First of all: I have a son. He is the coolest, smartest 9-month-old human baby OF ALL TIME. Proof:
See! He plays with books, not toys! Right after I turned off the camera, he picked up Don Quijote and read a few chapters. For serious!
Of course, Washington, D.C. is full of babies like him with parents like me. Indeed, May’s Washingtonian has an article by Brooke Lea Foster titled “The Type-A Parent Trap” (I’d link, but I can’t find it online). Foster writes:
Much has been written about “helicopter” parents…I don’t see [them] on the playground anymore. The upper-middle-class moms at Washington parks today are cut from a slightly different cloth. They hover, but not too much. They’ve read all about the dangers of overparenting and know it’s important to give kids some space. They’re obsessed with their children’s safety but don’t want them to miss out on anything…Which isn’t to say they’re less involved. Experts tell me that today’s new parents are “enmeshed.” While the helicopter parent is famous for hovering over a child, the enmeshed parent is blurring the line between parent and child altogether.
This is exactly right..and they’re not just in Washington. Most of all, these parents “try to create a perfect environment: educational, fun, structured, hands-on. Who needs to be a pushy helicopter parent if you can give your kid a setting in which to bloom?” They charge hard after the right preschool in order to set up their kid for easier access to elite elementary schools and so on and so forth until their kid is running the Harvard Crimson or the Bowdoin Orient and making partner by 35 and happily married to a Stepford wife or husband, etc. (Irony Alert…last fall the the Washingtonian published a guide titled “How to Get in to Washington Area Private Schools”)
Why would any parent put their kid (and themselves!) through this? Who witnesses childhood and thinks: “I gotta hustle my kid through this quickly?”
Chart via Business Insider & The Nation
One need not be a Marxist—though that’s a particularly useful analytical starting point for this particular case—to recognize that this is the product of the new American meritocracy: 1) American social mobility is now more fiction than fact. 2) In addition, the upper rungs of the social and economic ladder are more distant from the lower rungs than ever. 3) Finally, the top rungs of the economy now gain the lion’s share of American prosperity.
Taken together, those facts suggest that the American economy is stratifying into detached, distant classes—and that never the twain shall meet. The middle class continues to dwindle, which leaves parents with two options for their kids: up or down. Top or bottom. Market winners or market losers. Once you’re sorted into one or the other, your position is probably permanent.
With a bifurcated meritocracy like this, we shouldn’t be surprised to see child rearing becoming a developmental race. If you had the necessary resources, why would you leave your child’s success to chance? If you could give them a leg up with toddler accounting classes, why would you let them play one more minute in the local public sandbox?
You wouldn’t. No one would. And that’s what social immobility does. That’s what economic stratification does.
They subtly adjust Americans’ incentives in ways that discourage certain behaviors and encourage others. In this particular case, they drive American parents towards a less fulfilling, less enjoyable life. Our situation isn’t “natural” or the inevitable product of “free markets.” Quite the contrary. These challenges are directly related to the institutions we have and the rules they set. This style of parenting is arising amongst anxious upper class parents because we’ve built an environment that pushes them in this direction.
I can’t think of a better argument for policies that support more plural economic outcomes: rectifying the shocking imbalance between America’s best and worst public schools, insisting on a fair and democratic tax code, sensible student loan reform to make a college degree accessible to students who might not otherwise be able to afford it, and a good deal more.
“1) American social mobility is now more fiction than fact. ”
As a European, I’m amazed to read this, and it’s more and more frequent; Yesterday I red exactly the same idea on Twitter from David Sessions, I reckon, explaining that there’s less social mobility in the US than in Europe!
How about facts?
When you have a middle class kid like Mark Elliot Zuckerberg who was given the licence to build an business empire from scratch plus a couple of laptops and a little help from a friend. When you think of the opportunities given to the likes of Jobs, Page, Brin, Zuckerberg, (Gates excluded as he was born in sizable wealth).
When in Europe, we have a special program to sterilize that kind of offspring, or neutralize them once they are spotted at an early age! The schools, the Universities in Europe have special programs to literary forbid what Jobs, Page, Zuckerberg did with Reed, Stanford, Harvard.
- What? You want to take some time off after this semester, when you haven’t finished your degree, to try “something different”, and then eventually come back if it doesn’t work? Forget it. Respect the rules, the social hierarchy. Stay put. It’s our way or the highway!
So, as a matter of fact: Jobs, Page, Brin, Zuckerberg? Only in America.
Had Brin stayed in Europe, had his father believed that “…be a Marxist… that’s a particularly useful analytical starting point for this particular case…” (1) and stayed in Russia? Forget about Google, at least for Sergueï.
One more remark about this interesting article, as a father of a son who’ll be 21 next month, on his way to an MBA. Children, specifically young boys, do not identify with helicopters. They identify with the pilot of the helicopter, as the video games designer found out long ago.
(1) Yeah Conor Williams, I know, you’re joking. Still…
Posted by HR | April 23, 2012, 3:17 amAnecdotes are facts…they’re just not as compelling as the landslide of data I’ve linked above. Those data points represent enormous factual trends. In 2010, America’s top 1% reaped 93% of income growth. That’s a fact. It’s also considerably more compelling than “Oh yeah, but Steve Jobs started a company a few decades ago in an era well before this post’s analysis!”
But let’s take a look at one of your anecdotes, since it shows precisely the opposite of what you think it does. Mark Zuckerberg is the son of a dentist and a doctor. He grew up in Westchester County, one of the richest regions of the United States. He graduated from Phillips Exeter, one of America’s most expensive and prestigious private prep schools. From there, he went to Harvard.
Hardly a middle-class existence.
Indeed, Zuckerberg would appear to be precisely the case I’m talking about. He’s a rich kid given every opportunity to take advantage of that very status. That’s not meritocracy. It’s stratified hierarchy. It’s precisely my point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg
Posted by CPW | April 23, 2012, 8:44 amI mentioned specifically Brin in my comment but you singled Zuckerberg.
“More than 40% of our Fortune 500 companies were founded by an immigrant or a child of an immigrant – companies like Google…”
http://www.mikebloomberg.com/index.cfm?objectID=BF9D6F14-C29C-7CA2-F1C37E318A8E8DD1&flushcache=1
I know, at a time of deep economic crisis, wealth distribution is an issue, but I’ll say again: only in America.
And I think that you miss the point if you think that the left in the US has a central moral problem. It has a political problem, regarding the issue: get Obama reelected.
The narrow boundaries of moral philosophy are entirely confined inside the political philosophy. You have an election coming that will make a difference.
How about us, Europeans? We hardly have the right to vote. And as for the European Union, that right to vote doesn’t event exist, and there is no political alternative.
Posted by HR | April 30, 2012, 12:29 pmAgain—Brin’s case alone isn’t enough to make your argument. Indeed, it’s telling that 1 of your 4 case studies (Zuckerberg) actually supported the reams of data I linked to in the post. While we’re at it, though…your other examples are almost as dodgy. Larry Page’s parents were professors. Brin’s father was a professor as well, and he had enough money to attend private elementary schools. The point: neither of those guys lived a lower-class childhood. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs’ case comes from a prior era…back when social mobility was more fact than fiction in the USA. I’m arguing that social mobility now isn’t what it was several decades ago (when Jobs began his climb).
So, again: The wealthiest Americans reap almost all of the profits from the American economy. They largely segregate themselves into homogeneous wealthy communities with exceptional schools. The poor, meanwhile, are condemned to the nation’s worst schools and most underserved neighborhoods. There is far less social mobility in the United States now than there once was. The middle class, meanwhile, has been shrinking for quite some time now—by some measures, it’s been hemorrhaging people for several decades.
Here, by the way, is the data I linked above:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-for-americans-to-rise-from-lower-rungs.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all%3Fsrc%3Dtp&smid=fb-share
http://www.businessinsider.com/15-charts-about-wealth-and-inequality-in-america-2010-4#the-gap-between-the-top-1-and-everyone-else-hasnt-been-this-bad-since-the-roaring-twenties-1
http://stateofworkingamerica.org/who-gains/#/?start=1945&end=1975
If you want to continue with this argument, you need to justify those facts. Citing a few American entrepreneurs who grew up in the upper-middle class won’t get the job done.
Posted by CPW | April 30, 2012, 1:36 pmI’m not trying to make the point that during a deep “29 financial crisis type”, the social mobility doesn’t change. That would be obviously ludicrous.
What is the world situation right now? The world crisis hits Europe as hard as the US, as did the crisis of 29.
Now my point is strictly political, and it’s based on this political analysis, or rather, this political questioning: Why, when the economic crisis hit Europe as hard as in the USA in 1929, the crisis ended up in Europe in a war that spread to the entire world, ensuing massacres, destruction still unseen, and not in the USA? I have a simple political answer to that, but I’ll leave it aside…
So now, we are at the same point, same crisis, a.s.o.: You American, as others, are trying to figure out what could be the consequences and what could be the way out of it.
I’m reacting, for example, to the link of a New-York Times’s article that starts with a: “researchers have reached a conclusion that turns conventional wisdom on its head: Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe.”
This is entirely wrong and that’s my point. Because it is ridiculous, or rather, ludicrous to compare the US to, say, Denmark, Or if you want to go down that path, you have to analyse the social mobility of Cook county and compare it to Denmark’s. Or compare the social mobility in California and Germany, and you’ll find something meaningless anyway.
Here’s another link that’ll make my point better than I could do myself:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/05/01/europe_s_inequality_problem.html
You obviously don’t see the world as I see it. The point, about Brin’s case, or Zuckerberg’s for that matter, is not whether only middle class kids are still allowed to climb the social ladder to the top of America or American economy. My point is that only America would allow kids like Jobs, Brin, Page and Zuckerberg to climb the social ladder to the top of the WORLD economy, to the top of what could only be an typically american expression: an accidental (global) Empire.
And my point is that if it would never happen anywhere else in the world, particularly in Europe. Because even in a time of deep economic crisis, the social ladder in the US will still works much better, for political reasons.
Posted by HR | May 1, 2012, 12:33 pmI’ll be brief:
1) Social mobility has been dwindling in the US for decades. Not just during the financial crisis. Cf. the econ. data I cited above.
2) The NYTimes article I cited is about social mobility. Your Yglesias link is about income inequality. These aren’t the same thing. It’s largely irrelevant to my argument whether European incomes are more unequal than the USA’s (or not).
3) Last word is yours. I’m done commenting on this post.
Posted by CPW | May 1, 2012, 1:55 pmphoto/1
Posted by HR | May 8, 2012, 8:19 amAnother article along the lines of what my comment was about. The article is interesting because, as I was trying to comment, an economical answer to a political problem is incomplete.
This political analysis to an economical problem is not only very interstting on the subject, its 544 comments (and counting!!!) are even more.
http://pandodaily.com/2012/05/12/what-eduardo-saverin-owes-america-hint-nearly-everything/
Posted by HR | May 14, 2012, 1:12 am