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.
Dan Luu
Michał Kawalec
Jacob Christian Munch-Andersen
mp01