Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion NYT opinion: No (rich) child left behind

I like to think that people are better off now than in ancient times, but none of us were there so we really don't know. Money made that possible. Money let people work out how to work togeather. We talk about slave wages now, but remember reading about when it was just slaves with no wages? They would split up families to sell separately. What we have now ain't perfect but this is just us, just humanity's best efforts with what we know now.
We all do the best we can as far as we see it. To an extent we all help other people, and to an extent we all drain resources. The "crazy state of capitalism" is because money is just an iou, an abstract symbol. The world never has been "perfect". Capitalism is our collective efforts.
There are kids starving and being blown up still in the world. I wish their countries had better capitalism, even though we have problems here and kids still suffer, the suffering is less than the alternative. I'll take our crazy inequity over crazy malaria and bombings anyday thanks.

If you're not part of the soloution, you're part of the problem. Jonlaw, take up a new hobby, studying the law that empowers Congress to “regulate commerce with foreign nations,” and try to figure out how we planetary natives can do business togeather correctly. Listen to your wife and do something with your talents. A lot of smart people are already looking into it, at least I hope they are. But the solutions you see, what you see happening, is the answers found by people who tried. Quit yer bitching and start researching and developing legislation. Peace.

I shouldn't have added my 2c when the conversation is this weird.

Eta: HK, yes, deregulation hurts the working man's wages. Honestly I noticed Mitt Romney saying he wants to deregulate the oilfield industry during his fix America speech and I wondered if anyone heard him say it or knew what it would mean for the local economy, although he might have been good for the rest of the country which is suffering right now.

Does this mean that you don't like chicken?

LOL.

There is a real gift I've come to see with many successful leaders. They are comfortable and capable of making quick decisions on minimal information and at lower confidence levels. It may also be why there is an ideally intelligent range at all.

I think the learning behind that sort of expertise happens through the same neural network type of mechanism as learning common sense I mentioned on another thread. In a similar vein (though way more a mainstream/common trait, but still important for many leaders) is to always be on task and in character.

LoL, I prefer icecream. But if the world collapses I'm eating money. There's a hippy saying, "when the last tree is cut, when the last river is poisoned, when the last fish is caught, only then will u realize u can't eat money."

I don't like being told what I can and can't do. When all that happens I'm going to eat the money.

Interesting that so many people define "rich" as an income level. Many "rich" families would be homeless if their incomes were to cease. Many "rich" families have debts (mortgages, car payments) that overwhelm their assets. Having a nice lifestyle is not the same thing as having wealth. Having a mortgage is not the same thing as owning a house (or apartment blocks or companies).

The Upper Middle Class has to play the meritocracy game to insure the lifestyles of their children because their children will have to work, but the truly wealthy are fine with the "gentleman's C." Their children can live off their investments.

So, this article appears to be comparing Upper Middle Class children with slightly more disposable income to the Middle Class with slightly less. I'm curious if this investment actually pays off in their children's lifetime earnings (rather than just getting into better schools or having higher test scores).

Is there an article on that?
Or an article on actual wealth-based educational outcomes?

Because they don't save enough of their income and don't pay off their mortgages, etc.

Of course, if everybody saved enough of their income....hmmmm.

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.

Cheap energy made this possible.

Credit and money have been around for thousands of years.

And my point was about the current incarnation of capitalism, not about money or businesses in general.

And it's taken from Jeremy Grantham:

"Damage to the “commons,” known as “externalities,” has been discussed for decades, although the most threatening one—loss of our collective ability to feed ourselves, through erosion and fertilizer depletion—has received little or no attention. There have been no useful tricks proposed, however, for how we will collectively impose sensible, survivable, long-term policies over problems of the “commons.” To leave it to capitalism to get us out of this fix by maximizing its short-term profits is dangerously naïve and misses the point: capitalism and corporations have absolutely no mechanism for dealing with these problems, and seen through a corporate discount rate lens, our grandchildren really do have no value."

http://www.businessweek.com/article...pitalism-our-grandchildren-have-no-value

... they'd never be hungry again? (Using La Texican's logic here)


In all seriousness, Jon's last points reflect the exact same thing that I was referring to. This is a system that prides itself on "smartness" but it's really a house of cards built on aggregate human behavior-- and there's no factor for "human irrationality" since it's assumed for modeling purposes that people will ALWAYS act in their own self-interest. That's demonstrably untrue right from the beginning. Human beings may THINK that they are acting in their own self-interest, and they may sometimes choose to act in what they believe to be someone else's best interests, even at cost to themselves, and sometimes for reasons which are entirely irrational.

You can't really account for irrational human behavior, and modeling the behavior of large groups of people without considering that, or making the assumption that irrationality is bound to be an outlier phenomenon... well, it isn't always. That's what fuels bubbles to start with-- that couldn't happen in the first place if it were only true that a few people were behaving irrationally.

The rich don't have mortgages. That's my point.
Wealth is measured traditionally by net worth NOT by income.