Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you elaborate on your living conditions a little more? What is stopping you from gaining a place of residence?
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Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong
191–200 of 308 posts
Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong
#192Why should a meritocracy be individual based instead of family based?
I personally think it's okay for families to give their inheritance/assistance to their children even if the children don't "deserve" it. etc. Working towards bettering your children lives is a reason many of us get up in the morning.
Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong
#193Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a long story, rooted in the aforementioned incurable medical condition. Serious health problems are a common root cause or contributing factor to homelessness. (Source: I had a college class on homelessness and public policy some years prior to ending up on the street.) At this point, if I could come up with a few thousand dollars in relatively short order, I believe I could get off the street under circumstanc…
Could you elaborate on your living conditions a little more? What is stopping you from gaining a place of residence?
Could you elaborate on your living conditions a little more? What is stopping you from gaining a place of residence?
I am quoting you this time so that if you change your comment completely for a fourth time, people will at least know what I am replying to.
I have a deadly genetic disorder. I need a high degree of control over my living space. Renting is a no go. I need to go from homeless to homeowner. I think I could arrange that for around $10k, but, alas, I don't happen to have that kind of money just laying around somewhere.
Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
The educational system is a scapegoat for far bigger and more entrenched problems.
Exactly. I strongly suggest to speak with some actual teachers, instead of blindly relying on ridiculous propaganda. The problem is not the system, the problem is social mobility. Poor kids don't do well in school because their families and their environment don't value education. They perceive (correctly, BTW, from a statistical perspective) that if you're born poor, there isn't much you can do. You're gonna die poo…
>They perceive (correctly, BTW, from a statistical perspective) that if you're born poor, there isn't much you can do.
How can you blithely state this "fact" given that the article itself shows that a poor person who graduates college has a better-than-average income distribution (every percentile is better off than the population as a whole).
It's really frustrating to me that people like you don't make any honest effort to distinguish between objective "lack of hope" where poor people actually cannot improve their situation, with subjective "lack of hope" where people for whatever reason are unable to be motivated to take actual opportunities that could help them. Clearly these are different phenomena and conflating them is irresponsible and dangerous.
Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you elaborate on your living conditions a little more? What is stopping you from gaining a place of residence?
Could you elaborate on your living conditions a little more? What is stopping you from gaining a place of residence? I am quoting you this time so that if you change your comment completely for a fourth time, people will at least know what I am replying to. I have a deadly genetic disorder. I need a high degree of control over my living space. Renting is a no go. I need to go from homeless to homeowner. I think I cou…
My condolences for your illness. Best of luck in your endeavours.
Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong
#197An event that will always stay with me, some years ago I a job opened up where I would have some sway in recommending candidates. I had a uni friend who would fit the role well. A great bloke, smart and hard working. He came from a very blue collar, low income background. His job was pretty middle of the road stuff. This job would have been lateral in responsibility but in a better industry giving about 2+ times sala…
I have seen this before. Some people will only take a job if they KNOW how to do the job. Others will take a job, and are confident they can learn it along the way.
It might have more to do with that confidence than being poor.
Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong
#198This article is terrible. It makes a shitty and misleading graph, and generates a variety of nonsensical judgements from it.
The graph used makes it really hard to see what the actual distributions of overall income are. If you make, say, a bar graph of the income distributions, you'll see that poor college grads do much better than rich high school dropouts. I made such a graph here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/112K9ejdFQMPcnvEqERT2...
I also estimated the average incomes of both groups based on the given statistics, and found an average income of $78k for the poor college grads and $60k for the rich high school dropouts.
The main piece of evidence that this blog post uses to support its thesis is: "Specifically, rich high school dropouts remain in the top about as much as poor college grads stay stuck in the bottom — 14 versus 16 percent, respectively. Not only that, but these low-income strivers are just as likely to end up in the bottom as these wealthy ne'er-do-wells. Some meritocracy."
The first of these statistics is not clearly related to meritocracy. If you want high income mobility, you want both these numbers to be low. The sentence is phrased as if it's bad that the numbers are similar; that doesn't make sense.
The second of these statistics is correctly interpreted, but seems cherry-picked: I could just as easily point out that 41% of poor college grads end up in the top 40% of income, while only 19% of rich high school dropouts do. To prevent such cherry-picking, we should probably use the Schelling point summary statistics like mean income or median income, both of which indicate that the poor college grads are doing significantly better.
As far as I can tell, the original paper didn't do anything wrong, this "reporter" just decided to make up some bullshit conclusions from the statistics. This is even worse than most reporting--the mistake isn't something you have to read the original source to find, the mistake is right there in the graph that Facebook is suggesting as the image preview. Alas!
Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong
#199Well, that's what economical disadvantage is about. A rich student can afford to attempt to enter a top school many consecutive times, by not having the pressure of having to work as soon as possible. Then once accepted, can afford to have minimum passing grades. A poor student can only enter a top school by earning a scholarship by having good grades, and sometimes that scholarship needs to be maintained by keeping…
To people who agree with this post, I have a genuine question: Is it a general principle of yours that the parents' efforts and accomplishments should not carry on to the child or there should be a limit to the benefit? Aren't you ignoring that, excluding historic inequities, rich people's parents didn't grow money on a tree? If Rob Rich's and Pete Pauper's grandparents had the same opportunities, but Rich's used the…
We should invest resources empowering people that have a higher chance of advancing our society.
Just like people believe that a guaranteed minimum income --or other forms of arbitrary wealth distribution-- is not a good idea because it encourages people to work less, this would be the same thing but across generations.
Re: Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong
#200Anyone else confused by the diagonal arrow on the graph? edit: > Specifically, rich high school dropouts remain in the top about as much as poor college grads stay stuck in the bottom — 14 versus 16 percent, respectively. weird comparison
The arrow basically says that 14% and 16% are similar. "As a rich high school dropout, you have a 14% chance of being in the top 20%." "As a poor college grad, you have a 16% chance of being in the bottom 20%." If you're in that ~15% of each group, you get the premise that the "poor" college grads didn't do better than the corresponding "rich" dropouts.
But that makes no sense--if you want high social mobility (and you think college grads should be paid more), you want both those numbers to be lower. The article treats it as a problem that they're similar.