Aside from the political discussion bound to happen here, I was surprised and happy to see the story of Hilltop highlighted. I used to buy filet mignon there for $7 a pound back in 2009 when I was living in Chelsea, as a recent migrant from California. I was very sad when it closed, and never knew the story.<p>It highlights a more general point: we, as humans, have a profound <i>attribution bias.</i> It's psychological. We tend to attribute success to our own individual characteristics, actions, and free will. Americans significantly more so.[<a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2786780?uid=2&uid=4&sid=21104247453601" rel="nofollow">http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2786780?uid=2&uid=4&si...</a>]<p>This would be fine, if it were true; however this attribution bias causes a significant departure from reality. When people succeed, we tend to focus on their personal attributes and actions, instead of looking at the situation surrounding them. When we do that, we tend to think of them as "rising above their situation," or "using their advantages well." We like to think we can do the same, but it is truly a kind of collective delusion.<p>We have to recognize that this is simply fantasy. It's not backed up by truth. Statistics says much the opposite: that most people who try will fail, and that people will be significantly burdened by failure, and that people who have failed <i>or succeeded</i> are extremely affected by external effects; that most successes are the result of both individual <i>and</i> significant historical and contextual factors. Externalities are more important than we want to believe. They're not everything, but they deserve much, <i>much</i> more attention than they get, which is often nil.<p>We would be a different kind of society were we to match our perception of success and failure with the reality of that success or failure. We don't have to give up our sense of individualism and the respect for personal growth and contribution; we just need to back it up with a recognition of the surrounding factors that are extremely real and highly influential on all our lives. I know we would be a better society if we did.
Humans have a problem with complexity and compound causality in general; any person who succeeds does so by some combination of both individual grit, and support from society and loved ones (even if indirectly), regardless of what the proportions happen to be (if one could even measure such a thing). Thinking that success must derive exclusively from either society or the individual is sheer absurdity, driven by a need to impose an idealized narrative upon messy reality.
I'm pretty skeptical of the study on which this essay bases its premise that economic mobility in the U.S. is limited compared to, say, France. The most detailed information I can find online is the executive summary[1], which has to handwave that it found Italy with a strongly <i>negative</i> correlation between parents' and children's economic outcomes! That suggests to me that their methodology is not particularly robust.<p>I've found similar attempts to establish parent/child economic correlation equally suspicious when, for example, they measure income correlation with percentiles rather than in adjusted dollars (it's much easier to be "mobile" if there's only $10K in income separating the 40th and 60th percentiles!)<p>[1] <a href="http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_assets/2011/CRITAFINAL1pdf.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_as...</a>
> <i>"Or is it more like a mass delusion keeping us from confronting the fact that poor Americans tend to remain poor Americans, regardless of how hard they work?"</i><p>The language used here is interesting. Wasn't the labor theory of value thrown out a while ago?
yeah but I'm always struck by how many successful people started out through some criminal act. Andrew Carnegie apparently committed fraud to get his start. That was a new one to me.