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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   30516 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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one interesting data point that I've come across is that people who grew up poor tend to lag behind, even after obtaining the degree

It's worth noting here that years of education completed is a piss-poor measure of human capital. It's better than nothing, but there's tremendous variation in IQ, non-cognitive skills, and even knowledge among people who nominally have the same educational attainment. Since IQ and non-cognitive skills are highly heritable, it's not surprising that people whose parents were weak in those areas and consequently had limited earning power do not, on average, accomplish as much with 17 years of formal education as people whose parents were strong in those areas and consequently had high earning power.

The flip side is that if you actually do have those traits, either because you got lucky with meiosis or because your parents were poor for reasons unrelated to lack of talent, your parents having been poor isn't nearly as much of a handicap as that Brookings white paper suggests.

Its probably more likely she is going to college because she is better off. Education provided her, an outlier in the community, a convenient way to move out of town, but so too would have a job posting asking for a high school graduate with good grades and a can do attitude in a world where universities remained finishing schools for the elite.

My point was not that she's doomed, but that if she actually has the quantitative skills and conscientiousness needed to do well in finance classes, she'll probably be fine and not be magically handicapped by having been poor as a child.

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