I got interested in what you posted and have been eagerly reading to see what “luck” Pizzagirl came by.
So far, all I’ve got is “(wasn’t) born with chronic and costly illnesses” and “born American”.
Did I miss some?
Among my luck(s) are being born white, being born a women after women’s lib, strong body, high IQ, being the front end of baby boom (not the end), having intellectual, artistic parents.
Pizzagirl, I am a bit puzzled. You understand patriarchy as a system, but you seem here to be denying class, race, and immigrant status as systems. Do I have this right?
Huh? Where did I “deny” those things? I didn’t explicitly say it, but yeah, it’s probably good that I’m white and not an immigrant. (My grandfather was, though.)
@mamalion, @pizzagirl Is it luckier to be born “white,” Asian, or Jewish? I would suggest that it is far “luckier” to be Asian or Jewish.
Why is it unlucky to be an immigrant? An immigrant in my son’s 10th grade class has already made a 35 on the ACT. Some of the smartest and best kids in his class are either non-citizens or citizens born here shortly after their parents arrived.
Both GMTbetterhalf & self grew up in the bottom ranks: poor working class. Neither of us had the benefit of parental college guidance-- I didn’t even know what the PSAT was when I took it. Both of us, via VERY different paths (scholarships & military), went to college, then on to professional careers. We now find ourselves in the position where our kids will not qualify for financial aid.
I don’t buy any of this media hyperbole about the death of class mobility.
Ha Ha. Neither did I. I thought it was just another one of those irritating “Iowa Tests”. I used to wonder what power the Iowans had to reach out here and make everyone take tests.
@GMTplus7, note that class stratification swings through cycles. The period around 1980 or so in the US was one of the most egalitarian (if violent) periods in recent US history (you have to go back to before the Civil War to find a period when the country was as egalitarian). This country has swung sharply more unequal since then: http://socialevolutionforum.com/2013/02/08/the-double-helix-of-inequality-and-well-being/
Don’t assume that just because you lived through a certain phase in history where the US had certain social and economic conditions that your kids and their peers would get those same conditions as well (just as the social and economic landscape you grew up in and lived through was quite different from the social and economic landscape your parents grew up in and lived through). If history shows us anything, it’s that they’re not static and unchanging.
@GMTplus7 I don’t understand how your one story means that the scientifically collected data on reduced social mobility is hogwash. Your evidence can simply be defeated by one story from the other side of the coin. Why aren’t you saying instead" this is what happened to me and I want to secure those opportunities for others." There is evidence on this subject. We don’t have to rely on opinion or our singular experience.
These opportunities ARE available for others. If anything, the pendulum has swung waaaay in the opposite direction to favor 1st gens and any demographic du jour. GMTspouse & I got no preferential treatment. We received no parental coaching, no test prep, no questbridge, no college confidential, etc. Today’s lower SES youth have many, many more resources & avenues than we had.
Now, pardon me while I drain my champagne glass and buckle up for my trans-Atlantic business class flight…
“@mamalion, @pizzagirl Is it luckier to be born “white,” Asian, or Jewish? I would suggest that it is far “luckier” to be Asian or Jewish.”
Well, half Jewish half Catholic. Raised with little religion aside from secular Christmas/Easter. But amazingly, fully white, as that’s not a separate category. Lucky or not?
Re academic inclination - my parents were proud of my academic successes, but they never “pushed” me a la Tiger Mom or tutors – I was the one who pushed myself, kept studying when they told me it was time to relax and take a break, etc. Is that “lucky” or just how I was made?
My H employs middle class workers (and I don’t mean the faux $225k-in-Scarsdale middle class of CC, but true middle class). It’s easy to see which ones are “training” their kids towards an upwardly mobile lifestyle in the choices they make and which ones aren’t – by observing who engages in delayed gratification, spending money on education vs fancy vacations or fancy cars, who puts away even small sums in the company 401k, who brings lunch everyday vs who goes out everyday, etc. None of these folks are highly educated, but they do make choices. That isn’t just luck.
Like GMTplus, I grew up poor to working class but was lucky enough to be born “smart”. My parents rented and then bought the least expensive house in a very good school district. Clearly, we were on the bottom end of the income ladder in my town. The kids in my classes generally came from much more affluent families. I was able to attend college on scholarships, financial aid and work study. We are now lucky that we make enough to be considered full pay, but (in our case) not enough to be able to actually afford that for multiple kids.
But I disagree that the pendulum has swung in the other direction. There was an article in our local paper that said that about 9% of kids from families making less than $35K graduated from college by age 24, compared to close to 70% at the highest income levels. The number of such students at elite colleges is likely to be minimal at best.
There are very few first generation kids that land in high schools where they are encouraged to go elite colleges. It is a myth that most of these kids can afford college or are in families that support education. They go to the worst high school imaginable. Even the smartest may not make it out of the grinding poverty that surrounds them. The income gap has grown substantially wider. Where is any evidence that it easier now? The occasional story about an inner-city whiz kids that gets into every Ivy?
One problem is society. Too many people make bad choices.
DW teaches at a disadvantaged school (avg SAT maybe 800??), and too many kids won’t even do the bare minimum required to pass her course. They don’t do homework. They don’t show up. They sleep or don’t pay attention. Every day I hear about things that just make me shake my head.
TV1 and TV2 went to a high performing HS where I would say they were advantaged. Only 1 of them chose to take advantage of their opportunity. The other one made bad choices and is still struggling to “make it”. TV3 chose to attend DW’s school despite its bad reputation. She makes choices that are the antithesis of the majority of her school. She takes 8 courses (many of them AP or college level). Most of the other seniors take 4 to 6. She frequently stays up until the middle of the night studying because of work or sports practice. She could study much less and actually get more than 4-5 hours of sleep and still do VERY well. But, she wants to excel so she makes the choice to sacrifice. Too many kids don’t. That isn’t genetics. That isn’t a meritocracy. That is drive.
Her friends are the same way, and their entire group will attend top colleges (many on large scholarships). They didn’t get where they are because of nepotism, a cultural advantage, or by attending an elite school (or even a good school). They did it by being the children of smart parents and by emulating the work ethic of those parents.
Another problem is genetics. There are obvious, and numerous, exceptions, but people who are smart tend to do well (all other factors being equal). They then are exposed to other smart people and produce smart kids.
I am all for giving a helping hand to people that need it and developing programs to help close the SES gaps that exist, but people have to take some responsibility for their actions, and the programs can’t come at the expense of hurting hard working, but more advantaged kids.
This is part of my point. There is one woman at my H’s office who isn’t educated, but she brings her lunch everyday instead of wasting $8 a day / $40 a week / $2,000 a year on going out to lunch like some of the cohorts do. (I make a heck of a lot more than these people and I bring my lunch!). She drives a modest car instead of some of her cohorts who “need” to have the latest SUV. She plans her vacations thoughtfully instead of some of the her cohorts who go to the same luxury hotels that people of more affluent means do. She’s the one who says to H - how can I maximize what we put in the IRA, can we get a health care flexible spending account, etc. and when she gets a bonus, she puts it away instead of blowing it on something frivolous. It’s no surprise that her daughter is now attending an elite college summer program and taking her studies seriously and will likely be upwardly mobile.
The other cohorts “wonder” why they have no money and why they are at a loss when the car or the furnace breaks down - but it doesn’t occur to them that the $2,000 a year they spent on ordering out lunch every day, or the $30 they spend at the end of every week having a few drinks with their coworkers, or the “need” to have a fancy SUV when a modest Camry gets you the same place, all adds up. Delayed gratification.
I am currently digging out under the mess that a loved one who had no sense of delayed gratification has left us. Of course there is luck in this world - the luck of being born into a loving family, having one’s health, and so forth. But there are also choices.
There seems to be an assumption here that everyone would choose to go to college and take a high-stress million dollar job if only they were given the opportunity. Where is the evidence for this? My life experience indicates the opposite: that most people don’t value that life path so they don’t try to take it.
Pizza- my administrative assistant spends more money on dry cleaning every year than my annual clothing budget. That’s a choice. I don’t begrudge her the designer shoes or the nice handbags- it’s her money, it’s her choices. But it is weird to hear about some of the things she “can’t afford” which she feels that someone at her income level should be able to. She doesn’t realize that she’s dressing like someone who runs a hedge fund or makes millions of dollars from every movie- and therefore, doesn’t have the scratch to fix the gutter or resurface the driveway (normal household repairs, not fancy upgrades).
As a geneticist, I can confirm that there is no luck whatsoever in whether you are born caucasian, asian, or whatever. It is completely predetermined by your parents.
Fear of success/fear of failure. If you come from a working class or poor background, and you are considering going to college or just doing well in school, then you have to deal with the fearful consequences of success (leaving everyone for the unknown of college and the middle class) and the fearful consequences of failure (putting effort into being different than everyone you know and publically failing to become college educated and middle class).
The saddest academic article I ever read was a sociolinguistic study by William Labov. He studied poor black kids in NYC ghettos who shifted their English to the mainstream dialect as best they could. They were trying to succeed. The sad thing was that the teachers didn’t notice the dialect shift; it wasn’t significant enough to clue the white ears. It was significant enough to clue the other kids. They knew that the “upwardly mobile” kids were moving away from the local culture and so ignored them, even ostracized them. Kids caught between failed upward mobility and failed peer group engagement.
Send your kid to a failing public school (urban or rural) and see how high their horizon is.
Similar to their parents’ horizons, with lots of exceptions?