The reason armies introduced IQ tests back in early 1900s was that well-performing officers achieved more of their military objectives while sacrificing less of their men.
There's also the issue that it's not okay to do okay. One common international metric puts upper-class as earning more than twice the median national family income. Here in the US, both political parties call families earning 3x the median income "struggling middle class".
For those making three times the median income, it can be a financial struggle, due to several factors:
First and foremost, is the need to spend a LOT on housing in order to escape the NAM undertow that impacts both safety and education. Where you live goes a long way in determining your probability of being a victim of violent crime and your children being safe at school and receiving a “good education.” It’s a given that “good neighborhood schools” is code for “school with few NAMs.”
Secondly, high income jobs are not distributed evenly among the fruited plains. They are concentrated in urban areas in which the cost of living is much higher.
Thirdly, those highly paid jobs go disproportionately to those who attended good universities, which means either parents got stuck with a high tab, for which it was necessary to save large amounts of that higher income to pay for their kids’ college, or the kids graduated with student debt equal to the down payment on a house. Higher education tuition has risen much faster that the cost of living.
Finally, graduated income taxes. People earning a median income pay little if any income tax (Bush 2 was so proud of his tax bill that removed half of the working population from the income tax rolls). Make three times the median income and you find yourself paying tax at a 22% or higher rate on each marginal dollar. The cap on Social Security tax at higher levels only partly offsets this phenomenon.
A commentator in another thread denigrated the prospects of a kid growing up in Salina, KS, where the choices of vocations are admittedly fewer than in major metropolitan areas. The average family income in Salina in 2020 was about $65.000. The cost of living there was only 81% of the national average, meaning that it was the equivalent of $80,000 in a city with an average cost of living. Not bad, and better than somebody than making $100,000 a year in NYC who has to pay much more in federal, state, and local taxes.
So yes, it’s possible for a family making three times the national median to struggle.
If you are trying to buy a house in a good school district in a high earning metro area, it really helps to have parents and/or in-laws who can help out with, at minimum, the down payment.
The couple making $65,000 in Salina would pay about $3,971 in federal income taxes. The same couple living in NYC making $100,000 would pay $10,459 in federal income taxes, assuming each took the same standard deduction of around $30,000. Kansas income taxes rates are considerably lower than NY. And NYC has their own income taxes as well, while Salina, KS has none.
Who has the higher standard of living, the Salina couple making $61,029 after Federal Income taxes if the NYC couple making $89,541, with both couples yet to pay state and local taxes? Given the much higher cost of living in NYC, it’s not even close.
And both of these are before state and local income taxes. Even if the NYC couple were making double the Salina couple to make up for the COL difference, the increased tax burden would still give them a lower standard of living. I won’t attempt to compare quality of life issues because that is highly subjective, depending on personal preferences.
If one compares the exact same job, then the advantage of Salinas Kansas is even better. However, for household income, Salinas is probably worse since having two professionals married to each other and living in Salinas is a much harder thing to do than a two professional couple living on Long Island or Northern New Jersey.
Also, if one is a physician, working in Salinas is a much better deal for standard of living since an internal medicine physician in Salinas will make about the same as in NYC but have a lower cost of living since most physicians incomes are based upon what CMS is reimbursing.
Your example makes the difference between Salina and NYC even more stark. Commuting time from Rob and Lara’s home in New Rochelle to Midtown is a minimum of an hour. No place in Salina is more than 20 minutes from any other place. That’s an extra 6.4 hours a week; almost another day of work minus the commute.
Access to major college sports, including football? Salina is an hour drive from Kansas State University, which has won several Big 12 championships. From NYC your choices are Syracuse in the ACC or Rutgers in the Big 10, with considerably longer drives from New Rochelle. Basketball would be a wash. Professional sports would tip in NYC’s favor. Museums? NYC the obvious winner. Shows and plays? Much more selection in NYC but the costs are such that our three times American median family couple of $240,000 before taxes.
To be a two professional couple living there, one member of the family has better be in healthcare. And Salinas does not have the private, college prep school for grades K-12 that will put a child on the Ivy League/Ivy-like pathway. So that means settling for 90% admission University of Kansas.
Upper-class is NEVER 2x median national income. Upper class means you individually contribute substantially to nation's tax income, have substantial political influence and boss around a substantial amount of people. Well, at least check the boxes in 2 out of 3 categories. So Bill Gates, Hilary Clinton or Randy Weingarten would qualify.
If the current lot of Republicans including POTUS won't manage to rebase education (ie good schools for good people for more or less free more or less everywhere), at some point many good people will pack up their bags and leave. Unfortunately the bad education is the product of the current university system, so probably won't get better without b*rning H*rv*rd down.
If the Democrats ever decided to revive their brand as the "party of the working man (or, better, "family")" instead of the party of Hollywood, the public employee unions, alphabet people, old blue-hairs, young blue-hairs, and the Palestinians, they'd hold power forever.
Good schools that kick out the uneducable 10% who ruin it for everyone, Medicare 4 All (we can scrap the tort system to pay for it), tariffs (welfare at the cash register instead of transfer payment), immigration moratorium, America First. And David French and George Will can take their Klassikuhl Libberalism and stuff it.
I'm sure you've seen the Drutman chart with all the swing voters in the socially conservative, economically liberal (really socialist) quadrant. So yeah, this is something a lot of people would be for.
I'd be good with a lot of that to be honest. I'm not even an ethnonationalist but I have come to the conclusion you need to shut down immigration every so often to give people time to assimilate. And...yeah, some people can't be educated. I'd probably slap a bunch of taxes on rich people, maybe make the capital gains tax equal to the income tax, to pay for Medicare 4 All, but I think it would put us level with other rich countries.
Tariffs assume you have a reasonable manufacturing base to begin with. I would support a move to rebuild American manufacturing for national security reasons, but the current way they're doing it I think is ham-handed, angers our allies (fricking Canada hates us now), and does more harm than good.
(Technically David French is a Christian conservative, I think.)
My problem with making capital gains taxed the same as income is that there are two kinds of people who pay capital gains. Rich people who live off capital gains and retired people who saved money that had already been subject to income tax. I'm fine with the income tax rate on the former but not the latter. Tax policy should not punish thrift and saving.
My position is (and I know this would never become law) if you save from your working income (and things like SP 500 funds would count) and then withdraw from it after you stop working, it should be tax free.
Not having any children myself, I'm fine with them taxing the crap out of it before it goes to probate :)
I can of course understand. My own preference is taxing consumption over investment. So I am OK with passing things to kids or grand-kids tax-free, but if they sell something to live from it, they should pay maximum tax.
The amusing thing is that everyone is so wrapped up in the team sports mentality and so focused on nonsense issues that they don't see how the solution to most of their complaints is a return to the moderate policies of earlier times.
Also that's called conservative (or at least skeptical) so no way! Old problems call for radical new solutions! I can't afford a house so open borders, free gender surgery, and universal basic income! The underpants gnomes put more thought into it.
Republicans will go down with the ship rather than come up with some creative risk-spreading mechanism for medical casualty, like the mechanisms we use to socialize medical casualty for federal, state and municipal employees, old people, poor people, tort claimants, and full-time employees of all businesses employing more than 50 individuals.
Speaking of, I fly without a net for the next few years remaining until Medicare. $10K a year in premiums for a $10K a year deductible still means $20K in medical expense regardless, which ought to cover any pneumatic infection or broken bone that comes up. So to hell with it; I'll buy toys instead.
I like it. If something really expensive happens tell 'em they can't get blood from a stone so they'd better be prepared to negotiate Trump style.
I have the beginning of a conservative solution to this problem. Not fully worked out so it might be impossible but I call it "Single Risk Pool". Everyone is in the same risk pool and you always have a balance assigned in the single risk pool. You are expected to pay in according to actuarial calculations. When you are kid your parent's insurance plan takes this money/risk. Then later your employer plan takes responsibility for you. Then sometimes you take responsibility for the payment maybe in a public plan or private carrier.
The big think is that any entity that was ever involved in taking your money maintains a calculated proportion of of responsibility for bad stuff that happens to you later.
Socializing medical casualty brings a lot of things into focus, like what kind of immigrants are we adding to the risk pool: are they going to be on the wagon or help pull the wagon? It would also free up the economists' precious labor mobility--nobody's hostage to an employer's health plan.
Then, these same economists will tell you we should never ever "socialize" medicine (even though it frankly already is).
Increase the number and quality of domestic doctors. Stop taking so many foreign students in to buy seats in Americans' medical educations. Eliminate all minority set-aside programs, bar some for primary, psychiatric, gynecological, and child-care, where intimacy and community do play a role.
40 years ago, my white, middle-class, genius boyfriend couldn't get into a decent medical school. He told me all the slots were going to foreign students and underqualified minorities. He still went on to become a prestigeous child cancer researcher. But he almost gave up. His experience opened my eyes. He worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week in college.
40 years ago the bottom 10% of med students was terrifying so on the one hand I'd say more slots would not have been a good idea. OTOH, I have a relative who is now an ER doc, easily a top 10% MD, who didn't get in on his first try.
From what little I've read that 10% terrifying number is way up these days.
Look at the massive increase in extremely wealthy legal immigrants who remain in family groups to educate and subsidize the next generation's wealth. Are there enough of them to make a difference?
It would help if Steve would go read something on the meritocracy trap, opportunity hoarding, or modern university operations.
Lawyers, doctors, consultants, investment bankers do not have a business that can be given to their children unless their children get the same credentials. Thus, what most affluent families can give their children is education and credentials.
Steve would also benefit from understanding that everything from being a college professor to being an investment banker means competing against the elite of the world for the job.
The Canadian journalist for Quillette had a interesting anecdote about this phenomenon. When he and his wife were house hunting in their upper middle class Toronto neighbourhood he was suprised by the number of newlyweds in their late twenties shopping for their first homes in this pricey neighbourhood. His real estate agent quipped"PHd: Papa has dough". Many young high achievers also have their lifestyle subsidized by their high achieving parents.
A relative of mine was surprised by how many of his law school classmates hade zero debt from both undergrad and law school, and then had their parents help by them a condo when they mooved to Toronto to start their careers.
My wife and I sold a condo in Brooklyn, NYC, a few years back. Just about every potential buyer was funded by their parents, and it was the same with other units in our building.
The big cities are filled with rich kids, who seem to be among the few who can afford our most expensive real estate.
In 2016, Lucille Ball's first house, all of 1874 sf, went on the market for 1.75. I thought to myself that it was only so expensive because Lucille Ball once owned it. But I looked at Zillow, and it wasn't that much higher than other houses in its immediate neighborhood. 1344 North Ogden Drive in Hollywood if that helps.
I asked myself back then: At the time she bought it, Lucille Ball was a rookie 22-year old B-movie actress. Would a 22-year old rookie B-movie actress be able to buy that same house or a very similar house in a similar area today? Obviously not.
3 Reasons: When SHE bought it THEN, it wasn't a similar area.
if 5x people move in and some of them have real money, of course real estate prices explode.
Finally, financial instruments then had higher yields then they had like till recently (2022). Since housing is a financial instrument, housing prices accommodated upwards.
To be clear, by similar I mean cheap and with no expectation that your house would be an investment. Housing today is much more expensive relative to incomes now but LA is an example of a place that is on the extreme end of overpriced.
Quick back of the envelope GPT search indicates that the median income of a couple each with bachelors degrees in their early 30s would be about 130K combined and that they could afford a house in the mid to upper 400 thousands. I did a quick Zillow search in Arlington Heights IL and found several homes in that range.
A three bedroom, two bath house in the attendance zone for the best high school in Arlington Heights is over $600k. It looks like a starter home but without the starter home price.
Oh and if you want to live in a neighborhood where hispanics are priced out you, by definition need more. How much more? More enough that most hispanics can't afford it. Anyway, my high school had a good sized hispanic population (not 30%) and it was no problemo.
I feel like you could find information about Arlington Heights on the web pretty easily but here is a summary from chatGPT. BTW I had a good friend in medical school who was from Arlington Heights:
John Hersey High School—the public high school serving many Arlington Heights residents—is a well‑regarded, safe, and academically strong school. Here's a detailed breakdown:
🛡️ Safety & Community
Arlington Heights is widely seen as a safe, family-friendly suburb. One local Redditor shared:
“It’s a middle to upper middle class city. It’s very nice. And very safe.”
Students at Hersey regularly attend top-tier universities, including strong state flagships and highly selective schools.
While specific Ivy League admission rates aren’t public, the strong AP offerings, high test scores, and broad extracurricular landscape give qualified students a competitive edge.
Admissions into Ivy League or similarly elite schools often hinge on a combination of:
High academic rigor (AP courses, grades, test scores)
Meaningful extracurricular achievements
Strong counselor and admission guidance
Many students do enter top 20–30 schools, though Ivy League admission remains rare—but not out of reach for standout students.
✅ Can Your Kids Get a Good Education?
Definitely. Hersey offers:
30+ AP/dual-credit courses
A 95% graduation rate
High proficiency and test scores
A safe, suburban environment
Strong teachers and support staff
With strong academic habits, passion projects, and proactive college planning, your child will be well-positioned for excellent college admission—possibly even Ivy League if they stand out.
According to a neighbor who has lived here since childhood (his dad one of the main singers for a famous band-leader of the swing era) the land my house was built on used to be owned by Lucille Ball. Of course he also said that it was a house she let her sister live in and I looked it up and Lucy had no sister. I still like to think that it's true.
I should add that all the fashionable current year talk about generational wealth is just a fancy overglorified tu quoque to justify affirmative action and DEI, and also a lazy brain excuse to explain away that which is better explained by cognitive and IQ differences.
The column seems to be be describing K-selection and assortative mating, which has a lot of hereditary feedback.
Kids are retirement-consuming expensive. You've got to get them housed away from r-selected NAMs, and you have to load them up with expensive credentials. Don't even think about marrying down; you'll need the income of your equally credentialed wife to pay the taxes and tuition. And she needs to come from money too, because otherwise the $160K loan she took out getting her LCSW or JD is going to put a damper on the house-buying and tuition-paying.
Mid-mids, lower-mids, and prole whites make the same kinds of calculations at their rungs on the ladder by the way. If you were an athletic youth, got a BA at Cow College and now manage a Walmart, you helicopter your similarly endowed kid around so he can get a scholarship as a long snapper to Cow College too, and pass the four year IQ test without mom and dad having to take out a second mortgage.
It's a tough juggling act. This is also why putting Americans in competition with the global wealthy for housing and the global poor for wages amounts to treason. Here's also what we don't need: foreign students (who cheat) taking slots and AA-admits destroying the signaling value of the bachelor's degree.
If wealth and K-selection are important to having grandkids, then genetics are going to select for them.
Non-college educated women have much lower marriage rates than women in higher socio-economic classes. One of the pull quotes used to described the situation is blue collar and working class women see men as just another mouth to feed and definitely not husband material.
The married or cohabiting non-college educated men and women use these life strategies to locate in good school districts and give a boost to their kids. The unmarried and childless are not relevant to this discussion. Really, their only function in society is to provide fodder for the tax farm.
One may want to think about single mothers given than 40% of children born in the U.S. are to unwed mothers. Not all of them are co-habiting or will be co-habiting with the same male for 18 years or so.
They’re r-selected tax eaters who breed Democrats. They’re good for recycling transfer payments through Walmart but that’s about it. The germane topic is K-selected reproductive practices.
The real reason is the benefits. Don't marry, live with your babies' daddy, and you both get subsidized housing, food, medicine, childcare...and his income buys the brand-new truck.
If I had a kid who was borderline for high achieving IQ/academic interest, I'd advise him to go into a skilled trade like plumbing or electrical instead of aspiring to a more prestigious office drone job. It's better to be the smartest person in your field. He'd end up owning a plumbing company and retire rich.
I agree. Airframe & power plant mechanic is hot as well. You could probably live anywhere in the world you wanted with an A&P license.
You know what is also guaranteed employment and could probably land you a job anywhere in the world? Dealing with shit. Solid waste, stormwater, sewage.
LOL. Dealing with shit? Your clarification in the next sentence was absolutely required and I agree. It's a working class saying in England something like "Where there's muck, there's brass".
The only problem I see is with the prestige. If you want to start a family a man requires a high quality reliable woman and such women are easily influenced by societal views on the prestige of their potential mate's job.
I suppose. I read a thread on Reddit that was basically about how garbage man is an amazing well paying job but it makes it impossible to get dates. The thread author was asking for advice on what to say when girls asked what he did.
It makes sense, no? Nature always plays a role, but nurture does as well; the leftist fallacy is to claim that nature plays *no* role. If inequality increases, the importance of the nurture component to life outcomes will as well.
Steve always writes about nature to describe gaps between whites and blacks but then blames nurture for all of the gaps between males and females even though the highest achievement gap is between male and female blacks.
Repeating myself, but the unwillingness to accept IQ as a real thing that impacts every socio economic factor primarily is because the left sincerely believes society can be perfected through politics, which is obviously untrue if cultural or environmental factors are not the primary drivers of outcomes. Secondarily, the left has fetishized blacks and internalized hatred of whites, so accepting biological factors matter far more in the gap between the two is simply too painful to contemplate and would take away the moral shield for their efforts to reward one and punish the other.
In terms of wealth, it does seem clear that a higher share of the population is upper middle class these days and there are perhaps fewer true middle class with decent assets or a pension. To some extent I wonder how much consumerism has dented the savings rate of ordinary people. My gut says people spent a lot more on clothes and cars today than was the norm even a generation ago. Obviously the economy has changed a lot since the middle of the twentieth century but I think businesses have become a lot better at separating people from their money than used to be the case.
Are good schools that good any more? With all the rainbow flags and wokism, I wonder.
One option for a good education today is to live in a cheap rural area and home school. This used to be illegal back in the days of forced busing, but is legal everywhere today. With flashcards and phonics, the homeschooled student can go from not reading to reading real books. Let a teenager pursue his or her muse and super powers happen.
The local Ninja gym has a homeschool class during the day. There are outlets for socializing. Motivated parents will find a way to make it work for their kids.
Why would your children have friendless childhoods?
According to the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey 11.1% of households with school-age children in the US home school. That means there are lots of home-school support groups and co-ops that hold regular meetings and activities. Then there are church activities, scouting events, youth sports, music, voice and dance lessons, library activities, the Toastmasters Youth Leadership program, and on and on.
What our kids miss is being bored out of their skulls most of the school day, staring out the window on beautiful days longing to escape. They avoid woke indoctrination and ignorant teachers who inform them that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in revenge for us nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki and other absurdities. They avoid bullying, sexual harassment and abuse. They avoid exposure to drugs.
They can learn at their own pace, taking their time to grasp things difficult for them, speeding on when they understand. They are taught cursive handwriting and how to parse a sentence. If their interests and abilities take them there, they can study at the college level even if they are only 10 years old.
They also learn things the public schools don't teach -- such things as paleoclimatology, aeronautics, edaphology, virology...whatever they develop an interest in. They can build a crystal-set radio, disassemble an old car, see how it works, and put it back together in running condition. They can learn to make a soufflé or a sour-dough starter as well as how to touch-type. They can design and build their own flying model airplanes as part of a hobby club with other children and fly them. They can design and build their own full-size sailboat and learn how to sail it. They can...; well, they can do whatever they want as well as things they may not want to do now but will want to do later -- something that will be explained to them by someone they know has their highest welfare at heart.
As mentioned in the book "Parenting to a Degree," families are more willing to help daughters than sons. That is why 20-something college educated women in Manhattan make more than the men, on average.
It seems that as a society gets more complex (technology) and scales up, people would be inclined to select (mates) for intelligence. Whereas in less advanced (in terms of complexity) societies other factors (strength, quickness, endurance, observational awareness) were critical so folks would tend towards those qualities for mates as that what was needed to succeed.
As an aside, one might view the inclination to loot stores and raise mayhem as a manifestation of hunting and gathering.
One needs to look up assortative mating. As an example, physicians do not marry nurses but marry other physicians which increases household income and decreases the chance of divorce.
Basically, the destruction of mass immigration. A little whip cream topping of minoritarianism--civil rights, "open housing", busing, de-policing, "disparate impact" in school discipline, etc. etc.
But mostly immigration. I can remember the big news--LBJ announcing the census experts (bureaucrats) had us hitting 200 million people. That was in a still 85%+ white population--our share% not yet skiing rapidly downhill. The white population peaked back in the 00s and is now less than 200 million and declining fast with our fertility down to 1.6ish and sub-replacement since the 70s. (Blacks have had slightly higher fertility, but black fertility has been sub-replacement for a generation also.) 3 million plus Americans are dying each year--scrubbing out the remainder of 30s and early 40s (e.g. Biden) born and grinding away on the Boomers. In short, this ought--*ought*--to be a golden time for young people--with their labor in high demand--getting married, buying homes, starting families.
Yet the nation now has 340 million plus people--that we know about. Probably another 10 or so simply uncounted. Immigration has hammered down native wages--especially working class--and employment. And whole swaths--including some of the best real estate in the world--are occupied by people who simply were not in country a half-century back. And most of those places simply become un-useable--culture, crime, school quality, school culture, foreignness--by native Americans.
This has just been a generations long attack upon Americans by people who don't much care for egalitarian, cohesive "white bread" America--i.e. for the American nation--whose vision of "America" is a super-state running a "diverse" "multicultural" territory with "the economy" tuned for optimum looting.
IQ tests are junk, measuring nothing except the ability to do IQ tests, always assuming there is anything for IQ tests to measure.
Unconscious bias tests are very accurate, and can detect and put a number on unconscious bias.
That is the Settled Science!
You are an idiot
The reason armies introduced IQ tests back in early 1900s was that well-performing officers achieved more of their military objectives while sacrificing less of their men.
> You are an idiot
Substack's commenting software removed Mr. Carr's [sarc] tag.
An intelligent person would have understood the comment to be sarcastic, tag or no.
“Intelligent”: IQ > 95? 😎
Or he is a satirist.
> Unconscious bias tests are very accurate, and can detect and put a number on unconscious bias.<
We need more conscious bias tests. I do much better on those.
There's also the issue that it's not okay to do okay. One common international metric puts upper-class as earning more than twice the median national family income. Here in the US, both political parties call families earning 3x the median income "struggling middle class".
For those making three times the median income, it can be a financial struggle, due to several factors:
First and foremost, is the need to spend a LOT on housing in order to escape the NAM undertow that impacts both safety and education. Where you live goes a long way in determining your probability of being a victim of violent crime and your children being safe at school and receiving a “good education.” It’s a given that “good neighborhood schools” is code for “school with few NAMs.”
Secondly, high income jobs are not distributed evenly among the fruited plains. They are concentrated in urban areas in which the cost of living is much higher.
Thirdly, those highly paid jobs go disproportionately to those who attended good universities, which means either parents got stuck with a high tab, for which it was necessary to save large amounts of that higher income to pay for their kids’ college, or the kids graduated with student debt equal to the down payment on a house. Higher education tuition has risen much faster that the cost of living.
Finally, graduated income taxes. People earning a median income pay little if any income tax (Bush 2 was so proud of his tax bill that removed half of the working population from the income tax rolls). Make three times the median income and you find yourself paying tax at a 22% or higher rate on each marginal dollar. The cap on Social Security tax at higher levels only partly offsets this phenomenon.
A commentator in another thread denigrated the prospects of a kid growing up in Salina, KS, where the choices of vocations are admittedly fewer than in major metropolitan areas. The average family income in Salina in 2020 was about $65.000. The cost of living there was only 81% of the national average, meaning that it was the equivalent of $80,000 in a city with an average cost of living. Not bad, and better than somebody than making $100,000 a year in NYC who has to pay much more in federal, state, and local taxes.
So yes, it’s possible for a family making three times the national median to struggle.
If you are trying to buy a house in a good school district in a high earning metro area, it really helps to have parents and/or in-laws who can help out with, at minimum, the down payment.
Between the boomers dying off and the expansion of remote work, the expensive house problem may solve itself over the next couple of decades.
The federal tax would be the same on the same level of income. It is the state and local taxes that are different.
The couple making $65,000 in Salina would pay about $3,971 in federal income taxes. The same couple living in NYC making $100,000 would pay $10,459 in federal income taxes, assuming each took the same standard deduction of around $30,000. Kansas income taxes rates are considerably lower than NY. And NYC has their own income taxes as well, while Salina, KS has none.
Who has the higher standard of living, the Salina couple making $61,029 after Federal Income taxes if the NYC couple making $89,541, with both couples yet to pay state and local taxes? Given the much higher cost of living in NYC, it’s not even close.
Salina COL = 81%
NYC COL = 162%
https://www.homesnacks.com/ny/new-york-cost-of-living/
Salina = $75,066
NYC = $55,272
And both of these are before state and local income taxes. Even if the NYC couple were making double the Salina couple to make up for the COL difference, the increased tax burden would still give them a lower standard of living. I won’t attempt to compare quality of life issues because that is highly subjective, depending on personal preferences.
If one compares the exact same job, then the advantage of Salinas Kansas is even better. However, for household income, Salinas is probably worse since having two professionals married to each other and living in Salinas is a much harder thing to do than a two professional couple living on Long Island or Northern New Jersey.
Also, if one is a physician, working in Salinas is a much better deal for standard of living since an internal medicine physician in Salinas will make about the same as in NYC but have a lower cost of living since most physicians incomes are based upon what CMS is reimbursing.
Your example makes the difference between Salina and NYC even more stark. Commuting time from Rob and Lara’s home in New Rochelle to Midtown is a minimum of an hour. No place in Salina is more than 20 minutes from any other place. That’s an extra 6.4 hours a week; almost another day of work minus the commute.
Access to major college sports, including football? Salina is an hour drive from Kansas State University, which has won several Big 12 championships. From NYC your choices are Syracuse in the ACC or Rutgers in the Big 10, with considerably longer drives from New Rochelle. Basketball would be a wash. Professional sports would tip in NYC’s favor. Museums? NYC the obvious winner. Shows and plays? Much more selection in NYC but the costs are such that our three times American median family couple of $240,000 before taxes.
Here are the ten largest employers in Saline county, Kansas
https://www.salina.com/picture-gallery/news/local/2024/10/29/here-are-the-top-10-largest-employers-in-saline-county/75796460007/
To be a two professional couple living there, one member of the family has better be in healthcare. And Salinas does not have the private, college prep school for grades K-12 that will put a child on the Ivy League/Ivy-like pathway. So that means settling for 90% admission University of Kansas.
Upper-class is NEVER 2x median national income. Upper class means you individually contribute substantially to nation's tax income, have substantial political influence and boss around a substantial amount of people. Well, at least check the boxes in 2 out of 3 categories. So Bill Gates, Hilary Clinton or Randy Weingarten would qualify.
If the current lot of Republicans including POTUS won't manage to rebase education (ie good schools for good people for more or less free more or less everywhere), at some point many good people will pack up their bags and leave. Unfortunately the bad education is the product of the current university system, so probably won't get better without b*rning H*rv*rd down.
If the Democrats ever decided to revive their brand as the "party of the working man (or, better, "family")" instead of the party of Hollywood, the public employee unions, alphabet people, old blue-hairs, young blue-hairs, and the Palestinians, they'd hold power forever.
Good schools that kick out the uneducable 10% who ruin it for everyone, Medicare 4 All (we can scrap the tort system to pay for it), tariffs (welfare at the cash register instead of transfer payment), immigration moratorium, America First. And David French and George Will can take their Klassikuhl Libberalism and stuff it.
I'm sure you've seen the Drutman chart with all the swing voters in the socially conservative, economically liberal (really socialist) quadrant. So yeah, this is something a lot of people would be for.
I'd be good with a lot of that to be honest. I'm not even an ethnonationalist but I have come to the conclusion you need to shut down immigration every so often to give people time to assimilate. And...yeah, some people can't be educated. I'd probably slap a bunch of taxes on rich people, maybe make the capital gains tax equal to the income tax, to pay for Medicare 4 All, but I think it would put us level with other rich countries.
Tariffs assume you have a reasonable manufacturing base to begin with. I would support a move to rebuild American manufacturing for national security reasons, but the current way they're doing it I think is ham-handed, angers our allies (fricking Canada hates us now), and does more harm than good.
(Technically David French is a Christian conservative, I think.)
My problem with making capital gains taxed the same as income is that there are two kinds of people who pay capital gains. Rich people who live off capital gains and retired people who saved money that had already been subject to income tax. I'm fine with the income tax rate on the former but not the latter. Tax policy should not punish thrift and saving.
One could do investment and inheritance trusts whose capital would be taxed minimally, but where outpayments would be taxed like wages.
My position is (and I know this would never become law) if you save from your working income (and things like SP 500 funds would count) and then withdraw from it after you stop working, it should be tax free.
Not having any children myself, I'm fine with them taxing the crap out of it before it goes to probate :)
I can of course understand. My own preference is taxing consumption over investment. So I am OK with passing things to kids or grand-kids tax-free, but if they sell something to live from it, they should pay maximum tax.
One might want to look closer at that chart.
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:720/format:webp/0*yyUm7NtzJmU45fXD.png
Point. It's less swing voters and more 'a mix of D and R voters, with much fewer on the opposed socially-liberal fiscally-conservative off-quadrant'.
Libertarianism is an elite ideology.
Sure. But every governance needs to accommodate the investors.
The amusing thing is that everyone is so wrapped up in the team sports mentality and so focused on nonsense issues that they don't see how the solution to most of their complaints is a return to the moderate policies of earlier times.
Also that's called conservative (or at least skeptical) so no way! Old problems call for radical new solutions! I can't afford a house so open borders, free gender surgery, and universal basic income! The underpants gnomes put more thought into it.
Republicans will go down with the ship rather than come up with some creative risk-spreading mechanism for medical casualty, like the mechanisms we use to socialize medical casualty for federal, state and municipal employees, old people, poor people, tort claimants, and full-time employees of all businesses employing more than 50 individuals.
Speaking of, I fly without a net for the next few years remaining until Medicare. $10K a year in premiums for a $10K a year deductible still means $20K in medical expense regardless, which ought to cover any pneumatic infection or broken bone that comes up. So to hell with it; I'll buy toys instead.
I like it. If something really expensive happens tell 'em they can't get blood from a stone so they'd better be prepared to negotiate Trump style.
I have the beginning of a conservative solution to this problem. Not fully worked out so it might be impossible but I call it "Single Risk Pool". Everyone is in the same risk pool and you always have a balance assigned in the single risk pool. You are expected to pay in according to actuarial calculations. When you are kid your parent's insurance plan takes this money/risk. Then later your employer plan takes responsibility for you. Then sometimes you take responsibility for the payment maybe in a public plan or private carrier.
The big think is that any entity that was ever involved in taking your money maintains a calculated proportion of of responsibility for bad stuff that happens to you later.
Socializing medical casualty brings a lot of things into focus, like what kind of immigrants are we adding to the risk pool: are they going to be on the wagon or help pull the wagon? It would also free up the economists' precious labor mobility--nobody's hostage to an employer's health plan.
Then, these same economists will tell you we should never ever "socialize" medicine (even though it frankly already is).
Increase the number and quality of domestic doctors. Stop taking so many foreign students in to buy seats in Americans' medical educations. Eliminate all minority set-aside programs, bar some for primary, psychiatric, gynecological, and child-care, where intimacy and community do play a role.
40 years ago, my white, middle-class, genius boyfriend couldn't get into a decent medical school. He told me all the slots were going to foreign students and underqualified minorities. He still went on to become a prestigeous child cancer researcher. But he almost gave up. His experience opened my eyes. He worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week in college.
And tell the AMA to shove their rules limiting numbers of available MD programs. They're a mafia limiting access to doctors.
40 years ago the bottom 10% of med students was terrifying so on the one hand I'd say more slots would not have been a good idea. OTOH, I have a relative who is now an ER doc, easily a top 10% MD, who didn't get in on his first try.
From what little I've read that 10% terrifying number is way up these days.
Look at the massive increase in extremely wealthy legal immigrants who remain in family groups to educate and subsidize the next generation's wealth. Are there enough of them to make a difference?
It would help if Steve would go read something on the meritocracy trap, opportunity hoarding, or modern university operations.
Lawyers, doctors, consultants, investment bankers do not have a business that can be given to their children unless their children get the same credentials. Thus, what most affluent families can give their children is education and credentials.
Steve would also benefit from understanding that everything from being a college professor to being an investment banker means competing against the elite of the world for the job.
The Canadian journalist for Quillette had a interesting anecdote about this phenomenon. When he and his wife were house hunting in their upper middle class Toronto neighbourhood he was suprised by the number of newlyweds in their late twenties shopping for their first homes in this pricey neighbourhood. His real estate agent quipped"PHd: Papa has dough". Many young high achievers also have their lifestyle subsidized by their high achieving parents.
A relative of mine was surprised by how many of his law school classmates hade zero debt from both undergrad and law school, and then had their parents help by them a condo when they mooved to Toronto to start their careers.
My wife and I sold a condo in Brooklyn, NYC, a few years back. Just about every potential buyer was funded by their parents, and it was the same with other units in our building.
The big cities are filled with rich kids, who seem to be among the few who can afford our most expensive real estate.
You mentioned the Brady Bunch house being sold.
In 2016, Lucille Ball's first house, all of 1874 sf, went on the market for 1.75. I thought to myself that it was only so expensive because Lucille Ball once owned it. But I looked at Zillow, and it wasn't that much higher than other houses in its immediate neighborhood. 1344 North Ogden Drive in Hollywood if that helps.
I asked myself back then: At the time she bought it, Lucille Ball was a rookie 22-year old B-movie actress. Would a 22-year old rookie B-movie actress be able to buy that same house or a very similar house in a similar area today? Obviously not.
3 Reasons: When SHE bought it THEN, it wasn't a similar area.
if 5x people move in and some of them have real money, of course real estate prices explode.
Finally, financial instruments then had higher yields then they had like till recently (2022). Since housing is a financial instrument, housing prices accommodated upwards.
correct and there are plenty of places similar to Los Angeles in the 1940s where someone could buy a starter home today.
One may want to provide an example along with the numbers.
To be clear, by similar I mean cheap and with no expectation that your house would be an investment. Housing today is much more expensive relative to incomes now but LA is an example of a place that is on the extreme end of overpriced.
Quick back of the envelope GPT search indicates that the median income of a couple each with bachelors degrees in their early 30s would be about 130K combined and that they could afford a house in the mid to upper 400 thousands. I did a quick Zillow search in Arlington Heights IL and found several homes in that range.
A three bedroom, two bath house in the attendance zone for the best high school in Arlington Heights is over $600k. It looks like a starter home but without the starter home price.
https://www.homes.com/property/11-e-appletree-ln-arlington-heights-il/skygrqnnqy8tl/
And the high school is still 30% Hispanic students.
Three bedrooms? Who are you, Cornelius Vanderbilt? When I was kid in our first suburban home we didn't get a bedroom for each sibling.
Oh and if you want to live in a neighborhood where hispanics are priced out you, by definition need more. How much more? More enough that most hispanics can't afford it. Anyway, my high school had a good sized hispanic population (not 30%) and it was no problemo.
Crime atatus? School status?
I feel like you could find information about Arlington Heights on the web pretty easily but here is a summary from chatGPT. BTW I had a good friend in medical school who was from Arlington Heights:
John Hersey High School—the public high school serving many Arlington Heights residents—is a well‑regarded, safe, and academically strong school. Here's a detailed breakdown:
🛡️ Safety & Community
Arlington Heights is widely seen as a safe, family-friendly suburb. One local Redditor shared:
“It’s a middle to upper middle class city. It’s very nice. And very safe.”
reddit.com
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Building incidents are rare. A single lockdown occurred a couple years ago, but police confirmed no weapon was found and the threat was contained .
Overall, you'll find very low crime, a calm environment, and a strong sense of community.
📊 Academic Performance & Rankings
**National & State Rankings (U.S. News)** (2023–24):
• #450 in the U.S.
• #17 in Illinois
• #1 in District 214
en.wikipedia.org
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College Readiness: 59% of students take at least one AP course; 51% pass with a 3+ score
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Proficiency Rates: 61% math, 64% reading, 82% science—well above state norms
niche.com
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Graduation Rate: 95%
homes.com
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Niche Ratings:
• Overall A+ grade
• College Prep A
• Teachers A+
• Average SAT: 1,290; ACT: 29
patch.com
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+5
niche.com
+5
homes.com
+5
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🎓 College Pathways & Ivy League Prospects
Students at Hersey regularly attend top-tier universities, including strong state flagships and highly selective schools.
While specific Ivy League admission rates aren’t public, the strong AP offerings, high test scores, and broad extracurricular landscape give qualified students a competitive edge.
Admissions into Ivy League or similarly elite schools often hinge on a combination of:
High academic rigor (AP courses, grades, test scores)
Meaningful extracurricular achievements
Strong counselor and admission guidance
Many students do enter top 20–30 schools, though Ivy League admission remains rare—but not out of reach for standout students.
✅ Can Your Kids Get a Good Education?
Definitely. Hersey offers:
30+ AP/dual-credit courses
A 95% graduation rate
High proficiency and test scores
A safe, suburban environment
Strong teachers and support staff
With strong academic habits, passion projects, and proactive college planning, your child will be well-positioned for excellent college admission—possibly even Ivy League if they stand out.
According to a neighbor who has lived here since childhood (his dad one of the main singers for a famous band-leader of the swing era) the land my house was built on used to be owned by Lucille Ball. Of course he also said that it was a house she let her sister live in and I looked it up and Lucy had no sister. I still like to think that it's true.
I should add that all the fashionable current year talk about generational wealth is just a fancy overglorified tu quoque to justify affirmative action and DEI, and also a lazy brain excuse to explain away that which is better explained by cognitive and IQ differences.
The column seems to be be describing K-selection and assortative mating, which has a lot of hereditary feedback.
Kids are retirement-consuming expensive. You've got to get them housed away from r-selected NAMs, and you have to load them up with expensive credentials. Don't even think about marrying down; you'll need the income of your equally credentialed wife to pay the taxes and tuition. And she needs to come from money too, because otherwise the $160K loan she took out getting her LCSW or JD is going to put a damper on the house-buying and tuition-paying.
Mid-mids, lower-mids, and prole whites make the same kinds of calculations at their rungs on the ladder by the way. If you were an athletic youth, got a BA at Cow College and now manage a Walmart, you helicopter your similarly endowed kid around so he can get a scholarship as a long snapper to Cow College too, and pass the four year IQ test without mom and dad having to take out a second mortgage.
It's a tough juggling act. This is also why putting Americans in competition with the global wealthy for housing and the global poor for wages amounts to treason. Here's also what we don't need: foreign students (who cheat) taking slots and AA-admits destroying the signaling value of the bachelor's degree.
If wealth and K-selection are important to having grandkids, then genetics are going to select for them.
Non-college educated women have much lower marriage rates than women in higher socio-economic classes. One of the pull quotes used to described the situation is blue collar and working class women see men as just another mouth to feed and definitely not husband material.
The married or cohabiting non-college educated men and women use these life strategies to locate in good school districts and give a boost to their kids. The unmarried and childless are not relevant to this discussion. Really, their only function in society is to provide fodder for the tax farm.
One may want to think about single mothers given than 40% of children born in the U.S. are to unwed mothers. Not all of them are co-habiting or will be co-habiting with the same male for 18 years or so.
They’re r-selected tax eaters who breed Democrats. They’re good for recycling transfer payments through Walmart but that’s about it. The germane topic is K-selected reproductive practices.
The real reason is the benefits. Don't marry, live with your babies' daddy, and you both get subsidized housing, food, medicine, childcare...and his income buys the brand-new truck.
Until the baby daddy leaves the baby momma and finds someone new. And who says that the farther even has a job?
If I had a kid who was borderline for high achieving IQ/academic interest, I'd advise him to go into a skilled trade like plumbing or electrical instead of aspiring to a more prestigious office drone job. It's better to be the smartest person in your field. He'd end up owning a plumbing company and retire rich.
I agree. Airframe & power plant mechanic is hot as well. You could probably live anywhere in the world you wanted with an A&P license.
You know what is also guaranteed employment and could probably land you a job anywhere in the world? Dealing with shit. Solid waste, stormwater, sewage.
LOL. Dealing with shit? Your clarification in the next sentence was absolutely required and I agree. It's a working class saying in England something like "Where there's muck, there's brass".
The only problem I see is with the prestige. If you want to start a family a man requires a high quality reliable woman and such women are easily influenced by societal views on the prestige of their potential mate's job.
I don't agree. Women from similar social classes know what plumbers make.
I suppose. I read a thread on Reddit that was basically about how garbage man is an amazing well paying job but it makes it impossible to get dates. The thread author was asking for advice on what to say when girls asked what he did.
Take a page from The Sopranos: my dad works in environmental recovery.
It makes sense, no? Nature always plays a role, but nurture does as well; the leftist fallacy is to claim that nature plays *no* role. If inequality increases, the importance of the nurture component to life outcomes will as well.
Steve always writes about nature to describe gaps between whites and blacks but then blames nurture for all of the gaps between males and females even though the highest achievement gap is between male and female blacks.
Repeating myself, but the unwillingness to accept IQ as a real thing that impacts every socio economic factor primarily is because the left sincerely believes society can be perfected through politics, which is obviously untrue if cultural or environmental factors are not the primary drivers of outcomes. Secondarily, the left has fetishized blacks and internalized hatred of whites, so accepting biological factors matter far more in the gap between the two is simply too painful to contemplate and would take away the moral shield for their efforts to reward one and punish the other.
In terms of wealth, it does seem clear that a higher share of the population is upper middle class these days and there are perhaps fewer true middle class with decent assets or a pension. To some extent I wonder how much consumerism has dented the savings rate of ordinary people. My gut says people spent a lot more on clothes and cars today than was the norm even a generation ago. Obviously the economy has changed a lot since the middle of the twentieth century but I think businesses have become a lot better at separating people from their money than used to be the case.
Are good schools that good any more? With all the rainbow flags and wokism, I wonder.
One option for a good education today is to live in a cheap rural area and home school. This used to be illegal back in the days of forced busing, but is legal everywhere today. With flashcards and phonics, the homeschooled student can go from not reading to reading real books. Let a teenager pursue his or her muse and super powers happen.
"I'm going to own the libs by giving my kid a friendless childhood" is possibly not a winning gambit.
The local Ninja gym has a homeschool class during the day. There are outlets for socializing. Motivated parents will find a way to make it work for their kids.
Why would your children have friendless childhoods?
According to the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey 11.1% of households with school-age children in the US home school. That means there are lots of home-school support groups and co-ops that hold regular meetings and activities. Then there are church activities, scouting events, youth sports, music, voice and dance lessons, library activities, the Toastmasters Youth Leadership program, and on and on.
What our kids miss is being bored out of their skulls most of the school day, staring out the window on beautiful days longing to escape. They avoid woke indoctrination and ignorant teachers who inform them that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in revenge for us nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki and other absurdities. They avoid bullying, sexual harassment and abuse. They avoid exposure to drugs.
They can learn at their own pace, taking their time to grasp things difficult for them, speeding on when they understand. They are taught cursive handwriting and how to parse a sentence. If their interests and abilities take them there, they can study at the college level even if they are only 10 years old.
They also learn things the public schools don't teach -- such things as paleoclimatology, aeronautics, edaphology, virology...whatever they develop an interest in. They can build a crystal-set radio, disassemble an old car, see how it works, and put it back together in running condition. They can learn to make a soufflé or a sour-dough starter as well as how to touch-type. They can design and build their own flying model airplanes as part of a hobby club with other children and fly them. They can design and build their own full-size sailboat and learn how to sail it. They can...; well, they can do whatever they want as well as things they may not want to do now but will want to do later -- something that will be explained to them by someone they know has their highest welfare at heart.
More like bullyless childhood.
And with schools cutting back on recess in order to comply with No Idiot Left Behind, where are the socialization opportunities?
Indeed. I went to public schools K-12 and most of my friends were from the neighborhood or from baseball.
Wrong
As mentioned in the book "Parenting to a Degree," families are more willing to help daughters than sons. That is why 20-something college educated women in Manhattan make more than the men, on average.
Because in the West, a daughter is a daughter for life, whereas a son gets a wife and forgets about his own parents.
TN Coates is back. Appeared on Chris Hayes and Ari Melber MSNBC shows, and even The Bulwark(!) podcast
Wow, what a surprise.
It seems that as a society gets more complex (technology) and scales up, people would be inclined to select (mates) for intelligence. Whereas in less advanced (in terms of complexity) societies other factors (strength, quickness, endurance, observational awareness) were critical so folks would tend towards those qualities for mates as that what was needed to succeed.
As an aside, one might view the inclination to loot stores and raise mayhem as a manifestation of hunting and gathering.
One needs to look up assortative mating. As an example, physicians do not marry nurses but marry other physicians which increases household income and decreases the chance of divorce.
Basically, the destruction of mass immigration. A little whip cream topping of minoritarianism--civil rights, "open housing", busing, de-policing, "disparate impact" in school discipline, etc. etc.
But mostly immigration. I can remember the big news--LBJ announcing the census experts (bureaucrats) had us hitting 200 million people. That was in a still 85%+ white population--our share% not yet skiing rapidly downhill. The white population peaked back in the 00s and is now less than 200 million and declining fast with our fertility down to 1.6ish and sub-replacement since the 70s. (Blacks have had slightly higher fertility, but black fertility has been sub-replacement for a generation also.) 3 million plus Americans are dying each year--scrubbing out the remainder of 30s and early 40s (e.g. Biden) born and grinding away on the Boomers. In short, this ought--*ought*--to be a golden time for young people--with their labor in high demand--getting married, buying homes, starting families.
Yet the nation now has 340 million plus people--that we know about. Probably another 10 or so simply uncounted. Immigration has hammered down native wages--especially working class--and employment. And whole swaths--including some of the best real estate in the world--are occupied by people who simply were not in country a half-century back. And most of those places simply become un-useable--culture, crime, school quality, school culture, foreignness--by native Americans.
This has just been a generations long attack upon Americans by people who don't much care for egalitarian, cohesive "white bread" America--i.e. for the American nation--whose vision of "America" is a super-state running a "diverse" "multicultural" territory with "the economy" tuned for optimum looting.