Disappointed that 4,000 words of herd morality drivel is upvoted on HN. Guess it's en vogue everywhere, even here.
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Upper middle-class parents obviously have more money to spend on their children, but there is also a social fracture. Class is not only defined in dollars, but by education, attitude, and zip code, by its way of life. America, warns Robert Putnam in Our Kids, faces “an incipient class apartheid.”
The typical child born and raised in the American upper middle class is raised in a stable home by well-educated, married parents, lives in a great neighborhood, and attends the area’s best schools. They develop a wide range of skills and gain an impressive array of credentials. Upper middle-class children luck out right from the start, even though this country was founded on antihereditary principles.
As part of the process of naturalization, I had to sign part 12, question 4 of Form N-400, which reads as follows: “Are you willing to give up any inherited title(s) or order(s) of nobility that you have in a foreign country?” I had none to give up, sadly, but very much enjoyed this question. Inheriting a particular position is un-American, after all. But while the inheritance of titles or positions remains forbidden, the persistence of class status across generations in the United States is very strong. Too strong, in fact, for a society that prides itself on social mobility.
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(emphasis mine). I mean, c'mon, this isn't very insightful.
If those „values and habits“ are supposed to be „be white and have a trust fund“, I may have misunderstood you.
The sheer quantity of information and habits children must process to climb up the rungs of success in the developed world is quite large. I don't mean just academics, but also soft-skills areas like networking, leadership, interpersonal communications, etc. More interestingly, the sheer amount of information to evaluate and reject is also quite large.
Read any Ask Reddit thread about what is common knowledge in a particular industry but isn't well-known publicly. Much of this information is passed along in many well-to-do families, but not as much in less-well-off families. Yet all of this information is either passed off as inaccurate common knowledge (you save more money per fluid ounce buying the biggest cup of Coke you can; truth: you shouldn't drink any sugar water of any kind, in any common American quantities, full stop), or is simply not known at all (insurance company tells you to use X body shop for repairs after an accident they're paying for, but fewer working class than middle-class people know you can tell them you're choosing Y body shop instead).
It takes a massive amount of parental involvement time to convey this mountain of information and inculcate these habits of thought into children, starting at infancy with baby sign language to impress an early predilection to communicate thoughts, all the way through adulthood with assessing people's character and financial affairs. Since these are young developing minds, repetition is the mother skill you will turn to time and again, so many lessons are taught many times over, increasing the time commitment.
If you're already time-trapped trying to hold down enough work to pay for exorbitant American urban/suburban real estate, healthcare, and education (among other expense categories), then you won't have the time to convey all this information that is definitely not taught in schools in America. Of course the issue is way more complex and nuanced than just what I've touched upon, but I see tons of parents in America spending way too little time with their children.
>> the top 20% possess superior values, habits, and cultural systems for social success and upward mobility
Wut? The top 20% possess a disproportionate amount of the real wealth. This isn't a value or habit, it's just the money itself. You don't need upward mobility when you're already at the top. You know what they say, the easiest way to make a million dollars is to start with 2 million dollars...
>>make choices to gear themselves and their children towards development of important skills to thrive in the modern workplace.
Or, they then use that disproportionate level of wealth to skew the system towards benefiting them. If you're a CEO, you can create a culture that favors people like you (because hey, you're a CEO, and "logically" you should want people that resemble you since you're so successful) which creates a bias towards certain people and therefor against others. If you have huge sums of money you can afford to hire the best accountants that allow you to avoid paying as much in taxes (because the tax code was lobbied for by previous generations of extremely wealthy people). Oh, and you already have a built in network of connections to allow open (or just fully remove) doors blocking your way towards success.
Getting rich is extremely hard. Staying rich, much less so. The point of this article however seemed to be that if you agree that there is a problem with the distribution of wealth (spoiler: pretty much every poll in recent years has shown this is overwhelmingly true on both sides of the political spectrum) then figuring out people who may be responsible for this would be a good way to solve it.
Also, "herd morality" is just "morality" or "culture". There's no such thing as objective morality that I've encountered. At best you'll just find common cultural agreements.
This one [0] says "Most of these studies have found inherited wealth to be in the range of 15% to 31% of total household wealth (Menchick and David, 1983; Modigliani, 1988; Hurd and Mundaca, 1989; Gale and Scholz, 1994; Juster and Laitner, 1996)".