Stupid paywall. Can we just ban these sites?
Can we just ban these comments?
Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong
91–100 of 308 posts
Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Affluent parents pass high IQ and conscientiousness I'll have to go with 'citation needed'.
Sure. Both are highly heritable: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3182557/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8776880
I was thinking less about the 'intelligence is partly heritable' part, and more about 'affluent people are smart and conscientious' part.
Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Poor kids don't do well in school because their families and their environment don't value education. Have you considered the possibility that the educational system doesn't value the needs of the poor?
And if it did, how would that work or operate?
What I was getting at is that the subject matter often isn't applicable to helping them solve their specific problems. Education (curriculums) shouldn't be one-size-fits-all.
Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong
#94This is presented as if this opinion journalist found a causative relationship when he's done no such thing. He's just looking at correlations and then shoehorning in his favorite explanations (glass floors, glass ceilings, diploma mills). Take a look at his previous articles and maybe you'll identify a trend: https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/matt-obrien/
How is that? The main thrust of the article (including the chart) comes from an academic source which doesn't appear to be opinion-based at all.
It's not about the academic source's basis on opinion, but on correlation studies.
This is your friendly reminder that correlation is not causation.
Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong
#95> But, of course, it's not just a matter of dollars and cents. It's also a matter of letters and words. Affluent parents talk to their kids three more hours a week on average than poor parents, which is critical during a child's formative early years. That's why, as Stanford professor Sean Reardon explains, "rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students," and they're staying that way.
I agree... that's why I work a traditional 9-5 instead of traveling the country with my wife and kids in an RV and working 15 hours per week remotely.
I view wealth not only as an exercise in creating income streams for myself when I retire, but as a means of ensuring that my descendants have the best possible chance at success.
Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I, too, think the educational system is the place to turn to help fix lots of society's problems. We have kids "captive" for 8 hours a day for 13 years, so it's an amazing opportunity to do some good. The problem is that everyone has different opinions about what "good" is. I tried a little experiment a couple months ago: I asked 5 of my highly educated friends from MIT how they would improve the educational system.…
> my material scientist friend immediately launched into a tirade about how we should teach kids how subatomic particles actually work rather than the simplified model of the atom, That's the problem, we have to get rid of the idea that there's a set of ideas that kids "have" to know. Why don't you let the kid decide what he wants to study. Like there will be limitations but fuck it, if s/he is interested in somethin…
> That's the problem, we have to get rid of the idea that there's a set of ideas that kids "have" to know. Why don't you let the kid decide what he wants to study. Like there will be limitations but fuck it, if s/he is interested in something weird, encourage it instead of killing it.
The collective cultural experience is that this is sometimes incredibly valuable, but very often leads to intense study of subjects of marginal economic value. A person may be intensely interested in Latin and Greek Classics, but the odds of this producing skills for a livelihood are not as high as some other subjects.
Which is to say there's sometimes an awkward tradeoff between "Weird thing a kid wants to study" and "Thing that can be studied that will pay the bills later in life". This is not something that can be avoided by making education services free at point-of-consumption, because student time is finite.
Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that? The main thrust of the article (including the chart) comes from an academic source which doesn't appear to be opinion-based at all.
It's not about the academic source's basis on opinion, but on correlation studies. This is your friendly reminder that correlation is not causation.
Ugh...this is your friendly reminder that a lot of people already know this and pointing it out doesn't make you look smart.
Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
And if it did, how would that work or operate?
What I was getting at is that the subject matter often isn't applicable to helping them solve their specific problems. Education (curriculums) shouldn't be one-size-fits-all.
What subject matters do you think are substantially neglected by the American educational system that fails to reflect the needs of the poor? How should curricula be changed? What specific problems are unaddressed?
Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
The solution is to diminish the income gap. If we believe that few employers are happy to carry employees who provide a net productivity deficit, then on the face of it we cannot assume that those who are impoverished and employed are not meaningfully productive. The question we ought to ask ourselves is how much disparity is acceptable to allow across the incomes of productive individuals; or more bluntly, why do th…
Anything that increases social mobility would be good. America is doing quite poorly in terms of social mobility, compared to other top-tier countries.
Surprisingly, there are some recent, more sophisticated studies indicating that our social mobility is a lot better than earlier thought, relative to the countries that are usually lauded for social mobility.
For example, Scandinavian countries are famous as exemplars for how to be a developed country with high income mobility. But a recent paper focused on Denmark (the most income-mobile country in the group) in order to study the effectiveness of the Scandinavian model. It found that pre-tax, pre-transfer income mobility was the same as the US! Needless to say, this is a pretty shocking find, as it belies years of assumptions about equality of opportunity and its effect on achievement (as measured by income). Even the addition of Denmark's much heavier investment in all levels of schooling does nothing to budge the level of educational attainment among the poor, relative to the US.
From the Atlantic article linked in my footnotes:
> Low-income Danish kids are not much more likely to earn a middle-class wage than their American counterparts. What’s more, the children of non-college graduates in Denmark are about as unlikely to attend college as their American counterparts.
IMO, Denmark's generous redistribution is worth the impact on outcomes, but it's fascinating to see redistribution have almost ZERO impact on one of its most positive-sum, universally appealing benefits (moving more towards equality of opportunity).
[1] http://voxeu.org/article/intergenerational-mobility-denmark-... [2] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/the-amer...
Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong
#100Its much easier to make money when you already have money, ever had to play monopoly while behind?