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You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

nytimes.com

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Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

#71

Post by ninv »

massysett wrote: post #65
ninv wrote: post #33

I do not understand why poor people have kids. There should be a guideline for married couples, which tells them that if family income is less then 90K in NYC, you can not afford to have kids, if it is more than 120K then they can have one kid etc. "Having kids" not for everyone. Kids degrade your lifestyle, drain you financially and limit your chances if you are poor. It's a SCAM.

If that's what you think, having kids is certainly not for you, regardless of what any "guideline" would say.

Yeah, like having a vacation home in Florida is not for me. If I want i can have it, i can apply for mortgage and buy one tomorrow, but i can not afford it. I should not do it.

Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

#73

Post by stegosaurus »

Why does it matter? (for reference I went to a decent university having had a poor upbringing).

Are we substantially better off in a world with 1000 arbitrary people going to e.g. Cambridge vs one in which 1000 upper class children go? (expand the concept to university in general if you wish).

You still have unbalanced outcomes based on what eventually comes down to a lottery of some sort. Even if you choose the absolute best 1000, are the next 10000, 20000, 30000 actually materially worse?

Going beyond that, surely the concept of prestige in and of itself is problematic? Should you get a better life because you have a higher IQ? Why? Do we actually want that? Would we design the world that way if we actively chose?

I certainly wouldn't... why should my friend have a shit life due to quirk of birth? Why should my other friend have a dramatically better life due to the same?

We seem to strive to normalise things that are/were seen as handicaps, like race, disability, sex, etc. etc. But we are seemingly unwilling to accept that the idea of ranking humans is broken. It only makes sense as a hack to encourage productive behaviours - it might not even be needed any more soon.

Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

#74

Post by yummyfajitas »

stegosaurus wrote: post #30

So do we keep bikeshedding and tweaking little levers or do we actually try and fix the fundamental problem? I can't be the only one who is tired of seeing all of these snippets about small parts of a large system. We need to deal with wealth inequality. We live in a world... hell, we live in countries, in cities with 10 orders of magnitude wealth difference. A western person earns 10e6 - 10e7 over a lifetime, revenu…

Savings rates: US 17% India 32% China 51%. Apparently the Chinese manage to save without having that "baseline of living" sucking up all their work. Yet Chinese people earn far less than Americans .

How is that possible? It's almost as if your "baseline of living" is actually "living high on the hog as if tomorrow doesn't exist".

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNS.ICTR.ZS

Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

#75

Post by yummyfajitas »

stegosaurus wrote: post #66
Yakimoto wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>do we actually try and fix the fundamental problem? >I can't be the only one >We need to deal with wealth inequality. Shill harder.

Reading my post again I can see why you would think that. I just feel frustrated, that's all. It feels like the premise is just so obviously silly.... like these articles are just fluff. Am I insane? Of course people with wealth do better at everything. It's definitional. That is what wealth is... better schools, better food, better holidays... bigger better more. I don't see the value in continually studying how bad…

That is what wealth is... better schools, better food, better holidays...

No, that's consumption. Wealth is ownership of stocks, bonds, REITs, and other investment vehicles. It provides no value whatsoever to the holder until it is consumed.

If consumption is what you are worried about, you should focus on consumption inequality, which is vastly lower than either wealth or income inequality and has not risen anywhere nearly as sharply.

http://www.voxeu.org/article/economic-inequality-during-rece...

Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

#76

Post by Nicholas_C »

malchow wrote: post #22

How would the curve change if the sample were cut to reflect only those students who scored in the top 1/3 on the SAT?

That would be very interesting. I would expect the higher income side to remain practically unchanged while the lower income side would move up to 50% or so, but still be far below the higher income side.

Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

#77

Post by tedsanders »

curun1r wrote: post #49
tedsanders wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but your claim is ridiculous. $150K is not the minimum living wage for a family of four in SF. Plenty of families get by on less. Here is a map of incomes in SF: http://www.city-data.com/income/income-San-Francisco-Califor... And here's a better map, though it doesn't seem to have household/family incomes: http://www.richblockspoorblocks.com/

Living wage is different than the poverty line. I wouldn't be surprised if $150k was really tight for a family of 4 in SF proper. Running the calculations, a payroll calculator indicates that $150k/yr turns into $3925 take home every 2 weeks or just over $100k/yr. The housing alone for a three bedroom (assuming everyone shares a room) would run at least $60k/yr. That leaves $40k/yr to support 6 people. That may be po…

(1) A family of four means four people

(2) $40k/year is enough money to support four people (or even six), if you've already paid taxes and rent. That's more than $500-800 per month for food/clothes/transportation/entertainment, etc.

(3) Middle-income parents spend about $7,000 a year per child (or $600/mo), not counting housing. [http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?contentid=2014/...]

Of course, many people would like families to get more than $150,000 of income, but I hope we all agree that it's common to get by on less than $150,000 of family income, as most families do.

Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

#78

Post by thedufer »

knowtheory wrote: post #41
interlocutor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is there no genetic component to this at all? I see parental income and educational achievement mentioned, but not parental genes. Kids who got got good genes from their parents are more likely to go to college. And the parents who gave the kids good genes are likely to have high income. Genetics is the most important ingredient here.

If that were the case you would expect to find that adoption did very weird things to educational attainment in families. And i can't find any evidence to assert that that's the case. "Genetics is the most important ingredient here." is a pretty extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I don't know about _most_ important, but genetics is definitely a large factor. Quoting from Heritability of Lifetime Income[1]

> we find that 24% (54%) of the variance of women’s (men’s) lifetime income is due to genetic factors and that the contribution of the shared environment is negligible

The Promises and Pitfalls of Genoeconomics[2] sees similar results, coming up with 46% and 58% heritability in women and men, respectively.

There's plenty of research here. "Heritability of income" is a good search term.

[1] https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/38881/HECER... [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3592970/

Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

#79

Post by waqf »

knowtheory wrote: post #41
interlocutor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is there no genetic component to this at all? I see parental income and educational achievement mentioned, but not parental genes. Kids who got got good genes from their parents are more likely to go to college. And the parents who gave the kids good genes are likely to have high income. Genetics is the most important ingredient here.

If that were the case you would expect to find that adoption did very weird things to educational attainment in families. And i can't find any evidence to assert that that's the case. "Genetics is the most important ingredient here." is a pretty extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

""Humans are descended from monkeys" / "The Earth goes round the Sun" / … is a pretty extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

Dismissing as "extraordinary" any claim to which you are politically opposed is not good science. (Frankly, the Sagan quote is in itself not good science until you can get everyone to agree on what is "extraordinary".)

Meanwhile, an entirely appropriate riposte to GP would have been: ""Genetics is the most important ingredient here." is a claim, and claims require evidence."

Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

#80

Post by interlocutor »

knowtheory wrote: post #41
interlocutor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is there no genetic component to this at all? I see parental income and educational achievement mentioned, but not parental genes. Kids who got got good genes from their parents are more likely to go to college. And the parents who gave the kids good genes are likely to have high income. Genetics is the most important ingredient here.

If that were the case you would expect to find that adoption did very weird things to educational attainment in families. And i can't find any evidence to assert that that's the case. "Genetics is the most important ingredient here." is a pretty extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

See: http://www.nyu.edu/econ/user/bisina/Chapter5_Sacerdote.pdf Excerpt: "Surely it would be difficult to deny that genetic effects matter. Just look at how much more biological siblings resemble each other on education and income than do adoptive siblings."

So maybe genetics is not the most important ingredient, but saying genetics is not relevant to this discussion is astounding. Smarter parents beget smarter kids -- that's not a controversial statement. IQ is heritable to a large extend. Smarter parents tend to be wealthier. (This is not true everywhere, but it is mostly true in the USA, the land of opportunity.) Smarter kids do better in college. That's not a controversial statement either.

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