My main point is that not needing money is not an unmitigated blessing. I tend to agree with DVH that external motivation (“hunger”) is a useful and possibly even a necessary thing. People who can realize their potential (in useful ways) purely on internal motivation are rare.
I specifically mentioned trust-fund kids to hint at two things. First, their outcomes are not great. I don’t have any links handy, but I think they are less successful and less happy than their peer group which is similar in terms of things like IQ and social standing, but doesn’t have enough money and actually has to work for a living. In everyday terms, I can’t help but notice that housewives are, as a rule, less interesting people than women who work—again, for comparable IQ and social status (I understand it’s possible to argue about the direction of causality here).
Second, a recurring motif in how wealthy people try to bring up their kids is that they explicitly do not want them to have all the money they need just for the asking. The money is there as a safety net, certainly, but the kids are pushed to go out and earn money. The idea is the same—the lack of external motivation does bad things to people.
I specifically mentioned trust-fund kids to hint at two things. First, their outcomes are not great. I don’t have any links handy, but I think they are less successful and less happy than their peer group which is similar in terms of things like IQ and social standing, but doesn’t have enough money and actually has to work for a living.
Is that a personal impression or a memory of research that you can’t find at the moment?
Second, a recurring motif in how wealthy people try to bring up their kids is that they explicitly do not want them to have all the money they need just for the asking. The money is there as a safety net, certainly, but the kids are pushed to go out and earn money. The idea is the same—the lack of external motivation does bad things to people.
This is consistent with a world in which “Adversity builds character” is a cached thought and in which a precise formulation of it is fact.
There’s also the general correlation between socioeconomic class and Good Things. Particularly important in this case is the negative correlation between number of risk factors and various Good Things. I suppose you could postulate some sort of Simpson-like paradox to explain your impressions. But for me, this pattern matches way too easily to bat-to-head fallacy as applied to scarcity.
Is that a personal impression or a memory of research that you can’t find at the moment?
Memory of research. I don’t know enough trust-fund kids to have a personal impression.
“Adversity builds character”
We’re talking about a slightly different thing: the need for external motivation. The point isn’t that for proper character development you should spend your youth going to school barefoot in the snow uphill both ways. The point rather lies in establishing the pattern and the expectation that if you want something, you should be prepared to pay for it in work (time, effort, resources), that some desires are too expensive this way, and that the amount of work you’re prepared to do limits the things you can get.
If, as a kid or a teenager, you don’t get any practice in limiting your wants and in pushing yourself to get something, you do not develop the appropriate “muscles” and so grow up lacking in abilities to control your desires and push yourself over the internal whining of “but I don’t wanna”.
Note that I’m not arguing that poverty is better. I am arguing that growing up without any financial constraints is not all rainbows and unicorns and brings with it its own set of problems.
Gotcha. I’d sure be interested in seeing empirical evidence demonstrating a link between socioeconomic class, parenting style, and/or impulse control and self-discipline.
The problem is that there is considerable genetic component in “impulse control and self-discipline” and it also affects your (and your parents’) socioeconomic class. And additional problem is that the effects of parenting style are asymmetric—it’s relatively easy to royally screw up a kid, but it’s very hard to improve a kid beyond his/her genetic baseline. Yet another problem is that certain possible outcomes of studying this topic are politically incorrect and likely to lead to… undesirable career consequences for the researcher.
My main point is that not needing money is not an unmitigated blessing. I tend to agree with DVH that external motivation (“hunger”) is a useful and possibly even a necessary thing. People who can realize their potential (in useful ways) purely on internal motivation are rare.
I specifically mentioned trust-fund kids to hint at two things. First, their outcomes are not great. I don’t have any links handy, but I think they are less successful and less happy than their peer group which is similar in terms of things like IQ and social standing, but doesn’t have enough money and actually has to work for a living. In everyday terms, I can’t help but notice that housewives are, as a rule, less interesting people than women who work—again, for comparable IQ and social status (I understand it’s possible to argue about the direction of causality here).
Second, a recurring motif in how wealthy people try to bring up their kids is that they explicitly do not want them to have all the money they need just for the asking. The money is there as a safety net, certainly, but the kids are pushed to go out and earn money. The idea is the same—the lack of external motivation does bad things to people.
Is that a personal impression or a memory of research that you can’t find at the moment?
This is consistent with a world in which “Adversity builds character” is a cached thought and in which a precise formulation of it is fact.
There’s also the general correlation between socioeconomic class and Good Things. Particularly important in this case is the negative correlation between number of risk factors and various Good Things. I suppose you could postulate some sort of Simpson-like paradox to explain your impressions. But for me, this pattern matches way too easily to bat-to-head fallacy as applied to scarcity.
Memory of research. I don’t know enough trust-fund kids to have a personal impression.
We’re talking about a slightly different thing: the need for external motivation. The point isn’t that for proper character development you should spend your youth going to school barefoot in the snow uphill both ways. The point rather lies in establishing the pattern and the expectation that if you want something, you should be prepared to pay for it in work (time, effort, resources), that some desires are too expensive this way, and that the amount of work you’re prepared to do limits the things you can get.
If, as a kid or a teenager, you don’t get any practice in limiting your wants and in pushing yourself to get something, you do not develop the appropriate “muscles” and so grow up lacking in abilities to control your desires and push yourself over the internal whining of “but I don’t wanna”.
Note that I’m not arguing that poverty is better. I am arguing that growing up without any financial constraints is not all rainbows and unicorns and brings with it its own set of problems.
Gotcha. I’d sure be interested in seeing empirical evidence demonstrating a link between socioeconomic class, parenting style, and/or impulse control and self-discipline.
It’s complicated :-)
The problem is that there is considerable genetic component in “impulse control and self-discipline” and it also affects your (and your parents’) socioeconomic class. And additional problem is that the effects of parenting style are asymmetric—it’s relatively easy to royally screw up a kid, but it’s very hard to improve a kid beyond his/her genetic baseline. Yet another problem is that certain possible outcomes of studying this topic are politically incorrect and likely to lead to… undesirable career consequences for the researcher.