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jsalvatier comments on Review: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - Less Wrong
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Generally speaking, when I search for literature on peer effects, the information is sparse and confusing. I'm not too surprised, since such effects are much more difficult to disentangle than heritability and shared environment.
My working hypothesis is that:
Peer effects matter a lot, but only up to a certain threshold of peer quality, and this threshold is basically what people intuitively perceive as sufficiently respectable company for their kids. So, basically, underclass peers will ruin your kids, but upper-class or genius peers won't improve things relative to the company of ordinary middle-class kids. (Just like downright abuse will ruin them, but helicopter parenting won't improve them.)
In order to quality for adoption, people must pass through sufficiently strict checks that they are highly unlikely to provide an environment below this threshold. So there aren't any good natural adoption experiments that expose kids to underclass peer groups.
I'd be curious to hear about any contrary evidence, though.
Maybe it does, but this really is my honest impression of what the situation looks like to a typical person aspiring to a middle-class lifestyle these days. I'm curious if you would disagree with any of the following statements, which seem to be roughly equivalent to what I wrote above (all given in the context of contemporary North America):
A house in a place where your kids will grow up with -- and, in particular, go to school with -- kids from respectable middle-class families is very expensive. In many places, and especially prosperous centers of economic activity that offer good career opportunities, it is somewhere around an order of magnitude above the median yearly household income.
Unless one is extraordinarily wealthy, to obtain such a house, one has to get into debt that is, just like the house price, enormous relative to one's income.
Such debt, due to its sheer size, can't be repaid in any time shorter than several decades. Just to pay the interest, let alone to make any dent in the principal, one must part with a significant part of one's income during this period. In this situation, a plausible bad luck scenario like job loss, health problems, etc. can easily push one into insolvency.
Worse yet, this situation implies that the bulk of one's net worth is completely non-diversified and invested in a single asset -- of a sort that is notoriously prone to bubbles and price crashes. Even worse, the occurrence of such crashes is positively correlated with bad economic conditions that make job loss and decreased earning power especially likely.
Even with a minimalist approach to parenting, raising kids is expensive. Each additional kid makes it less likely that one will manage to remain solvent under the above described conditions.
Sufficiently bad financial ruin can plausibly put one into a situation where one is no longer able to afford to ensure a peer group for one's kids that will be above the threshold where bad peers exercise significant bad influence. Also, generally speaking, below a certain class threshold, all sorts of social pathologies are rampant to a degree that seems frightful to a typical middle-class person -- and, again, bad financial ruin can make one unable to afford to insulate oneself from people that fall below this threshold.
Taken together, (1)-(6) makes for a rather stressful existence, in which having more kids will seem to a lot of people like an additional burden in an already difficult situation, and an additional risk in an already uncomfortable gamble.
I'd be really curious to see where exactly our opinions diverge here.
As phrased above, your position seems like a reasonable starting point for a discussion, and I probably would not have made my comment if you had first commented with something closer to that.
I was trying to comment on the way you presented the argument before rather than argue that your object level point is mistaken, since I don't have strong views here. It's not a serious issue, just something I thought you might like to be aware of. The more I think about this, the less 'justifiable' it seems to bring this up.
You used several adjectives with a normative tinge "enormous debt", "edge of solvency" and colorful imagery "precariously holding onto a rope above a pond full of crocodiles", which sound like they're designed to get the reaction "Oy My God! What has America (or pick your favorite country) come to?!", rather than the reaction "buying a house in an expensive area sounds risky".
Does that make things clearer?
On the object level topic, your argument seems very focused on debt, do you think renting a house in a similar area substantially lessens the burden?
I have no problem with your comment, and I'm glad to explain the reason why I made my original comment that way. The reason why I used such emotional imagery is that I wanted to depict the way people feel about their situation, which is the relevant thing in this context, even if the way they feel is unrealistic and biased. (Since the way they feel, and not some ideally objective evaluation of the situation, will ultimately determine their decisions about having kids.)
(By the way, do you really think that "enormous debt" and "edge of solvency" are not perfectly realistic descriptions of how many, if not most people in their child-bearing years live these days?)
I'm probably over-focusing on debt, since I myself consider any serious indebtedness with horror. I would guess that debt by itself is probably a much lesser source of worry to most people.
Now, when it comes to the issue of renting vs. buying, this is one of those things where people, including otherwise smart and successful people, tend to have opinions that seem seriously crazy to me. As far as I can tell, among the North American middle classes, it seems to be near-universal belief that a basic prerequisite for serious family life is owning a house, so the idea of renting is a non-starter. There is also the near-universal belief that renting is somehow a raw deal compared to buying, so that renting sends a strong signal that you're either stupid or, more likely, can't be approved for credit because of some shameful history you're hiding (and all the bad qualities it likely implies).
All this despite the fact that basic economics strongly suggests that renting should be a better deal for nearly everyone. (Unless perhaps the relevant markets are distorted to an enormous degree by subsidies, regulations, and perhaps also status signaling games, but in reality I see only the latter in sufficiently strong form.)
However, this gets us to the more general issue of various other expensive status games that one is supposed to play in order to be accepted among one's social group nowadays. This is a difficult and complicated topic, but on the whole, it seems to me that for a variety of reasons, these signaling requirements tend to expand as one's career and income advance, so in the end, it's difficult to avoid the situation where one is constantly walking on the edge financially. Needless to say, all this certainly isn't conductive to having kids.
So it seems we all agree that your crocodile-pit description does not necessarily reflect reality.
Except for certain child-bearing zoo employees.
It depends on the concrete place and people we're talking about. There are ways to escape falling into the underclass even with very little money, but that requires luck and talent that many (and I'd even say most) people don't have.
Well, in 15 years I'll let you know whether my decision to live and reproduce in a city that has poor people has turned my kids into underclass wrecks.
It would be mere anecdotal evidence. I kind of feel you are trying to tell or signal something other than offering to eventually share with us the results of a long term experiment.
...you're right, I'm not making housing and childrearing decisions with the main goal of providing a useful data point to LW 15 years in the future. And I am trying to signal that I think poor people are not a crocodile pit. Enough so that I am choosing to share a neighborhood with them.
I don't think he was painting it as a crocodile pit, I read him as pointing out that negative effects on life outcomes are to be expected on average. It seems a highly probable hypothesis.
How do you interpret "it means being thrown, together with your kids, right into the dreaded underclass in which all sorts of frightful social pathologies are rampant. It's like precariously holding onto a rope above a pond full of crocodiles" ?
As Julia said, people are offended by the suggestion to treat their own class position with extreme cynicism, and to believe that there's, like, a separate species of people in their country - their compatriots, mostly, not just illegal immigrants - who are dangerous animals to be avoided at all costs. While certainly such a position could increase personal safety, I'm adamantly against it.
For fuck's sake, I grew up in Russia in the 90s - a time of danger, opportunity and rampant inequality/unfairness - and no-one back then had a "bubble" (well, except for the top 0,1% maybe), so I mixed with kids from rough neighbourhoods and not-so-good families, was even friends with one (after we fought for years and then grew up a bit). Our school was an ordinary one, but well-run, with good and savvy teachers, so there was no violence outside of the usual scuffles and playing at gangs; I think that every one of us would be offended were our parents to try and "bubble" us away from the "underclass".
Juliawise said she does not believe that she is throwing her kids into a pit of crocodiles. You seem to be saying that she has an obligation to throw her kids into a pit of crocodiles.
I'm saying that she has an obligation, whatever she does, not to think about her society as a pit of crocodiles (except hypothetically, for abstract arguments, etc - never in semi-conscious daily thinking, as a matter of "attitude"), because that'll only increase the class divide and its problems. Society is affected by its members' perception of it, and if everyone just wanted to maximize safety for themselves and their families... why, that society would be utterly helpless! What's the difference between civic responsibility in the face of war or natural disasters and civic responsibility in the face of social division and alienation?
If the middle class just evacuates from everywhere where they have any contact with the "underclasses", so that the latter are left in utter and visible isolation, like the "Untouchable" castes in India... do you think that spells any hope of survival for the American nation, its culture, its spirit?
Your comment has some similar features to what I commented earlier in this discussion (http://lesswrong.com/lw/col/review_selfish_reasons_to_have_more_kids/6onl?context=1#6onl). We both grew up in late communist era. Non-elitarianism was both an official moral value, and it also was enforced by mixing up people geographically. The good neighbourhoods and bad neighborhoods were not so strongly different from each other as they are now. I started wondering for a while, if my attitude is caused by the regime I grew in... Maybe in some countries or areas there is almost nothing in the middle between good and bad neighborhoods. But people describing schools in Cambridge, where profesors' kids mix up with the low class kids seem to have the similar experience as I have.
To summarize my opinion: Creating the bubble is usually unnecessary and deforms the mental image of the world for the child. The child chooses his peers as long as there is some variety available. If the child instinctively wants to go out with little criminals and do wrong things together, it is time to sit together at the table and discuss it in the family. One day the child will grow up and will have to choose his peers on his own, as well as make his own moral decisions. Of course, if reasoning would not work, I would probably proceed to creating a bubble eventually, as a last and desperate measure. But in most cases this stage will never happen, and I would not ruin myself financially to do the bubble thing as the first step.
Nice thoughts, thanks.
The important thing is the neighborhood not the city. I think it also depends on the type of poor people.
Cambridge, MA. Lots of lefty professorial and computer types, also lots of Haitian and Cape Verdean immigrants in housing projects.
In different neighborhoods. Specifically, would your children be playing with the children in the projects?
Probably. They'll certainly be going to school with them. We haven't bought a house yet, but all the areas we're considering have projects nearby.
At least in the US, there is a big subsidy for homeowning in that you can deduct the interest on you mortgage (I think this only applies to your first home ).
I wasn't aware that the tax breaks on mortgage interest were so straightforward in the U.S. Here in Canada nothing similar exists.
There seems to be an interesting natural experiment here -- in Canada, even though there is no such deduction, people's attitudes and behavior with regards to renting vs. buying are still more or less the same as in the U.S. (In fact, the recent crash has probably left Americans less eager to buy on average.) So while the tax break changes the math in favor of buying significantly for people in high tax brackets, it looks like this isn't the crucial factor motivating people to buy in practice.