Kind of cool, but the conclusion was completely backwards.
The final line of the study was "So he is our collective responsibility. They all are.", but the entire study was about how the home environment affects your outcomes. I guess their conclusion is that if an individual does a bad job raising their kids, it is societies fault.
I watched the video. Maybe I am not understanding the visuals, but it looked like the narrator's conclusions do not actually match the data. He is trying to make an argument that poor kids need extra help or they will have a rough life. But the data seems to show that over the last 20 years, people from all background types are likely to experience bad things.
Granted the last 20 years has been pretty awful, with 9/11, various wars, and other things. So I'm not really sure if I can take anything away from the video.
Granted the last 20 years has been pretty awful, with 9/11, various wars, and other things.
Those are awful things, but I suspect they don’t affect kids in the same way that poverty and violence does.
(as others have said countless times)
Poverty fucks people up like no other thing, sometimes for life.
FWIW, and as someone who's been through it, that's a really disempowering belief for people who have already experienced it or who are currently living through it.
Life involves many profound challenges, most of which are unfairly distributed. Learning to overcome the challenges that one faces and turn them into novel opportunities and perspectives is the constructive way of looking at it.
There are enough of these challenges that we as a society don't need to encourage them and can work to eradicate or minimize many, but this fatalist view (as indeed gets said countless times) doesn't help the people who already faced it or who will in the coming decades.
And of course, this is not just limited to poverty.
There are enough of these challenges that we as a society don't need to encourage them and can work to eradicate or minimize many, but this fatalist view (as indeed gets said countless times) doesn't help the people who already faced it or who will in the coming decades.
At an individual level, a fatalist view is definitely incredibly harmful. But at that doesn't mean we shouldn't work to counter it at a systemic level.
That's exactly what's said in what you quoted, even so far as putting the emphasis on societal effort by mentioning it first, so clearly I don't disagree :)
There's a pretty good, evidence backed system of childhood suffering, its an adverse childhood experience score. And yep its all about personal experiences.
Yeah I saw the same thing in the shape of what was presented. The proportions are roughly the same in the visualization, it's just that most people had some or many adverse experiences. But what I see is that in my generation your home life didn't matter as much. I agree that we need to move as many kids as possible out of the "adverse experiences" category but I don't think this data supports that.
The last 20 years have been really really awful for everyone I went to school with.
The proportions are roughly the same in the visualization
They're not, though? E.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKv1Mixv0Hk&t=278s — note that the final bar is also shorter, so really you need to elongate it a bit in your mind (and compress the bar above it): the proportion of the "many adverse experiences" group is definite greater than the other two. (I wish they'd've just labelled the %'age on the screen, made the bar lengths equal — I have a lot of issues with the data visualization here, but none severe enough that they defeat the core point of the video.)
Edit: okay, I've counted the miniature people on this chart. For this specific example, they are: no adverse exp.: 7 aff, 109 total; some adversity: 16 aff, 239 total; many adverse exp.: 24 aff, 152 total. In percentages, that's "No adverse experiences" → 6.4% victims of crime, "Some adverse experiences" → 6.7% victims of crime, "Many adverse experiences" → 15.8%. The last group is more than double the other two. (The first two, in this example are equal; but the visualization also roughly shows that.)
I'm willing to bet poverty is really what is leading, everything else is a spurious correlation. If you're poor you probably live in a more dangerous area, are in a significantly worse situation to study, need money right now so need to get a job asap after school - or even during school, etc etc. I wish we could easily check this from the data.
Agreed, the visualizations don't sell the story.
If you actually take the percentage, it's like 30-50% more likely to have the worse outcome the worse your adverse background gets.
But on the chart, it's only like an extra line of kids. The absolute number increases don't look like much, but the percentage increase is very high. I think the authors could have done a much better job at highlighting that.
If you actually take the percentage, it's like 30-50% more likely to have the worse outcome the worse your adverse background gets.
I realize that this is a taboo subject, but how much of that is nature and how much is nurture?
Low IQ is associated with worse life outcomes, and it's not exactly a problem you can fix by throwing money and resources at it.
First, … I don't think I dig the visualization done. These are essentially like bar-pie charts (whatever you call a bar, split into segments, each segment representing a % of a whole), but many of the "bars" are not of the same length, which makes visual comparison of the subsegments tricky.
But the data seems to show that over the last 20 years, people from all background types are likely to experience bad things.
But that adverse backgrounds are more likely to experience those things. Take "Happy person in the last month" at 2021 (the final outcome, essentially): the "many adverse experiences" group is unhappier. "General health" is the same. "Victim of crime" is the same. I think "Annual income" shows the same as the rest, but I think this is also the hardest graph to read.
I.e., it's not that people from all backgrounds aren't adversely affected by bad things, it's that people from adverse childhoods are disproportionately affected.
whatever you call a bar, split into segments, each segment representing a % of a whole
A percentage stacked bar chart
yeah agree.
I feel bad for Alex but it seemed like a pretty impressive percentage of people with very adverse childhoods ended up being happy. The graph didn't make it seem like his outcome was typical.
It also looked like the claimed racial disparity wasn't very pronounced?
Maybe the visualizations are just bad.
They even through in a non-sequitur jab at Trump for good measure. This is what happens when you use ideology to read and interpret data rather than the other way around.
I like the message, but I feel like this is bad data visualization. The width of each group of people is not the same, so it's somewhat meaningless to visually compare groups without being able to see the raw percentages. For example, the "Many Adverse Experiences" group is stretched to be longer than the other groups so that proportionally fewer people in that group appear to be a larger proportion than the same proportion would be in other groups because they're not as wide.
It also seems backwards, unless I'm reading it wrong and 80% of high school kids see someone get shot ...
I think you're reading it right. They have the color key correct but the key for which side is seen vs not seen is incorrect. It should be <--Seen someone shot ... Not seen someone shot-->
Agreed. Spent a couple minutes trying to figure out how I was reading it wrong for several of the categories - sometimes it is correct, but often it is not.
Also, the visualization doesn't update well when scrolling back and forth; and the grouping is bad -- "bullied" is listed as an adverse condition, but is also shown as a separate grouping; and the way it's displayed for "Seen someone shot with a gun" is backwards, implying that the vast majority have seen that. Too bad, because it otherwise seems like an interesting study.
Social sciences is not value-free. In reality the most important indicator of "at-risk" is previous involvement with social services and mental health professionals. Usually because these experiences tend to be so bad that the kids involved start to hide problems, or even attack anyone involved with social services. And THEN they get into a negative spiral. It is not the first time they get into a negative spiral, except now their experiences with mental help are so incredibly negative they fight to remain in the negative spiral, sometimes to the point of physical violence.
Likewise, these professionals hide that almost all experiences kids have with social services are negative for the kids. Now I suppose you could say the above is an example of that, but really, it goes further. Kids seek help with homework, and only get berated by someone that couldn't do the homework themselves ...
Studies keep pointing out that social services is exactly the wrong approach. What makes teachers, and social professionals good is excellent subject knowledge, combined with basic psychology. NOT the other way around. And in practice every mental help professional I've ever seen thinks they know what to do, and when pushed fail to produce even basic psychological facts, or outright deny them. I like to think you can explain this that when push comes to shove our minds are trying to solve problems in the real world.
The majority of mental problems are someone failing to solve real world problems, and repeatedly failing to influence the outcome. A little bit of psychology is needed to get them to try again ... and a LOT of knowledge of the real world is need to make sure the outcome is different.
I don't even think that the message is likeable. "Oh no they don't go to college!" is schoolmarmish and patronizing. "College is for everyone!" and "you're not really an adult until you're 25!" have done an awful lot of societal harm.
As a college non-graduate, I think that is leveraging the strong data that for most people a college degree is a huge net benefit is reasonable.
As someone who was once <25, I think that version of me is stupid in a wide variety of ways. I hear you that it can be negative to divide things that way, but it seems reasonable to say “after you are either a non college graduate with a number of years of experience or a college graduate with ~2 years of post-college experience.
I hear you, though, it’s hard to sort people into buckets.
The visualization is a good iteration on trying to get complex papers distilled into a digestible format. That was nice.
I'm not super sure how I feel about the message though as it operates on a handful of really big presumptions. I'll share my own bias to save everyone the tldr on where I'm coming from: I'm a parent advocate. I think the nuclear family is the backbone to society and that much, if not every, societal ill can be linked to the destruction of the nuclear family. Parents matter, and I agree with the general conclusion that we need to focus TREMENDOUS effort into raising children in a loving and safe way. If you are still reading, consider also that I'm a 3rd generation son of Mexican immigrants. I grew up in a lower economic class background in Los Angeles county during the 90s. I grew up shoulder to shoulder with many of the people included in this study.
The first is that it's somehow a bad thing not to go to college. The trades by now are a known lucrative path with significant upward mobility, especially as we consider entrepreneurship. This is, in my experience, hand in hand with a lot of cultural practices that just doesn't get captured in these types of sociological studies. I can personally attest to the increased risk tolerance that a lot of cultures have towards starting a business or joining a labor based trade. Food trucks, car washes, detailing services, maid services, laundromats, dry cleaning businesses, convenience market franchises. In the privacy of your own head, and without fear of judgement from your HN peers, I invite you to honestly consider the ethnicity of the people who own these businesses. See my point? The mobility is there. These aren't "bad" lives. They're different. These people also have different standards of living. Most people who are immigrants or 2nd to 3rd generation of those immigrants don't want a multi-hundred thousand dollar life. Just speaking from personal experience here, most lower class migrants see the prospect of making that much money in America as foreign and unsafe. Maybe this furthers the point that not everyone should or can be a doctor/lawyer/FAANG-engineer.
The second presumption is that "abuse" or "adverse experiences" is able to be categorized by the researcher's definition. Again, we're dealing with people of different cultures who have different standards for living. We're overlaying our own "refined" terminology of what constitutes "abuse" or "danger" to them and drawing conclusions. Worse yet, we're saying that those same conclusions are correlated to the conditions that they experienced, regardless of how they themselves would classify it.
"High risk" is a highly contestable term, especially as the diversity of subjects increases. Maybe it's a good thing that mom divorced the man who was never around. Maybe mom was sleeping around and dad found out? Maybe mom remarried because dad died. Either way, non-intact households are being labelled "high risk" in a general sense.
"Being held back" as a bad thing is contestable. Some kids fall in that weird Nov-December enrollment period and make it through by being the oldest kid in their class. This isn't typically a good thing. The threat of being held back a grade is also encouraging for those who take their schooling seriously. Should it ever happen, its a serious kick in the pants for kids to wake up and take this seriously.
"Suspension", again any type of school based discipline, is seen as a adverse event. Suspension protects the children of the school, it notifies the parents of the suspended that there is a __real__ problem with your child, and provides a significant deterrent from bad behavior. It's wild to me that anyone would think of suspension as a noteworthy heuristic for adverse experiences.
Thanks to anyone who made it this far, even those that will disagree.
I agree that the visualization could be better, but it actually seems the differences between the three groups are not that large.
Came here to say similar - making the page extremely wide helps a big by making the rows more similar but ideally consistent scale and number of rows should be maintained so we can see a column-to-column width comparison of the data points.
I'm torn. On the one hand, I agree with your remarks. On the other hand, I strongly appreciate the attention to detail in:
- Actually keeping individual datapoints all the time, clickable and with full details, and just moving them around to form different charts;
- Making the icons consistent with data - based on a few random instances I checked, the person's body shape and hairstyle correlated to biometric parameters in the data set.
Positive relationships with adults is shown to be means of counteracting adverse childhood experiences.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8237477/
I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but something has to change.
Less kids in households that don't want them. This is a pipeline problem. Intentional children only. Hard topic to cover online, nuance and emotions on the topic.
I volunteer in a local school. It's not always fun, but something has to change.
You're a good person doing necessary work. There aren't enough humans doing it, but it matters to who you're helping.
It would also help if more people that are doing marginal work could receive a wage that they felt secure with. Money is one of the biggest stressors for couples and families.
I do not disagree. But it will take years, if not decades, for labor rights and organizing to improve the situation you mention. Preventing unwanted children takes less time and effort, tragic as it is to type out.
Related, and equally hard to cover online:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39978774 ("HN: Steven Levitt and John Donohue defend the abortion-crime hypothesis")
https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2024/04/08/steven-le... | https://archive.today/m3zl0 ("Steven Levitt and John Donohue defend a finding made famous by “Freakonomics”")
You can select a dropdown at the end for "Parenting style" which divides the groups by number of parents involved. This seems to be the strongest correlator of any of the data shown.
Very cool site, however...
...my takeaway is a little different than what is in the commentary box (for the year 2017 in particular). The distribution of incomes don't actually look that different, to my eye.
If this is the grand reveal -- showing that childhood heavily influences future financial mobility -- it's not super obvious. I mean, yes, there seem to be a bit of a skew towards low earners in the bottom tranche -- but really it looks like the group that has had some astounding headwinds is kinda sorta doing about the same as the 'no adverse experiences' group? That is amazing as well!
It'd be nice to be able to get to the underlying data more easily, and drill into see the statistical conclusions. The horizontal bands not being of even length doesn't help either.
Edit: I don't think I was correctly taking into account the "no data" group, which makes the skew much more obvious (that the "many adverse experience" group has substantially lower earning power). I wish that the horizontal groups were of the same length, and the "no data" group was simply removed. I think that would make a transformative difference in terms of actually being able to understand this visually and intuitively.
Edit 2: Also how amazing is it that this study got done! The link to the study is very hard to find on this site, and also is wrong. The correct link (I think anyway) is https://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy97.htm
The visualizations suggested the differences were very marginal. Some people with no adverse experiences struggle; some with many adverse experiences thrive; and while the reverse is more often true there appear to be other factors more strongly determining outcomes.
the best determinant, statistically, is what zip code you grew up in.
If this is the grand reveal -- showing that childhood heavily influences future financial mobility -- it's not super obvious. I mean, yes, there seem to be a bit of a skew towards low earners in the bottom tranche -- but really it looks like the group that has had some astounding headwinds is kinda sorta doing about the same as the 'no adverse experiences' group?
This was my takeaway as well. My expectation was that the longitudinal study would show that bad experiences compound much more dramatically over time than the video appears to suggest.
Another issue I have with the presentation is that I had to keep pausing and carefully considering what each slide was saying, because the first several slides start by
- categorizing people according to whether they had bad experiences or not,
- arranging them spatially in one big group on the "bad experiences" axis,
- and coloring them according to the severity / occurrence.
- categorize people on lots of different dimensions (income, health, etc)
- but always grouped spatially by no/some/many bad experiences
- color them according to the dimension being measured
- some of them are arranged spatially in reverse order compared to the
legend, see 4:50 in the linked video / the slide on "general health"
I wonder if it would be clearer if the measurement slides were instead grouped / arranged spatially by outcomes and colored according to the childhood experiences.
edit: it's ugly as heck but this is kind of what I mean:
their slide: https://snap.philsnow.io/2024-04-16T10-16-25.uifh7bss3d5f66b...
proposed rearrangement + recoloring: https://snap.philsnow.io/2024-04-16T10-45-19.n7ft281jipgv3tx...
Like I said, it's ugly, I obviously just copy/pasted regions around, but it should get across the idea that this would make it easier to see the proportions of each measurement class (income bucket, health bucket, etc) according to childhood experiences.
I noticed that too... the effects didn't look nearly as dramatic from the visuals as the text would make me believe.
The exception was health, that was a much more dramatic correlation than income/etc. It reminds me of a study recently of homelessness in California, and people made a big deal about housing availability and affordability as the prime factor, but seemed to ignore the very notable health correlation in that study.
The visualization will frequently incorrectly show something of the form:
<--- False True --->
True True False False
True True False FalseYes I saw this on a few "screens" and it really confused me at first. They flashy visuals detract from the message in a variety of ways.
I noticed this on Relatives died (thus far).
Yeah I agree this was very confusing.
Just clicking randomly shows a (to me) unexpectedly low age for first sex. If I understand right, the people in here were born in 1984, so they are younger than me (late Gen-X), and i keep hearing that Millennials are having less sex than all previous generations, but these numbers look on the young side. Sampling 11 across cohorts I got a median of 15, which is lower than I found for one all-generations measure I found[1]
[edit]
Finally got to the end where I can sort by various metrics and found a median of 17/16/15 for low/medium/high ACEs score, which is slightly closer to what I expected.
Also reading the "millennials are having less sex" articles, they mostly focus on people born in the early '90s, so the tail-end of millennials.
> i keep hearing that Millennials are having less sex than all previous generations
This article is about a longitudinal study; it follows "Alex" who was age 13 in 1997, i.e. born in 1984.
US teen birth rates have been falling a lot - 61 births per 1000 in 1991 fell to ~48 births per 1000 in 2002 (When Alex would have been 18) and continued falling to just 13.9 births per 1000 today according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/259518/birth-rate-among-...
You have probably heard reports that teenagers are having less sex today. The teen birth rate would seem to clearly show that. But "millenials" aren't teenagers any more, they're 30-40 year olds.
Might be poor reporting, but it's not hard to find headlines like: Why millennials are having less sex than generation Xers[1]
1: https://www.cnn.com/2016/08/02/health/millennials-less-sex-t...
It's self-reported, and if someone's going to lie about this, it's more likely they'll give a younger age than an older age than reality.
Am I supposed to see more than one teenager at the point where the narrative suggests I can? I only see one as I'm scrolling through. Firefox 120.0.1
[edit]
I scrolled all the way to the top and then back down and it seems to have resolved the issue.
Same but here with Chrome on Android. I also get scrolling freezing in places so I am forced to reload the page (and then graphics disappear).
The article would have been vastly more readable if it was plain html with static embedded images and without any custom scroll/touch event handling - then one would easily be able to scroll around in it, search text, and view charts uncorrupted by javascript bugs.
I am sure the author is proud of their nytimes-like data visualization project, but in this case, the visualization makes the result in every way worse.
They get points for linking to a video at least.
yes
>> He'll be bullied at school. He'll be held back a few grades. He won't go to college.
I dont even know where to start with this.
1. The whole anti bullying campaign that we now have two and a half decades of in schools has backfired spectacularly. This feels like "well DARE didn't work, we need to put this money somewhere else". We tell kids dont bully people, but if you defend yourself in a fight everyone gets suspended because of zero tolerance... it is obscene.
2. College? Really? We stripped schools of anything that was vocational, or practical. What happened to shop and home economics... and the computer labs that got many of us started are long gone. Meanwhile we're short on plumbers, welders and all sorts of middle skill jobs...
Note: that there are now middle skill jobs (trained professionals but not college) that not only make more than those with degrees, they will do better over the course of their life because they dont have massive debt.
Alex has a shitty home life, but we under fund public schools and then rob kids for college (and we dont need more college grads).
We stripped schools of anything that was vocational, or practical. What happened to shop and home economics... and the computer labs that got many of us started are long gone. Meanwhile we're short on plumbers, welders and all sorts of middle skill jobs...
I completely agree. The hollowing out of the education system in response to NCLB and the relentless drive for "data" and "standards" is why a lot of people no longer graduate from high school with any life skills.
but if you defend yourself in a fight everyone gets suspended because of zero tolerance... it is obscene.
Zero tolerance, in it's current meaning, is stupid. But the original concept was great: if anything happens, then you respond to it. "Respond to it" including things like sitting down and talking about it, without necessarily issuing any punishments whatsoever.
We really do love pudding.cool[1]- I'd never bothered to go look at what it's actually all about till today, and you should too if you've not, because it wasn't exactly as I expected: https://pudding.cool/about/ - these people seem great, we should probably support them. I noticed they have a Patreon if you're feeling generous[2].
[1]https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Their mission statement is disingenuous, to say the least, and I sensed it as soon as I started the current post. Here is the mission statement, in bold, and in this form, great, I'd be all for it:
The Pudding explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays. We’re not chasing current events or clickbait.
Then we scroll down a bit and see that, in fact, they are not taking a fresh, objective look at issues, but are strongly committed to one side of the culture war, the progressive left:
"We believe in journalism that denounces false equivalence, one that can explicitly say Black Lives Matter"
"We strive for our journalism to be one of key making, not gate keeping, and we won't shy away from stories that tackle racism, sexism, and classism head on."
"We're a small group that operates as a collective rather than hierarchical team."
"Don't feel like scrolling? Watch the video instead!"
Please add a TL;DR here as well. Some of us never want to watch the video instead.
Everything can't have a TL;DR. Well, it can, but it loses the essence, the meaning. I saw the animations, I read the text, I interacted with the page, and felt touched. I understood the message the author is trying to convey. I liked the execution.
Just as you, I don't like (much) watching videos.
Anyone else notice how those with the most adverse experiences were both more likely to be depressed and more likely to be happy "all of the time" for the past month?
Is this a flaw in the data? What is the causal explanation for this?
When you see a friend or family member shot/experience drug use/other awful things maybe you stop taking for granted the things you have.
The color scheme is terrible. Salmon, plum, light purple, medium purple, dark purple, and grey?
Hey! Teacher! Leave the kids alone!
It might be me not getting it but all the charts seemed to have roughly the same percentage of people across the different types, given some small wiggle room.
It was never an obvious impact.
Am I getting it wrong or is it a tiny change that statistically is significant at huge scales of population?
Apparently GPA distribution is less affected by adverse experiences. So doing college admissions based on GPA sounds more fair than affirmative action. Some people from disadvantaged groups also say they would rather be admitted on merit alone because it is more reliable in the long run, but they don't get this choice.
The animation is dominating the narrarive rather than assisting it. I (as many I assume) just want to skim the information and find myself stuck waiting for things to load or pathfinding algorithms to work. People keep flipping side to side needlessly also. Sometimes I'd just prefer flat 2d diagrams.
It sure appeared that on a percentage basis, the difference in outcomes between the 3 identified groups, wasn't that significant. Or maybe it was just a poor visualization of the data.
Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKv1Mixv0Hk
In case the author swings by - I think the presentation of this is really cool. The sprites bring it to life as they hurry around the screen! The way Alex bookends the walkthrough of the data is clever as well, and I felt the return to him at the end was quite evocative. Nice work!
you can find out your ACE score online easily. It is 10 questions. A lot of folks commenting are getting stuck on poverty. Even folks in higher socioeconomic categories can have high ACE scores; poverty is only part of an ACE score. What is wild is the relationship to health as it ties to ACE scores.
I found a lot of value reading The Deepest Well by Dr. Burke Harris. She notices that some of her patients are having strange health issues and then she realizes that these strange health issues can be tied to their ACE scores. Issues include epigenetic changes and immune system dysfunctions among many others. She advocates for early ACE screening to help address issues as early as possible.
Not to distract from the important content of this piece - which I simply can't devote any attention to in the middle of my workday, lest I ruminate for the next few hours - but for those interested in its development, here's a dev diary: https://bigcharts.substack.com/p/behind-the-scene-this-is-a-...
One thing that jumps out is that being held back in school is one of the "adverse experiences" that will cause poor performance later. But of course being held back in school is what happens when your school performance is poor, so this seems backward. All of these things just seem to be proxies for "your parents are rich".
The data visualization is fun, but the conclusion has exactly the same problem as the studies it links to: it's an analysis of a previous survey, with no experimental interventions, and as such is only measuring a correlation, with the causality being an asspull. In reality, every idealistic explanation of why these things happen gets shot down by RCTs or twin studies.
“Ultimately, initial conditions matter”
Whoa. Mind blown. Worth the infinite scroll and meandering presentation.
Condescending and pearl clutching read. I used the military to escape. Life’s tough, navel gazing and pushing college doesn’t help in the vast majority of cases. Everyone has adverse things happen, but not everyone makes the choice to start finding solutions.
Watching the video And looking at the visualisation rather than the voiceover, I’m surprised that having more adverse experiences in childhood doesn’t have A more significant effect on the adults.
Great site. However, I think there's much more interesting things one could visualize from the same dataset.
I'll go out on a limb (these days?) and say that nothing is more influential when growing up than what your parents teach you. That alone transcends all other negative/positive effects considered (health, income, "have you seen someone getting shot", ...).
I see the study does account for parents present or not but I would've liked to read a similar story in which this is the categorical control.
The other one "classic" correlation of interest is race vs. all the other variables, but I can understand why they didn't want to initiate yet another flamewar.
Happiness charts were pretty interesting given Haidt’s hypothesis regarding cell phones. It seems that cellphones may be worse than experiencing a lot of childhood trauma. Not sure I’m convinced by haidt, but if he is correct it seems like some of the policy focus on risk factors might well be spent studying the impact of new tech on societal outcomes.
College isn't just a place that teaches you how to do a job; it's also a safe, structured, and productive environment for people to continue growing up – and to fend off adulthood for a bit.
This is actually a problem.
in developed countries, there is an era between ages 18 and 25 when we collectively agree to let people explore the world and figure out what role they want to have in it. He calls it "emerging adulthood". And college is an environment built for emerging adults – a place where kids can leave their family environment and finally have a chance to independently shape their futures.
This is a wholly inaccurate description of college.
Every single one I clicked on said they weren't in college or work. Is it bugged?
This is wonderful in a lot of ways but also seems to be designed to annoy HN specifically. With its somewhat, um, adventurous choices in data visualization combined with an overall conceit that poverty is harmful and kids are not the ones to blame... It's like a dangerous cocktail. I could read this thread in my head probably!
Crashes my browser.
Visualization was confusing and I don't think the narrative matches the data being shown. Differences between groups were way less dramatic in the visuals than the narration suggests. The differences could just be statistical noise for all we know.
I have a request to this comments section: Can you stop focusing on the website, and actually care and feel for these people like human beings?
Please, have a little empathy
Let's discuss how this problem can be tackled instead. How we can reduce the number of people suffering.
The scrolling on Android was horrible, much like being a teenager.
Well done.
But in 2022, the average cost for first-time college students living in campus was $36,000 – nearly $10,000 higher than a decade prior. It's made college inaccessible for kids who need it most.
College kids do not need to live on campus, most people in this country live within commuting distance of a community college or university. It may not be a top rated university, but it will always be one that teaches skills kids need to build a life. You do not NEED to pay anywhere near $36,000 for college, and stating it as a necessity is misleading. The point that the author misses is that the subject, Alex, would have easily qualified for free tuition at his local community college or university, and most likely a scholarship or grant would have paid his living expenses while attending as well, based solely on his economic and ethnic background and not his grades. The only missing piece was someone to tell him how to do it, or someone to encourage him to do it. This is generally what people mean when they say that poor people lack the knowledge to get themselves out of poverty.
Over the last few years, his annual income was around $20,000. He has struggled with his weight for much of his adult life, and it affects his overall health.
It is worth noting that the poorest in the USA struggle with eating too much, not too little. This is at least a silver lining that we should not ignore. Many countries in the world, poor people are starving.
In one year, the US will elect Donald Trump as president – a man who constantly insults poor people and calls them "morons."
As part of this paragraph, the author links to an extremely partisan article which does not even try to hide its bias. It quotes something that Donald Trump said back in a 1999 interview. I don't love Trump and wouldn't vote for him, but I think the author's point about him is stretched quite a bit and was unnecessary for the overall point he's trying to make.
In the end, the main takeaway from this article seems to me to be that you can justify any bad decisions or bad outcomes in your life by blaming your childhood trauma. With such a worldview how can one ever better themselves? It seems such a self-defeating way to look at things, if you never blame yourself for your bad decisions how can you ever learn how to make better decisions?
I know that if I personally lived my life blaming my childhood trauma for problems I've had, that I would still be poor to this day.
For a different approach on the socio-economic background's influence on growing up (and eventually growing old), check out the very interesting "Up Series" [0].
It's a British documentary series that starts out with interviews with kids at age 7 from different backgrounds, and then interviews the same group of people every 7 years (14 Up, 21 Up, you get the idea). They've come up to "63 Up" so far.
The page opens.
Title appears.
I start scrolling.
Nothing happens.
I scroll and I scroll but the page doesn't budge. I come to my senses: "aha, I get it! For the last few minutes I've been aimlessly scrolling in search of content and all the people around me in the train must have seen me do it with the same crooked posture and lifeless expression of a modern day teenager on their phone! This is me, the teenager! I have been the victim of a piece of performance art!"
Then I realized it simply doesn't work properly on my phone's Chrome...
I think the idea is that "only support your family" harms everyone. The example, Alex, has 2 kids, works manual labor to earn poverty wages, and is depressed. Which one of the types of teen do you think his kids will be?
The common refrain is "then he shouldn't have had kids" but unless you're going to create an authoritarian state people will always have kids (and restricting kids went awfully for China anyway).
I think social and individual expectations are a big part of this. Why is Alex depressed? If they had 20k more a year, would they be happier, or just 2 steps ahead on and empty hedonistic treadmill. Alex now has a new mustang, but is still depressed and fails as a parent.
I think it would be interesting to see the relative impact of a 2 parent + low risk home vs income, and I think there is a lot lost when people assume every variable reduces to income.
What about Alex when they have low income, but a healthy home life? What about Alex when they have higher income, but a shit home life?
Money actually does buy happiness, despite what the wealthy would like you to believe.
It is very likely that yes, he would in fact be happier with an extra 20k a year.
You don't know he'd have a new mustang; that's just you projecting. He might put the extra 20k a year into savings for his kid's education - I know that feeling like I'm setting my kids up for future success makes me happy.
Money buys happiness, up to a point. It's like a pretty linear increase in happiness to some spot somewhere above median income (I forget, something like 1.5x median income). After that, it has very little impact on happiness, if at all.
Supposedly, based on some studies.
Another way to view it is to say poverty buys misery
Money can buy happiness, but it isn't a guarantee, and isn't necessarily the most important factor.
Kill Alex's parents, and rape them as a child, addict them to meth, and 20k wont fix that.
This article and data is in desperate need of a Analysis of variance for the different factors.
I'm not sure who you know that makes $40k and has a foot on a "hedonistic treadmill"
Most everyone I know, of all incomes, are on some form of hedonistic treadmill.
Convincing people that their problems are outside of their control and that the only way to solve them is to vote a certain way is also a form of authoritarianism. If you aren't to blame for your own life that implies you have no control over it.
Statistically most people born into poverty stay there. Do you think most of them aren't trying? Conversely, do you thing most people born wealthy have to put as much effort into staying wealthy?
There are a number of systemic barriers, one of the big ones mentioned in this demonstration is education.
If we had equal baseline access to education, housing, healthcare, and food... then sure, if people stayed impoverished I might begin to agree with you.
We're not even close in our current state so "you're in control of your own life" is a completely ignorant argument.
The system is obviously not fair but individuals are still responsible for how they play their hand.
You really think it is ignorant to believe you have control over your life? What do you do just lay on the floor and wait for things to wash over you?
Basic, simple logic, says not all of someones problems are in their control either.
Saying that problems are completely outside of someone's control or completely their own fault is a false dichotomy. Reality is usually somewhere in the middle, especially in studies like this one on teenagers. Everyone's situation is shaped by a mix of personal choices and the world around them. It's not just about blaming people or the system; it’s about seeing how both play a role. Voting is one way to make a difference, but it’s not the only way—people have a lot of ways to shape their lives.
Yes, systemic poverty can only be solved politically. That is just the nature of a systemic problem. I am pretty sure encouraging people to be active in the political process of which voting is a small but important part is the opposite of authoritarianism.
Yes. Bitter pill to swallow but that is the reality. We are mostly defined by nature and nurture and we can't choose with which genetics we are born with or our upbringing and if we will have adverse childhood experiences.
The circle of influence most people have over their own life is very tiny, especially the lower they are on the ladder.
The ideology of personal responsibility is propagated to justify the current status quo and block political change that would help poor people.
Being born into a situation where your problems are minor is a great way to be ignorant of how systemic issues affect people.
If a child shows up to school every day unfed for breakfast and without lunch money, right-wing states have decided that somehow their kid not having food is a motivational issue for the parent. And their solution for when a distracted, hungry student is unable to focus in class is to bring back corporal punishment and post religious texts in classrooms.
If it were merely a motivational issue for parents, then the child would already be fed. The political situation that made the most sense for the school district in which I grew up, which is a bright red area that is also a public education stronghold, was to dip into the budget to ensure that all kids got breakfast and lunch if they wanted it. That way it can't be framed as a political issue.
The issue was never about the benefit, it was about the race and class of people who received it.
Same thing with work. We have age-based workplace discrimination laws precisely because a class of workers who are over the age of 50 have been discriminated against due to their age and in lieu of other concerns. Those problems are outside of their control. Most people with 20+ year careers are unemployed for reasons that have nothing to do with performance, and they can't help what age they are.
This isn't authoritarianism. It's basic common sense.
I think the core message is that a child's life is strongly determined by his family life/environment, it's not just a personal choice to succeed or to fail.
So if we want people to have better outcomes, we need to help better family lives/environments (and lives in general) to break the cycle, and not just give them basic education. Also, the family is just a group of individuals that probably themselves have come from poor conditions: this means there's hope of breaking the cycle.
Where in the data does it indicate that it's possible to "break the cycle"?
In the presentation it talked about college, even a short amount, can give better outcomes.
But the presentation was more of an overview of the issue, and I don't think it's fair to argue that, because it doesn't go deeply into every data point, that it's not valid. It more about bring awareness to the issues, and grounds for further research.
It shows that family/environment influences life outcomes (it should be obvious); it's not conclusive (in establishing causation), it does show a correlation. I really think it's almost obvious this is true, but it's important reinforcing with data nonetheless.
So you can break (or weaken) the cycle if you improve those conditions, and this improvement propagates.
If a society has a trend line of poor home environments then I think the society is in some sense at fault for fostering poor home environments. This doesn't and shouldn't take away from the individual's responsibility for raising kids.
But home environments exist in a specific social context that effect how people think they should foster a good home environment. We've lost a lot of societal knowledge and experience around good family structures since probably the 60s. As a society we have definitely encouraged, especially the lower income bands, to outsource it to schools and institutions. That is going to have an effect.
I don't think that "fault", which I take as implying blame, had anything to do with the presentation. I interpreted it as very neutral in that respect. Maybe I'm misinterpreting it?
I do think it touches on how everyone is exposed to adverse outcomes, whatever category they are in. And I agree that it's a collective responsibility, although the presentation does a poor job of arguing the "collective responsibility" point.
The take-home for me was that as parents, or future parents, here are some things we can do to make the child have a greater chance at success. None of these are doorways to success, but they make it easier for success to happen with those conditions present, as well as the inverse.
The point is that, as a society, we should do more to help kids who are having a rough time.
Another point is that if you're not thriving as an adult, it could be because of the experiences you had when you were a kid.
In health care, sometimes we help the body fix the problem, and sometimes we "just" treat symptoms.
It's ... probably not a good idea for the government to try to fix families. Any interventions must be very carefully considered.
But some of the symptoms can be helped out relatively easily.
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I also think the author(s) may have a different perspective on responsibility, fault, and blame. I feel like blame is something that our minds do for us so we can stop thinking about a problem - to fix things you have to look past the blame.
Responsibility doesn't imply fault. For example we all have a collective responsibility to protect and improve our environment, even though none of us created it and none of us caused any of its problems.
I guess I can see this conclusion if you start from a position that all families are nothing but isolated, self-interested atoms in the world. Rather than, you know, a part of society!
I think the conclusion is: Think about how you can help in reducing this problem
There is a difference between fault and responsibility