Some Quotes
Nick Magguili on levels of wealth; Emil Kirkegaard on personality and outcomes; a reader on Mastery Learning; Adam Louis-Klein on antisemitism
Nick Maggiulli has an article on the distribution of wealth in the United States.
In The Wealth Ladder, Maggiulli has a table showing the percentage of American households with various levels of net worth.
Level 1: under $10,000 18 %
Level 2: up to $100,000 21 %
Level 3: up to $1 million 43 %
Level 4: up to $10 million 16 %
Level 5: up to $100 million 1.7 %
Level 6: over $100 million .0075 %
I assume these come from the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances for 2022. When I say 21 % have up to $100,000 I mean that 21 % have between $10,000 and $100,000.
My guess is that most of the Level 4’s and a lot of the Level 3’s are at least 50 years old. Younger households are likely to raise their net worth over the next decades, and if you were to categorizing them by their future wealth, the percentages of Level 3’s and Level 4’s in the population would be even higher than that shown.
among your smart peoples, the variation you see is not much to do with intelligence (too little variation among them), but they usually show very large variation in work ethics (some are lazy, some are workaholics) and mental health.
…I would not be surprised if taking all the big 5 traits together using proper error corrections would mean that personality is more predictive than g for many life outcomes. So the practical purposes, this still means that IQ is king but that is because it is easy to measure, not because it is the most important psychological trait causally speaking.
Pointer from Rob Henderson. My emphasis.
I agree that measurement error is important. I wrote,
When you read a study, one important question to ask is “How did they measure that?”
…Measurement error makes the relationship we observe weaker than the true relationship.
If we get years-of-schooling data and salary data on a thousand individuals, and we find that 40 percent of the variation in salary across individuals can be explained by years of schooling, then we know that if we had better measures of education and income we would be able to explain even more of the variation.
A reader of my Mastery Learning post writes,
I run an SAT test prep company and we’ve adopted Mastery Learning based on Bloom’s work and have been running a special class with it for the past 6 years. I think the reason adoption is so low is that there is far more demand/workload on the teacher compared to running a normal classroom. I see this as the principle reason for lack of adoption. Teachers in established schools, even private ones, would rebel against having their workload upped so much. The other reason being any administrator would have to sell this to parents if they are making such a massive change to methodology at an established school, and very few want to rock that boat. I believe there have been a few independent schools established with it in place from the start, which is kind of the only way this can be done outside of specialized applications like mine, hence why you rarely see it. You need the condition of 1) willingness to start a new school, 2) belief that this is the right path to go with that school. That’s naturally going to produce some very low numbers.
Yes, it’s not just students that need motivation. Teachers need it, also. Just being in charge of a classroom is hard work. Expecting teachers to optimally develop their students is asking for more.
The very fact that we have an “ethnostate “is cast as a moral scandal—despite the existence of dozens of Arab and Muslim ethnostates that provoke no such outrage. Jewish difference, uniquely, is framed as a crime.
If you are someone with a lot or rage that is seeking an outlet, you want an enemy that is shared by other people with pent-up rage. Jews have long served that purpose. Jew-hatred is focal.
substacks referenced above:
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Anyone who runs an SAT prep school should use principal instead of principle for the passage above.
The concept of wealth is misleading, and the accounting for income/wealth is inferior.
1- Guaranteed income is not wealth, but even better than wealth for protecting you from future unpredictable events.
2- Individuals and Families accumulate wealth as a hedge against the unknown future.
3- Appearance of extreme wealth does have "status value" but also attracts human parasites and con men.
4- Wealth does provide some opportunities to fund what you support or believe in.
My objective has always been to avoid ending up as an old man under a bridge, and now that my planning horizon is only 7 years, I am reasonably sure that won't be an issue. A paid-off home and sufficient financial assets, along with well-educated children who are independent with their own zip codes and grandchildren with education savings accounts, create as much stability as possible in the later years. All these plans are counted as Wealth.
My brother-in-law's plan was an inflation-proof government employee pension plan. This guaranteed income stream was equivalent to over $3 million, but that's not wealth. His is a better plan with the inflation-proofing that I don't have. He could spend loans on his Hawaiian vacation and other homes without creating a risk.
Having viewed "inflation instability" up close and played Monopoly with real money (Brazil, early 60s), his cola makes his plan superior, but I didn't have his political connection to the taxpayers' pockets.
Statistically, I am wealthier, but so what? He was able to spend more on travel and vacations, but so what? The Dumb Luck component of all life can be the factor you can't avoid.