Might it also be that there's a decreased willingness on the part of young persons who've always lived a cushy middle-class lifestyle to live more frugally for a few years at the beginning of their professional lives? Or a decreased willingness on the part of their parents to allow them to do that?
I'm 25, and I suspect I'm pickier about giving up my many middle-class comforts just because I'm on a budget than my own parents were at my age, even though their upbringings were every bit as comfortably middle-class as my own.
This is a very real phenom. Funny too is how much more respect people from lower-middle-class backgrounds (like myself) have for someone whose resume is littered with summers earning money to help pay for school, rathering than doing this or that fancy unpaid internship. (And I speak not just for myself, but for others similarly situated with whom I have spoken about the issue.) I really think I take it so far as to probably tend to be biased against those who have recieved significant patental support. And yes I realize this is basically class resentment and is not at all a fair thing way for me to evaluation, but it's something against which I inevitably fight.
I think I had a point but I lost it somewhere along the way...
This is a very real phenom. Funny too is how much more respect people from lower-middle-class backgrounds (like myself) have for someone whose resume is littered with summers earning money to help pay for school, rathering than doing this or that fancy unpaid internship. (And I speak not just for myself, but for others similarly situated with whom I have spoken about the issue.) I really think I take it so far as to probably tend to be biased against those who have recieved significant patental support. And yes I realize this is basically class resentment and is not at all a fair thing way for me to evaluation, but it's something against which I inevitably fight.
I think I had a point but I lost it somewhere along the way...
Please consider the double post in 3 as mere collateral damage in the great and valient war I fought against the many various error messages that were attempting to thwart my effort to comment.
2: Urple, I don't know if it is just class resentment. There is a certain maturity that is only realized by pulling your own weight for a while. There isn't any reason not to value that....
I tend to think the problem here lies with the companies, not the parents or the kids. Parents are going to give their kids whatever chances they can, whether the parents generally feel it's fair or not. Children are going to take them, and often misuse them. That's part of the benefit of capital; lots of opportunities to make mistakes. Heck, if you're rich enough and connected enough, you can drink one after another till you're 40 and still become President.
Might it also be that there's a decreased willingness on the part of young persons who've always lived a cushy middle-class lifestyle to live more frugally for a few years at the beginning of their professional lives? Or a decreased willingness on the part of their parents to allow them to do that?
I think there's some of that, but that it's not all that much of the dynamic. People I know getting parental support don't seem to be living large all that much; although of course it's hard to analyze someone else's budget.
Funny too is how much more respect people from lower-middle-class backgrounds (like myself) have for someone whose resume is littered with summers earning money to help pay for school, rathering than doing this or that fancy unpaid internship.
I know exactly how you feel, although with somewhat less justification. My class identification is somewhat unrealistic -- my parents were comfortably upper-middle-class by income and by Dad's profession, but they were also both first-generation college-goers, very frugal in lifestyle and spending habits, and Mom was always an active and committed union member at her job. So I identify with the unionized working class, although I'm a professional who's never had a day's realistic worry about making ends meet in my life.
Also, there's something gross about the way in which the NYT appears to be turning into a high-end People/Family Living magazine. There are a seemingly endless array of stories about issues that arise in, perhaps, the richest 5% of all households. Maybe that's what they have to do to maintain their market share, but it makes me sad.
I know I feel the class envy when I meet people in the theater industry who have been able to do all those unpaid internships and what not. It's sort of a joke. Everyone who has the time to try and be an actor is almost unfailingly upper middle class, with indulgent parents. The young directors I know are even worse; I've met only one who wasn't a trust fund baby.
I'm like Urple in that I gravitate toward people who I judge to have sufficiently "earned" it. Which is elitist, but from a meritocratic point of view.
5- Well, no, of course I realize it's not *just* class resentment, and that there is maturity involved in supporting oneself. But let's not kid ourselves: there's vaulable experience to be earned in doing fancy unpaid internships to, even while living (more than) comfortably on mommy's dime. I think most people underweight the value of the first sort of experience; I think I'm predisposed to underweight the latter.
(It's actually not so much that I underweight the experience as that I find it difficult to respect the person. "You're how old, and you're still taking money from you parents??" Where I'm from (socio-economically, not geographically) if that answer was much above 18 there had better be a damn good reason. (And wanting to live more comfortably did not qualify as a good reason.)
(And yes, I realize I'm likely indirectly talking about many people who comment here. Sorry... I don't mean it personally. I admit that it's a a bias of mine, and unfair to some extent.))
10 gets it exactly right, and says effectively in few words pretty much exactly what I earlier said ineffectively in many words. Except the part about the theatre industry, with which I have no direct experience.
Clementine has gotten tens of thousands of dollars from her parents beyond her college money, often while she was basically dancing around (I mean literally dancing), not pursuing a career path in a really directed fashion, and it's only been in the past month that she's finally realized that being a stunt woman and eventually opening a dance studio will never ever support the kind of comfortable domestic life she wants, and now she's sensibly pursuing a physical therapy degree that she can use to branch off into other kinds of treatment (rolfing etc.) But she used to avow, when more stable, remunerative careers were suggested to her, that her interests were only movement and teaching movement, and anything that deviated slightly from the thing she absolutely wanted most was intolerable. I think her attitude that she could have everything she wanted was promoted by getting a lot of money to do what she felt like for years.
I'm glad to hear you say that Urple, because I can't tell you how often I run into friends around my age (I'm 26) who get huge checks from their wealthy parents on a regular basis to subsidize their incomes, and I can't help but be enormously resentful. These are the same people who are not facing college debt, and who can afford to take a year off to "write". As someone who lives paychek to paycheck while I grapple with college debt, this sort of disparity sometimes makes me shake with anger.
LB, I know confused class identities. We're first generation immigrants (of the invisible sort), and while things were tight for a while, by the time I can really remember I would describe us as safely into `middle-class'. I dropped out of high school and got up to all sorts of no good, which includes first hand experience with poverty and socio-economic realitie below `working class'. I probably always had a way out, which changes things, but I've seen/tasted it, anyway.
On the other hand, now I'm a phd and so are most of the people I know (or MD/whatever). Neither of my parents went to college, and I think there is only one example in my extended family from that generation.
So I've already been in the position of making more money than my parents ever did (singly, and probably combined). Were I to leave academia, I could almost certainly find my way into quite a lucrative job, given my areas of research.
... so exactly whom am I supposed to identify with?
It ain't just what the chattering classes would call the "interesting" jobs that are affected, either (and no offense to LB intended). If you come from struggling circumstances, must work your way through college and emerge on the other side $50,000 or more in debt, and you want to be a newspaper reporter or a social worker or an elementary-school teacher, you've got an incredibly tough row to hoe.
I took an entry-level PR job in New York straight out of college. New York was great fun, but I had three roommates, I lived on tuna fish and mac & cheese, I saw one baseball game and three club shows in 18 months and I was incredibly lucky not ever to need health insurance because I could never have afforded it.
there's vaulable experience to be earned in doing fancy unpaid internships
????? if someone was applying for a post as a "professional coffee fetcher" perhaps, or "person who sits round awkwardly having his acne mocked". "Creator of large unstructured spreadsheet for no obvious purpose"? "Alphabetiser of files"? "Filler in of geography projects in binders provided by HR department"? Interns never do anything valuable; if it was valuable, you wouldn't have a fucking intern doing it.
I have never known anyone who handled CVs for a living who didn't translate "I was an intern for XY & Z" to "I sat around bored out of my mind at a desk without a computer for two months", and "I was President of the Debating Society" as "Don't hire me because I am probably a twat". This might be specific to the stockbroking industry but I doubt it.
11: I can see what you mean. My concern, in your shoes, though wouldn't be that their experience wasn't professionally useful, but that one day when you needed them they would not act professionally at all. There is a certain amount of drama a lot of people seem to need to go through as part of finding their independent place in the world --- you don't want to get any of that on you if you can avoid it.
I come at this from a decidedly warped perspective. As I've written about before, I went to fancy schools (including boarding school), paid for by my grandmother, because my mother was completely nuts and home life was chaotic. I also got sent to summer camp and on trips to Europe for the same reason, but my parents were scrimping by on $30,000/ year.
So, I'm both really privileged and have had to put up with a lot and overcoem obstacles, only--unlike coming from a working-class background--it is not generally socially acceptable to say that you overcame your mother's mental illness. In part, because people will think that you too are a nutter (or likely to become one), and that's not an entirely unreasonable assumption. So, I don't like to assume that the rich kids are all that lucky or that the working-class kids from stable homes have the world stacked against them. In general, I don't trust resumes.
Having said that I'm not sure how new this phenomenon is. My Dad's father was not college educated, because--despite the offer of a partial scholarship to Cornell--his father made him go to work, because his $5/wk salry was very helpful during the depression. He did well in business as a controller and VP for contracts (back when being a vice-president meant something.) He paid for all of his kids to go to college. I'm sure that until I came around he saw prep-schools as pampering for rich kids who couldn't make it on their own.
My Mom's family was very different. Her mother never worked, although at one point her maternal grandfather decided that she should get her own apartment (with a maid). Her father was a historian and arcghivist and did live off of some of his wife's income, although he was gainfully employed. And in the past most American scholars, e.g., Henry Adams, Samuel Eliot Morrison, had independent means. I know that in retirement my maternal grandparents lived below their means so that they could leave more to their kids, to help them out the way that they hadbeen helped. What I think this meant is that my maternal grandfather put off buying a car so that he could help his daughter with a downpayment on a house (and really who wants a car that won't last) whereas my Dad's family was used to buying new cars with some regularity, and if they lent money to their kids, they always charged interest.
For what it's worth, my Dad's brother learned that he made it completely on his own, despite the fact that he came from a middle-class background and is a hard-core Republican in Massachusetts. My Mom's siblings are all Democrats.
Totally agree with 17 and 20. With regard to 18, (a) some internships are in fact professionally useful, or at least look that way on a resume (in the eyes of many people who look at resumes), and more importantly (b) I was using "unpaid internships" very broadly and generically to refer to all those various jobs and experiences that people who are trying to support themselves find very difficult to pursue.
*Note: I spent most of my late adolescence and early adulthood actively trying to supress feelings of resentment, envy, and longing for revenge. I do not think it got me exactly where would have been ideal but in retrospect I'm not the one who should complain.
21- I certainly don't think this is new phenomenon at all, though I suspect that maybe it is beginning to involve a larger percentage of the populations.
I spent most of my late adolescence and early adulthood actively trying to supress feelings of resentment, envy, and longing for revenge. I do not think it got me exactly where would have been ideal but in retrospect I'm not the one who should complain.
I don't get this at all. Do you mean the ideal would have been to let it out instead of repress it? And who should complain?
Do you mean the ideal would have been to let it out instead of repress it?
Not sure. I find myself dissatisfied in various ways with my station in life and the path that brought me here; maybe that path would have been different if I had been more whiny and vengeful. Not to say it would necessarily have been better; there are many many worse places I could be than where I am now; and probably not that many better places.
And who should complain?
Hmm... Someone who is worse off than I? Somebody by whom I have done wrong?
I don't know about 18. Unpaid internships doing Gofer work in DC or New York or Chicago seemed to count for a whole lot more than my summers at McDonald's or temping did.
Yeah, and if you don't have money, you spend a lot of time trying to explain to your monied friends that it's not that you're incompetent with your finances, it's just that if your parents pay your college loans and buy you a car and pay your car insurance and send you money because you're still in school and put the down payment on your house.... well, this is about the point where I realize that in all likelihood, I've educated myself into a class that I have very little in common with.
And the stupid thing is, until I went to college and was called white trash by my roommates whose daddies golfed, I thought I was middle class.
I'm not particularly troubled by this trend. This may be a bridge from the American ethic of going out and making it on your own somewhere far away from home with more space than you really need (but I need my privacy!) and the Italian tradition of living at home until marriage. It's a big continent here, but the good parts are pretty much full. Well, there full of single family homes with big yards and golf courses. One of these days we may stop overconsuming, but no time soon unless compelled.
Eh. I tend to think this is all really just a case of "benefits accrue to capital." Not much way around it that I can see. I used to be more of a I gravitate toward people who I judge to have sufficiently "earned" it. Which is elitist, but from a meritocratic point of view person (though I'm roughly in LB's position), but increasingly I doubt "earned it." Either we understand what makes someone good at Profession X, and we have good measurements for it, or we don't. If we do, I don't really care how they get there, just so as they get there. More to the point, I am more sure that's how every employer in the world feels (or should feel, on pain of market punishment). The problem is that I'm pretty suspicious of claims that we know what makes someone good at Profession X.
I now tend to think that connecting moral issues of "deserving" to actual real world success confuses matters (reading academic blogs on tenure has been instructive here). And, insofar as it implies that, assuming equal capital, knowledge, etc., the people who have had less success have failed somehow in comparison to those who have succeeded (relative terms, obvs.), it's harmful.
it's a 'Styles' article, so I'm not relying on the data
But the data support the argument. The US used to be more professionally and geographically mobile than, e.g., the UK, but in the decades since WWII, that has become less true. See, e.g.
It is harder to break into the professional class than it was.
Unpaid internships doing Gofer work in DC or New York or Chicago seemed to count for a whole lot more than my summers at McDonald's or temping did.
Yeah -- while I think 18 is psychologically true, in that that's what everyone feels about internships, I stil get the strong impression that they are a big help getting hired despite the fact that people know they don't necessarily mean much in terms of actual experience.
I now tend to think that connecting moral issues of "deserving" to actual real world success confuses matters (reading academic blogs on tenure has been instructive here). And, insofar as it implies that, assuming equal capital, knowledge, etc., the people who have had less success have failed somehow in comparison to those who have succeeded (relative terms, obvs.), it's harmful.
You betcha. Absolutely.
I wonder if anyone bothers to read this blog and doesn't read the comments -- about 95% of the value is down here.
I like to see the envious recognize their relative advantages in the same breath. I'm kind of I don't know--what's the Protestant denomination this attitude is characteristic of?--that way. I used to get sick of kids at [Tia's fancy college] complaining about the privelege of the rich kids relative to them when we were all phenomenally priveleged to be there.
33-
I hate it when people judge unfairly those who are from the lower classes, for not having some things or being some ways representative of the higher classes; I've always therefore thought it (equally?) unfair to judge those from the higher classes just for coming from that background.
By the way, my (equally?) above is an interesting question. I have to go get tlunch now though so I can't hazard an answer.
35 -- true. I mean, just to be born a white male in the United States is a gigantic head start in and of itself. But that doesn't mean I'll ever stop hating the rich.
18 and 31: I think that there may be a real difference between the UK and the US.
There's a guy at my church who's just moved here from England. He finished university at 21 and has been in industry for 10 years. He can't imagine getting an MBA, because he thinks that the opportunity cost is too great and that it would cost too much money. He thinks that Americans have too much formal education and that they delay adulthood too long.
In the U.S. most professional, business employment (unless you're an entrepreneur, a geek or a biomedical person) practically requires that you go back to school.
My English friend also says that he disdains CVs where people have moved from job to job, because he thinks that these people it's hard to find people generally don't have to be responsible for the consequences of their decisions. And what you're really looking for is people with good judgment. It's the complete antithesis of the management consultant mindset where everything can be boiled down to a regression analysis.
I joked that a lack of accountability was the American way.
So, I'm guessing that the American emphasis on internships is just another part of our belief in more "education."
I think that tthe legal profession is a bit of an exception, although an imperfect one, and in that area the US compares favorably with tthe UK. Big firm jobs pay well enough for young lawyers who live frugally to pay off their debt. Solicitors in the UK enter into training contracts whiel foing the work of a young associate at a US firm, and litigators in the US can make real money from the start. Barristers make almost nothing for the first couple of years. I once met a working class guy who was training to be a barrister in London, but he lived with his mother on a council estate in London, because he made so little.
Fine, I'll acknowledge. Yes, privileged. Yes, by most accounts had a great childhood. No, didn't have a sob story. No one died tragically of cancer or overcame huge obstacles or had an above-average abusive father. I'm white.
On the other hand, my main memory of getting into my dream school is my dad fighting back tears because he was alternately very proud of me and terrified he'd have to tell me that there was no way I'd be able to go because we couldn't afford it if the financial aid didn't come through. It was like watching the belief that everyone could make it if they worked hard dissolve.
This is something I feel that most of my peers didn't experience, and the difference in debt loads and ability to, well, get ahead (I'm talking 'maybe purchase a small house someday' not 'ensure my child gets into Choate'), and while I'm not going to call it suffering, because I'm not retarded, it does build resentment for the reasons SCMTim mentions in 29.
There's a strong tie between 'make a lot of money' and 'must be a good person' that I wish would go away.
There's a strong tie between 'make a lot of money' and 'must be a good person' that I wish would go away.
Right, and not even 'good' in a moral sense, but 'competent', or 'sensible', or 'makes good choices'. Being stuck for money doesn't necessarily mean you screwed up anywhere.
I grew up in a reasonably priviliged environment, and while I don't think it skewed my sense of what's normal too much, I did take a lot of things for granted. For example, my great-grandfather left enough money to pay for college for me; I really was aware that paying for college is a struggle for most people, but it didn't hit me in a personal way. Now, since I fucked up in school and am taking longer to finish, that money no longer covers the full bill. I'm finding I appreciate it quite a bit more now that I'm actually having to work and pay for it myself.
I'm also now appreciating the value of good health insurance, since I had to pay $250 out of pocket for a doctor's appointment yesterday. This whole "real world" thing takes some getting used to.
I do think the idea that money = good person has only strengthened over the last couple of decades, and I blame that on the rise of suburban mega-church evangelical Christianity. Before, churches used to stress messages that were more "do your best to be a good person here on Earth, you may be rewarded financially or you may not, either way, your reward will come in the afterlife" but the new denominations have much more of a message of "God will reward good people with success". So the message is that if you aren't wealthy it's your fault because your heart isn't pure or you aren't really a good person.
Oh, it's good in a hard work, ethics sense. Protestant busy-bee sort of sense. Poorer people just spent all their money going out of pizza.
I don't have a house when I'm 26 because if my parents were better people, they would have taught me to prioritize savings. (Nearly verbatim.) If I were a better person, I'd own a house instead of renting. Don't I know that I'm just throwing my money away?
And the really stupid thing? I feel like I have little in common with people I went to school with despite relatively similar life histories, except for whether one had to take out loans for college or mom & dad paid the whole way.
I can't imagine how isolated someone who is actually working class must feel.
I can't imagine how isolated someone who is actually working class must feel.
Possibly less, actually. Your sense of isolation derives from the idea that your peers have expectations that diverge from your reality. Whereas the working-class peers of a working-class person would have more realistic expectations.
I can't imagine how isolated someone who is actually working class must feel.
Mmmhm. It's funny, because that kind of class division is barely visible from the more affluent end of the divide; it's perfectly possible for manners and tastes and habits to be essentially identical (of course, where they aren't, that's a whole nother level of barriers). But for someone who comes from a poorer background, the division looks huge -- you get all kinds of shame and isolation around financial issues, and all the life-planning issues they influence.
A working-class person by background who does achieve a measure of class mobility (education, if you manage to afford it, is a great equalizer), I speculate, will feel more isolated from the 'why don't you just use an heirloom diamond?' crowd than I do.
But for someone who comes from a poorer background, the division looks huge -- you get all kinds of shame and isolation around financial issues, and all the life-planning issues they influence.
Yes, also this. And: financially insecure people tend to have terrible credit, which is a whole other set of barriers and stigmas.
That's Buck. Grew up working class, but with some very close friends who were quite well off, so he picked up the college and professional job expectations by osmosis, and then half killed himself getting here.
I was lucky to have landed myself in a college town when I did, because then I had the peers who expected it of me and the college counselors to explain how it worked, and that no I didn't need to actually have thirty thousand dollars a year. If I had never moved to the college town, I wouldn't have known.
I was lucky in that my parents were very good at the 'education above all' mantra, and that the FAFSA gods were good that year, and that genetically I turned out to be pretty bright.
Where it bugs me is if I had done only a little less well in high school, I wouldn't have gone to where I did, but that my classmates at college did do as well as I hypothetically didn't do, and they were able to go.
Yeah, my parents were good at the "education above all" mantra, just not so good at the practically enabling. But I was in just the city that it didn't matter. Regional advantages are frequently not inconsiderable.
I can't imagine how isolated someone who is actually working class must feel.
I probably have more working class cred than all y'all, and this portrait of meritocracy and scrimping and saving seems kind of middle class to me. The point is to work really hard at some incredibly dangerous job, and then blow your money buying rounds of drinks for all your friends on Friday after work. That's doing it old school.
I probably have more working class cred than all y'all,
While I, personally, have basically no working-class cred, I'm now bristling on behalf of my NYC transit-worker grandparents. I thought your dad was an academic; or do I have your family mixed up with someone else from high school?
It's very hard to do a Gatsby these days. In the past 25 years, colleges have become obscenely expensive (not that they were cheap before), while the Republicans have continually cut back on student loans. The rich have gotten much richer, while the middle class and below have pretty much treaded water (or worse, under Dubya). Accordingly, there's less and less class mobility in the United States.
I'm a lawyer and reasonably well off. My parents were very much middle class: a teacher and a Department of Public Aid employee. Most of my colleagues, and before that my classmates at Columbia law school, came from more privileged backgrounds.
"doucebag" s/b "douchebag". Also this article circulated on an e-mail list I'm on with high school friends on Thursday of last week. Also, while I'm embarassed about it to the point that I sometimes mislead people about it (and I consider it fairly serious to mislead people whom I know about non-jokey things), I get money from my parents too.
I can't imagine how isolated someone who is actually working class must feel.
I just told this story elsewhere, but when I was a kid I lived with my grandparents when they were living in a very wealthy neighborhood in CA they'd been grandfathered into by rising property values and whatever that CA law is that said their taxes wouldn't rise along with them. I went to private school for a couple years while my grandparents paid for it, despite my parents driving a Honda civic with a door that wouldn't open after it had been sideswiped and sleeping in an uninsulated crawl space in the one bedroom apt. above my grandparent's garage. It was kind of a schizophrenic situation, like BG's. I felt self conscious a lot of the time, especially as I got older; my uniforms were used and too short for me, and class stuff became gender stuff as I worried about how everyone was looking at my chubby knees. Then I started going to public school after private school got expensive in somewhat higher grades, but even that was very chi chi in this town. Anyway, the point of the story is that once I went to a birthday party of one of my classmates, and his family was the richest I've ever or maybe will ever come in close contact with again. They had a property in this neighborhood where even a normal house would cost a million dollars with endless horse trails, a pool, tennis courts, but most insanely, a multi car garage where the recreational vehicles included a fire engine and a *tank*. As we were tramping down one of the trails to the pool, I asked this kid, stupefied, "What does your father do for a living?" The teacher, who'd come along, tried to shush me, but the kid told me he was a stockbroker.
Also, while I'm embarassed about it to the point that I sometimes mislead people about it (and I consider it fairly serious to mislead people whom I know about non-jokey things), I get money from my parents too.
Don't sweat it too much; while I never got financial support after college, I got a no loans ride through undergrad from my parents, which is much more than most people do. All you need to be a decent person is to recognize that someone who isn't getting that kind of support is having a much more difficult time doing the same things you're doing.
It's very hard to do a Gatsby these days. In the past 25 years, colleges have become obscenely expensive (not that they were cheap before), while the Republicans have continually cut back on student loans.
While this is true of most colleges, it's worth noting that there are some colleges that match your need with aid that largely takes the form of grants if you've been admitted, regardless of things like your desirability relative to the rest of the admitted class. I feel like noting it because no one in my family understood it, and, as I said, only the college counselors at my high school were encouraging me to go to a private college.
65 - You're in law school. There's a difference between getting help from your parents when you're in school and getting help from them after you graduate. And, even then, I think there's a difference between someone with a low-paying job getting help starting out and an I-banker's parents buying him a brownstone.
Oh, see, I hadn't even noticed 66. They don't have to be geniuses, just Tias or the like. I can't tell you how many times I heard from my mom, and I quote, "If you don't win the Westinghouse you have to go to community college. Maybe you can transfer to Berkeley after a couple years."
I feel like noting it because no one in my family understood it, and, as I said, only the college counselors at my high school were encouraging me to go to a private college.
This kind of thing makes me hyper-cranky -- you can get what you need if you're well educated and savvy enough to know who to ask or where to look. It's like the NYC public school system, which is riddled with good little special schools that your kids can go to if you can figure out the unpublicized admissions process; oddly enough, the student body ends up being drawn from the well-educated middle class. Funny how that works.
I mean, yes -- it should be noted that this stuff is out there. It just burns me that that's how the system works.
All you need to be a decent person is to recognize that someone who isn't getting that kind of support is having a much more difficult time doing the same things you're doing.
And also, not being ashamed of your situation (ashamed enough that you feel compelled to mislead people about it) is helpful. Also, what Becks said in 70.
I've just arrived on thread, I was having a procedure done this morning. Having read everything at once, I'm struck by a common theme: we all acknowledge we've had some breaks, and that luck, both financial and in terms of the exposure to what we wanted has played in our lives. On the other hand, if any regular commenters are trust-fundies, they're keeping quiet about it.
Now God knows this blog is not a cross-section of our country, but I think it is representative of our intellectual class. Why are we so focussed on the well-to-do, and their many advantages? What we have testified to here, an in-between life of chances and risks and no reliable relation between work, talent and success, is actually the norm in my experience. Why is it so hard to treat it as the norm, to support each other and help each other feel less isolated and more normal?
This kind of thing makes me hyper-cranky -- you can get what you need if you're well educated and savvy enough to know who to ask or where to look.
This reminds me that no small part of the capital that people benefit from is the social capital they get from their parents. It's not just knowing the right people; it's knowing what's available, how much or little various sign posts along the way matter, etc. My recollection is that, for example, SAT (and the like) scores correlate best with parental education, so professors' kids do really, really well, despite often relatively small salaries. I tend to think this is a function of nurture, not nature - hang out with all smarties, and you'll end up pretty smart. Similarly, an extraordinary number of the most successful people I know tend to be people going into the same profession as a parent; they come in with a lay of the land, a paternal mentor, and a larger sense of how to structure a life so that it fits that career (and, perhaps more importantly, a sense that such is how a life should be structured).
I think the point (if there is a unitary point) is in SCMT's 29 -- that we aren't living in a meritocracy. Someone who's succeeded in the US, while they may have worked hard and had a lot of ability, also almost certainly had either family money or some other significant lucky break. That shouldn't be the occasion for lifelong bitterness, but you also shouldn't forget that it's true.
68/70/73: funny how my advice would differ here. I would say: if you feel ashamed enough that you feel compelled to mislead people about your situation, then perhaps what you are doing is in fact shameful. And being deceitful about your circumstances is weak and dishonorable.
So, why not stop taking the money? Resolve to be an adult and make it through life standing on your own two feet. Unless you're starving (which if you're in law school I guarantee you're not), accept no charity. Recognize that you've already recieved far more advantages than most, and that you deserve no more. Take none. And use some signifcant part of your life to give back to those less fortunate in your community and to your world, in grateful recognition of the undeserved advantages you've recieved.
I heard a lot of 'If you don't finish that college application RIGHT NOW (mid-June for a Dec. 1 deadline), you'll end up working at McDonald's!" '98% isn't good enough.' My guidance counselor told me not to apply to the school I went to because I wouldn't get in. On the other hand, the school had an excellent financial aid night where everyone learned about the forms.
And to some extent, they were probably right. My younger siblings are bright, but did just a little bit less well in high school. The amount they are in debt/have to pay far exceeds mine.
And the reason no one treats this as the norm is that no one talks about this when they're not pseudonymous.
Another point, I guess: While the intersection of high school dropouts (or similar) and phd's is probably smallish, there are bound be a bunch of us, and I was probably luckier than most.
I didn't get any money from my parents to go to school. I did live with them for a while in undergrad (but paid them cheapish rent). Since I wasn't in the `normal' stream of doing things, I didn't have much shot at financial aid at first --- but this changed. I've been given roughly equivalent to a small house over the years in sholarships/fellowships/whathaveyou, and I can't imagine I would have kept at it as long as I did without that. I can't imaginge that I am *particularly* deserving, so makes me wonder sometimes....
77: I don't disagree with anything you say before the linebreak. The only thing you say that particularly bothers me is the very last sentence, insofar as it presumes that I'm not going to do that. Also, I'm not sure you should describe my parents giving me money as charity, since it doesn't have even the putative disinterest which I would think characterizes charity generally. But perhaps my taking money is taking charity even if giving i to me isn't giving charity.
77- And why not flagellate yourself with rods and sticks while you're at it. You can pay your parents back later by, you know, becoming successful and doing good works and raising a family and looking after them when they're old and stuff. Money within a family has all sorts of different meanings, which you're not obliged to discuss with people with whom you are not intimate. In part because other people you don't know very well can judge you about it, unfairly.
Now, now. Easy on washerdreyer! There's nothing wrong with taking money from your parents: presuming you're not demanding it or feeling entitled, and they have it to give, you'd be a fool not to.
All you owe, in my opinion, is to recognize that not all of your classmates are in the same fortunate position (or maybe they are, law students always seem to live better than grad students) when deciding whether to order takeout, check out that new expensive place and catch a show, or make tuna salad sandwiches and watch a movie.
81 - Well put -- I was waffling over how to say something along the same lines.
WD: While I think it's a bad thing that it is so hard to break into the professional class without family assistance, that doesn't mean that there's anything wrong on an individual level with taking help from your family -- they love you, and that's what families are supposed to do, is help each other out.
Being severely embarrassed about it is another matter -- you should probably, for mental health reasons, convince yourself that there's not a thing wrong with taking money from your parents, or stop taking it. But there really isn't a thing wrong with taking it.
77 was perhaps unnecessasirly stern, particularly the last line, as you mention. It wasn't meant to imply that you aren't going to do that, it was meant to imply that most people don't. (This includes most relatively less-advantaged people, who if they opened their eyes to the broader world should realize they are actually quite advantaged.)
And the term "charity" was being used loosely. And I don't think it's morally problematic for you to take your parents' money, especially while in school. That's what's done by almost everyone who has the opportunity.
That being said, I do think (in most cases, without knowing your individual circumstances) that the more honorable course of action is to turn down the money.
And I do think there's a meaningful aspect of adulthood imbedded in that notion. Being physically an adult but financially dependant really is somewhat adolescent.
As long as we're disclosing things, lest I too give the impression of having a harder scrabble existence than I do (though I'm not sure I am) I'm not sure how much money I've gotten from my mom post graduation, but it's more than five and less than ten thousand dollars, to cover getting started, education stuff, travel related emergencies, etc. Oh, and once my dad gave me $200 for two doctor's appointments. How many Hail Marys?
You know, it's not about the Hail Marys. It's about that my mother, for example, thinks of Buck as a bit of a useless slacker because he had some debt when we got married. And he had that debt because he paid for every dime of tuition, every dentist appointment, and every months' rent from when he moved out at eighteen, and sent money home for his parents' mortgage besides. The connection between being in a less than ideal financial position and being a lazy incompetent is one that gets assumed by too many people, and that assumption shouldn't ever be made without a specific reason.
You say "thinks of Buck" -- she has not had occasion to reevaluate her initial impression over the course of your marriage? It's been a couple years now, right?
Over a decade. And like many inlaw relationships, and like many relationships with my mother generally, things remain, shall we say, fraught with tension. She's an excellent cook, and great with the kids, though.
In the context of this thread: i'ts like some people feel that pissing away someone elses money because it doesn't mean anything to you is ok, but knowingly going into debt to improve you lot or whatever is morally contentious?
It is extremely easy to be lazy and incompetent, and still live reasonably, if you have a bit of money. Takes talent to pull it off if you don't...
Thanks everybody. Now that we've dealt with my issues, I should probably try to remember some stories about how much of a dick the guy in the article actually is. I probably shouldn't use "how much" there, since it means the answer should be a quantity, like "He's a lot of a dick."
The day he got into college, he went into the senior section of our school cafeteria, and said "Where's someone who did work?" Then he went up to a friend of mine and said something like "Ha ha, I didn't do anything in high school and I got into college. What do you have to say about that?"
That story didn't work as well in text as it does orally.
Not that I should judge anyone by their haircut and facial expression, but I have to say that after looking at his picture that story doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
96: w/d, you are such a bourgie pig. Real poor people don't have time to wait in line an hour and a half for the satisfaction of a free ice cream cone.
OMG, that reminds me of these horrid, horrid people Clementine babysat for. They wanted her to wait in line for Shakespeare in the Park Tickets, but they wanted to pay her eight dollars an hour for her time--this for their regular babysitter who spent like 15 hours a week with their children! That's not the main reason they were horrible at all, but it still struck me as awfully tacky to be so cheap with someone who was so good with your very spoiled, bratty (I babysat them once; one of them started kicking me within ten minutes) little girls.
I think for the kind of people most of us are, a family background of education or passionate belief in it, usually both, is more crucial in forming our choices than money.
SCMT said some of this in 75. Like him, I think of this as social capital. I come from, and remain in, what Orwell called the "lower upper middle class;" people with the tastes, refinements, habits and education of the upper middle class without the money.
And this is worth a great deal. Both my kids go to Chicago Public Schools, and for went for much of their time to our local public school. But we were very active in that school's governance, knew the teachers personally, and were able to steer, request and avoid on our children's behalf. My daughter now goes to a selective high cchool, that she had to apply to and which required as much gamesmanship and application massaging as we expect for college. She is flourishing there, and is being taught and nurtured on a far higher level than either of us were. My son goes to a middle-school program he had to test into in one of the city's richest neighborhoods. People apparently buy million-dollar homes (this is not California or NYC) to get their kids into this school. My son and his friends, exactly analogous to Orwell's "scholarship boys" in Such, Such, Were the Joys, lift the scores of the entire school, and attract the good teachers, etc.
Now, we haven't "paid" for this, but we have used a great deal of time, effort and knowledge to make it happen. This is privilege too, albeit of a different kind.
Actually, "spoiled" is the wrong word, because they were actually deprived, just not financially. They had a horrible anorexic mother who was turning them anorexic. She'd decided the older one (the kicker) was too chubby, so she was trying to keep her on a diet. The night I babysat she told me she'd had too much cake and thus could only have a half cup of macaroni and cheese for dinner. I tried to give her more than what her mom said to without using up so much it was suspicious. As it was the mom got very accusatory about how much they'd eaten when she got home.
Much of this thread (particularly 87, but much of the rest too) is giving me an image of Unfogged as confeitor -- which kind of ties in with my comment at AWB's the other day, about viewing Unfogged as my congregation. Kinda interesting I think though I'm not sure what to make of it.
86: Still wrong. It's what you do with the money your family can afford to give you that demonstrates your maturity. Going to law school = good. Clubbing every night from age 18 - 28 = bad. And most of the people I know who give time and effort to charity work are people who are not hanging on by their fingernails. When I was in graduate school and working full time, I didn't do a fucking thing for those less fortunate than myself.
It seems to me that it's a continuum. Taking money from your parents and going to law school? Good. Taking some small amount to get started in an apartment? Good. Taking money and going to do a PhD in the humanities? Not as good. Taking money so you can 'follow your passion' as an actor or a singer, etc? Meh, now we're getting into 'time to grow up territory'. Taking money so you can climb rocks in Thailand or pretend to be boheme in Paris? Ehhhhh... Taking money because you can't live within your means and you totally need to party? Grow up.
Er, um, I mean "Unfogged as confessor" -- look I've never been Catholic ok, I thought confeitor was a cool way of saying confessor but I am obviously wrong. The Catholic Dictionary thinks I probably had "confiteor" in mind, but that also does not mean what I meant. So there you go.
Until someone gives me a very good model of Utopia, including all goals and all measurable, mechanical steps that will (rather than should) determine lives in that place, I want really only three things:
(1) As gigantic a continuing GDP as is humanly possible,
(2) A set of government programs to ensure everyone, deserving or not, has a decent life, a realistic opportunity to better their lives should they so want, and the tax structure to support it,
(3) And a society with strong norms against being a dick.
Beyond that, spend your money, your parents' money, your windfall winnings, or the money you stole from the I-banker passed out in the bathroom, any way you want. Split total cash available in two and spend the first half on coke and the second on rehab, if you want. Absent that model, I'm pretty suspicious of any moral claims about success, whether they're about morality causing success or about what success morally requires.
(2) A set of government programs to ensure everyone, deserving or not, has a decent life, a realistic opportunity to better their lives should they so want, and the tax structure to support it
But I thought we were in agreement about the need to heighten the contradictions?
I'm being mostly facetious, just trying to describe my lizardy-brained reaction to "I'm going to Thailand to climb mountains because that's my passion", or "Well, I wanted to live near the frat houses, but my dad was paying for the apartment, so I guess he had the right to decide!" It's not a categorical examination of anything but my own prejudices.
A set of government programs to ensure everyone, deserving or not, has a decent life
Yeah, but this is the problem with everyone who isn't crazy; we can't even have a discussion about what set of programs would be sufficient to ensure this.
Taking money so you can 'follow your passion' as an actor or a singer, etc? Meh, now we're getting into 'time to grow up territory'.
See, that's where you're wrong. Artists in most creative fields take time to develop, unless they are prodigies, and their early work is not necessarily indicative of their potential. Persistence is half the battle. So if your parents can give you money so that you can do your work full-time instead of, say waitressing full-time and doing your work on the side, your chances of actually achieving something are greatly increased. As an alternative, you can develop a high tolerance for squalor, which is stupid, if you don't have to.
Doing a full-time job while successfully pursuing a creative endeavor is actually rather unusual. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Williams. I can't think of any others. Of the major visual artists of the nineteenth and twentieth century, I can't think of one.
I'm not, of course, suggesting that you should be Acting while your mother scrubs floors, but it's no more shameful to take money from parents who can afford to give it than from the NEA, and possibly more honorable than teaching poetry workshops to hopeless wannabes.
Okay. Pretty much thinking of the person who's spending a year partying on the parental dime but describes it as 'trying to be an author for a year', before 'going onto law school or getting my MBA.'
For what it's worth, the people I know who are making it supporting themselves (all in music) do so while supporting themselves on the side with other jobs, grants or smaller gigs.
"Wait, why is it better to get help through law school than through a humanities PhD?"
"Greater potential for future earnings."
What if you use your law degree to work in the public interest instead of representing corporations, making a fraction of corporate salaries?
I disagree with the idea that it's somehow better/more responsible to pursue careers in which you earn more money. I don't see why people who will earn a lot of money in the future are necessarily more deserving of help along the way. Obviously people should adjust their lifestyles according to their means, but it's problematic to rank jobs (or education) on a moral scale according to future earnings. (On that scale, the clueless intern who fetches coffee comes out ahead of the minimum wage earner because the intern is building cultural capital and connections that will translate into future opportunities for higher wages.)
The point wasn't that 'greater earning power is morally superior.'
If a PhD program wants you, they will give you tuition and modest living support (enough to pay the bills, but not enough to save a lot). If they don't, they won't, and they're not worth your time because they're using you to fund someone else.
Getting support from your family, when you have a fully-funded program, should be unnecessary, as while your standard of living won't be all iPods and martinis, it's probably a lot higher than other non-students who make the same amount. Getting support when it's not fully-funded just isn't wise. The job market sucks too much to go into debt for a program that really doesn't want you there and probably won't support your work.
Law students, on the other hand, almost never get aid and take out loans for everything. Accepting parental aid there is simply prudent.
The followup to that is, if you're not getting funding in your PhD, you probably won't be using your PhD to make a living afterwards. (At least not teaching in that field; there are doubtless more things in heaven and earth to do with a PhD than are dreamt of in my, um, philosophy.) So it's closer to "something I want to do that delays earning a living later, rather than contributing to it," than law school.
Or, "greater potential for future earnings" should be "greater potential for some future earnings," not "greater potential future earnings."
That said, I know someone from a rich family who does public-spirited work that she might not be able to afford to if she weren't wealthy (I don't know if she gets help from her parents), and I think that's perfectly admirable.
Composer who did significant work with a full-time job: Charles Ives.
(I got out of college debt-free, and have got some help from my parents -- the BIG thing being that they bought me a car -- though never a monthly check. And wouldn't be in academica, or would have taken a different path, if that weren't the case.)
What if someone's super-rich? I mean if you're a Walton or whatever, what's wrong with taking family money and doing a Ph.d. even if you won't get a decent job afterwards? In fact, the department might even have taken you, because they want you to give some money? Is that entirely bad?
In fact, although I don't believe it that strongly, I think that you can make an argument for why certain very privileged people ought to get into certain kinds of good schools other than just the fact that they subsidize the poor kids. If you're really rich,you're going to wield a disproportionate amount of power no matter what happens. So shouldn't they be civilized a bit by a good education?
There is good ice cream in Texas, though. There was a place in Houston that was called Marble Slab and they'd mix gummy bears in your ice cream if you wanted it that way.
I went to a Marble Slab in California. I also had amazing ice cream in South Dakota when I went out there to campaign for Stephanie Herseth on the DCCC's dime.
140: Oh, there's Ben & Jerry's in Houston, and in many other locations in Texas all of which are at least 300 miles from me. Haven't found any great ice cream here; an ice cream shop recently opened a couple of blocks from my house, but AFAICT they just serve the same non-high-end stuff that you can get at the supermarket across the street.
139 seems reasonable enough to me, though when you get into the territory of people who never will have to work for a living no matter what these things may change. If you're getting a PhD you're at least working at something.
Well, let's clarify. It's *not* the job market. That's a crapshoot even if you are funded.
It is the super-rich. Six years at a PhD program, let's say $40K a year in tuition, plus roughly $15K in living expenses... over $300K?
I think the PhD's the wrong kind of program for someone who just wants to explore some interests on the family dime. At least at my school, where I'm only tangentially familiar with admissions, they're very very interested not just in taking a smart person, but a smart person who they really want to train up. and who they think is a good fit.
Funding's a sign that they're serious, and if they're not serious, six years is a long time just to be a dilletante.
The Waltons are totally welcome to take the time-honored route of funding PhD students and do serial terminal master's.
It's very nice. It's up there with the some best I've had, but really, any full-cream natural ingredient kind of ice cream is nummy. (Creamery at Penn State Main! Whee!)
I'm not sure Ben & Jerry's has anything special in that department, it's just that most packaged ice cream is crap.
What if someone's super-rich? I mean if you're a Walton or whatever, what's wrong with taking family money and doing a Ph.d. even if you won't get a decent job afterwards?
I understand I'm waaay out of the mainstream here, but the morality of this to me turns on why exactly you are spending your family money getting this Ph.d. Are you doing it to help people because you think you can use this degree to help people or to just while away your time in personal indulgence?
I guess on some level I believe in the biblical maxim "to whom much is given, much is expected". If you don't have to expend a lot of effort in life worrying about taking care of yourself (because your needs are pretty well met), you really ought to be spending all that extra effort giving back to others. In some sense you ought to be working harder than those who work to support themselves, because you have recieved so many advantages. If you choose instead to simply flutter through life indulging each passing fanciful desire (whether openly silly things things like just being a partying socialite, or even serious-and-time-consuming desires like "hmm... maybe I'll get a phd in art history..."), yes I do believe that is immoral. It's profoundly selfish.
And, to tie this somewhat into what was said above, I do believe that art helps make the world a better place, and so if you're serious about it and not just wasting time, devoting yourself to the production of some sort of art could satisfy the above.
Having read this thread quickly (I was out earning a living today, darn it, not lounging by the pool counting the money my parents sent me), but on that quick reading it strikes me how quickly the thread moved from LizardBreath's point, which was mostly about class mobitlity and got on the issue of upper-middle-class guilt.
Hey, it's your parents' money. I suspect that a big part of why they earned it (or at least avoided disapating it all, if they did not earn it) was because they wanted to give it to you so that your life is easier. Relax. Feel the love. As noted above, being rich is not a reflection of any particular virtue, but neither is being poor or anyplace in between. Except for the very rich, you will have a lifetime to earn your own way, regardless of whether your folks helped you along the way. Way too much guilt in this thread.
On LizardBreath's original point, I think the statistics that get thrown out in regarding the decreasing social mobility are a bit misleading, but I think she nonetheless raises a valid concern. It is unfortunate that public higher education has gotten so expensive that the cost of such an education (particularly post-graduate education) can make it very hard for someone with no money to pursue it.
However, there is what seems to me to be something cultural going on too. In certain classes, there simply seems to be a greater expectation that parents will support their kids when they are young--not that they have to or that the kids would not make it without it--just that certain classes of parents seem more likely to cushion the blow of adulthood and their kids' need to support themselves financially. This has both good and bad points, but I think it is (mostly) about something other than the possibility of class mobility.
150 seems about right. But it may also be that getting a PhD in the humanities is above-average behavior for the superrich, compared to going into the family business or running for the Senate as a Republican.
I'll agree that it's partially the expectations of the parents involved. How tied to class that is up for grabs, but my parents' help ended with college. (Maybe less than that, if you count that they didn't actually pay for my college. But they would have if they could. They wouldn't have paid for a master's.)
But it does affect class mobility. I hate to use my own life as an example, because it sounds more whiny than I mean, but consider:
1) [too tendentious; not renumbering.]
2) I turned down a relatively prestigious paying internship in Chicago because I couldn't afford to both live in Chicago and bank money for the next school year.
3) I worked about 15 hours a week all four years. This lead to:
4) Not getting a chance to study abroad or take a semester in D.C. No point in studying abroad if you can't afford to see anything once you're there.
5) After graduation, I had a job lined up, but it didn't start for four months, so I worked 60 hours a week to make money to be able to buy work-appropriate clothes and to fix up the car.
6) I don't have a car. It died, and the car fairy didn't bring me a new one (and I feel it's not worth it.)
7) I'm in a moderate amount of school debt.
Is it hurting my class mobility? Hard to tell. I don't really feel like it has, but I'm sure that my college years would have been a lot different, and that I'd own a car now, if someone had been picking up the littler bills along the way.
My parents owned a house at my age, y'know? So do some of my friends.
Without buying the paper to read it, I cannot address their specific claims. In general, class mobility is not a particularly meaningful concept without context. For example, showing mobility between particular income quartiles is interesting in some ways, but it does not say a lot about peoples' lives--their standard of living, security, etc. Thus, it says little about the lives of people to say that country X is better than the United States in terms of social mobility if the standard of living in country x is neither as high, nor rising as quickly as, that of the US. That is, in terms of how people live, moving from the second income quartile in country X to the third may not result in as much real improvement in standard of living as staying in the same quartile in the United States, but having your standard of living--along with everyone elses (and hence no change in income quartile)--go up. Sure, income inequality just by itself can be a cause for social unrest, but there is scant evidence that this is much a problem here.
146 gets it right. I don't know if I really believe in the dilletante doctorate Urple cites in 150; she sounds like a perfectly irritating creature, but implausible—those who aren't weeded out are eventually seeded with the right intentions, which lead to their success, right?
Cala- I've had similar experiences (without knowing much about the details of your experiences), worked all through school, etc.
The best thing is when you run into people (and they are legion) who seem to think that your not studying abroad, et al., somehow signals a lack of intellectual curiousity.
I guess in some way it makes sense, as perhaps a lack of intellectual curiosity would be the only reason they, or similarly situated people they know, wouldn't have studied abroad in college. But that's hardly a universal truth.
And examples of different things just like that abound, which I think is what has driven part of this comment thread.
From slol's link: You should expect a free download if you are a subscriber, a corporate associate of the NBER, or a resident of nearly any developing country or transition economy.
157- Armsmasher: what makes you think the "dilletante doctorate" I cite is female? Regardless, I wasn't really evisioning him/her as necessarily likely to complete the phd, though if you think such creatures don't exist I think you're mistaken.
I don't mean to sound whiny. I'm just trying to point out that it's not just the big things that determine class mobility. I got the big things. I managed to get the college education and I'm probably going to get the Ph.D. at this point since they've spent too much money to kick me out.
It's the little things that add up, though, and they're usually invisible. It's just a matter of not going to Europe (and being 'enlightened') or interning (and making 'connections') or having a car (and feeling 'not trapped') or going home instead of going out (and not 'networking') and then having stupid people say that if your parents had better morals, then you'd be better off.
160: Nothing at all. I have a degree in art history, so I think I'm unlikely to hold to whatever assumption you're suggesting, given your specific (and slightly irritating) example. (I merely like switch up my gender pronouns whenever I think to do it.)
I switch up my gender pronouns, too. Or I name my examples so I can use a gendered pronoun without inviting stupid people worrying about what sort of political statement I'm making. ('Suppose an epistemologist, Matt, were tied to a railroad track through no fault of his own. A train, conducted by Tia, will squash him unless she throws the switch, which will redirect the train, saving Matt, but killing three innocent endangered butterflies.')
164- I hope you know no offense was intended. I chose that example because I had somone specific in mind. The general principle wouldn't be any different in my mind for a phd in economics, or anything else.
And I thought upon posting that you were probably just switching up your gender pronouns, but I was curious if there was something I had said that had hinted female... it wasn't a question about your assumptions...
re: 18 [and sorry, not read through all the other comments yet, there's a lot!]
Unpaid internships and the like always seemed to me to be a deliberate class barrier. You erect a hurdle that only those who already come from moderately wealthy backgrounds can leap, at least without savagely crippling hardship, and then you can ensure that those who get through are the 'right kind of people' -- can't have those uppity poor-folks getting a look in.
I am working class -- I grew up on a shit council estate in the industrial belt in central Scotland, my parents were on unemployment benefit/welfare through the whole of my childhood, both my parents and my sister still live in council houses. I spent the years 17/18 working on a YTS for 29 pounds a week and when I was an undergraduate supported myself by working as a cleaner 5 days a week. In between each of my degrees I've had to take a year or two off to earn enough money to pay of the debts incurred during the previous one before I can start on the next.
I used to think I was fairly comfortable with the gulf between my background and my peers in education but now, as I come to the last few months of my doctorate, I realise that all the really close friends I have are people like me. Educated members of the working classes -- people who grew up on shit council estates in Belfast or Glasgow and who 'escaped' to university -- and that, at one level, I really don't trust the middle classes as at some key levels we really don't have a lot in common.
Similar tastes in art, music or literature and a similar level of education, ultimately, don't completely trump all the other class baggage.
That's not to say that I don't have friends with middle-class backgrounds, but there's still a level at which the gap between us is very real and the consciousness of that gap is largely mine -- I'm sure those friends think that I am largely like them but in a lot of ways I'm really not.
Unpaid internships and the like always seemed to me to be a deliberate class barrier.
It ends up being a class barrier, but a lot of it is due to good old fashioned greed. Internships, grad students, etc. are a great way to get a lot of work done by intelligent, educated people without paying them shit.
Anyway, I'm not sure that it's all just being a dilettante. Going to Divinity School is not the same as getting a Ph.D, but the guy who used to own Tom's of Maine, Tom whatever, has an M.Div. from Harvard which, I believe, informs a lot of how he ran his businees, although that didn't keep him from selling it to Procter and Gamble.
I know someone who is a top-flight neurosurgeon, and when his wife was in grad school, he got a bit bored, so he got another degree that was only tangentilly related to his other work.
I think on this continent the classes are more fluid, and there is a great deal less class-consciousness. So compared with you, who are able to say "Educated members of the working classes" without feeling you're engaged in any kind of contradiction, and to know easily what you're talking about, we're likely not to be sure. There is a vast, thoughtful and useful literature on the question of class in America, but if you have read the thread, you'll have had a capsule introduction to the way most of us are. That is, 'tweeners, largely without solidarity or a way of communicating with one another. And we are bombarded with images that suggest that wealth is normal, and anything else is not. We know this is not true, and in fact defies common sense, but we are forced to struggle with this insidious impression constantly.
The problem with Ben & Jerry's (which I like a lot regardless): Too sweet. There is frequently so much sugar in their standard flavors that it crystallizes out and you get some crunchy granules in your scoop; which makes for a less-than-ideal ice cream eating experience. This is less true with their flavors which do not have stuff suspended in them -- but the stuff is part of what makes it Ben & Jerry's. Given the choice (and no option C, local creamery) I would go with Haagen Dasz. (Is that how you spell their corny name?)
Marble Slab: nice idea when done well. Unfortunately its progeny is Cold Stone Creamery, an evil among evils. Do you guys have CSC in the rest of the US? Here in the northeast (well, "New Jersey and southern New York"), they are mind-bogglingly popular and are putting parlors far better out of business. (I don't know if there's any relation between Marble Slab and CSC, probably not, CSC just took the same idea and ran with it. And did such a lousy job with the implementation.)
I was not aware there was any difference between Marble Slab and Cold Stone, but I've only been to the latter (which is I think the only one of the two in Burque, but I could be wrong). My current location has neither.
As long as we're surveying the places-that-will-put-stuff-into-your-ice-cream-for-extra-money landscape, MaggieMoo's deserves mention. I've patronized only one location, near Richmond, Va. They met my expectations---there was certainly some tasty stuff in my tasty ice cream---but that's about it.
I've never been to the CSC (which I still view as a religious designation, sue me.) here. For all I know they could be a lovely place where the gummy bears dance freely in fields of sweetened, frozen cream.
What is it about CSC that everyone finds so objectionable? I wasn't too impressed with it myself, but I'm not a connoisseur of ice cream parlors in general.
I've only been to the ones here in Utah, but both the singing employees (my god, the singing) and the people who frequent the CSC are just plain fucking annoying. And the ice cream quality didn't warrant the price.
Oh yeah, the singing. I've only been late at night to the one where my friend worked, so there was no singing. I suspect singing would have irritated me. And 192 gets it exactly right.
195: Yes, they sing as they take your order. And the other thing is, the ice cream quality is so low. The other marble slab-style place I had been to (don't know if it was Marble Slab itself or some other thing) used really good ice cream, available only in vanilla and chocolate, as a base. And what came out after they mixed in stuff was very tasty. CSC's ice cream is bad. Packed full of guar gum so it will not melt while employees who have been inadequately trained stir it around on the Cold Stone. Instead of teaching them to sing, teach them to prepare the ice cream! Then you will not have to stabilize it as much and will be able to prepare something with more flavor in it!
I used to work in the local ice cream shop, first job I ever had. Good old minimum wage. I made up for it by eating a truly phenomenal amount on the job.
Modesto Kid, thanks for the clarification on the singing. I hate to belabor the point, but: what exactly are they singing? Acapella? In unison? Improv? Is this singing some iteration of the mortifying TGIFriday's-style birthday singing?
207: Take your conclusion and move it up to the beginning of the essay, as an introduction. It's now significantly better organized. Then just finish writing it.
Chicago is disturbingly flat -- rather as if someone had ironed Manhattan.
Take your conclusion and move it up to the beginning of the essay, as an introduction. It's now significantly better organized. Then just finish writing it.
Er, if I had a conclusion, I would already be finished.
I hate to belabor the point, but: what exactly are they singing?
They all sing a song when someone puts a tip in the jar. I now have a policy of shooting the kneecaps of anyone whose hand even strays too close to the tip jar.
Which reminds me of something I've noticed the last few years. At least in this state, I cannot go anywhere without there being a tip jar. Sweet jesus, whose fucking dea was it that handing me the product I just purchased was a service worthy of a tip?
As for tips, I have questions (as long as we're way off-topic at this point). This past weekend found me driving through New England. We gassed up in New Jersey twice.
(i) Is it state law that only employees can pump gas?
(ii) Is it proper etiquette to tip these employees?
I drove from Virginia to Manhattan, then through New York state to southern Vermont, then home to Virginny again. Somewhere in there, I was under the impression that I entered and left New England. I may be mistaken, but in any case, I mentioned New England only for context (and 'cause ya'll gots so much culture and roads and states and all, it's too hard to keeps it all straight, Massuh Teo).
I should also mention the singing often involves taking some already tedious song and shamelessly placing their name in said song. Take Me Out To The Ballgame becomes Take Me Out To The Cold Stone, and so on. And when they're not singing, there's a tendency to shout WELCOME TO COLDSTONE!! at everyone who comes through the door.
General consensus among Utahns seems to be that Coldstone is peachy keen. Fucking Utah.
217: We have a thread on the spread of tipping and some related tipping norms, I can't find it right now.
218: (i) Yes; there's one other state that has that law. Maybe Oregon?
The last time I went to a Cold Stone and tipped, I requested that they not sing as I put in the tip. The problem is that the main reason I oppose the singing (other than its quality) is that its demeaning. But acknowleding that I have the option to have them sing and am choosing not to exercise can be as demeaning if you don't take care with your delivery of the request.
[Written before I previewed and saw that 218 had been answered.]
I find this (seemingly mandatory) singing to be fascinating and demeaning. But if there's an opportunity for them to cover Nirvana's "Rape Me" (Cream me?), then I'm ready for some covert CSC ops.
Yeah, you entered and left New England, but I wouldn't really say you drove through it. (Actually, I guess the only way one could drive through New England would be if one's ultimate destination were Canada.) What still puzzles me, however, is why you gassed up in NJ when Delaware has no sales tax.
I was going to suggest that in this magical Cold Stone where they take requests for Nirvana songs, it'd be even funnier to request I Hate Myself And I Want To Die, but I'd forgotten that the title isn't part of the lyrics.
General consensus among Utahns seems to be that Coldstone is peachy keen. Fucking Utah.
At least the liberal gun laws make it easier to implement the shooting-in-the-kneecap policy. (I was not sure, when I was teaching at the U., whether it was OK for my students to be packing. Intellectually I didn't have a problem with this, especially as the campus is allegedly alcohol-free, but still.)
I lived in Oregon until after college and I never tipped them. They make a proper minimum wage, unlike waitstaff, so I figure they've got no reason to be tipped. Plus, not one ever washed my damn windshield.
227: I must revise and extend my original comment, alas. Full disclosure's a bitch.
I was trying to avoid mentioning that this adventure was a sort of mini-tour for my band. It seemed pretentious, but now it seems prudent, information-wise.
I made no decisions with regards to where or when we gassed up. Indeed, said decisions were subject to the whims of basic need ("Fuck! We need gas!"). And, while the pool of money used to purchase said fuel belong partially to me, I feel no sense of personal loss when this money is squandered on the more-expensive Jersey 87 Octane. Also, we spent Friday night in Philly, precluding Delaware (and its stupid tolls, wtf?).
I don't recall if they take requests, I haven't been in one in a few years. I suppose the singing is demeaning, although once you're in a uniform with a hat mashing up ice cream you already feel like a total dorkwad. Maybe they tell themselves what I used to tell myself when I worked at Domino's. "Could be worse dude. At least it's not Hot Dog On A Stick."
By the way, I also went to New England this weekend (which is how I ended up eating ice cream for dinner--Massachusetts needs to get better food options for its turnpike rest areas). Weiner, your amla teram is a remarkable place.
234: Aye-aye on the dinner options (though I didn't hit Massachusetts, my own choices were also generally limited to rest areas). The best meal of the weekend was a Wawa Hummus-'n'-Pita thing.
Hummus: suprisingly tasty.
Wawa: still somehow eerier than Sheetz (an amazing feat, no doubt).
(I was not sure, when I was teaching at the U., whether it was OK for my students to be packing. Intellectually I didn't have a problem with this, especially as the campus is allegedly alcohol-free, but still.)
As I recall the University banned concealed carry on campus, then the legislature passed something telling them to rescind the ban. Naturally it's now in the State Supreme Court. I would really like to find some kind of happy medium. CA and NY tend to legislate guns to death while here in Utah the screwballs throw a fit when told they're not allowed to bring one to class.
Sorry, I know the thread has drifted, but I'm familiar with a bit of the social science literature on social mobility and wanted to say a couple things. I think this is all pretty standard w/in the social mobility literature: 1) social mobility in the U.S. is decreasing and has been since the 1970s; 2) the U.S. generally has less social mobility than other comparable nations (i.e., England, France, Sweden, Australia, etc). This has to do with the larger welfare states in such countries equalizing life chances. If you want cites, feel free to email.
in re: social mobility, I would just like to point out to you American types that I graduated with *zero* debt, because:
a) I did not pay fees to go to university (the very idea would have seemed bizarre to me; education is something the state gives you for free)
b) my living expenses, including booze, were more than covered by something called a "student grant", which was basically just free money from the government.
no, I do not feel guilty, although I hear the bastards have changed the law to make it a less sweet deal these days.
clearing up a few other things:
1. Internships, grad students, etc. are a great way to get a lot of work done by intelligent, educated people without paying them shit.
yes I too would like to believe in these intelligent educated interns and grad students, but actually we all know that the unpaid thing is simply because interns are so damn useless that nobody can bear the thought that you are actually paying them money.
2. Composers with second jobs; I'll see your Ives and raise you Alexander Borodin.
3. Ice cream? Good god, connoissuers of ice cream, that I should live to see this day. You do realise that this stuff is *frozen* and that therefore what you think are subtleties of flavour are actually variations in the fat content?
4. god don't be such bloody puritans. You can go stark raving mad worrying about what someone else is earning and what they do with their money.
Chicago is disturbingly flat -- rather as if someone had ironed Manhattan.
We traveled very little when I was a kid and it was not until sometime in my teenage years that I realized that flatness is not the usual condition of the world. If I'd grown up in, say, San Francisco, no doubt I'd have had a much different perspective.
my mother, for example, thinks of Buck as a bit of a useless slacker because he had some debt when we got married.
That's bizarre. I guess by that standard someone like Dubya qualifies as really industrious.
yes I too would like to believe in these intelligent educated interns and grad students, but actually we all know that the unpaid thing is simply because interns are so damn useless that nobody can bear the thought that you are actually paying them money.
I don't know what field you're in, but in mine, chem/biochem, this is completely wrong. Grad students and undergrads working as lab assistants do a hell of a lot of difficult work crucial to success of the project.
Part of my undergraduate degree was covered by a grant but they'd already starting cutting the amount each year. I think it was just over 1000 per year when I finished -- which is not enough to live off, even in Glasgow. No fees though.
Graduate study was easier and harder -- fully funded for masters but only partly funded (2 out of 4 years) for doctorate. Living in oxford with no maintenance grant for 2 years = a LOT of paid work along with the study to keep body and soul together.
242 - the nature of internships depends a lot on the field.
for example, although I never applied for an unpaid internship at Harper's magazine because it pissed me off to no end that someone would expect me to work for them and live in New York on $0 income, it was made very clear to me that if I did such a thing, I would get a good job in the magazine industry afterwards.
Sure enough, 2 friends of mine whose parents do support them (unlike mine) took the unpaid Harper's internship, did plenty of editing while there, and they both now have good jobs in quality magazine journaldom in New York.
Unpaid internship is expected in industries that don't have high profit margins like publishing or the arts...and it's the only way to get jobs in other popular sectors like certain kinds of environmental work.
industries that don't have high profit margins like publishing
I'm an ivory-tower academic but these don't look too shabby; and I hear that one of the big stories about publishing is the push for ever higher profit margins. Though it may be that one of the reasons for the profit margins is that there's a big supply of unpaid interns and underpaid low-level workers, since publishing is considered a glamorous job (and then we could get into the pink-collar job issue).
I did consider going into publishing, but unpaid work after college was not an option (except for a period when I was living in my parents' house while waiting to start grad school and volunteering at the ACLU, but, though that was something I could do because my parents were well off, it wasn't meant as a career move). I don't know if the unpaid internship thing wound up being a barrier; but when I was working as a copy editor in Boston, I wasn't getting paid that much more than I did as a grad student. Fortunately this was pre-tech boom so I could afford to live in Somerville on that salary.
I haven't read the rest of the thread, but I just wanted to gripe about the thing that annoys me, which I guess is related to what bothers LB--people who are so casually unconscious that anyone ever has to work harder than them, or doesn't automatically get the stuff they get. One friend of mine expresses some surprise that I was having a hard time finding a job after graduating, but she was working at the UN, a job she'd gotten through her internship, which she got through her father's connections. And then another ex-friend of mine suggested I take a writing class at the Y, and I said, in a totally non-accusatory way, "I don't have $300 for a writing class [implied: and my mom doesn't have the money to satisfy my every whim]" and she made the whole interaction into how she felt guilty about not having class consciousness and then I had to comfort and reassure her. Typing this out is making me glad I'm not her friend anymore.
I also have a paper to write that I think I'm going to stay up tonight to do. I'm considering stimulants.
Coffee and cigarettes work for me. Especially once you reach that golden hour when extreme tiredness and stimulants work in harmony to create a brief period of lucid clarity circa 3-4am.
Might it also be that there's a decreased willingness on the part of young persons who've always lived a cushy middle-class lifestyle to live more frugally for a few years at the beginning of their professional lives? Or a decreased willingness on the part of their parents to allow them to do that?
I'm 25, and I suspect I'm pickier about giving up my many middle-class comforts just because I'm on a budget than my own parents were at my age, even though their upbringings were every bit as comfortably middle-class as my own.
Posted by Chris Brody | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:49 AM
This is a very real phenom. Funny too is how much more respect people from lower-middle-class backgrounds (like myself) have for someone whose resume is littered with summers earning money to help pay for school, rathering than doing this or that fancy unpaid internship. (And I speak not just for myself, but for others similarly situated with whom I have spoken about the issue.) I really think I take it so far as to probably tend to be biased against those who have recieved significant patental support. And yes I realize this is basically class resentment and is not at all a fair thing way for me to evaluation, but it's something against which I inevitably fight.
I think I had a point but I lost it somewhere along the way...
Posted by Urple | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:50 AM
This is a very real phenom. Funny too is how much more respect people from lower-middle-class backgrounds (like myself) have for someone whose resume is littered with summers earning money to help pay for school, rathering than doing this or that fancy unpaid internship. (And I speak not just for myself, but for others similarly situated with whom I have spoken about the issue.) I really think I take it so far as to probably tend to be biased against those who have recieved significant patental support. And yes I realize this is basically class resentment and is not at all a fair thing way for me to evaluation, but it's something against which I inevitably fight.
I think I had a point but I lost it somewhere along the way...
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:50 AM
Please consider the double post in 3 as mere collateral damage in the great and valient war I fought against the many various error messages that were attempting to thwart my effort to comment.
Posted by Urple | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:53 AM
2: Urple, I don't know if it is just class resentment. There is a certain maturity that is only realized by pulling your own weight for a while. There isn't any reason not to value that....
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:54 AM
Speaking of dimes, let me discreetly direct the Mineshaft's attention here. Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Posted by Paul | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:57 AM
I tend to think the problem here lies with the companies, not the parents or the kids. Parents are going to give their kids whatever chances they can, whether the parents generally feel it's fair or not. Children are going to take them, and often misuse them. That's part of the benefit of capital; lots of opportunities to make mistakes. Heck, if you're rich enough and connected enough, you can drink one after another till you're 40 and still become President.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:57 AM
Might it also be that there's a decreased willingness on the part of young persons who've always lived a cushy middle-class lifestyle to live more frugally for a few years at the beginning of their professional lives? Or a decreased willingness on the part of their parents to allow them to do that?
I think there's some of that, but that it's not all that much of the dynamic. People I know getting parental support don't seem to be living large all that much; although of course it's hard to analyze someone else's budget.
Funny too is how much more respect people from lower-middle-class backgrounds (like myself) have for someone whose resume is littered with summers earning money to help pay for school, rathering than doing this or that fancy unpaid internship.
I know exactly how you feel, although with somewhat less justification. My class identification is somewhat unrealistic -- my parents were comfortably upper-middle-class by income and by Dad's profession, but they were also both first-generation college-goers, very frugal in lifestyle and spending habits, and Mom was always an active and committed union member at her job. So I identify with the unionized working class, although I'm a professional who's never had a day's realistic worry about making ends meet in my life.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:59 AM
Also, there's something gross about the way in which the NYT appears to be turning into a high-end People/Family Living magazine. There are a seemingly endless array of stories about issues that arise in, perhaps, the richest 5% of all households. Maybe that's what they have to do to maintain their market share, but it makes me sad.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:02 AM
I know I feel the class envy when I meet people in the theater industry who have been able to do all those unpaid internships and what not. It's sort of a joke. Everyone who has the time to try and be an actor is almost unfailingly upper middle class, with indulgent parents. The young directors I know are even worse; I've met only one who wasn't a trust fund baby.
I'm like Urple in that I gravitate toward people who I judge to have sufficiently "earned" it. Which is elitist, but from a meritocratic point of view.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:02 AM
5- Well, no, of course I realize it's not *just* class resentment, and that there is maturity involved in supporting oneself. But let's not kid ourselves: there's vaulable experience to be earned in doing fancy unpaid internships to, even while living (more than) comfortably on mommy's dime. I think most people underweight the value of the first sort of experience; I think I'm predisposed to underweight the latter.
(It's actually not so much that I underweight the experience as that I find it difficult to respect the person. "You're how old, and you're still taking money from you parents??" Where I'm from (socio-economically, not geographically) if that answer was much above 18 there had better be a damn good reason. (And wanting to live more comfortably did not qualify as a good reason.)
(And yes, I realize I'm likely indirectly talking about many people who comment here. Sorry... I don't mean it personally. I admit that it's a a bias of mine, and unfair to some extent.))
Posted by Urple | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:06 AM
Also, there's something gross about the way in which the NYT appears to be turning into a high-end People/Family Living magazine.
I couldn't agree more. The generic person, to the Times, is someone who makes at least six figures, or expects to.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:07 AM
10 gets it exactly right, and says effectively in few words pretty much exactly what I earlier said ineffectively in many words. Except the part about the theatre industry, with which I have no direct experience.
Posted by Urple | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:10 AM
Clementine has gotten tens of thousands of dollars from her parents beyond her college money, often while she was basically dancing around (I mean literally dancing), not pursuing a career path in a really directed fashion, and it's only been in the past month that she's finally realized that being a stunt woman and eventually opening a dance studio will never ever support the kind of comfortable domestic life she wants, and now she's sensibly pursuing a physical therapy degree that she can use to branch off into other kinds of treatment (rolfing etc.) But she used to avow, when more stable, remunerative careers were suggested to her, that her interests were only movement and teaching movement, and anything that deviated slightly from the thing she absolutely wanted most was intolerable. I think her attitude that she could have everything she wanted was promoted by getting a lot of money to do what she felt like for years.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:11 AM
I'm glad to hear you say that Urple, because I can't tell you how often I run into friends around my age (I'm 26) who get huge checks from their wealthy parents on a regular basis to subsidize their incomes, and I can't help but be enormously resentful. These are the same people who are not facing college debt, and who can afford to take a year off to "write". As someone who lives paychek to paycheck while I grapple with college debt, this sort of disparity sometimes makes me shake with anger.
Posted by Sommer | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:13 AM
LB, I know confused class identities. We're first generation immigrants (of the invisible sort), and while things were tight for a while, by the time I can really remember I would describe us as safely into `middle-class'. I dropped out of high school and got up to all sorts of no good, which includes first hand experience with poverty and socio-economic realitie below `working class'. I probably always had a way out, which changes things, but I've seen/tasted it, anyway.
On the other hand, now I'm a phd and so are most of the people I know (or MD/whatever). Neither of my parents went to college, and I think there is only one example in my extended family from that generation.
So I've already been in the position of making more money than my parents ever did (singly, and probably combined). Were I to leave academia, I could almost certainly find my way into quite a lucrative job, given my areas of research.
... so exactly whom am I supposed to identify with?
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:14 AM
It ain't just what the chattering classes would call the "interesting" jobs that are affected, either (and no offense to LB intended). If you come from struggling circumstances, must work your way through college and emerge on the other side $50,000 or more in debt, and you want to be a newspaper reporter or a social worker or an elementary-school teacher, you've got an incredibly tough row to hoe.
I took an entry-level PR job in New York straight out of college. New York was great fun, but I had three roommates, I lived on tuna fish and mac & cheese, I saw one baseball game and three club shows in 18 months and I was incredibly lucky not ever to need health insurance because I could never have afforded it.
Posted by Lex | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:15 AM
there's vaulable experience to be earned in doing fancy unpaid internships
????? if someone was applying for a post as a "professional coffee fetcher" perhaps, or "person who sits round awkwardly having his acne mocked". "Creator of large unstructured spreadsheet for no obvious purpose"? "Alphabetiser of files"? "Filler in of geography projects in binders provided by HR department"? Interns never do anything valuable; if it was valuable, you wouldn't have a fucking intern doing it.
I have never known anyone who handled CVs for a living who didn't translate "I was an intern for XY & Z" to "I sat around bored out of my mind at a desk without a computer for two months", and "I was President of the Debating Society" as "Don't hire me because I am probably a twat". This might be specific to the stockbroking industry but I doubt it.
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:19 AM
Sommer, I know I channel my anger and resentment into motivation to write more, just so I can show all those motherfuckers! All of them!
Resentment is a vastly underrated creative phenomenon, in my experience. Revenge, too! That's a good one.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:20 AM
11: I can see what you mean. My concern, in your shoes, though wouldn't be that their experience wasn't professionally useful, but that one day when you needed them they would not act professionally at all. There is a certain amount of drama a lot of people seem to need to go through as part of finding their independent place in the world --- you don't want to get any of that on you if you can avoid it.
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:21 AM
I come at this from a decidedly warped perspective. As I've written about before, I went to fancy schools (including boarding school), paid for by my grandmother, because my mother was completely nuts and home life was chaotic. I also got sent to summer camp and on trips to Europe for the same reason, but my parents were scrimping by on $30,000/ year.
So, I'm both really privileged and have had to put up with a lot and overcoem obstacles, only--unlike coming from a working-class background--it is not generally socially acceptable to say that you overcame your mother's mental illness. In part, because people will think that you too are a nutter (or likely to become one), and that's not an entirely unreasonable assumption. So, I don't like to assume that the rich kids are all that lucky or that the working-class kids from stable homes have the world stacked against them. In general, I don't trust resumes.
Having said that I'm not sure how new this phenomenon is. My Dad's father was not college educated, because--despite the offer of a partial scholarship to Cornell--his father made him go to work, because his $5/wk salry was very helpful during the depression. He did well in business as a controller and VP for contracts (back when being a vice-president meant something.) He paid for all of his kids to go to college. I'm sure that until I came around he saw prep-schools as pampering for rich kids who couldn't make it on their own.
My Mom's family was very different. Her mother never worked, although at one point her maternal grandfather decided that she should get her own apartment (with a maid). Her father was a historian and arcghivist and did live off of some of his wife's income, although he was gainfully employed. And in the past most American scholars, e.g., Henry Adams, Samuel Eliot Morrison, had independent means. I know that in retirement my maternal grandparents lived below their means so that they could leave more to their kids, to help them out the way that they hadbeen helped. What I think this meant is that my maternal grandfather put off buying a car so that he could help his daughter with a downpayment on a house (and really who wants a car that won't last) whereas my Dad's family was used to buying new cars with some regularity, and if they lent money to their kids, they always charged interest.
For what it's worth, my Dad's brother learned that he made it completely on his own, despite the fact that he came from a middle-class background and is a hard-core Republican in Massachusetts. My Mom's siblings are all Democrats.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:25 AM
Totally agree with 17 and 20. With regard to 18, (a) some internships are in fact professionally useful, or at least look that way on a resume (in the eyes of many people who look at resumes), and more importantly (b) I was using "unpaid internships" very broadly and generically to refer to all those various jobs and experiences that people who are trying to support themselves find very difficult to pursue.
Posted by Urple | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:32 AM
19: Don't forget envy.*
*Note: I spent most of my late adolescence and early adulthood actively trying to supress feelings of resentment, envy, and longing for revenge. I do not think it got me exactly where would have been ideal but in retrospect I'm not the one who should complain.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:33 AM
21- I certainly don't think this is new phenomenon at all, though I suspect that maybe it is beginning to involve a larger percentage of the populations.
Posted by Urple | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:35 AM
I spent most of my late adolescence and early adulthood actively trying to supress feelings of resentment, envy, and longing for revenge. I do not think it got me exactly where would have been ideal but in retrospect I'm not the one who should complain.
I don't get this at all. Do you mean the ideal would have been to let it out instead of repress it? And who should complain?
Posted by Urple | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:38 AM
Do you mean the ideal would have been to let it out instead of repress it?
Not sure. I find myself dissatisfied in various ways with my station in life and the path that brought me here; maybe that path would have been different if I had been more whiny and vengeful. Not to say it would necessarily have been better; there are many many worse places I could be than where I am now; and probably not that many better places.
And who should complain?
Hmm... Someone who is worse off than I? Somebody by whom I have done wrong?
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:45 AM
I don't know about 18. Unpaid internships doing Gofer work in DC or New York or Chicago seemed to count for a whole lot more than my summers at McDonald's or temping did.
Yeah, and if you don't have money, you spend a lot of time trying to explain to your monied friends that it's not that you're incompetent with your finances, it's just that if your parents pay your college loans and buy you a car and pay your car insurance and send you money because you're still in school and put the down payment on your house.... well, this is about the point where I realize that in all likelihood, I've educated myself into a class that I have very little in common with.
And the stupid thing is, until I went to college and was called white trash by my roommates whose daddies golfed, I thought I was middle class.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:45 AM
I'm not particularly troubled by this trend. This may be a bridge from the American ethic of going out and making it on your own somewhere far away from home with more space than you really need (but I need my privacy!) and the Italian tradition of living at home until marriage. It's a big continent here, but the good parts are pretty much full. Well, there full of single family homes with big yards and golf courses. One of these days we may stop overconsuming, but no time soon unless compelled.
Posted by Mo MacArbie | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:46 AM
Eh. I tend to think this is all really just a case of "benefits accrue to capital." Not much way around it that I can see. I used to be more of a I gravitate toward people who I judge to have sufficiently "earned" it. Which is elitist, but from a meritocratic point of view person (though I'm roughly in LB's position), but increasingly I doubt "earned it." Either we understand what makes someone good at Profession X, and we have good measurements for it, or we don't. If we do, I don't really care how they get there, just so as they get there. More to the point, I am more sure that's how every employer in the world feels (or should feel, on pain of market punishment). The problem is that I'm pretty suspicious of claims that we know what makes someone good at Profession X.
I now tend to think that connecting moral issues of "deserving" to actual real world success confuses matters (reading academic blogs on tenure has been instructive here). And, insofar as it implies that, assuming equal capital, knowledge, etc., the people who have had less success have failed somehow in comparison to those who have succeeded (relative terms, obvs.), it's harmful.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:48 AM
it's a 'Styles' article, so I'm not relying on the data
But the data support the argument. The US used to be more professionally and geographically mobile than, e.g., the UK, but in the decades since WWII, that has become less true. See, e.g.
It is harder to break into the professional class than it was.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:49 AM
Unpaid internships doing Gofer work in DC or New York or Chicago seemed to count for a whole lot more than my summers at McDonald's or temping did.
Yeah -- while I think 18 is psychologically true, in that that's what everyone feels about internships, I stil get the strong impression that they are a big help getting hired despite the fact that people know they don't necessarily mean much in terms of actual experience.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:51 AM
I now tend to think that connecting moral issues of "deserving" to actual real world success confuses matters (reading academic blogs on tenure has been instructive here). And, insofar as it implies that, assuming equal capital, knowledge, etc., the people who have had less success have failed somehow in comparison to those who have succeeded (relative terms, obvs.), it's harmful.
You betcha. Absolutely.
I wonder if anyone bothers to read this blog and doesn't read the comments -- about 95% of the value is down here.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:52 AM
What's wrong with class resentment?
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:53 AM
Annoying tendency for blood to flow in streets like borscht when it comes to a head?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:56 AM
I like to see the envious recognize their relative advantages in the same breath. I'm kind of I don't know--what's the Protestant denomination this attitude is characteristic of?--that way. I used to get sick of kids at [Tia's fancy college] complaining about the privelege of the rich kids relative to them when we were all phenomenally priveleged to be there.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:59 AM
33-
I hate it when people judge unfairly those who are from the lower classes, for not having some things or being some ways representative of the higher classes; I've always therefore thought it (equally?) unfair to judge those from the higher classes just for coming from that background.
By the way, my (equally?) above is an interesting question. I have to go get tlunch now though so I can't hazard an answer.
Posted by Urple | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:00 AM
35 -- true. I mean, just to be born a white male in the United States is a gigantic head start in and of itself. But that doesn't mean I'll ever stop hating the rich.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:03 AM
18 and 31: I think that there may be a real difference between the UK and the US.
There's a guy at my church who's just moved here from England. He finished university at 21 and has been in industry for 10 years. He can't imagine getting an MBA, because he thinks that the opportunity cost is too great and that it would cost too much money. He thinks that Americans have too much formal education and that they delay adulthood too long.
In the U.S. most professional, business employment (unless you're an entrepreneur, a geek or a biomedical person) practically requires that you go back to school.
My English friend also says that he disdains CVs where people have moved from job to job, because he thinks that these people it's hard to find people generally don't have to be responsible for the consequences of their decisions. And what you're really looking for is people with good judgment. It's the complete antithesis of the management consultant mindset where everything can be boiled down to a regression analysis.
I joked that a lack of accountability was the American way.
So, I'm guessing that the American emphasis on internships is just another part of our belief in more "education."
I think that tthe legal profession is a bit of an exception, although an imperfect one, and in that area the US compares favorably with tthe UK. Big firm jobs pay well enough for young lawyers who live frugally to pay off their debt. Solicitors in the UK enter into training contracts whiel foing the work of a young associate at a US firm, and litigators in the US can make real money from the start. Barristers make almost nothing for the first couple of years. I once met a working class guy who was training to be a barrister in London, but he lived with his mother on a council estate in London, because he made so little.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:06 AM
37: OK, Joe D should now feel free to marry Becks and be fruitful and multiply again. But only if they promise to raise the kids as anarchists.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:06 AM
I wonder if anyone bothers to read this blog and doesn't read the comments
I know people comment without reading the comments.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:08 AM
Woo hoo!
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:09 AM
Urple, your "equally" is wrong. Being privileged gives you more options, so you should be held more responsible for what you do.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:09 AM
Fine, I'll acknowledge. Yes, privileged. Yes, by most accounts had a great childhood. No, didn't have a sob story. No one died tragically of cancer or overcame huge obstacles or had an above-average abusive father. I'm white.
On the other hand, my main memory of getting into my dream school is my dad fighting back tears because he was alternately very proud of me and terrified he'd have to tell me that there was no way I'd be able to go because we couldn't afford it if the financial aid didn't come through. It was like watching the belief that everyone could make it if they worked hard dissolve.
This is something I feel that most of my peers didn't experience, and the difference in debt loads and ability to, well, get ahead (I'm talking 'maybe purchase a small house someday' not 'ensure my child gets into Choate'), and while I'm not going to call it suffering, because I'm not retarded, it does build resentment for the reasons SCMTim mentions in 29.
There's a strong tie between 'make a lot of money' and 'must be a good person' that I wish would go away.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:12 AM
There's a strong tie between 'make a lot of money' and 'must be a good person' that I wish would go away.
Right, and not even 'good' in a moral sense, but 'competent', or 'sensible', or 'makes good choices'. Being stuck for money doesn't necessarily mean you screwed up anywhere.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:20 AM
Being stuck for money doesn't necessarily mean you screwed up anywhere.
And vice versa.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:25 AM
I grew up in a reasonably priviliged environment, and while I don't think it skewed my sense of what's normal too much, I did take a lot of things for granted. For example, my great-grandfather left enough money to pay for college for me; I really was aware that paying for college is a struggle for most people, but it didn't hit me in a personal way. Now, since I fucked up in school and am taking longer to finish, that money no longer covers the full bill. I'm finding I appreciate it quite a bit more now that I'm actually having to work and pay for it myself.
I'm also now appreciating the value of good health insurance, since I had to pay $250 out of pocket for a doctor's appointment yesterday. This whole "real world" thing takes some getting used to.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:32 AM
I do think the idea that money = good person has only strengthened over the last couple of decades, and I blame that on the rise of suburban mega-church evangelical Christianity. Before, churches used to stress messages that were more "do your best to be a good person here on Earth, you may be rewarded financially or you may not, either way, your reward will come in the afterlife" but the new denominations have much more of a message of "God will reward good people with success". So the message is that if you aren't wealthy it's your fault because your heart isn't pure or you aren't really a good person.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:33 AM
Oh, it's good in a hard work, ethics sense. Protestant busy-bee sort of sense. Poorer people just spent all their money going out of pizza.
I don't have a house when I'm 26 because if my parents were better people, they would have taught me to prioritize savings. (Nearly verbatim.) If I were a better person, I'd own a house instead of renting. Don't I know that I'm just throwing my money away?
And the really stupid thing? I feel like I have little in common with people I went to school with despite relatively similar life histories, except for whether one had to take out loans for college or mom & dad paid the whole way.
I can't imagine how isolated someone who is actually working class must feel.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:35 AM
I can't imagine how isolated someone who is actually working class must feel.
Possibly less, actually. Your sense of isolation derives from the idea that your peers have expectations that diverge from your reality. Whereas the working-class peers of a working-class person would have more realistic expectations.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:38 AM
I can't imagine how isolated someone who is actually working class must feel.
Mmmhm. It's funny, because that kind of class division is barely visible from the more affluent end of the divide; it's perfectly possible for manners and tastes and habits to be essentially identical (of course, where they aren't, that's a whole nother level of barriers). But for someone who comes from a poorer background, the division looks huge -- you get all kinds of shame and isolation around financial issues, and all the life-planning issues they influence.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:40 AM
It's when you try to pull a Gatsby that the problems start.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:41 AM
Sorry, should have clarified:
A working-class person by background who does achieve a measure of class mobility (education, if you manage to afford it, is a great equalizer), I speculate, will feel more isolated from the 'why don't you just use an heirloom diamond?' crowd than I do.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:41 AM
But for someone who comes from a poorer background, the division looks huge -- you get all kinds of shame and isolation around financial issues, and all the life-planning issues they influence.
Yes, also this. And: financially insecure people tend to have terrible credit, which is a whole other set of barriers and stigmas.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:42 AM
That's Buck. Grew up working class, but with some very close friends who were quite well off, so he picked up the college and professional job expectations by osmosis, and then half killed himself getting here.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:43 AM
54 to 51.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:44 AM
It's when you try to pull a Gatsby that the problems start.
Time cannot wither, nor custom stale, my visceral hatred of the Buchanans.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:46 AM
I was lucky to have landed myself in a college town when I did, because then I had the peers who expected it of me and the college counselors to explain how it worked, and that no I didn't need to actually have thirty thousand dollars a year. If I had never moved to the college town, I wouldn't have known.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:47 AM
I was lucky in that my parents were very good at the 'education above all' mantra, and that the FAFSA gods were good that year, and that genetically I turned out to be pretty bright.
Where it bugs me is if I had done only a little less well in high school, I wouldn't have gone to where I did, but that my classmates at college did do as well as I hypothetically didn't do, and they were able to go.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:52 AM
Yeah, my parents were good at the "education above all" mantra, just not so good at the practically enabling. But I was in just the city that it didn't matter. Regional advantages are frequently not inconsiderable.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:55 AM
Funny story: the guy mentioned in the first paragraph, and whose doucebag-looking picture graces the article, was in my high school graduating class.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:00 PM
I can't imagine how isolated someone who is actually working class must feel.
I probably have more working class cred than all y'all, and this portrait of meritocracy and scrimping and saving seems kind of middle class to me. The point is to work really hard at some incredibly dangerous job, and then blow your money buying rounds of drinks for all your friends on Friday after work. That's doing it old school.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:02 PM
I probably have more working class cred than all y'all,
While I, personally, have basically no working-class cred, I'm now bristling on behalf of my NYC transit-worker grandparents. I thought your dad was an academic; or do I have your family mixed up with someone else from high school?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:10 PM
It's very hard to do a Gatsby these days. In the past 25 years, colleges have become obscenely expensive (not that they were cheap before), while the Republicans have continually cut back on student loans. The rich have gotten much richer, while the middle class and below have pretty much treaded water (or worse, under Dubya). Accordingly, there's less and less class mobility in the United States.
I'm a lawyer and reasonably well off. My parents were very much middle class: a teacher and a Department of Public Aid employee. Most of my colleagues, and before that my classmates at Columbia law school, came from more privileged backgrounds.
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:10 PM
My dad was in the sandhog union.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:12 PM
"doucebag" s/b "douchebag". Also this article circulated on an e-mail list I'm on with high school friends on Thursday of last week. Also, while I'm embarassed about it to the point that I sometimes mislead people about it (and I consider it fairly serious to mislead people whom I know about non-jokey things), I get money from my parents too.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:12 PM
I fully expect that I won't be able to pay for my hypothetical children's education. They better be little geniuses.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:15 PM
I can't imagine how isolated someone who is actually working class must feel.
I just told this story elsewhere, but when I was a kid I lived with my grandparents when they were living in a very wealthy neighborhood in CA they'd been grandfathered into by rising property values and whatever that CA law is that said their taxes wouldn't rise along with them. I went to private school for a couple years while my grandparents paid for it, despite my parents driving a Honda civic with a door that wouldn't open after it had been sideswiped and sleeping in an uninsulated crawl space in the one bedroom apt. above my grandparent's garage. It was kind of a schizophrenic situation, like BG's. I felt self conscious a lot of the time, especially as I got older; my uniforms were used and too short for me, and class stuff became gender stuff as I worried about how everyone was looking at my chubby knees. Then I started going to public school after private school got expensive in somewhat higher grades, but even that was very chi chi in this town. Anyway, the point of the story is that once I went to a birthday party of one of my classmates, and his family was the richest I've ever or maybe will ever come in close contact with again. They had a property in this neighborhood where even a normal house would cost a million dollars with endless horse trails, a pool, tennis courts, but most insanely, a multi car garage where the recreational vehicles included a fire engine and a *tank*. As we were tramping down one of the trails to the pool, I asked this kid, stupefied, "What does your father do for a living?" The teacher, who'd come along, tried to shush me, but the kid told me he was a stockbroker.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:19 PM
64: Then I do have your family mixed up.
Also, while I'm embarassed about it to the point that I sometimes mislead people about it (and I consider it fairly serious to mislead people whom I know about non-jokey things), I get money from my parents too.
Don't sweat it too much; while I never got financial support after college, I got a no loans ride through undergrad from my parents, which is much more than most people do. All you need to be a decent person is to recognize that someone who isn't getting that kind of support is having a much more difficult time doing the same things you're doing.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:19 PM
It's very hard to do a Gatsby these days. In the past 25 years, colleges have become obscenely expensive (not that they were cheap before), while the Republicans have continually cut back on student loans.
While this is true of most colleges, it's worth noting that there are some colleges that match your need with aid that largely takes the form of grants if you've been admitted, regardless of things like your desirability relative to the rest of the admitted class. I feel like noting it because no one in my family understood it, and, as I said, only the college counselors at my high school were encouraging me to go to a private college.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:24 PM
65 - You're in law school. There's a difference between getting help from your parents when you're in school and getting help from them after you graduate. And, even then, I think there's a difference between someone with a low-paying job getting help starting out and an I-banker's parents buying him a brownstone.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:25 PM
Oh, see, I hadn't even noticed 66. They don't have to be geniuses, just Tias or the like. I can't tell you how many times I heard from my mom, and I quote, "If you don't win the Westinghouse you have to go to community college. Maybe you can transfer to Berkeley after a couple years."
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:27 PM
I feel like noting it because no one in my family understood it, and, as I said, only the college counselors at my high school were encouraging me to go to a private college.
This kind of thing makes me hyper-cranky -- you can get what you need if you're well educated and savvy enough to know who to ask or where to look. It's like the NYC public school system, which is riddled with good little special schools that your kids can go to if you can figure out the unpublicized admissions process; oddly enough, the student body ends up being drawn from the well-educated middle class. Funny how that works.
I mean, yes -- it should be noted that this stuff is out there. It just burns me that that's how the system works.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:28 PM
All you need to be a decent person is to recognize that someone who isn't getting that kind of support is having a much more difficult time doing the same things you're doing.
And also, not being ashamed of your situation (ashamed enough that you feel compelled to mislead people about it) is helpful. Also, what Becks said in 70.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:30 PM
I've just arrived on thread, I was having a procedure done this morning. Having read everything at once, I'm struck by a common theme: we all acknowledge we've had some breaks, and that luck, both financial and in terms of the exposure to what we wanted has played in our lives. On the other hand, if any regular commenters are trust-fundies, they're keeping quiet about it.
Now God knows this blog is not a cross-section of our country, but I think it is representative of our intellectual class. Why are we so focussed on the well-to-do, and their many advantages? What we have testified to here, an in-between life of chances and risks and no reliable relation between work, talent and success, is actually the norm in my experience. Why is it so hard to treat it as the norm, to support each other and help each other feel less isolated and more normal?
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:31 PM
This kind of thing makes me hyper-cranky -- you can get what you need if you're well educated and savvy enough to know who to ask or where to look.
This reminds me that no small part of the capital that people benefit from is the social capital they get from their parents. It's not just knowing the right people; it's knowing what's available, how much or little various sign posts along the way matter, etc. My recollection is that, for example, SAT (and the like) scores correlate best with parental education, so professors' kids do really, really well, despite often relatively small salaries. I tend to think this is a function of nurture, not nature - hang out with all smarties, and you'll end up pretty smart. Similarly, an extraordinary number of the most successful people I know tend to be people going into the same profession as a parent; they come in with a lay of the land, a paternal mentor, and a larger sense of how to structure a life so that it fits that career (and, perhaps more importantly, a sense that such is how a life should be structured).
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:38 PM
I think the point (if there is a unitary point) is in SCMT's 29 -- that we aren't living in a meritocracy. Someone who's succeeded in the US, while they may have worked hard and had a lot of ability, also almost certainly had either family money or some other significant lucky break. That shouldn't be the occasion for lifelong bitterness, but you also shouldn't forget that it's true.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:38 PM
68/70/73: funny how my advice would differ here. I would say: if you feel ashamed enough that you feel compelled to mislead people about your situation, then perhaps what you are doing is in fact shameful. And being deceitful about your circumstances is weak and dishonorable.
So, why not stop taking the money? Resolve to be an adult and make it through life standing on your own two feet. Unless you're starving (which if you're in law school I guarantee you're not), accept no charity. Recognize that you've already recieved far more advantages than most, and that you deserve no more. Take none. And use some signifcant part of your life to give back to those less fortunate in your community and to your world, in grateful recognition of the undeserved advantages you've recieved.
Posted by Urple | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:39 PM
I heard a lot of 'If you don't finish that college application RIGHT NOW (mid-June for a Dec. 1 deadline), you'll end up working at McDonald's!" '98% isn't good enough.' My guidance counselor told me not to apply to the school I went to because I wouldn't get in. On the other hand, the school had an excellent financial aid night where everyone learned about the forms.
And to some extent, they were probably right. My younger siblings are bright, but did just a little bit less well in high school. The amount they are in debt/have to pay far exceeds mine.
And the reason no one treats this as the norm is that no one talks about this when they're not pseudonymous.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:44 PM
74: hope your procedure went well
Another point, I guess: While the intersection of high school dropouts (or similar) and phd's is probably smallish, there are bound be a bunch of us, and I was probably luckier than most.
I didn't get any money from my parents to go to school. I did live with them for a while in undergrad (but paid them cheapish rent). Since I wasn't in the `normal' stream of doing things, I didn't have much shot at financial aid at first --- but this changed. I've been given roughly equivalent to a small house over the years in sholarships/fellowships/whathaveyou, and I can't imagine I would have kept at it as long as I did without that. I can't imaginge that I am *particularly* deserving, so makes me wonder sometimes....
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:49 PM
77: I don't disagree with anything you say before the linebreak. The only thing you say that particularly bothers me is the very last sentence, insofar as it presumes that I'm not going to do that. Also, I'm not sure you should describe my parents giving me money as charity, since it doesn't have even the putative disinterest which I would think characterizes charity generally. But perhaps my taking money is taking charity even if giving i to me isn't giving charity.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:51 PM
77- And why not flagellate yourself with rods and sticks while you're at it. You can pay your parents back later by, you know, becoming successful and doing good works and raising a family and looking after them when they're old and stuff. Money within a family has all sorts of different meanings, which you're not obliged to discuss with people with whom you are not intimate. In part because other people you don't know very well can judge you about it, unfairly.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 12:58 PM
Now, now. Easy on washerdreyer! There's nothing wrong with taking money from your parents: presuming you're not demanding it or feeling entitled, and they have it to give, you'd be a fool not to.
All you owe, in my opinion, is to recognize that not all of your classmates are in the same fortunate position (or maybe they are, law students always seem to live better than grad students) when deciding whether to order takeout, check out that new expensive place and catch a show, or make tuna salad sandwiches and watch a movie.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:00 PM
So, why not stop taking the money?
Eh. As my Mom used to say, "I'd rather help you now, than make you wait until I'm dead."
Which goes back to 7: "Parents are going to give their kids whatever chances they can, whether the parents generally feel it's fair or not."
Posted by Paul | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:01 PM
81 - Well put -- I was waffling over how to say something along the same lines.
WD: While I think it's a bad thing that it is so hard to break into the professional class without family assistance, that doesn't mean that there's anything wrong on an individual level with taking help from your family -- they love you, and that's what families are supposed to do, is help each other out.
Being severely embarrassed about it is another matter -- you should probably, for mental health reasons, convince yourself that there's not a thing wrong with taking money from your parents, or stop taking it. But there really isn't a thing wrong with taking it.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:04 PM
Next meetup, drinks are on w/d! :-)
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:05 PM
80-
77 was perhaps unnecessasirly stern, particularly the last line, as you mention. It wasn't meant to imply that you aren't going to do that, it was meant to imply that most people don't. (This includes most relatively less-advantaged people, who if they opened their eyes to the broader world should realize they are actually quite advantaged.)
And the term "charity" was being used loosely. And I don't think it's morally problematic for you to take your parents' money, especially while in school. That's what's done by almost everyone who has the opportunity.
That being said, I do think (in most cases, without knowing your individual circumstances) that the more honorable course of action is to turn down the money.
And I do think there's a meaningful aspect of adulthood imbedded in that notion. Being physically an adult but financially dependant really is somewhat adolescent.
Posted by Urple | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:05 PM
As long as we're disclosing things, lest I too give the impression of having a harder scrabble existence than I do (though I'm not sure I am) I'm not sure how much money I've gotten from my mom post graduation, but it's more than five and less than ten thousand dollars, to cover getting started, education stuff, travel related emergencies, etc. Oh, and once my dad gave me $200 for two doctor's appointments. How many Hail Marys?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:05 PM
(The last paragraph of 84 is what I was meaning to say in 73; hopefully it did not come off harsher than I meant it to, which was "not at all harsh".)
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:08 PM
81/82/84-
I warned everyone early on in this thread that I had a chip on my shoulder, right?
Posted by Urple | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:08 PM
You know, it's not about the Hail Marys. It's about that my mother, for example, thinks of Buck as a bit of a useless slacker because he had some debt when we got married. And he had that debt because he paid for every dime of tuition, every dentist appointment, and every months' rent from when he moved out at eighteen, and sent money home for his parents' mortgage besides. The connection between being in a less than ideal financial position and being a lazy incompetent is one that gets assumed by too many people, and that assumption shouldn't ever be made without a specific reason.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:12 PM
I know LB. I was joking about the idea that it was shameful, which I don't think it is.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:15 PM
You say "thinks of Buck" -- she has not had occasion to reevaluate her initial impression over the course of your marriage? It's been a couple years now, right?
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:16 PM
Over a decade. And like many inlaw relationships, and like many relationships with my mother generally, things remain, shall we say, fraught with tension. She's an excellent cook, and great with the kids, though.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:20 PM
LB: That is a very, very annoying mindset.
In the context of this thread: i'ts like some people feel that pissing away someone elses money because it doesn't mean anything to you is ok, but knowingly going into debt to improve you lot or whatever is morally contentious?
It is extremely easy to be lazy and incompetent, and still live reasonably, if you have a bit of money. Takes talent to pull it off if you don't...
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:24 PM
Thanks everybody. Now that we've dealt with my issues, I should probably try to remember some stories about how much of a dick the guy in the article actually is. I probably shouldn't use "how much" there, since it means the answer should be a quantity, like "He's a lot of a dick."
The day he got into college, he went into the senior section of our school cafeteria, and said "Where's someone who did work?" Then he went up to a friend of mine and said something like "Ha ha, I didn't do anything in high school and I got into college. What do you have to say about that?"
That story didn't work as well in text as it does orally.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:29 PM
Speaking of getting things undeservedly, everyone does know that it's Free Cone Day at Ben and Jerry's, right?
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:31 PM
Not that I should judge anyone by their haircut and facial expression, but I have to say that after looking at his picture that story doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:31 PM
Ok but you still owe us drinks next time around.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:34 PM
96: w/d, you are such a bourgie pig. Real poor people don't have time to wait in line an hour and a half for the satisfaction of a free ice cream cone.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:34 PM
They might miss Maury Povich or something.
Posted by Tarrou | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:37 PM
No, if w/d were really bourgeois, he'd pay a poor person to wait in line for a free ice cream cone, and THEN he wouldn't share.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:39 PM
OMG, that reminds me of these horrid, horrid people Clementine babysat for. They wanted her to wait in line for Shakespeare in the Park Tickets, but they wanted to pay her eight dollars an hour for her time--this for their regular babysitter who spent like 15 hours a week with their children! That's not the main reason they were horrible at all, but it still struck me as awfully tacky to be so cheap with someone who was so good with your very spoiled, bratty (I babysat them once; one of them started kicking me within ten minutes) little girls.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:46 PM
I think for the kind of people most of us are, a family background of education or passionate belief in it, usually both, is more crucial in forming our choices than money.
SCMT said some of this in 75. Like him, I think of this as social capital. I come from, and remain in, what Orwell called the "lower upper middle class;" people with the tastes, refinements, habits and education of the upper middle class without the money.
And this is worth a great deal. Both my kids go to Chicago Public Schools, and for went for much of their time to our local public school. But we were very active in that school's governance, knew the teachers personally, and were able to steer, request and avoid on our children's behalf. My daughter now goes to a selective high cchool, that she had to apply to and which required as much gamesmanship and application massaging as we expect for college. She is flourishing there, and is being taught and nurtured on a far higher level than either of us were. My son goes to a middle-school program he had to test into in one of the city's richest neighborhoods. People apparently buy million-dollar homes (this is not California or NYC) to get their kids into this school. My son and his friends, exactly analogous to Orwell's "scholarship boys" in Such, Such, Were the Joys, lift the scores of the entire school, and attract the good teachers, etc.
Now, we haven't "paid" for this, but we have used a great deal of time, effort and knowledge to make it happen. This is privilege too, albeit of a different kind.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:47 PM
Real poor people don't have time to wait in line an hour and a half for the satisfaction of a free ice cream cone.
Economists disagree.
I once proposed creating a line waiting cooperative. I'm not really sure why I didn't do it.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:48 PM
Actually, "spoiled" is the wrong word, because they were actually deprived, just not financially. They had a horrible anorexic mother who was turning them anorexic. She'd decided the older one (the kicker) was too chubby, so she was trying to keep her on a diet. The night I babysat she told me she'd had too much cake and thus could only have a half cup of macaroni and cheese for dinner. I tried to give her more than what her mom said to without using up so much it was suspicious. As it was the mom got very accusatory about how much they'd eaten when she got home.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:50 PM
Much of this thread (particularly 87, but much of the rest too) is giving me an image of Unfogged as confeitor -- which kind of ties in with my comment at AWB's the other day, about viewing Unfogged as my congregation. Kinda interesting I think though I'm not sure what to make of it.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:54 PM
86: Still wrong. It's what you do with the money your family can afford to give you that demonstrates your maturity. Going to law school = good. Clubbing every night from age 18 - 28 = bad. And most of the people I know who give time and effort to charity work are people who are not hanging on by their fingernails. When I was in graduate school and working full time, I didn't do a fucking thing for those less fortunate than myself.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 1:57 PM
It seems to me that it's a continuum. Taking money from your parents and going to law school? Good. Taking some small amount to get started in an apartment? Good. Taking money and going to do a PhD in the humanities? Not as good. Taking money so you can 'follow your passion' as an actor or a singer, etc? Meh, now we're getting into 'time to grow up territory'. Taking money so you can climb rocks in Thailand or pretend to be boheme in Paris? Ehhhhh... Taking money because you can't live within your means and you totally need to party? Grow up.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:05 PM
Er, um, I mean "Unfogged as confessor" -- look I've never been Catholic ok, I thought confeitor was a cool way of saying confessor but I am obviously wrong. The Catholic Dictionary thinks I probably had "confiteor" in mind, but that also does not mean what I meant. So there you go.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:05 PM
Until someone gives me a very good model of Utopia, including all goals and all measurable, mechanical steps that will (rather than should) determine lives in that place, I want really only three things:
(1) As gigantic a continuing GDP as is humanly possible,
(2) A set of government programs to ensure everyone, deserving or not, has a decent life, a realistic opportunity to better their lives should they so want, and the tax structure to support it,
(3) And a society with strong norms against being a dick.
Beyond that, spend your money, your parents' money, your windfall winnings, or the money you stole from the I-banker passed out in the bathroom, any way you want. Split total cash available in two and spend the first half on coke and the second on rehab, if you want. Absent that model, I'm pretty suspicious of any moral claims about success, whether they're about morality causing success or about what success morally requires.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:07 PM
Wait, why is it better to get help through law school than through a humanities PhD?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:08 PM
I can get behind Tim.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:09 PM
Wait, why is it better to get help through law school than through a humanities PhD?
Greater potential for future earnings.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:10 PM
(2) A set of government programs to ensure everyone, deserving or not, has a decent life, a realistic opportunity to better their lives should they so want, and the tax structure to support it
But I thought we were in agreement about the need to heighten the contradictions?
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:10 PM
Because your PhD should come with a living stipend, or you shouldn't be doing it.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:11 PM
Taking money so you can 'follow your passion' as an actor or a singer, etc? Meh, now we're getting into 'time to grow up territory'.
Hey, if the government isn't going to support the arts, someone else has to.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:16 PM
Are there no Medicis?
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:18 PM
I can get behind Tim.
Only if you play "Ask".
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:23 PM
I'm being mostly facetious, just trying to describe my lizardy-brained reaction to "I'm going to Thailand to climb mountains because that's my passion", or "Well, I wanted to live near the frat houses, but my dad was paying for the apartment, so I guess he had the right to decide!" It's not a categorical examination of anything but my own prejudices.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:24 PM
118: OK, that's awesome.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:25 PM
A set of government programs to ensure everyone, deserving or not, has a decent life
Yeah, but this is the problem with everyone who isn't crazy; we can't even have a discussion about what set of programs would be sufficient to ensure this.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:26 PM
How does one play "Ask"?
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:26 PM
One purchases "Louder than Bombs" and cues up the first track.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:34 PM
Taking money so you can 'follow your passion' as an actor or a singer, etc? Meh, now we're getting into 'time to grow up territory'.
See, that's where you're wrong. Artists in most creative fields take time to develop, unless they are prodigies, and their early work is not necessarily indicative of their potential. Persistence is half the battle. So if your parents can give you money so that you can do your work full-time instead of, say waitressing full-time and doing your work on the side, your chances of actually achieving something are greatly increased. As an alternative, you can develop a high tolerance for squalor, which is stupid, if you don't have to.
Doing a full-time job while successfully pursuing a creative endeavor is actually rather unusual. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Williams. I can't think of any others. Of the major visual artists of the nineteenth and twentieth century, I can't think of one.
I'm not, of course, suggesting that you should be Acting while your mother scrubs floors, but it's no more shameful to take money from parents who can afford to give it than from the NEA, and possibly more honorable than teaching poetry workshops to hopeless wannabes.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:35 PM
What about one of the great composers of our time, Joseph Drymala?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:42 PM
Well, he's unusual too.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:44 PM
Okay. Pretty much thinking of the person who's spending a year partying on the parental dime but describes it as 'trying to be an author for a year', before 'going onto law school or getting my MBA.'
For what it's worth, the people I know who are making it supporting themselves (all in music) do so while supporting themselves on the side with other jobs, grants or smaller gigs.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:46 PM
"Wait, why is it better to get help through law school than through a humanities PhD?"
"Greater potential for future earnings."
What if you use your law degree to work in the public interest instead of representing corporations, making a fraction of corporate salaries?
I disagree with the idea that it's somehow better/more responsible to pursue careers in which you earn more money. I don't see why people who will earn a lot of money in the future are necessarily more deserving of help along the way. Obviously people should adjust their lifestyles according to their means, but it's problematic to rank jobs (or education) on a moral scale according to future earnings. (On that scale, the clueless intern who fetches coffee comes out ahead of the minimum wage earner because the intern is building cultural capital and connections that will translate into future opportunities for higher wages.)
Posted by kry | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:47 PM
127: oh. well, I hate them too.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:52 PM
96: Fifteen minutes on the line, maybe a minute or two more.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:54 PM
Because you intimidated everyone when you pulled up in your limo, and they tucked their heads down and let you pass, obviously.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:57 PM
Oh, I just thought of a painter with a "real" job--Rousseau. But he's the only one that comes to mind. Maybe Armsmasher can think of some.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:57 PM
The point wasn't that 'greater earning power is morally superior.'
If a PhD program wants you, they will give you tuition and modest living support (enough to pay the bills, but not enough to save a lot). If they don't, they won't, and they're not worth your time because they're using you to fund someone else.
Getting support from your family, when you have a fully-funded program, should be unnecessary, as while your standard of living won't be all iPods and martinis, it's probably a lot higher than other non-students who make the same amount. Getting support when it's not fully-funded just isn't wise. The job market sucks too much to go into debt for a program that really doesn't want you there and probably won't support your work.
Law students, on the other hand, almost never get aid and take out loans for everything. Accepting parental aid there is simply prudent.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 2:59 PM
131: No, no it was a line of limos outside the secret Ben and Jerry's.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:06 PM
What flavor did you get?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:08 PM
The followup to that is, if you're not getting funding in your PhD, you probably won't be using your PhD to make a living afterwards. (At least not teaching in that field; there are doubtless more things in heaven and earth to do with a PhD than are dreamt of in my, um, philosophy.) So it's closer to "something I want to do that delays earning a living later, rather than contributing to it," than law school.
Or, "greater potential for future earnings" should be "greater potential for some future earnings," not "greater potential future earnings."
That said, I know someone from a rich family who does public-spirited work that she might not be able to afford to if she weren't wealthy (I don't know if she gets help from her parents), and I think that's perfectly admirable.
Composer who did significant work with a full-time job: Charles Ives.
(I got out of college debt-free, and have got some help from my parents -- the BIG thing being that they bought me a car -- though never a monthly check. And wouldn't be in academica, or would have taken a different path, if that weren't the case.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:11 PM
Freakin' blue-state elitists. There ain't no Ben and Jerry's in the heartland.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:12 PM
135: Mint chocolate chunk.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:18 PM
Cala,
What if someone's super-rich? I mean if you're a Walton or whatever, what's wrong with taking family money and doing a Ph.d. even if you won't get a decent job afterwards? In fact, the department might even have taken you, because they want you to give some money? Is that entirely bad?
In fact, although I don't believe it that strongly, I think that you can make an argument for why certain very privileged people ought to get into certain kinds of good schools other than just the fact that they subsidize the poor kids. If you're really rich,you're going to wield a disproportionate amount of power no matter what happens. So shouldn't they be civilized a bit by a good education?
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:22 PM
There is good ice cream in Texas, though. There was a place in Houston that was called Marble Slab and they'd mix gummy bears in your ice cream if you wanted it that way.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:25 PM
I'd have to hop on a train/bus to get to Ben and Jerry's, so I'm not going, but there's a Herrell's down the street from me.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:25 PM
I went to a Marble Slab in California. I also had amazing ice cream in South Dakota when I went out there to campaign for Stephanie Herseth on the DCCC's dime.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:27 PM
Freakin' blue-state elitists. There ain't no Ben and Jerry's in the heartland.
You're not trying hard enough, Weiner.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:29 PM
they'd mix gummy bears in your ice cream if you wanted it that way
But, as we found to our chagrin, gummy bears reduced to the temperature of ice cream achieve the consistency of rocks. Not-at-all-gummy rocks.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:31 PM
140: Oh, there's Ben & Jerry's in Houston, and in many other locations in Texas all of which are at least 300 miles from me. Haven't found any great ice cream here; an ice cream shop recently opened a couple of blocks from my house, but AFAICT they just serve the same non-high-end stuff that you can get at the supermarket across the street.
139 seems reasonable enough to me, though when you get into the territory of people who never will have to work for a living no matter what these things may change. If you're getting a PhD you're at least working at something.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:32 PM
Well, let's clarify. It's *not* the job market. That's a crapshoot even if you are funded.
It is the super-rich. Six years at a PhD program, let's say $40K a year in tuition, plus roughly $15K in living expenses... over $300K?
I think the PhD's the wrong kind of program for someone who just wants to explore some interests on the family dime. At least at my school, where I'm only tangentially familiar with admissions, they're very very interested not just in taking a smart person, but a smart person who they really want to train up. and who they think is a good fit.
Funding's a sign that they're serious, and if they're not serious, six years is a long time just to be a dilletante.
The Waltons are totally welcome to take the time-honored route of funding PhD students and do serial terminal master's.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:35 PM
144 gets it exactly right. M&Ms turn into little rocks, too, but they leave rainbow trails in the ice cream.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:36 PM
Is Ben and Jerry's ice cream really that good?
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:39 PM
It's very nice. It's up there with the some best I've had, but really, any full-cream natural ingredient kind of ice cream is nummy. (Creamery at Penn State Main! Whee!)
I'm not sure Ben & Jerry's has anything special in that department, it's just that most packaged ice cream is crap.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:41 PM
What if someone's super-rich? I mean if you're a Walton or whatever, what's wrong with taking family money and doing a Ph.d. even if you won't get a decent job afterwards?
I understand I'm waaay out of the mainstream here, but the morality of this to me turns on why exactly you are spending your family money getting this Ph.d. Are you doing it to help people because you think you can use this degree to help people or to just while away your time in personal indulgence?
I guess on some level I believe in the biblical maxim "to whom much is given, much is expected". If you don't have to expend a lot of effort in life worrying about taking care of yourself (because your needs are pretty well met), you really ought to be spending all that extra effort giving back to others. In some sense you ought to be working harder than those who work to support themselves, because you have recieved so many advantages. If you choose instead to simply flutter through life indulging each passing fanciful desire (whether openly silly things things like just being a partying socialite, or even serious-and-time-consuming desires like "hmm... maybe I'll get a phd in art history..."), yes I do believe that is immoral. It's profoundly selfish.
And, to tie this somewhat into what was said above, I do believe that art helps make the world a better place, and so if you're serious about it and not just wasting time, devoting yourself to the production of some sort of art could satisfy the above.
Posted by Urple | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:46 PM
Having read this thread quickly (I was out earning a living today, darn it, not lounging by the pool counting the money my parents sent me), but on that quick reading it strikes me how quickly the thread moved from LizardBreath's point, which was mostly about class mobitlity and got on the issue of upper-middle-class guilt.
Hey, it's your parents' money. I suspect that a big part of why they earned it (or at least avoided disapating it all, if they did not earn it) was because they wanted to give it to you so that your life is easier. Relax. Feel the love. As noted above, being rich is not a reflection of any particular virtue, but neither is being poor or anyplace in between. Except for the very rich, you will have a lifetime to earn your own way, regardless of whether your folks helped you along the way. Way too much guilt in this thread.
On LizardBreath's original point, I think the statistics that get thrown out in regarding the decreasing social mobility are a bit misleading, but I think she nonetheless raises a valid concern. It is unfortunate that public higher education has gotten so expensive that the cost of such an education (particularly post-graduate education) can make it very hard for someone with no money to pursue it.
However, there is what seems to me to be something cultural going on too. In certain classes, there simply seems to be a greater expectation that parents will support their kids when they are young--not that they have to or that the kids would not make it without it--just that certain classes of parents seem more likely to cushion the blow of adulthood and their kids' need to support themselves financially. This has both good and bad points, but I think it is (mostly) about something other than the possibility of class mobility.
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:53 PM
150 seems about right. But it may also be that getting a PhD in the humanities is above-average behavior for the superrich, compared to going into the family business or running for the Senate as a Republican.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:54 PM
I think the statistics that get thrown out in regarding the decreasing social mobility are a bit misleading
I don't. What's your quarrel with Ferrie and Long?
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:56 PM
when I went out there to campaign for Stephanie Herseth on the DCCC's dime.
I was supposed to go on that trip! But I couldn't get off work. I did the Ben Chandler one earlier in the year and had a blast.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 3:58 PM
I'll agree that it's partially the expectations of the parents involved. How tied to class that is up for grabs, but my parents' help ended with college. (Maybe less than that, if you count that they didn't actually pay for my college. But they would have if they could. They wouldn't have paid for a master's.)
But it does affect class mobility. I hate to use my own life as an example, because it sounds more whiny than I mean, but consider:
1) [too tendentious; not renumbering.]
2) I turned down a relatively prestigious paying internship in Chicago because I couldn't afford to both live in Chicago and bank money for the next school year.
3) I worked about 15 hours a week all four years. This lead to:
4) Not getting a chance to study abroad or take a semester in D.C. No point in studying abroad if you can't afford to see anything once you're there.
5) After graduation, I had a job lined up, but it didn't start for four months, so I worked 60 hours a week to make money to be able to buy work-appropriate clothes and to fix up the car.
6) I don't have a car. It died, and the car fairy didn't bring me a new one (and I feel it's not worth it.)
7) I'm in a moderate amount of school debt.
Is it hurting my class mobility? Hard to tell. I don't really feel like it has, but I'm sure that my college years would have been a lot different, and that I'd own a car now, if someone had been picking up the littler bills along the way.
My parents owned a house at my age, y'know? So do some of my friends.
I have a cat.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 4:10 PM
What's your quarrel with Ferrie and Long?
Without buying the paper to read it, I cannot address their specific claims. In general, class mobility is not a particularly meaningful concept without context. For example, showing mobility between particular income quartiles is interesting in some ways, but it does not say a lot about peoples' lives--their standard of living, security, etc. Thus, it says little about the lives of people to say that country X is better than the United States in terms of social mobility if the standard of living in country x is neither as high, nor rising as quickly as, that of the US. That is, in terms of how people live, moving from the second income quartile in country X to the third may not result in as much real improvement in standard of living as staying in the same quartile in the United States, but having your standard of living--along with everyone elses (and hence no change in income quartile)--go up. Sure, income inequality just by itself can be a cause for social unrest, but there is scant evidence that this is much a problem here.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 4:16 PM
146 gets it right. I don't know if I really believe in the dilletante doctorate Urple cites in 150; she sounds like a perfectly irritating creature, but implausible—those who aren't weeded out are eventually seeded with the right intentions, which lead to their success, right?
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 4:16 PM
Cala- I've had similar experiences (without knowing much about the details of your experiences), worked all through school, etc.
The best thing is when you run into people (and they are legion) who seem to think that your not studying abroad, et al., somehow signals a lack of intellectual curiousity.
I guess in some way it makes sense, as perhaps a lack of intellectual curiosity would be the only reason they, or similarly situated people they know, wouldn't have studied abroad in college. But that's hardly a universal truth.
And examples of different things just like that abound, which I think is what has driven part of this comment thread.
Posted by Urple | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 4:19 PM
From slol's link: You should expect a free download if you are a subscriber, a corporate associate of the NBER, or a resident of nearly any developing country or transition economy.
Information welfare!
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 4:24 PM
157- Armsmasher: what makes you think the "dilletante doctorate" I cite is female? Regardless, I wasn't really evisioning him/her as necessarily likely to complete the phd, though if you think such creatures don't exist I think you're mistaken.
Posted by Urple | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 4:24 PM
Without buying the paper to read it,
Got an email address, Idealist?
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 4:28 PM
Got an email address, Idealist?
Yes (it should show with my name, below).
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 4:30 PM
I don't mean to sound whiny. I'm just trying to point out that it's not just the big things that determine class mobility. I got the big things. I managed to get the college education and I'm probably going to get the Ph.D. at this point since they've spent too much money to kick me out.
It's the little things that add up, though, and they're usually invisible. It's just a matter of not going to Europe (and being 'enlightened') or interning (and making 'connections') or having a car (and feeling 'not trapped') or going home instead of going out (and not 'networking') and then having stupid people say that if your parents had better morals, then you'd be better off.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 4:31 PM
160: Nothing at all. I have a degree in art history, so I think I'm unlikely to hold to whatever assumption you're suggesting, given your specific (and slightly irritating) example. (I merely like switch up my gender pronouns whenever I think to do it.)
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 4:33 PM
I switch up my gender pronouns, too. Or I name my examples so I can use a gendered pronoun without inviting stupid people worrying about what sort of political statement I'm making. ('Suppose an epistemologist, Matt, were tied to a railroad track through no fault of his own. A train, conducted by Tia, will squash him unless she throws the switch, which will redirect the train, saving Matt, but killing three innocent endangered butterflies.')
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 4:41 PM
164- I hope you know no offense was intended. I chose that example because I had somone specific in mind. The general principle wouldn't be any different in my mind for a phd in economics, or anything else.
And I thought upon posting that you were probably just switching up your gender pronouns, but I was curious if there was something I had said that had hinted female... it wasn't a question about your assumptions...
Posted by Urple | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 4:43 PM
saving Matt, but killing three innocent endangered butterflies.
"What is the coefficient of friction between the wheels and the rails?"
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 4:44 PM
No one ever suspects the butterflies.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 4:54 PM
Damn you, butterflies!
Posted by the moths | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 4:58 PM
No political statement, hmph.
Posted by Chopped Liver | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 5:03 PM
Oh come on. You'd be immortalized in an example! Like the existent gold mountain!
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 5:19 PM
re: 18 [and sorry, not read through all the other comments yet, there's a lot!]
Unpaid internships and the like always seemed to me to be a deliberate class barrier. You erect a hurdle that only those who already come from moderately wealthy backgrounds can leap, at least without savagely crippling hardship, and then you can ensure that those who get through are the 'right kind of people' -- can't have those uppity poor-folks getting a look in.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 5:21 PM
I don't want to be immortalized in an example, I want to be immortalized by not getting run over by a trolley.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 5:28 PM
or a train. Why can't you stick to the canon?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 5:29 PM
re: 48
I am working class -- I grew up on a shit council estate in the industrial belt in central Scotland, my parents were on unemployment benefit/welfare through the whole of my childhood, both my parents and my sister still live in council houses. I spent the years 17/18 working on a YTS for 29 pounds a week and when I was an undergraduate supported myself by working as a cleaner 5 days a week. In between each of my degrees I've had to take a year or two off to earn enough money to pay of the debts incurred during the previous one before I can start on the next.
I used to think I was fairly comfortable with the gulf between my background and my peers in education but now, as I come to the last few months of my doctorate, I realise that all the really close friends I have are people like me. Educated members of the working classes -- people who grew up on shit council estates in Belfast or Glasgow and who 'escaped' to university -- and that, at one level, I really don't trust the middle classes as at some key levels we really don't have a lot in common.
Similar tastes in art, music or literature and a similar level of education, ultimately, don't completely trump all the other class baggage.
That's not to say that I don't have friends with middle-class backgrounds, but there's still a level at which the gap between us is very real and the consciousness of that gap is largely mine -- I'm sure those friends think that I am largely like them but in a lot of ways I'm really not.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 5:33 PM
Canon, schmanon. Let's use a cannon!
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 5:34 PM
Unpaid internships and the like always seemed to me to be a deliberate class barrier.
It ends up being a class barrier, but a lot of it is due to good old fashioned greed. Internships, grad students, etc. are a great way to get a lot of work done by intelligent, educated people without paying them shit.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 6:44 PM
I totally agree with 177.
Anyway, I'm not sure that it's all just being a dilettante. Going to Divinity School is not the same as getting a Ph.D, but the guy who used to own Tom's of Maine, Tom whatever, has an M.Div. from Harvard which, I believe, informs a lot of how he ran his businees, although that didn't keep him from selling it to Procter and Gamble.
I know someone who is a top-flight neurosurgeon, and when his wife was in grad school, he got a bit bored, so he got another degree that was only tangentilly related to his other work.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 7:22 PM
Re:175
I think on this continent the classes are more fluid, and there is a great deal less class-consciousness. So compared with you, who are able to say "Educated members of the working classes" without feeling you're engaged in any kind of contradiction, and to know easily what you're talking about, we're likely not to be sure. There is a vast, thoughtful and useful literature on the question of class in America, but if you have read the thread, you'll have had a capsule introduction to the way most of us are. That is, 'tweeners, largely without solidarity or a way of communicating with one another. And we are bombarded with images that suggest that wealth is normal, and anything else is not. We know this is not true, and in fact defies common sense, but we are forced to struggle with this insidious impression constantly.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 7:23 PM
Apparently the guy who runs the pub at the U of C has a degree from CTS.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 7:30 PM
The problem with Ben & Jerry's (which I like a lot regardless): Too sweet. There is frequently so much sugar in their standard flavors that it crystallizes out and you get some crunchy granules in your scoop; which makes for a less-than-ideal ice cream eating experience. This is less true with their flavors which do not have stuff suspended in them -- but the stuff is part of what makes it Ben & Jerry's. Given the choice (and no option C, local creamery) I would go with Haagen Dasz. (Is that how you spell their corny name?)
Marble Slab: nice idea when done well. Unfortunately its progeny is Cold Stone Creamery, an evil among evils. Do you guys have CSC in the rest of the US? Here in the northeast (well, "New Jersey and southern New York"), they are mind-bogglingly popular and are putting parlors far better out of business. (I don't know if there's any relation between Marble Slab and CSC, probably not, CSC just took the same idea and ran with it. And did such a lousy job with the implementation.)
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 8:00 PM
By "the pub" to you mean the place downstairs at Ida Noyes? Is it still called that?
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 8:05 PM
There's a CSC in Calaville, but it's not as popular as the independent ice creamèrie.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 8:30 PM
By "the pub" to you mean the place downstairs at Ida Noyes? Is it still called that?
Well that's what it's called.
Re CSC: the thread on metafilter about free ice cream day! witnessed a lot of bashing of them.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 8:56 PM
I was not aware there was any difference between Marble Slab and Cold Stone, but I've only been to the latter (which is I think the only one of the two in Burque, but I could be wrong). My current location has neither.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:06 PM
Bashing of CSC is all to the good, but inefficacious. I reckon hand grenades would work better, or vans full of fertilizer.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:07 PM
As long as we're surveying the places-that-will-put-stuff-into-your-ice-cream-for-extra-money landscape, MaggieMoo's deserves mention. I've patronized only one location, near Richmond, Va. They met my expectations---there was certainly some tasty stuff in my tasty ice cream---but that's about it.
Posted by Stanley | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:12 PM
I've never been to the CSC (which I still view as a religious designation, sue me.) here. For all I know they could be a lovely place where the gummy bears dance freely in fields of sweetened, frozen cream.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:14 PM
What is it about CSC that everyone finds so objectionable? I wasn't too impressed with it myself, but I'm not a connoisseur of ice cream parlors in general.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:14 PM
I prefer ice cream anterooms.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:19 PM
#189
I've only been to the ones here in Utah, but both the singing employees (my god, the singing) and the people who frequent the CSC are just plain fucking annoying. And the ice cream quality didn't warrant the price.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:21 PM
Incidentally, Good Ice Cream, thy name is Starbucks Java Chip.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:22 PM
Oh yeah, the singing. I've only been late at night to the one where my friend worked, so there was no singing. I suspect singing would have irritated me. And 192 gets it exactly right.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:24 PM
Coffee ice cream is for the insipid.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:26 PM
Singing? Someone please enlighten the CSC virgins.
Posted by Stanley | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:28 PM
Coffee and mint chocolate chip is my favorite combination.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:28 PM
Wolfson!
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:29 PM
Somewhat less shocking. (But still wrong.)
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:30 PM
Speaking of ice cream, I had Ben & Jerry's for dinner on Sunday and I agree with whoever said upthread that it's too sugary.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:39 PM
2oo!
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:42 PM
195: Yes, they sing as they take your order. And the other thing is, the ice cream quality is so low. The other marble slab-style place I had been to (don't know if it was Marble Slab itself or some other thing) used really good ice cream, available only in vanilla and chocolate, as a base. And what came out after they mixed in stuff was very tasty. CSC's ice cream is bad. Packed full of guar gum so it will not melt while employees who have been inadequately trained stir it around on the Cold Stone. Instead of teaching them to sing, teach them to prepare the ice cream! Then you will not have to stabilize it as much and will be able to prepare something with more flavor in it!
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:47 PM
Incidentally, my browser is no longer telling me about hash assignments below the comment box. The subroutine etc. is still there, though.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:48 PM
Oh and: very good coffee ice cream is made by Haagen Dasz (ithystcn).
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:49 PM
I think the only ice cream chain I've been to is 31 Flavors, but I'm probably wrong about that.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:49 PM
I still get the hash assignment/list assignment messages.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:50 PM
I used to work in the local ice cream shop, first job I ever had. Good old minimum wage. I made up for it by eating a truly phenomenal amount on the job.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:54 PM
ithystcn
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
whatever!
Someone, please, make me work on this essay. Its shortness is making it take longer than a longer one would.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:55 PM
Modesto Kid, thanks for the clarification on the singing. I hate to belabor the point, but: what exactly are they singing? Acapella? In unison? Improv? Is this singing some iteration of the mortifying TGIFriday's-style birthday singing?
Posted by Stanley | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:56 PM
Ben, you should take some sort of amphetamine-derived substance. That always gets me in the essay-writing mood.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:59 PM
207: Take your conclusion and move it up to the beginning of the essay, as an introduction. It's now significantly better organized. Then just finish writing it.
Chicago is disturbingly flat -- rather as if someone had ironed Manhattan.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 9:59 PM
I can't give you any more information about the singing -- CSC was such a traumatic experience that I have blocked out all the details.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:00 PM
Take your conclusion and move it up to the beginning of the essay, as an introduction. It's now significantly better organized. Then just finish writing it.
Er, if I had a conclusion, I would already be finished.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:05 PM
ithystcn
"If that's how you spell that camel nipples"
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:08 PM
So write the conclusion already.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:10 PM
209: I'd pitch in $20 for Wolfson to liveblog a crystal meth bender.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:13 PM
I don't think I could take the shaggy dog jokes.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:18 PM
I hate to belabor the point, but: what exactly are they singing?
They all sing a song when someone puts a tip in the jar. I now have a policy of shooting the kneecaps of anyone whose hand even strays too close to the tip jar.
Which reminds me of something I've noticed the last few years. At least in this state, I cannot go anywhere without there being a tip jar. Sweet jesus, whose fucking dea was it that handing me the product I just purchased was a service worthy of a tip?
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:25 PM
As for tips, I have questions (as long as we're way off-topic at this point). This past weekend found me driving through New England. We gassed up in New Jersey twice.
(i) Is it state law that only employees can pump gas?
(ii) Is it proper etiquette to tip these employees?
Posted by Stanley | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:31 PM
i. yes
ii. I never do, but I suppose one could. Not necessary, though.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:33 PM
Why were you filling up in NJ if you were driving through New England?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:34 PM
It's a state law that only gas station employees can fill your tank in Oregon, and I wouldn't tip them a red cent.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:39 PM
220: I anticipated this geographical nitpicking.
I drove from Virginia to Manhattan, then through New York state to southern Vermont, then home to Virginny again. Somewhere in there, I was under the impression that I entered and left New England. I may be mistaken, but in any case, I mentioned New England only for context (and 'cause ya'll gots so much culture and roads and states and all, it's too hard to keeps it all straight, Massuh Teo).
Posted by Stanley | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:40 PM
I should also mention the singing often involves taking some already tedious song and shamelessly placing their name in said song. Take Me Out To The Ballgame becomes Take Me Out To The Cold Stone, and so on. And when they're not singing, there's a tendency to shout WELCOME TO COLDSTONE!! at everyone who comes through the door.
General consensus among Utahns seems to be that Coldstone is peachy keen. Fucking Utah.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:43 PM
217: We have a thread on the spread of tipping and some related tipping norms, I can't find it right now.
218: (i) Yes; there's one other state that has that law. Maybe Oregon?
The last time I went to a Cold Stone and tipped, I requested that they not sing as I put in the tip. The problem is that the main reason I oppose the singing (other than its quality) is that its demeaning. But acknowleding that I have the option to have them sing and am choosing not to exercise can be as demeaning if you don't take care with your delivery of the request.
[Written before I previewed and saw that 218 had been answered.]
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:48 PM
223: Do they take requests?
I find this (seemingly mandatory) singing to be fascinating and demeaning. But if there's an opportunity for them to cover Nirvana's "Rape Me" (Cream me?), then I'm ready for some covert CSC ops.
Posted by Stanley | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:51 PM
222: New England is Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. And nothing more! You speak of the Mid-Atlantic.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:52 PM
Yeah, you entered and left New England, but I wouldn't really say you drove through it. (Actually, I guess the only way one could drive through New England would be if one's ultimate destination were Canada.) What still puzzles me, however, is why you gassed up in NJ when Delaware has no sales tax.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 10:58 PM
I was going to suggest that in this magical Cold Stone where they take requests for Nirvana songs, it'd be even funnier to request I Hate Myself And I Want To Die, but I'd forgotten that the title isn't part of the lyrics.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:04 PM
General consensus among Utahns seems to be that Coldstone is peachy keen. Fucking Utah.
At least the liberal gun laws make it easier to implement the shooting-in-the-kneecap policy. (I was not sure, when I was teaching at the U., whether it was OK for my students to be packing. Intellectually I didn't have a problem with this, especially as the campus is allegedly alcohol-free, but still.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:07 PM
B-Wo, are you from the Pacific NW?
I lived in Oregon until after college and I never tipped them. They make a proper minimum wage, unlike waitstaff, so I figure they've got no reason to be tipped. Plus, not one ever washed my damn windshield.
Posted by TJ | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:07 PM
227: I must revise and extend my original comment, alas. Full disclosure's a bitch.
I was trying to avoid mentioning that this adventure was a sort of mini-tour for my band. It seemed pretentious, but now it seems prudent, information-wise.
I made no decisions with regards to where or when we gassed up. Indeed, said decisions were subject to the whims of basic need ("Fuck! We need gas!"). And, while the pool of money used to purchase said fuel belong partially to me, I feel no sense of personal loss when this money is squandered on the more-expensive Jersey 87 Octane. Also, we spent Friday night in Philly, precluding Delaware (and its stupid tolls, wtf?).
Posted by Stanley | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:09 PM
#225
I don't recall if they take requests, I haven't been in one in a few years. I suppose the singing is demeaning, although once you're in a uniform with a hat mashing up ice cream you already feel like a total dorkwad. Maybe they tell themselves what I used to tell myself when I worked at Domino's. "Could be worse dude. At least it's not Hot Dog On A Stick."
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:09 PM
Thread on tipping.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:10 PM
Okay, Stanley, my curiosity is sated.
By the way, I also went to New England this weekend (which is how I ended up eating ice cream for dinner--Massachusetts needs to get better food options for its turnpike rest areas). Weiner, your amla teram is a remarkable place.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:16 PM
234: Aye-aye on the dinner options (though I didn't hit Massachusetts, my own choices were also generally limited to rest areas). The best meal of the weekend was a Wawa Hummus-'n'-Pita thing.
Hummus: suprisingly tasty.
Wawa: still somehow eerier than Sheetz (an amazing feat, no doubt).
Posted by Stanley | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:23 PM
If the Canadians had joined us, Nova Scotia could be in New England too.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:24 PM
(I was not sure, when I was teaching at the U., whether it was OK for my students to be packing. Intellectually I didn't have a problem with this, especially as the campus is allegedly alcohol-free, but still.)
As I recall the University banned concealed carry on campus, then the legislature passed something telling them to rescind the ban. Naturally it's now in the State Supreme Court. I would really like to find some kind of happy medium. CA and NY tend to legislate guns to death while here in Utah the screwballs throw a fit when told they're not allowed to bring one to class.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:26 PM
Why "surprisingly"? Hummus is awesome.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:34 PM
Hummus can be awesome. My expectations for hummus bought at Wawa at 8 p.m. on a Sunday are very, very low (lucky for Wawa).
Posted by Stanley | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:39 PM
I see.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 04-25-06 11:41 PM
Sorry, I know the thread has drifted, but I'm familiar with a bit of the social science literature on social mobility and wanted to say a couple things. I think this is all pretty standard w/in the social mobility literature: 1) social mobility in the U.S. is decreasing and has been since the 1970s; 2) the U.S. generally has less social mobility than other comparable nations (i.e., England, France, Sweden, Australia, etc). This has to do with the larger welfare states in such countries equalizing life chances. If you want cites, feel free to email.
OK, back to lurking...
Posted by singular girl | Link to this comment | 04-26-06 12:07 AM
in re: social mobility, I would just like to point out to you American types that I graduated with *zero* debt, because:
a) I did not pay fees to go to university (the very idea would have seemed bizarre to me; education is something the state gives you for free)
b) my living expenses, including booze, were more than covered by something called a "student grant", which was basically just free money from the government.
no, I do not feel guilty, although I hear the bastards have changed the law to make it a less sweet deal these days.
clearing up a few other things:
1. Internships, grad students, etc. are a great way to get a lot of work done by intelligent, educated people without paying them shit.
yes I too would like to believe in these intelligent educated interns and grad students, but actually we all know that the unpaid thing is simply because interns are so damn useless that nobody can bear the thought that you are actually paying them money.
2. Composers with second jobs; I'll see your Ives and raise you Alexander Borodin.
3. Ice cream? Good god, connoissuers of ice cream, that I should live to see this day. You do realise that this stuff is *frozen* and that therefore what you think are subtleties of flavour are actually variations in the fat content?
4. god don't be such bloody puritans. You can go stark raving mad worrying about what someone else is earning and what they do with their money.
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 04-26-06 12:56 AM
Yeah, who's ever heard of such a thing as an ice cream connoisseur.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 04-26-06 1:05 AM
Chicago is disturbingly flat -- rather as if someone had ironed Manhattan.
We traveled very little when I was a kid and it was not until sometime in my teenage years that I realized that flatness is not the usual condition of the world. If I'd grown up in, say, San Francisco, no doubt I'd have had a much different perspective.
my mother, for example, thinks of Buck as a bit of a useless slacker because he had some debt when we got married.
That's bizarre. I guess by that standard someone like Dubya qualifies as really industrious.
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 04-26-06 1:23 AM
yes I too would like to believe in these intelligent educated interns and grad students, but actually we all know that the unpaid thing is simply because interns are so damn useless that nobody can bear the thought that you are actually paying them money.
I don't know what field you're in, but in mine, chem/biochem, this is completely wrong. Grad students and undergrads working as lab assistants do a hell of a lot of difficult work crucial to success of the project.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 04-26-06 1:23 AM
re: 242
Part of my undergraduate degree was covered by a grant but they'd already starting cutting the amount each year. I think it was just over 1000 per year when I finished -- which is not enough to live off, even in Glasgow. No fees though.
Graduate study was easier and harder -- fully funded for masters but only partly funded (2 out of 4 years) for doctorate. Living in oxford with no maintenance grant for 2 years = a LOT of paid work along with the study to keep body and soul together.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 04-26-06 1:27 AM
242 - the nature of internships depends a lot on the field.
for example, although I never applied for an unpaid internship at Harper's magazine because it pissed me off to no end that someone would expect me to work for them and live in New York on $0 income, it was made very clear to me that if I did such a thing, I would get a good job in the magazine industry afterwards.
Sure enough, 2 friends of mine whose parents do support them (unlike mine) took the unpaid Harper's internship, did plenty of editing while there, and they both now have good jobs in quality magazine journaldom in New York.
Unpaid internship is expected in industries that don't have high profit margins like publishing or the arts...and it's the only way to get jobs in other popular sectors like certain kinds of environmental work.
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 04-26-06 3:42 AM
industries that don't have high profit margins like publishing
I'm an ivory-tower academic but these don't look too shabby; and I hear that one of the big stories about publishing is the push for ever higher profit margins. Though it may be that one of the reasons for the profit margins is that there's a big supply of unpaid interns and underpaid low-level workers, since publishing is considered a glamorous job (and then we could get into the pink-collar job issue).
I did consider going into publishing, but unpaid work after college was not an option (except for a period when I was living in my parents' house while waiting to start grad school and volunteering at the ACLU, but, though that was something I could do because my parents were well off, it wasn't meant as a career move). I don't know if the unpaid internship thing wound up being a barrier; but when I was working as a copy editor in Boston, I wasn't getting paid that much more than I did as a grad student. Fortunately this was pre-tech boom so I could afford to live in Somerville on that salary.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 04-26-06 6:58 AM
I haven't read the rest of the thread, but I just wanted to gripe about the thing that annoys me, which I guess is related to what bothers LB--people who are so casually unconscious that anyone ever has to work harder than them, or doesn't automatically get the stuff they get. One friend of mine expresses some surprise that I was having a hard time finding a job after graduating, but she was working at the UN, a job she'd gotten through her internship, which she got through her father's connections. And then another ex-friend of mine suggested I take a writing class at the Y, and I said, in a totally non-accusatory way, "I don't have $300 for a writing class [implied: and my mom doesn't have the money to satisfy my every whim]" and she made the whole interaction into how she felt guilty about not having class consciousness and then I had to comfort and reassure her. Typing this out is making me glad I'm not her friend anymore.
I also have a paper to write that I think I'm going to stay up tonight to do. I'm considering stimulants.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04-26-06 8:11 AM
Glad to see you've joined the fold.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 04-26-06 8:18 AM
I have a source for Ritalin.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04-26-06 8:21 AM
(but I'm working on my paper now so maybe it won't be necessary.)
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 04-26-06 8:23 AM
re: 249
Coffee and cigarettes work for me. Especially once you reach that golden hour when extreme tiredness and stimulants work in harmony to create a brief period of lucid clarity circa 3-4am.
Posted by Matt McGrattan |