* The cruelty of life in the meritocratic upper class. The tragedy of the meritocracy is that the children of smart parents are inevitably likely to be dumber than their parents. If meritocratic upper class culture is built on contempt of the more middling, then children will understand they themselves are worthy of contempt.
* Other big reasons include constant new stream of cheap immigrant labor and a permanent black underclass. Once a family became established, it wasn’t too hard staying afloat. But immigration and less crowded also go hand in hand. When the US wasn’t crowded, land was free or very cheap. When crowded, structures built on that free cheap land generate rents, a big advantage to the descendents of the earliest arrivals. I’m obviously simplifying this, but you get what I mean.
A related micro example of this is how Angelenos made retirement money just by selling their LA house and moving to Arizona or Washington. An average kid born today in SF or LA will never be able to buy a house in those cities without their parents’ help. Hell, just about every 20-something living in the trendy parts of town are getting help from their parents or have roommates.
* The real problem is that our economy is skewed by the presence of a huge (~10 million) illegal immigrant work force. This, along with the relentless outsourcing of American manufacturing, ruins the supply of jobs (and the pay) at every level for Americans. In the 1960′s, relatively few Americans went to college, because jobs at all levels of the economy were reasonably plentiful, jobs that provided a lifestyle that everyone could live with.
A factory worker with nothing more than a high school diploma could afford a nice 3-bedroom house in a decent neighborhood, a couple of cars, along with a motorboat in the driveway, or even a vacation cottage within driving distance. State college tuition for your kids, if they got in, was about $700/term (2010 dollars). Didn’t get into college? No problem, no one worried. Bright future for everyone.
Now, if you don’t get into a very good college, and take the right classes that get you into the right graduate school, you’re doomed to being poor your entire life. No wonder these kids are so stressed.
* A faculty member at bronx science said there was at least one Asian suicide a year there, but not acknowledged as such by the shamed parents. Some other cause went on the death certificate or it was hushed up. It’s probably worse at stuyvesant hs, which is even more competitive and has proportionately more asians.
Two of my kids went to bx science when it was only a third Asian and less cutthroat but they told me a few stories of the treatment of these students by their parents. Not pretty . Now that both schools are majority Asian I would never have let them attend. It’s interesting though, I remarked to my son’s physics teacher that the asians must intimidate the white kids with their awesome smartz. Not so, the white kids are smarter, just less driven he told me.
* I think regression to the mean is misunderstood. First of all, it’s regression TOWARD the mean, not to the mean. So if two 130IQ parents have a child, chances are that child will fall somewhere in between the population mean of his ethnic group and that of his parents, but not all the way back to the population mean. And sometimes it goes the other way – it’s not an iron law. Two 130IQ parents have 145IQ offspring much more frequently than two 100 IQ parents.
Second, you have a phenomenon of assortative mating going on that is pushing in the other direction – Belmont is marrying Belmont and Fishtown is marrying Fishtown. What appears to be a single population mean for whites is actually a blended mean of two increasingly distinct groups. So maybe the relevant population mean is not the mean of the general population but that of your subgroup, so you don’t have that far to regress to. If you look at, for example Zuckerberg and Gates, their parents were not toothless hillbillies but professionals. Jobs was raised in a blue collar family but his birth parents were very intelligent. His father, Jandali, is from a prominent and wealthy Syrian family and has a PhD in Economics. The mean IQ of Kenyans is 71 but Obama’s father was clearly much smarter and Obama did not regress all the way back to the Kenyan mean or even the mulatto mean.
