If I think about everything I've learned about the world since I was a kid, the thing that would've most surprised kid-me is how privileged the median or even 10%-ile person with a "good" job is, e.g., what's the rate of tech folks at top companies who were too poor to get dental care and have crooked teeth?
1/1000 seems like the right order of magnitude for someone my age or younger in tech and maybe it's 1/100 but, at a population level in the U.S., seems more like 1/5 or maybe 1/10.
Where are all the people who grew up too poor to get dental care ending up? Not in high-end tech jobs, and tech is less highly selected on this than finance, law, etc.
I've interacted with quite a few interns and new grads at big tech companies and, among U.S. born folks, I think the rate of people who were on the U.S. Olympic team is pretty similar to the rate of people who haven't had dental care (IME, the Olympic team rate has been higher, but sampling from tails like this is noisy)
I don't think there's anything wrong with attending an elite private high school or being wealthy enough to live in a great school district, but the rate feels surreal to me. The thing that really surprised me when I looked at the data is how heavily top companies recruit from top schools and then how heavily top schools "recruit from" high income families.
The median student at a top school is > p90 parental income and even at a "merely good" school, the median student is > p80.
BTW, I consider myself extremely lucky to have grown up in the U.S., but poor enough that I have crooked teeth, lightheaded from hunger often enough that I had standard strategies for dealing with it, malnourished enough that I once broke my collarbone from from gently rolling off the couch onto the floor, in an abusive home where I was regularly beaten, etc.
I definitely had better opportunities than the p99 person in Vietnam and likely even p99.9.
One thing that feels surreal is that someone who's p99.9 privilege in Vietnam is really at the bottom of the barrel in terms of privilege for someone who grew up in the U.S.
It boggles my mind how much of a leg up the median successful American got.
Sure, it would've been nice to have an easier childhood but, by comparison to almost anywhere in the world, my life has been on extreme easy mode despite being considered highly disadvantaged by U.S. standards.
Another thing is that seems surreal is, given how I see privilege call-outs used IRL in the progressive spaces I'm in (Recurse Center, companies, etc.), privilege call-outs are generally punching down (https://twitter.com/altluu/status/1480701266695102465), often comically so, e.g., I've repeatedly seen people from the U.S. call out immigrants who grew up on < $1k/yr annual household income, but I've yet to see the opposite.
And that doesn't even get into the difficult of learning English as a second language, etc.
“I wonder if this kind of thing is also the fundamental reason behind something that's puzzled me for a while: why, in progressive spaces I'm in, keeping in mind that privilege is high dimensional, privilege call outs seem to generally "punch down", often to an extreme degree.”
@danluu I do wonder where you get your data for that statement. A rich Vietnamese has something like 10 years higher life expectancy than a poor American. What you describe may have been true when your family migrated and you grew up, but by now things are both better in Vietnam and worse in the USA.
Also, what exactly is you family/migration story? You have hinted at it a few times, but I'm left filling in guesses.
@danluu
It matters how you value material wealth vs social, but I would guess they are at least 25%ile in US.
Part of this may be due to Vietnam's growth in the past 10-20 years, and your statement may have been true circa 2000 but feels qualitatively wrong now.
@whitequark I don't know that it's the primary factor, but find it fairly useful for mitigating various chronic pain and disability issues, which would be a lot worse if I was poor.
In terms of stopping things while they were happening, in retrospect, I think I should've rolled the dice on the foster care system (I thought about this a lot and didn't do it because I didn't know how to get almost any info on the tail risk there), which wouldn't have been a serious option in Vietnam.
@whitequark In the counterfactual worlds where I didn't have these medical problems in either instance, then I think I'd take the abusive U.S. upbrigning over the non-abusive Vietnamese upbringing.
I definitely have some not-so-great emotional scars from that, but a lot of people I know with more mundane upbringings often have worse emotional scars, so I don't know that I'd be that much happier or better adjusted or w/e if you swapped by upbringing for a random Vietnamese one.
@whitequark I think it's impossible for me to really reason about what would've happened in the other case.
Compared to most people, I used to have an extremely high tolerance for stress. Maybe that came out of my bad childhood experiences, in which case that's an ok silver lining. Or maybe I had a large reservoir of capacity that got half used up in childhood, which would then just be bad with no upside. Hard to say which of these models is correct.
@whitequark re: the other subthread, I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have any family in my life at all. When I was younger, that sounded great to me, but the more I see how people's family treat them, the less good it seems.
I do know some people with great family relationships, but at the median, people are mistreated badly enough that they seem worse off emotionally (generally better off financially), but maybe my sample is biased due to my own weird upbringing?
@danluu I have made the same observations generally. I also know some people who have an okay family relationship but whose system of values is obviously fucked and very likely because of said family, so the mistreatment is externalized; that is in some ways even worse.
I've had one (1) positive family experience that goes above having basic needs met, which is my father inspiring me to love electronics and computers, which obviously worked out very well to me.
@danluu oh, I'm similar, and that's actually how I initially read your post, i.e. that you'd prefer to have an awful US upbringing to a p99 Vietnamese one because it gave you tolerance for awful conditions.
While morbid this is a line of thought I've entertained before and I do feel that the skills I got from going through utterly horrific experiences are valued tools that are likely to serve me well in the future.
@whitequark Oh, I meant the post as something like "what are the odds of hitting, say, senior staff engineering compensation" plus maybe "having lots of intellectually stimulating opportunities" and I think, when I was born, the odds were much better for a very poor American than a p99 Vietnamese person (and I would bet this is not true today, but we won't know for 30 years).
I think one thing a lot of commenters (not saying this is you) don't understand is how poor Vietnam was.
@whitequark E.g., someone replied with how this didn't seem true at all in Poland and, well, I bet it was true, but also, in the year I was born, the GDP per capita of Poland was 50x the GDP per capita of Vietnam (US:Poland was 8x).
Average annual income in Vietnam was ~$200/yr-$300/yr, with large scale starvation due to famine; people who were senior leaders in govt didn't get three meals a day worth of rice (unless they were corrupt and stealing it). p99 lifestyle wasn't that great.
@danluu oh damn, that bad, huh. I'm sorry.
I personally do not find that wealth helps a lot with chronic pain and disability issues. My partner, who is in state-mandated poverty (SSI), certainly has it worse, but that's less because of lacking wealth and more because of the state threatening to actively take what little you get away if you so much as get one wrong cheque.
@whitequark For me personally, the biggest expense categories are paying to reduce the amount of physical labor that's problematic for me and paying for things like physical therapy, which aren't covered if you have moderate income in Canada and are only covered for a very small number of visits if you have low income
I've been extremely hesitant to try opioids although doctors here hand them out like candy (at least if you're not on them; I've heard they can be hard to get long-term)
@whitequark Thanks for the comments on specific painkillers. I haven't looked into what I'd want to do, but doctors generally offer up T3s and, most recently, in the hospital (outpatient), one handed me a bunch of Dilaudid / Hydromorphone which I'd never heard of, but on looking it up, seemed like an even worse idea than taking T3s all the time for chronic pain.
I don't know that I'll do anything with this at the moment, but it gives me a starting point if/when I go down this route.
@danluu Oh yeah, can't imagine how either of those options would go over well for you.
In a perfect world where I can get any medication I would try LDN first. Counterintuitively, LDN can actually be combined with tramadol (despite the fact that it's used in opioid overdose; it's a mixed agonist-antagonist so in low doses it acts in the other direction), and it's a combination that some people use when, like with me, tramadol is a good short to medium term option.
@danluu You will probably find yourself with doctors suggesting SSRIs and TCAs. Personally I would rather experience acute opioid withdrawal every week than be on an SSRI or a TCA, but I think some of that is my personal hypersensitivity to these drugs. It's unclear why they would work for pain, and while they do work for some people, I see it as really a much more of a "I don't want to treat you" option than a serious treatment in many, maybe most, cases.
Good luck
@danluu I listened to some podcasts recently with people in the same cohort as me and a major difference between us was that people trusted and expected them to achieve things whereas for me it’s mostly been having to prove people wrong. That was wild to realize.
Also a significant number of people I hung out with in Amsterdam didn’t have to pay rent and probably still don’t. That explains a lot.
@danluu What year did you graduate? I ask because I'm in a similar tech career, graduated university in 1998, and my high school was well below Texas median, graduated *far* less than 100%, had a number of poor folks getting help with lunch, etc.
I didn't *think* that was unusual where I worked, but maybe it was? It was fairly unusual at CMU, where I went to school.
@codefolio At my first job, a non-prestigious company where the median age of a logic/verification/ucode/circuit engineer when I joined seemed like it was 55 or so, there was a lot more variation in social background (though there was less demographic variation — almost everyone was a white man)
I suspect it's not a coincidence that the one non-prestigious company I worked for is also the one company where it wasn't the case that basically all of the U.S.-born tech folks had perfect teeth, etc.
@danluu I suspect you're right about age. I think my year was one of the last ones where it wasn't clear that "computer programmer" was going to be a particularly good lifetime job (and then it was unclear again for a little while during the dot-com crash.)
You probably got a lot more competition and push from the parents after my age. For the class of '98, it wasn't clear that you were trying for something at least as valuable as an accounting degree/job.
@danluu Amusingly, my teeth are pretty wonky. But I don't get to claim it's from lack of privilege. I was raised as one of those weird rural rich people where we didn't have much anybody else we cared to impress.
I didn't get into computer programming because I wanted a high-prestige job, or because anybody around me really knew anything about it. I just decided on a weird fixation and it turned out to make a bunch of money.
I assume people like me are rarer in recent years.
@codefolio @danluu i started uni in 2005 at the trough of the tech bubbles (and graduated during Great Recession).
at the time iirc we had declining comp sci enrolment, and this is weighted by attending a commuter school in a big city but
most of us were 1st or 2nd gen immigrants hoping to score a Good Job (ie middle class work at a bank or insurance company). nobody thought of getting rich quick.
can’t imagine what it’s like for kids today!
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