The Importance of Mobility in Societies | The Economics of Childhood Episode 2

[@TheCommonS3Nse]

I’m on my second read through Jacob Soll’s book Free Market. It’s astonishing how many “free market” thinkers over the years recognized the importance of government to balance out the economy and ensure everyone can engage in free exchange between individuals. They all recognized the importance of wealth redistribution in this endeavour, they just disagreed over who should run the economy and who that wealth redistribution should be funded by. It wasn’t until the Austrians and later Hayek/Friedman that the term free market became associated with this anti-government agenda. This school of thought seems unbelievably naive about the impacts of wealth distribution on childhood development. It’s like they don’t understand that those children will grow up to be the wealth generators in your society. If half the children in your society grow up in absolute poverty, then your economy is not going to grow because your next generation won’t have the knowledge and skills to compete in a global marketplace. This I has been well understood going all the way back to Cicero in Rome. It’s not rocket science.

[@dulynoted2427]

There's a huge importance of at home jobs. Especially, with the high costs associated to travel.

[@ajones8008]

this was a good one!

[@karlwhitehead3057]

This is very thoughtful but I would like to challenge many of Dr. Durlauf's claims. I am very curious about the low income students who are high achieving who are successful despite their circumstances. I would like to see Dr. Durlauf on a panel with Robert Putnam and William Julius Wilson.

[@marianhunt8899]

Those tough, high achievers are usually the exception to the rule. Like the chain smoker who lives to 90 without getting lung cancer. They are true survivor's of the fittest. They can often be very hard heart, having had to claw their way to the top through such harsh circumstances. Often they can't understand why so many others are weaker than them and can make absolutely ruthless bosses. 😊

[@MrNolife21]

@karlwhitehead3057 I understand the sentiment. But a more fundamental question is whether you build a society for those few exceptional individual or for everyone. These high achievers are high achievers exactly because they exceed the performance of wider society and are exceptional.

[@lanceblankenship9995]

The brute reality is that most kids slot themselves into academic ability bands early in life and stay there throughout schooling. We have a certain natural level of performance, gravitate towards it early on, and are likely to remain in that band relative to peers until our education ends. There is some room for wiggle, and in large populations there are always outliers. But in thousands of years of education humanity has discovered no replicable and reliable means of taking kids from one educational percentile and raising them up into another. Mobility of individual students in quantitative academic metrics relative to their peers over time is far lower than popularly believed. The children identified as the smart kids early in elementary school will, with surprising regularity, maintain that position throughout schooling. Do some kids transcend (or fall from) their early positions? Sure. But the system as a whole is quite static. Most everybody stays in about the same place relative to peers over academic careers. The consequences of this are immense, as it is this relative position, not learning itself, which is rewarded economically and socially in our society. The left really needs to educate themselves on behavioral and quantitative genetics. This "blank slate'" thinking is every bit as ignorant as Bible-thumping creationism and climate change denial.

[@karlwhitehead3057]

Thousands of years of education? That's not true. Public education as we know it only goes back to the 19th century because of industrialism and the emphasis on job training. There is a limited knowledge on the subject of education because you can't separate a child's education from that of their parents. The pedagogy over time has changed significantly, for example the current prevalence of age segregation which has been criticized; or the emphasis on memorization, standardized tests, and repeating without comprehension only goes back to the childhood of baby boomers. The current pedagogy may be thoroughly eviscerated in the near future as American literacy levels have stagnated since the 70s. There is no evidence of genes either to support your claims. I challenge you to provide evidence of it because you have just overstated and overvalued genetics far more than actual serious experts of the subject. In a similar respect, the repeaters of IQ testing can never answer why extroverts earn far more money than introverts, estimated between hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars over the course of their lifetimes. Yet introverts consistently have higher IQs but lower incomes than their extrovert counterparts. It is too acceptable in this country to recite information while not comprehending it.

[@lanceblankenship9995]

@@karlwhitehead3057 Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains. This phenomenon is relevant to the question of genetic influence on intelligence. The evidence of such influence appears strong to me, and opposition to it seems to rely on a kind of Cartesian dualism. To attribute innate academic ability to pure environmentalism requires truly immense amounts of mental work, given how dramatically environments change over the course of life without attendant dramatic changes in student outcomes. But an assumption of some innate property of educational ability fits perfectly with the basic contours of static educational hierarchy. The most parsimonious explanation for such a quality as innate academic ability or tendency would be genes. Within 50 years, perhaps within 30, rich parents will routinely pay to have children whose genomes have been manipulated or selected for higher intelligence and other attractive qualities. I do not know what specific technologies will enable this to happen, but I do know that it will happen. And when the monetary elite uses genetic science to further strengthen the unearned dynastic advantages of their progeny, locking in the privileges that they already enjoy and pass down through inheritance, DNA, and low estate taxes, what will the people attacking hereditarians have to say about it? What arguments will they be able to muster, against genetic engineering for those who can afford it, after decades of denying that genes matter in human behavior at all? What smarmy little jokes will the left-wing gene denialists tell then? Saying “eugenics” won’t ward off that future. Saying “Gattaca” won’t ward off that future. Saying “Charles Murray” won’t ward off that future. Nothing can prevent a future in which our technological capacity to manipulate the genome has ever-increasing social consequences, perhaps very bad ones.

[@marianhunt8899]

Yes, but you do not always need to be hugely academic to be a huge business success. Far from it, social skills and being street wise can take you just as far as those with impressive academic achievements.

[@karlwhitehead3057]

@@lanceblankenship9995 Unfortunately, you seem to struggle with reading comprehension. I asked for evidence, you have provided none. You just offered your opinion. I know it's very hard for people like you to understand, your opinion is no better than anyone else's on the face of the earth. The only thing that matters are case facts that have been thoroughly studied. You claim to know things but have never provided any evidence. Which makes me think, you are repeating information you don't even comprehend nor understand how it was measured in the first place. You didn't even provide the usual "a study", which usually implies I am talking with a bachelor of arts graduate because they fail grasp how difficult it is to actually know something. Not only did you not provide a single study, you didn't even come close to providing a meta-analysis.

[@violinsheetmusicblog]

If you think that the people at the top running the show are the smartest in society, boy are you mistaken. All the educational system does is select for bootlicking, conformity, and a touch of DEI.