Comment by fingerprinter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fingerprinter | Hacker News Reader

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I can't help but feel that this is about a couple of things:

1. education

2. income

3. influence

I've travelled and lived all over the world. It always struck me odd that the poorer places in the world always seem to value religion over education (my perception), and it creates a nasty cycle where the majority of people don't/can't better themselves.

I saw this first hand in the southern US where it was always God #1, everything else (including education, which in my view is super important) #2. You would be amazed at the things people would give up if they thought "God" told them to.

I haven't studied the interaction of the three things above, so this is just my observations, but if you have a strong influencer at a young age, that influencer has a dramatic effect on the trajectory of your life. If that person pushes you to education, likely you'll be ok. Though it goes both ways. If the influencer pushes you away from education (for whatever reason), your life situation could end up very differently.

I was very lucky to have a non-religious teacher mother who pushed education above all else. I didn't know college "was optional". In my family, it wasn't. Not b/c I think college is necessary; I don't by any means. It was her thinking and pushing that molded me in a certain direction. Even though I grew up in the northeast US, I saw super religious families who pushed their kids away from education. Those kids are now in the their 30s and 40s and have lost most of their lives to "god".

As a bit of a counterpoint, I'm originally from rural Mississippi and was raised by very religious parents who would absolutely say that God should be #1. But this didn't translate into devaluing education. Instead they viewed it as their religious duty to give their children the very best education they could so that we could make a positive difference in the world.

"You would be amazed at the things people would give up if they thought "God" told them to."

I wouldn't be surprised at all. My parents made tremendous sacrifices to provide their children with a better life because they believed God wanted them to.

On the flip side, I have often seen people making poor decisions and attributing the decision to what they believed God wanted them to do. However, I don't think it is at all obvious that this is caused by their belief in God. It seems more likely to me that in the absence of belief in God, they would make similarly poor decisions but give different justifications.

Oddly, the researchers’ Summary of Project Findings (http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/website/IGE/Executive%2...) says that on average, the religious correlation is the opposite: “Finally, some of the strongest predictors of upward mobility are correlates of social capital and family structure. For instance, high upward mobility areas tended to have higher fractions of religious individuals and fewer children raised by single parents.”

I’m not sure how what data on religious people they are referring to. The Bible Belt is clearly deep red in the income mobility map.

As an extreme counter example I visited rural South Sudan, this is one of the poorest parts of the world, people are subsistence farming so their monetary income is very low. Some people struggle to pay school fees of 20 South Sudanese Pounds ($6.88) a term (3 terms a year).

Government funding is pretty limited so a lot of schools are supported by the church there, I think the funds are mainly provided by Christian organisations outside of the country.

My theory is that people with a better education are more keen on education. In South Sudan the people in church leadership are highly educated compared with the average person.

It isn't just God (in whatever form that takes). It can be family, it can be a job, it can be a farm. It doesn't have to be God.

I think the big take away is that education should be the number one priority. In my situation, my parents pushed either college/university or a trade school. The military wasn't an option (Father, dear, had a terrible time with Vietnam), and getting a job straight out of high school was out as well.

I genuinely believe that the attitude of --you'll go somewhere and study to do something, no matter what-- is what really counts in kids' lives.

Yes, it's much, much, much easier for the ones who have money and cultural capital; but it's the lessons of do anything with your life that seem to impact harder.

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