This was an whiny and awful post about "life isn't fair". The socially outgoing and confident worker will always outperform his socially awkward counterpart of equal intelligence. It doesn't matter that he came from a wealthy family, what matters is he has MORE skills. It isn't discrimination until you start hiring the less wealthy (with less skills) because of the fact that they're less wealthy.
"This was an whiny and awful post about 'life isn't fair'."
It wasn't whiny at all.
"The socially outgoing and confident worker will always outperform his socially awkward counterpart of equal intelligence. It doesn't matter that he came from a wealthy family, what matters is he has MORE skills."
"His point was that rich kids have better attitudes, skills and perceived work ethic which is simply not true."
I mean I can point you to any number of academic studies confirming this, e.g. Hart & Risley's Meaningful Differences book.
Or just go to any elite private university and compare the kids who are there during summer session with the kids who are there during the rest of the year. The only real difference is SES, as you can't apply financial aid to summer session classes, and you also can't be there if you need a job over the summer. And yet the kids are completely different than the ones who are there during the regular school year.
Sure, can you link me to an academic study that shows the average "rich kid" has a better attitude or work ethic than average kid in the middle class? Of course going to an elite university will show highly motivated students (of all classes). However, it doesn't show the rich kids who decided to do nothing with their lives because they've been pampered 24/7.
Rather than link you to an individual study, here is a link to an NYT Magazine article that summarizes many studies about how the attitudes of high-SES ("rich kids") students are more highly valued ("better") than those of middle class and poor kids. You can find all of the primary source studies via the article.
"In her book “Unequal Childhoods,” published in 2003, Lareau described the costs and benefits of each approach and concluded that the natural-growth method had many advantages. Concerted cultivation, she wrote, “places intense labor demands on busy parents. ... Middle-class children argue with their parents, complain about their parents’ incompetence and disparage parents’ decisions.” Working-class and poor children, by contrast, “learn how to be members of informal peer groups. They learn how to manage their own time. They learn how to strategize.” But outside the family unit, Lareau wrote, the advantages of “natural growth” disappear. In public life, the qualities that middle-class children develop are consistently valued over the ones that poor and working-class children develop. Middle-class children become used to adults taking their concerns seriously, and so they grow up with a sense of entitlement, which gives them a confidence, in the classroom and elsewhere, that less-wealthy children lack. The cultural differences translate into a distinct advantage for middle-class children in school, on standardized achievement tests and, later in life, in the workplace.
...The disadvantages that poverty imposes on children aren’t primarily about material goods. True, every poor child would benefit from having more books in his home and more nutritious food to eat (and money certainly makes it easier to carry out a program of concerted cultivation). But the real advantages that middle-class children gain come from more elusive processes: the language that their parents use, the attitudes toward life that they convey. However you measure child-rearing, middle-class parents tend to do it differently than poor parents — and the path they follow in turn tends to give their children an array of advantages. As Lareau points out, kids from poor families might be nicer, they might be happier, they might be more polite — but in countless ways, the manner in which they are raised puts them at a disadvantage in the measures that count in contemporary American society.
What would it take to overcome these disadvantages? Does poverty itself need to be eradicated, or can its effects on children somehow be counteracted? Can the culture of child-rearing be changed in poor neighborhoods, and if so, is that a project that government or community organizations have the ability, or the right, to take on? Is it enough simply to educate poor children in the same way that middle-class children are educated? And can any school, on its own, really provide an education to poor minority students that would allow them to achieve the same results as middle-class students?"
As for work ethic, how are you defining work? Time on task? Emotional labor? Social loafing? Intrinsic motivation? Extrinsic motivation? Protestant Work Ethic? Locus of control? Prosocial behaviors?
There are at least a dozen different academic disciplines that study issues related to work ethic, so the question of how work ethic correlates with SES isn't really answerable as it currently stands.
The issue with this study in the context of the OP is this study discusses middle class vs poor. The OP discussed high class vs middle class. The main assertion of those who have argued against the OP is that high class vs middle class doesn't matter. I don't think people have seriously argued that middle class vs poor doesn't matter.
Good point, though that's really just the summary from the magazine. The actual Hart-Risley study (which was mostly the basis for the passage I quoted) shows that the relationship between SES and achievement is fairly linear, as are the relationships between SES and the factors that lead to achievement. I don't have time to scan in the entire appendix of the study, but here is a quick snap from Hart-Risley:
You could probably say the same thing about the summer session at most universities. The kids willing to give up their summers for education have a different level of drive than the ones that attend the rest of the year.
Not that summer session is always the best course of action. An internship will go a lot further toward most careers than a few extra classes.
"The kids willing to give up their summers for education have a different level of drive than the ones that attend the rest of the year."
Not really, if anything it takes less drive. It's vastly easier to take classes over the summer (when classes are usually easier), and then do your internships in fall or spring when there's no competition. The only reason not everyone does this is that it wouldn't be financially viable.
Since when can you not apply financial aid to summer classes? When I was in college (10 years ago), the rule was 2 semesters/year.
Summer usually wasn't viable because class selection is limited. For example, Quantum Mechanics 1 is fall semester, Quantum Mechanics 2 is spring semester, and you need both to graduate.
> You could probably say the same thing about the summer session at most universities
Not really. The summer session at most state schools is like the summer sessions in public high schools. Mostly people who failed a class or couldn't register for the one they needed
Seconded. And it's worth noting that the percentage of people in the US whose parents make >$10M a year is so small that it's unlikely that anyone knows enough of them to make statistically valid assumptions about their performance relative to kids from more median backgrounds.
You'd need to know or track 1000+ of those individuals to find statistical significant in a phenomenon that's probably a few percentage points in size. It makes the article very hard to disagree with in a concrete way (since I doubt any of us know that many trust funders) but I doubt the OP really has that level of data either.
This is just a long anecdotal gripe based on a few data points.
Not a statistician, but I don't believe this is true. You need ~1000 individuals to find statistically significant phenomena in a population the size of the U.S.. Since the population of rich people is so much smaller, you'd need a smaller number of individuals to draw statistical inferences from it.
Anyone know the actual formula for statistical significance, and able to work out how big a sample needs to be for, say, a population of 100k?
Not trying to be harsh, but you apparently haven't been taught this key idea about statistical significance: degree of confidence depends only on the size of the sample and the sample selection mechanism, not the size of the total population. This is a really unintuitive idea. The dependence is something like
confidence = (signal/noise)*sqrt(sample size)
(One caveat: if your population is very small, you may be able to get away with a smaller sample size if you are sampling without replacement. In other words, to make statements about a group of 10 people at any desired level of confidence, you never need to sample more than 10 people. This caveat is definitely ignorable for groups like "the number of families with $10 million.)
You're right (and my follow up comment is wrong) but the core of my comment holds - you still probably need 1,000+ samples to get a statistically significant result for a phenomena like this and I really doubt the OP has any knowledge on that order of things.
There's huge noise in terms of the lifetime income / career success earned by any sample population regardless of background and the phenomena we'd be looking for is probably on the order of a single-digit difference.
You'd need something like a twins study to ever really know if this was true.
Do rich kids really outperform at work because of how they behave / think? Or do their parents have better connections? Or do they just have more money to afford better colleges? The OP has no evidence that the perceived better results are actually because of the reasons he cites, or other phenomena.
If point of the post is just "rich kids have more resources so they do better at life than poor kids", well, that's kind of uninteresting and obvious. If it's "rich kids are treated different" or "rich kids act different at work" then that needs to be substantiated.
The funny thing about sample sizes is that they don't scale with population size. [Edited the part where I said they don't scale "much"... they don't scale.]
If you're studying a phenomena with less than 5% impact, you need 1000+ data points to reach 95% significance.
Looks like we just replied to nostrademons at the same time, but we slightly disagree. You say that the dependence on population size is slow (sqrt) but I say there is no dependence for most cases. Are you sure you aren't confusing the dependence of confidence on sample size as opposed to population size? See, e.g.,
That's a little better. Granted, it's difficult to quantify things like socially outgoing and confident. Also, that's still not quite what the author is arguing here.
It's not about general social skills or confidence, but about specific (and subconscious) knowledge about how to navigate certain social dynamics that are foreign to some kids and very familiar to others.
I think the scenario in this article works in some banks, law firms and other places that give a hoot about Ivy League connections and hire a few proles to avoid being painted as a company full of elitists.
The article isn't about entrepreneurs, which are an entirely different type of person that makes different kinds of mistakes. An entrepreneur isn't afraid of making mistakes, regardless of his place in the social order. That's why he's starting a company instead of working for a bank.
The example given in the article was: "two analysts at a prestigious financial firm". A "prestigious financial firm" is not a startup, and while networking is important, it isn't the same networking/hustle that a entrepreneur engages in.
I don't think it would be possible to disagree more. Connections are not at all necessarily required for startup success.
I am speaking here merely from an anecdotal and firsthand perspective, but all it takes is one data point to refute the claim that condition A is necessary for outcome B.
