who suggests that there is an inflection point in the income spectrum, below which normal economic rules do not apply. Once an individual has crossed that threshold, the burden of accumulated problems is such that it is no longer rational to address any of them.
Yeah, it's called hopeless.
The self-proclaimed middle class in the US is HUGE because being middle class = being average, normal, the same as everyone else, and Americans aren't comfortable with the feeling that any one of them (I mean, us) is much better or worse than themselves. I grew up in a small town that/which, once upon that time, was home to the international headquarters of a couple of companies. Everyone considered themselves middle class--from the people working in the factories all the way up to the CEOs. And we had to consider everyone that way in order to keep up the American egalitarian myth.
The fourth bar on the graph represents the A.J. Sopranos of the world, those who scored in the bottom 25 percent (the first achievement quartile) on standardized tests as high school sophomores and came from families earning more than $100,000 per year. Despite their academic shortcomings, 58.4 percent of these students went on to college. For high-income students in the second achievement quartile--still below the median--the college-going rate was significantly higher, 85.3 percent.
This is a higher rate than that for those directly opposite A.J.--students from the highest achievement quartile and the lowest income level, less than $20,000 per year. 80.3 percent of these meritorious poor students went to college, which means that nearly 20 percent did not. High-achieving wealthy students, in contrast, went to college at a 96.2 percent clip. In other words, high-achieving poor students are five times more likely than high-achieving rich students to skip college in the first two years after high school.
More than half the children born to upper-income parents, those in the top fifth, who finish college remain in that top group. Nearly one in four remains in the top fifth even without completing college.
Then what, I ask Stratyner, do the most distressed rich kids fantasize about when it comes to their family money? That they didn't have it?
"Rarely," he answers. "They're not stupid."
Having less?
"No, not really."
So what, then?
He thinks for a long moment, then finally gives an answer. "That they'd made it themselves."
...
It turns out there's research to back up their hand-wringing. Writing in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1981, George Vaillant, a Harvard psychiatrist who's spent the bulk of his career devoted to the study of adult resilience and coping, argued that childhood capacity for work is one of the best predictors of adult mental health and the capacity to love. He based his conclusion on a famous longitudinal study of 456 young men from inner Boston who, starting in the forties, were followed beginning at age 14. All came from blue-collar and welfare families, and none, at least at the time of their selection, had juvenile records. The subjects were assigned ratings for their ability to work as teenagers—in school, at home, in jobs outside the home, in extracurricular pursuits—and they were reinterviewed at several intervals since, at ages 25, 31, 47. The outcomes were pretty stark. Those who demonstrated the greatest capacity for work as 14-year-olds were five times more likely to be paid well for their work at 47 than those who scored lowest, and sixteen times less likely to have experienced unemployment—and intelligence, Vaillant was careful to note, did little to mediate the latter outcomes. They were also twice as likely to have warm relations with a wide variety of people and almost twice as likely to still be enjoying their first marriages. But perhaps the most striking datum was what Vaillant wryly called a "value-free definition of health": Those who had the poorest ratings were six times as likely, at age 47, to be dead.
But here's a question: How do you drum a work ethic into those who, strictly speaking, don't have to work?
Though if your biggest problem in life is you're not happy that you didn't earn what you've got, you've got very little to complain about, not to mention that this "problem" would be really easy to fix: sell your mansion, fancy car and whatever else you've got and empty out your bank account and give it all away. Give the opportunity you've had to someone else who otherwise wouldn't have it because they didn't have the dumb luck of being born into a family with money.
I find it interesting, but not surprising, that intelligence has little bearing on the subjects' later outcomes, but that their ability to work was a striking indicator of success both both financially and physically.
The whole time I was growing up no one ever said anything about oil. No one ever said anything about foreign manufacturing. No one ever said anything about non-linear population growth. No one ever said anything about Topsoil. No one ever said anything about illegal aliens. No one ever said anything about preparation for anything that might come our way. No, the sad truth is that the boomers grew up in unprecedented wealth and security and blissfully burned more oil, energy, topsoil and whatever else you can regretfully burn than any generation since the beginning of known history. These are the assholes who told us to “get good grades†and everything will be awesome.
,,,
End the war, you save your children.Prolong this war, you might get your social security checks with all the nuclear fallout around and illegals stealing your mail to.
All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming conquest as an article of faith. It is to be achieved either by gradually acquiring more and more territory and so building up an overwhelming preponderance of power, or by the discovery of some new and unanswerable weapon. The search for new weapons continues unceasingly, and is one of the very few remaining activities in which the inventive or speculative type of mind can find any outlet. In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance--meaning, in effect, war and police espionage--the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life. In the vast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands of the Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work. Some are concerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars; others devise larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more and more impenetrable armour-plating; others search for new and deadlier gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce a vehicle that shall bore its way under the soil like a submarine under the water, or an aeroplane as independent of its base as a sailing-ship; others explore even remoter possibilities such as focusing the sun's rays through lenses suspended thousands of kilometres away in space, or producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the earth's centre.
