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Aug 17, 2022Liked by Bari Weiss

About thirty years ago, exhausted from career and domestic demands, my wife and I left our son with relatives and took a much-needed fall vacation. We spent a lovely week in Nantucket at a place called, "The Nantucket Beach Club." It was a sprawling wood frame affair, at least a hundred years old, and a building, I observed, that would never pass modern fire code. It was something right out of an old Bing Crosby movie.

Every morning, still on medical-practice time, I would rise early and drift down to the quiet and comfortable lobby for coffee and a morning newspaper. "Interns," young women of freshman college age, busied themselves with their duties. They were cookie-cutter identical: khaki shorts, white tennis shoes with short white socks, a white knit shirt, and the requisite ponytail pulled through a golf hat.

One stopped by my chair to ask if I needed anything, and we struck up a conversation. "Where are you from? What do you do? May I get you anything for your coffee?" She was a superb conversationalist and we became fast friends. She appeared fascinated by my background from the coalfields of West Virginia and quizzed me about my upbringing (farmhouse without running water, and its very own outhouse!), and my education. She was especially interested in my college and career experiences, and was surprised that I was a practicing doctor.

Now her turn. She was from Cambridge, from a fairly well-to-do family, had gone to a private high school and was doing this "internship" for her "CV." We compared our educations, our family lives, our friends and connections, and I slowly began to realize: one's background is everything. Family is everything. Connections are everything. When I was stuck on a math problem, I either figured it out or I didn't. She would walk down the street, where a Nobel laureate in physics (that was a real example) would help her figure it out. She bathed in an atmosphere of success around her breakfast table; my parents wanted me to be a mining engineer because I was "smart." All the families she knew "had money, but you didn't talk about it; it was just understood." Also understood was that success was expected; it didn't matter your career, but your duty was to increase the family wealth before passing it down. My mother had supplemented our income by selling corn and beans.

This thirty minute conversation had brought with it tremendous insight, and when I see the elite looking down upon the hoi polloi, denigrating their poor lives and their poor ways, I think back to this cookie-cutter intern and wonder where she is now.

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Great piece. Structure matters. Friendships that lead to more structure are important. Friendships that inhibit structure are problematic. The issue I have with Chetty and Dunbar is they are single factor analyses, targeting the wrong factor. Structure can come from parents, religion, work, in your case the military service etc. For one, I’m glad you found something that worked for you!

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I have had the curse/blessing of being born to incredible privilege, losing it through a very public scandal, moving in with my middle class grandparents from the “other side” of the family in a poor working class town, and still ending up in an elite high school, college, and law school. Through all of it, I made friends with kids from “both sides of the tracks” and I can easily agree with Rob that I was - in alternating environments - hated for being “stuck up” and I was looked down on for being poor. The one thing I could never shake was the early privilege and expectations that go along with it. For me, as I look back, it was this expectation mindset - drilled in early and coloring me through osmosis - that led me to seek out boarding school (on scholarship) and then upward from there. It was also my working class friends who taught me to be grounded and real and authentic - especially valuable when some of the kids at boarding school knew my family’s fall from grace. But now when people ask me the single greatest influence, it was the ubiquity of the expectation of betterment and success from my early peers, family and church. With that said, I would not be the human being I am today without the kids from the Shaker Street after school program. I credit that cohort with keeping me humble, awake, and aware of the greater world beyond the oft gray walls of privilege.

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Aug 17, 2022·edited Aug 17, 2022

If trying to help actual friends change their lives' paths is this futile, imagine how hopeless it is for the government to try and help poor people in dysfunctional communities en masse. We have poured trillions of dollars down that hole, with nothing to show for it other than that all the social dysfunction and pathology is more solidified than ever and just continues to grow.

As the Left's takeover of American institutions becomes so complete that even the military is starting to turn woke, the entry point to a better life that worked for the author may not even be available to others in the future.

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Aug 17, 2022·edited Aug 17, 2022

I don’t inderstabdhow a study based on Facebook “friendships” could lead to any major finding. Aside from the loose definition of “friend”, the platform has only existed for less than 20 years, in my view not long enough to generate enough data that could help support a hypothesis around a long term impact of social class on one’s life.

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This column makes me think of my single mother who was a nurse in the 70s when they made nothing in terms of today's money while fighting off men who abused her. My brother and I had to learn life's lessons the absolute hard way, but her guidance was key; a bar of soap in the mouth after saying the F word I had just learned on the kindergarten bus does that. Or, making my meals and doing my own laundry at the age of eight while mom worked the night shift not affording child care...

The connections we made with other people of similar backgrounds are still alive and well today - and we are all successful. I have to add... Our three children are now productive adults we are very proud of. That is my mother's legacy. I adore her as she was the absolute toughest human being I have ever met.

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Whether rich or poor, talented and highly motivated friends early in life can show us how to set our own sights higher and permanently raise our life's trajectory. In 8th and 9th grade I attended a decent middle school and high school, but happened to meet Patty, Nicole, Craig, David and Chris, who generated friendly competition with me. They ultimately went to Harvard, Williams, Johns Hopkins, USC and West Point, and their influence on me lasted for the rest of high school, even though I moved away.

I know another guy, the first person in his poor white family in Northern Alabama to go to college, who got there by competing in a friendly way with a best friend who was determined to go to West Point. The guy not only made it into West Point, too, but became a doctor.

Our friends definitely shape how we see ourselves and the standards we set for ourselves in life, especially early in life when we're all molten metal and have a disproportionate effect on the shape of one another.

Of course, the reverse is true too--bad friends pull us down, as Mike Tyson has talked about many times.

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Aug 17, 2022·edited Aug 17, 2022

I was born lower working class, lots of family dysfunction, lots of trashy behavior. I tested into gifted class at school and after that my friend group was those kids, and they were all of a very different social class than I; their parents were all white collar and many had terminal degrees. That changed my life. The exposure to upper middle class habits, tastes, norms and behavior, plus my own modestly high intelligence and genuine interest in books and culture, prepared me to later marry someone from that class. I didn’t finish college as I had my first child earlier than planned, but I still am married to a highly educated executive with a high salary, and most our friends are well educated professionals. I look at my many cousins with their alcohol and drug abuse, arrests, casual profanity, illegitimate children, cigarettes, trashy tattoos, and poor diets and think that there but for having been placed into gifted class go I.

I would never dream of giving my cousins advice or trying to help other than in ways that don’t insult their dignity. Of course their lives would be better if they stopped sleeping with losers and blowing their limited funds on tattoos and sometimes ate a vegetable, but that is normal behavior in their social group so they do what they need to to fit in, like anyone else. So I occasionally give hand me downs to their kids (I accept them too for mine; I’m frugal not a princess) and occasionally contribute to their Amazon wish lists for school supplies and keep my mouth shut when she keeps going back to him when he gets out of jail and when he cusses out his boss. They don’t want to hear it.

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I really liked this article. It was well written and enjoyable to read. Having said that, as Kemah’s comment above points out, the study is weak.

In the US, familial wealth is transitory. The pattern is that a family builds wealth over a couple of generations and loses it within a couple of generations. Poor people and rich people make terrible decisions, become morally bankrupt and possessed with foolish, self defeating beliefs.

The only constant is that moral and ethical behavior generates a sustainable path through multiple generations of family life. Social class has an impact but is by no means the only determining factor in how someone chooses to be.

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When I was a kid, I dreamed of being adopted by a stable normal family that would whisk me away from a single mother with a personality disorder, addiction issues, and a penchant for relationships with abusive men. She would drop me off at friends or relatives houses for months at a time and I recall feeling a burden when I would over hear them criticizing my mother about the time she would stop sending money to take care of me. She would invariably appear to drag me back into her world of neglect, punctuated by partying and screaming. There is no world where I belong now, despite fighting tooth and nail for every opportunity I found and becoming a successful therapist who enjoys a life of relative success and ease now. The closest I can come to relating to others is the scene in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein when the monster introduces himself to the family he’s fallen in love with from the cover of the pig sty, they shrink back in horror and murder follows. I wept when I read that in college, a place none of my family members have ever stepped foot in. I too understand the rarity of our kind, and it’s so nice to know you are with me friend. Thank you for putting my experience into your words.

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Rob should chat with JD Vance. I completely agree, unless the subject is willing or desperate they’ll never seek help. I witnessed it every year at the inner city school where I taught 5th and 6th grade. The major influence was intact families and friendships.

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The military has always done an excellent job at giving intelligent poor kids opportunities. What’s more interesting to me is the science behind who takes advantage of those opportunities.

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Graduate from high school or get a GED or higher education if possible, don’t get into drugs or go to jail, get a job, don’t have kids until you’re married, don’t spend more than you earn.

This is what we should should be teaching in schools. Following the guidelines above would solve most people’s problems in the US.

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I have a different take, my discipline and success has led me to better more successful friends. The discipline came from my lower middle class religious family and the values they instilled in me. Along my journey I have met many unimpressive people from more successful backgrounds and have also met many spectacularly successful people from very underprivileged backgrounds. Discipline, character and values are the difference. The things we seem to not value in our culture today. The things left out of our government education system.

What I find so confusing is this is not new, why are we still searching for answers as to what separates successful people from unsuccessful ones? Friends? Race? Blah blah blah, nothing but excuses for the infinite number of “victims” who’s circumstances are never their fault. We all have choices in life, make good ones.

There are victims who deserve sympathy and support but we have lost the ability to differentiate between victims that truly did nothing to deserve their circumstance and those who only have themselves to blame and I am not going to apologize if my conservative lack of empathy is annoying to you. Let’s award another PHD for a new theory we can build our disastrous education system on. Let’s build more welfare systems to support peoples bad choices, seems like the foundation of ruin to me. One example homelessness is the result of unaffordable housing- really? I could go in but I’m sure I’ve disgusted you enough by now. A society’s success is determined by the character of its people. Inflation is not our biggest issue it’s a symptom of a much bigger illness.

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Aug 17, 2022·edited Aug 17, 2022

This can be true even the our first jobs we seek. When I was in college (working and putting myself through) I first worked at a well known steakhouse. The clientele were working-middle class. I always enjoyed listening to the conversations of the people. These were my people! Then 1.5 years later, I got a job at a very fancy restaurant that catered to the elite of the small city. Their conversations were so different! I was fascinated and enjoyed overhearing the differences in their thinking, especially about money. Observing the differences of thinking between the two groups changed me and how I though about money. I am grateful that I worked both jobs because I learned a lot about people from both.

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It's uplifting to read about someone who transcended his existence and somehow found bootstraps to pull himself up by. Most kids stuck in broken or dysfunctional families can't even find or recognize the bootstraps.

My own theory about social success and upward mobility: reasonably secure family and a school environment where academic achievement is not "uncool". Unfortunately, today's schools are teaching poor kids the perpetual victim mindset that will keep them from even looking for their bootstraps.

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