Comment by shkkmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shkkmo | Hacker News Reader

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> What are the CAUSAL relationships between parental earnings, educational attainment, and child earnings?

Social network, safety net, family experience with college, etc.... There are plenty of reasons why class mobility is imperfect. [Edit: I, for example, had access to summer jobs in highschool through my parents' professional network that were not as easily available to other people.]

> There's an entire literature base on exactly this question. "lifetime earnings parental earnings education" returns 130K results on Google Scholar.

Yes, but you chose a specific article to post to refute a specific claim. The article doesn't address that claim, so it is entirely reasonable to ask for a citation that does actually back up your argument. Your response here amounts to: "just go read the all the literature until you see I'm right" and is not constructive, even without the name calling.

Edit: You seem to have substantially edited your comment. Thanks for removing the name calling but generally ghost edits like this are frowned upon here.

> Yes, but you chose a specific article to post to refute a specific claim.

Yes it does! I think you're misreading OP's post.

What was OP's claim?

>> The most accurate predictor of a person's lifetime income is the income of their parents. Children of wealthy parents are more likely to go to college. It's like saying "People who drive expensive cars in high school make more money over their lifetime, period".

OP's assertion about "best predictor" is true but irrelevant. The interesting question is why?

OP asserts that the answer to that question is literally "for the same reason that rich kids drive BMWs".

OP is asserting that college has the same causal effect as a parent purchasing a BMW for a child. I.e., none at all, it's just a proxy for parental wealth.

That strikes me as an unlikely causal hypothesis.

Could there perhaps be a reason other than parent income that the child of an MD drives a BMW to school? Probably not.

But could there perhaps be a reason other than parent income that the child of an MD does well in their premed program? Seems likely.

And indeed, the above article establishes a causal link that's directly relevant to falsifying that assertion, that college == bmw in terms of causal effect.

Elsewhere, OP asks if the college wage premium persists across family backgrounds. I think perhaps something related to that question is what you perhaps read into their post. But that's not actually the claim they are actually making in that post.

(BTW: CWP and PEP are positive for students from low income backgrounds... these are just numbers you can look up... why am I the thread secretary for basic statistics?)

I simply do not see a anything in that study that refutes that college is just a proxy for parental income. The study only discusses parental background in terms of parental education and I don't see any controlling for parental income (though those two factors are clearly correlated, but are not identical and conflate them in several places.)

In reality, a significant part of the correlation between of college and is indeed due to college being a partial proxy for parental wealth. At the same time a significant part of the correlation between parental wealth and child income is to the that same proxy.

Even when you control for parental wealth, there are large heterogeneities in the effect of college on income in different groups. This makes it hard to argue for a simple, direct causal link between college and income.

While I think you and me tend to agree on this subject, I think you should focus less on being the "thread secretary" and more on understanding the opposing argument and clearly explaining your argument rather than posting dense statistical papers with no analysis and using abstruse acronyms.

Let's say there's a social norm to "go to college if you are smart enough or hard-working enough" for lower income families and "no matter what" for the wealthy (since all you need to be successful anywhere is wealth). If that were the case, they would be self-selecting into college on the basis of their own perceived ability to succeed there, confounding other related measures.

I'd guess that the why is irrelevant too.

Why? The parent got their child a tutor. Why can't poor kids have that? They're parents can't afford it.

Over and over again, better food, better housing stability, not having to work while doing school, etc.

The cause still comes back to some parents being wealthier than others.

It's classist to think wealthier parents are more virtuous in some way than their poorer peers

I think focusing just on resources misses part of it.

Upper class parents know how to raise children to present as higher class because they have the benefit of having been raised and lived in that class.

Being able to spend time on my kids helped, but they also entered school at a high level in math and reading and with the diction of a higher class because I knew how to teach this to them.

Some of the knowledge of how to succeed in education and develop children's minds is unevenly distributed, and it's not something easily fixed by just committing resources. (Though committing resources surely helps).

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