Planet Money : NPR: A few weeks ago, we were sitting around the office arguing over this simple question: Who had richer parents, journalists or people working in finance? Doctors or artists? More generally: What's the link between household income during childhood and job choice during adulthood?
After some poking around, we figured out how to settle the argument. It allowed us to look at the same group of people in 1979 and 2010 — from a time when most were teenagers to the time when they were middle-aged and, for the most part, gainfully employed.
4 comments:
This is so weird! I guess I can see the truth in it though. A lot of people who were "poor" during their childhood strive to better their lives and the lives of their families, so they work really hard to get that high paying job. A lot of "rich" children tend to slack off because they've never had to work for anything in their lives when their parents would give it to them. They don't often know the meaning of hard work. I have seen this is public schooling. There were a lot of "rich" kids in the lower percentile, and there were a lot of "poor" kids in the upper percentile. Now I'm not saying there wasn't a crossover. "Rich" kids can be smart, and "poor" kids can be dumb. I think this is just a general issue of work ethic. "Poor" kids know that if they want to go to college, then they have to study hard and get as many scholarships (and if possible free rides) to be able to even go to college. I know I wouldn't be going to college if I hadn't worked hard in high school to succeed. I would have had to immediately go into the work force to make money to pay for my older sister's college tuition. Kids learn from their parents' lives even if it seems like they don't.
This article is definitely thought provoking and the author was right in admitting that it doesn't answer any questions. I agree with Kristen in being able to see the truth in it though. However, in my experience, I have mostly seen where students want to make the same or more as their parents and work hard or not based on that. If their parents were construction workers, they were happy going into it as well. If their parents were educated, most likely they were striving for college. I'm curious though how the research would read if they included high school grades or degrees to compare.
So, I'm not going to get into a discussion of work ethic vs. career path, but this makes sense. Typically, art type lessons (dance, painting, music etc.) are expensive and largely unnecessary, though enriching, childhood expenses.
I guess my question is, what do we as a society want to do with this information? As budget cuts are limiting or eliminating arts programs, arts education will become an even bigger determiner of income and social status. If we don't want that (and as artists and frankly, Americans we shouldn't), then what kind of pragmatic solutions can we think of? Crowd-sourced, tax deductible arts funding? Cutting some other element of education? The solution isn't as simple as posting things on Facebook about how arts education helps students' grades and well-being, because things like free-lunch programs and phys. ed do that too... Obviously, it's a complex issue and thousands or millions of people are dedicating their lives to helping solve it, but at what point does pointing out how a system is broken hinder the process of fixing it?
I was surprised that artists were that high up in terms of income. 65,000 dollars is a pretty good salary. What surprised me was that people who had artists as parents made significantly less than their parents did. I'm curious as to what factors played into that. Did they just think they didn't have to work hard? Did they expect their parents to provide for them for the rest of their lives? Lawyers and Doctors make a more than comfortable living. I guess that's why everyone wants to be one.
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