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Ghatanathoah 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.
Perhaps another reason peer effects don't show up is that situations consisting of one kid of upper class background completely surrounded by lower class kids and having no other options but them as a peer group are relatively rare. In most cases there are a number of other middle classish kids in the same boat to form a peer group with.
I base this conclusion on two pieces of evidence, the first is anecdotal, my own school background. My school had a variety of kids that included a large amount of lower class kids from a nearby trailer park and a large amount of respectable kids. For the most part nothing the trailer park kids did rubbed off on me or any of the other respectable kids because we rarely socialized with them, we naturally tended to interact with the kids we had something in common with (although most of the trailer park kids were friendly enough in class, I can't really say that most of them were unpleasant to be around). The only long-term impact they had on me was to help me realize that the underclass are usually trying to be nice people, even if they fail at it a lot.
The second piece consist of articles (mostly by Thomas Sowell) I've read about various immigrant communities in poor neighborhoods and how kids from groups with middle-class values (i.e. Chinese, Jewish immigrants) tended to cluster together and interact with each other and not the poorer kids around them. So it seems plausible to me that the ability to form small clusters of like-minded peers might mitigate peer effects.
Also, I second jsalvatier's points about some of your comments having a "political" feel. In particular it seems like you have a tendency to work in angry-seeming statements about how awful and unpleasant poor people are that can be rather off-putting, to say the least.
I didn't say anything about poor people as such. In fact, I would bet that I have more experience with actually being poor myself than most people here (and almost anyone here who is posting from a first-world country).
Now, it certainly isn't a source of any pleasure to me when I observe that in North America, and especially in many parts of the U.S., the class system has been evolving for several decades in a direction where there is an increasingly wide and severe chasm between the growing underclass and the middle classes, with rampant social dysfunction among the underclass, and increasing correlation between being poor and belonging to the underclass. (Note that I distinguish merely being poor, i.e. non-affluent, and belonging to the underclass, which is dysfunctional by definition.) But that's what the actual situation seems to be.
You characterize my statements as "off-putting," but you don't indicate what exactly you find inaccurate about them. Do you believe that I'm exaggerating the above described phenomenon? Or do you think only that I should be expressing myself more diplomatically about it?
Sorry to take so long getting back to you, I've had internet problems all week.
I'm somewhat familiar with Charles Murray's research on this subject, I assume you are too. But he has argued that the middle-class' efforts to separate themselves from the underclass make the situation worse, not better, because they make it harder to middle class culture to spread to the underclass, and he has advocated attempting to close the chasm in various ways. By contrast in your original comment you seemed distressed that it was so financially difficult for the middle class to separate themselves from the underclass and I got the impression you wished it was easier. Do you disagree with Murray, or was I drawing an incorrect inference from your comment? Feel free not to answer if you think doing so would break the "no discussing politics" rule.
What I find off-putting is primarily that they sound rather political and we aren't supposed to discuss politics at Less Wrong. If you were making the point at some politics forum I wouldn't necessarily find it off-putting. Admittedly this sort of discussion is something of a gray area since it's hard to discuss this type human social behavior without mentioning ideas that are parts of major political ideologies. I am reticent about voicing my personal opinion on the accuracy of your description is because I'm afraid I'm skirting the edge of political discussion already.
Well, even if we assume for the sake of the argument that it exacerbates the problem, this still doesn't mean that it's irrational for individual middle-class people to separate themselves from the underclass. All that this assumption would imply is that there is a tragedy-of-the-commons effect. But this doesn't change the perspective and the incentives faced by individuals at all.
Don't worry. As long as your comments are polite, well-argued, and made in good faith, you won't break any social norms here. Especially if the discussion is about general and long-standing social issues, and not about the ongoing political controversies from the headlines.
Out of curiosity, I did a search for "father" here and got about 1,030 results.
I did a search for "father figure" and got 3 results, one of which was a comment of yours.
I did a search for "father figures" and got 4 results, all of which were about fictional Heinlein characters.
That seems to suggest that people around here say "father" quite a bit more often than they say "father figure."
So, can you summarize your basis for this claim?
I mean, I don't accept the assertion that using the phrase "father figure" endorses the position that biological fathers are unnecessary, nor that such a position is transparently false or outrageously improbable. It might be false, but it's not obviously false; plenty of families don't have fathers and yet don't spontaneously implode. My own father died twenty years ago, for example, but I didn't stop being part of a family.
But if we can't even agree on what language people around here actually are using, it seems pointless to try and agree on what the implications of certain language use would be, were they using it.
"Father figure" seems to me to permit either position, "father" not so much. It's always troublesome when someone declares that you can only be properly impartial by agreeing with them.
Upvoted. Why was it downvoted before ? Perhaps the last paragraph irritated someone ? Apart from that, all the other statements I consider a sheer wisdom :-)