[Kabal]

(10-30-2014 03:19 AM)Switch Wrote:  

I would disagree with your hypothesis that upper class kids already have it made and that there is little pressure to succeed. In fact I would say that the pressure to succeed increases as your family gains in status. I know a few upper class kids (0.1%) and you can see in their faces their pain and stress to do well, because they really want to do well and exceed expectations, and of course are very worried about failure. No parent has a kid thinking "this kid is going to end up doing less than me." All hope that their kid does better.

Rich VP at a tech company worth $30 million? Kid better start a biotech company and make 3x that.

Dad makes 300k in a corporate management gig? Kid better make VP.

Single mom makes 50k working as HR office drone? Kid better get that upper management job.

On a slight tangent, I have always found amusing the popular American expectation that:

1. Everything will only get monotonically better over time, e.g. your kids will have better absolute living standards and/or income than you do. If one takes a quick look at estimated historic GDP per capita, caloric intake per person, or average heights, it's quite obvious that these things follow/followed sinoid waves, with waxes and wanes, and are/were not always monotonically improving. Sure, the West has had unprecedented growth in the post-industrial era--but it wasn't monotonic for every country, and it can't continue forever.

2. Your kids will have relatively better living standards and/or income than you do, e.g. your kids will be of higher SES than you. This gets more unlikely the smarter/higher-earning you are due to regression to the mean--the smarter/higher-earning you are, the more likely a greater portion of your smarts/income was due to random luck, not genes (just like height). And above all--SES is not like Lake Wobegon--for someone to rise in SES, someone has to fall.

This is likely, at least in part, motivated by the legacy of America's relatively high-IQ immigration in the decades prior to 1990 or so--where immigrants saw their children surpass them in both absolute and relative SES. However, this is/was a first generation effect, and dies/died off.

For medium (or low)-IQ immigrants, their children may experience an increase in absolute living standards, but may suffer a decline relative to them compared to their home country. The archetypal example I have in mind are white/whitish latinos, who may be ringers in their home countries for intellect and achievement--but in America they join their white gentile counterparts in the middle of the bell curve (or worse) in getting statistically outperformed by Jews and Asians.