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If I think about everything I've learned about the world since I was a kid, the thing that would've most surprised kid-me is how privileged the median or even 10%-ile person with a "good" job is, e.g., what's the rate of tech folks at top companies who were too poor to get dental care and have crooked teeth? 1/1000 seems like the right order of magnitude for someone my age or younger in tech and maybe it's 1/100 but, at a population level in the U.S., seems more like 1/5 or maybe 1/10. 19 comments | Expand all CWs
For a less extreme example, a large group of tech folks I was hanging out with compared notes on US high schools. My high school was ok (one random site ranked it 35%-ile among schools in WI, another one rated it well above median), which made it bottom of the barrel among tech folks. Most people went to high schools where basically everyone graduated, very few people were in the "reduced price lunch" income bracket, etc., which means they were in high-end high schools. I don't think there's anything wrong with attending an elite private high school or being wealthy enough to live in a great school district, but the rate feels surreal to me. The thing that really surprised me when I looked at the data is how heavily top companies recruit from top schools and then how heavily top schools "recruit from" high income families. The median student at a top school is > p90 parental income and even at a "merely good" school, the median student is > p80. BTW, I consider myself extremely lucky to have grown up in the U.S., but poor enough that I have crooked teeth, lightheaded from hunger often enough that I had standard strategies for dealing with it, malnourished enough that I once broke my collarbone from from gently rolling off the couch onto the floor, in an abusive home where I was regularly beaten, etc. I definitely had better opportunities than the p99 person in Vietnam and likely even p99.9. One thing that feels surreal is that someone who's p99.9 privilege in Vietnam is really at the bottom of the barrel in terms of privilege for someone who grew up in the U.S. It boggles my mind how much of a leg up the median successful American got. Sure, it would've been nice to have an easier childhood but, by comparison to almost anywhere in the world, my life has been on extreme easy mode despite being considered highly disadvantaged by U.S. standards. @danluu I mean, having the time to call out people is a privilege within itself. I'd guess immigrants growing up on a low household income don't have the time to punch up. There's been a lot of times in Canada my parents have been wronged, but they're too busy trying to survive to shift some of their focus on "punching up" and getting justice (whatever it may be). (child of Egyptian immigrants, we all became naturalized Canadian citizens) @danluu I do wonder where you get your data for that statement. A rich Vietnamese has something like 10 years higher life expectancy than a poor American. What you describe may have been true when your family migrated and you grew up, but by now things are both better in Vietnam and worse in the USA. Also, what exactly is you family/migration story? You have hinted at it a few times, but I'm left filling in guesses. Having spent some time in Afghanistan definitely recalibrated my very American understanding of poverty and difficulty.  @danluu the compounding effects from wealth just seem insane. You go to the right school and have time and resources to study the right thing, which gets you into the next right school, which lets you make friends with the right person, who happens to know someone with an opportunity and so on and so forth @deadalnix I do it manually, which is horribly inefficient but I think also the only thing that works decently since auto-cross-posted stuff always reads oddly due to the differences in message length limits. I've tried ChatGPT for automated re-writes and it's not even close to good enough, unfortunately. I guess this highly incentivizes me to write more on my blog or drop Twitter. @danluu Thanks for the thread. It's an interesting read, having grown up in a rural Wisconsin town with a nurse and janitor for (great) parents. This thread has me thinking conflicting thoughts. @danluu My family immigrated to the US when I was in elementary school, and I grew up relatively poor here (the CA gov considered our income "very low", some years, "extremely low"). I remember seeing classmates get picked up for doctor/dentist appointments, never realizing that periodic regular health checkups were a thing. I thought you only went to the doctor when you had a disease or something. (I didn't have insurance until my university gave me a grant)  @danluu the fact that there are a lot of "wow it's a small world!" moments in these spaces are kinda all one needs to see to understand how homophilous these spaces are too I get that you can substitute dental care for other social markers but I do think such social differences might be less pronounced in countries with better social safety nets like Western European countries. I noticed even in Canada the class composition of those who intern at big tech companies is a lot broader than what you see in the US. My US intern friends within the same companies had a totally different pedigree than my Canadian friends. |
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Where are all the people who grew up too poor to get dental care ending up? Not in high-end tech jobs, and tech is less highly selected on this than finance, law, etc.
I've interacted with quite a few interns and new grads at big tech companies and, among U.S. born folks, I think the rate of people who were on the U.S. Olympic team is pretty similar to the rate of people who haven't had dental care (IME, the Olympic team rate has been higher, but sampling from tails like this is noisy)