Life of Work

A group of us were discussion an old article from The Atlantic, "Rich People Are Great at Spending Money to Make Their Kids Rich, Too." Once we painfully ground past the part where people felt that they were being criticized for disposing of their own money as they saw fit, the debate moved into whether or not money actually made a difference in outcomes. Even while people prided themselves on the money they put into their children, they insisted that society was a meritocracy.

But there's a disconnect there. A society cannot simultaneously be organized around parents being able to purchase or pass along advantages to their children AND the individual merits of those same children.

So, whether there is anything wrong with passing on financial (or merely expensive) benefits or not, I shouldn't claim that "my kid was a harder worker than yours" and therefore deserving of a better outcome when the "work" involved was taking advantages of opportunities that I purchased for them. If life is unfair, then let's own up to the unfairness, or advocate for our own definition of fairness and to deprecate the other. This seems fairly straightforward to me.

But many people in the United States, in their pursuit of "meritocratic fantasies," as one person described them, tend to treat gifted capital as earned capital. And there's nothing wrong with gifting capital. They can gift their money to whomever they want. If they want to give it to their kids, fine. But then they seem reluctant to actually admit that the gift makes a difference.

American society tends to be of two minds about this sort of thing. Parents will work their butts off to provide advantages to their children, and then strenuously deny that those advantages are worth anything, and behave as though if their children had been absolutely deprived, they would have achieved the same things.

And I get it; it seems to me that a lot if it is about protecting parental pride. No one wants to be told that their children had it easy, despite the amount of work they put into making sure their children had it easy.

The United States is not a meritocracy. There is a well-known correlation between the resources a child's parents pass along to them, and where they end up. And that's fine, It's when parents deny that any such correlation exists, so that they can say that their children did it all on their own and that the "extra tutoring, classes, what ever it takes" were all just meaningless expenditures that it becomes ridiculous. People deny that the "head start" they worked so hard to provide actually made a difference, because that breaks the narrative that if one only has the right "values and culture attitude," then literally nothing else matters. And in the end, one winds up with character assassination in the service of a "just world" fallacy.

Or, perhaps one winds up with character assassination in the service of an understanding of one's own character. There's a vestige, I think, of the fabled "Protestant Work Ethic" that despises leisure and idleness, even when it's the reward of years of effort. It can, very easily I think, become a celebration of toil for the sake of toil, even though work is perhaps best understood as a means, rather than and end. And so people don't like to think that they've raised their children to be idle layabouts, even though what's the point of having enough money to last you the rest of your life, if you never take the time to enjoy life? And so people like to see a work ethic reflected in their children, even when it serves little purpose.