Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
the curve may be obscuring this trend if I'm right because above a certain point in the SES, it is possible for one parent to forgo income in order to parent full-time. In highly educated parent-couples, that is a real zinger, because you're cutting the income of the household effectively by over 1/3, and in some cases by half.

That means that there are households in the middle two quartiles who are there by CHOICE, not by circumstance, and for most purposes, we don't really belong there, but in the upper quartile instead.

I guess that's me busted. My DW gave up her career for full-time child care. Also, our income is down due to my own career choices. I've said before how I took a 25% pay reduction to move to another location, for a higher quality of life. I also choose not to put in 60-80 hour work weeks, in the vain hopes of climbing the corporate ladder. I choose life.

There are opportunities out there for me to earn A LOT more money, basically doing what I already do, in which I would fly every week to a new location, arrive to a half-baked project plan, with too few resources allocated, and end up receiving all the blame when things don't go as (poorly) planned. My evenings would be spent working in the hotel room, with maybe a half-hour chat with my DD, if we can fit it in. The people who work this job in my place may be making a lot more money than I am, but you'd be hard-pressed to argue that they've made the smarter choice.

I would love to see some studies done on this, but it is my strong suspicion that these kinds of choices are fairly common among the gifted, and the more highly gifted, the more commonly these choices. After all, the American social paradigm is money as a sign of success. And aren't the gifted paradigm breakers by nature?

Back when companies used to invest in research, your smartest employees were likely to be found in that department, not in the board room. And you can make the case that the researchers made the smarter choice... economic stability, regular hours, the chance to explore, and someone else is footing the bill... how cool is that?

And then, of course, there's gifted underachievement, for reasons many and varied.

For documentary evidence, I submit that I'm reading this: http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10056.aspx

And the follow-up to the St. Louis project showed that the gifted boys had not gone on to eminence... they were leading rather ordinary lives.