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.

@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.

@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.