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US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8090

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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.

In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up!

NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious.
Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action.
Tachion
Profile Blog Joined May 2010
Canada8573 Posts
Last Edited: 2017-08-20 20:03:08
July 13 2017 23:48 GMT
#161781
On July 14 2017 08:27 Leporello wrote:


Our country is run by insecure sociopaths.
This is the best lawyer Trump could find.
This is a professional.

The fucking guy can't even structure a proper fucking sentence, in his threat-laden responses to random e-mails.

I might be shocked if I wasn't so busy laughing at him instead. This dude is writing emails like this at 65 years of age. This is hilarious.
i was driving down the road this november eve and spotted a hitchhiker walking down the street. i pulled over and saw that it was only a tree. i uprooted it and put it in my trunk. do trees like marshmallow peeps? cause that's all i have and will have.
{CC}StealthBlue
Profile Blog Joined January 2003
United States41117 Posts
July 13 2017 23:48 GMT
#161782
"Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules."
Gorsameth
Profile Joined April 2010
Netherlands21904 Posts
July 13 2017 23:52 GMT
#161783
On July 14 2017 08:48 Tachion wrote:
Show nested quote +
On July 14 2017 08:27 Leporello wrote:
https://twitter.com/ProPublica/status/885601659283484674

Our country is run by insecure sociopaths.
This is the best lawyer Trump could find.
This is a professional.

The fucking guy can't even structure a proper fucking sentence, in his threat-laden responses to random e-mails.

I might be shocked if I wasn't so busy laughing at him instead. Thus dude is writing emails like this at 65 years of age. This is hilarious.

Its stupidly bad but on the other hand I can somewhat relate.

Can you imagine how nerve wrecking it must be to represent a client who so blatantly disregards your advice and turns off to incriminate/implicate himself at every chance he gets?
I image it would drive most lawyers into madness.

(this is no way excuses his response as utterly inappropriate)
It ignores such insignificant forces as time, entropy, and death
Nyxisto
Profile Joined August 2010
Germany6287 Posts
July 14 2017 00:00 GMT
#161784
I await the xDaunt response how "watch your back bitch" is perfectly reasonable legalese in the Trump era. This is simply modern day lawyering.
a_flayer
Profile Blog Joined April 2010
Netherlands2826 Posts
July 14 2017 00:10 GMT
#161785
Maybe the lawyer didn't get mid when he picked pudge that one time, and now he's like that.
When you came along so righteous with a new national hate, so convincing is the ardor of war and of men, it's harder to breathe than to believe you're a friend. The wars at home, the wars abroad, all soaked in blood and lies and fraud.
NewSunshine
Profile Joined July 2011
United States5938 Posts
July 14 2017 00:16 GMT
#161786
It suddenly makes sense why he's Trump's attorney. Neither of them can form proper sentences, as they waste their time attacking strangers.
"If you find yourself feeling lost, take pride in the accuracy of your feelings." - Night Vale
ticklishmusic
Profile Blog Joined August 2011
United States15977 Posts
July 14 2017 00:18 GMT
#161787
On July 14 2017 09:00 Nyxisto wrote:
I await the xDaunt response how "watch your back bitch" is perfectly reasonable legalese in the Trump era. This is simply modern day lawyering.


alt lawyering
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
IgnE
Profile Joined November 2010
United States7681 Posts
Last Edited: 2017-07-14 00:34:43
July 14 2017 00:33 GMT
#161788
On July 14 2017 08:45 mozoku wrote:
Show nested quote +
On July 14 2017 07:59 IgnE wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:41 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:37 Gorsameth wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:17 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 06:45 Gorsameth wrote:
On July 14 2017 06:39 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 06:29 GreenHorizons wrote:
I think the conversation on privilege has reinforced my belief that it's so hard for many white people to accept, acknowledge, and address white privilege in large part because of their being tethered to the American meritocracy myth.

I'd argue a lot of people (not everyone) who thinks American meritocracy is a myth simply made poor decisions and are blaming the system for their own problems.

Check statistics for social mobility and compare it to the rest of the first world.
There is your answer to meritocracy in the US.

The world isn't split into "meritocracies" and "non-meritocracies." Nor is only the world's purest meritocracy the only meritocracy.

If you are born in the US in, say, the 20th percentile or above, then you can reliably rise to 70th or 80th percentile income by your mid-30s. Most people don't, but most people don't spend as much time on their schoolwork and productive extracurricular activities as they could/should either. I define that as a rough meritocracy. Of course, it can always be improved.

I'm making these numbers up, but I'm confident enough that they're roughly true based on personal experience.

Some people are truly unfortunate and it's very difficult to climb the socioeconomic ladder for them due to the situation they were placed in. That's sad, and worth trying to fix as best as we can.

No where am I talking in absolutes, way to try and dismiss the argument.

Social mobility in the US is shit compared to many other first world nations as shown by numerous statistics and studies.
Does that mean is doesn't exist? No, it means its worse then in other developed nations.

I misunderstood your phrase "There is your answer to meritocracy in the US" and took it to mean absolutes. My bad.

Other than that, I don't think we disagree. I think the system I described is reasonably fair for most people. I should also note that, if one is intelligent and/or lucky, it's quite possible can rise far beyond the 70-80th percentile from 20th or so. My original statement was under the assumption of someone of average intelligence without well-connected parents, freakish athletic skills, etc.

Of course it can be improved. Kudos for Europe if they're doing better on the meritocracy part. That doesn't make America's system broken or horribly unfair (with unfortunate exceptions that I'm sure occur in Europe as well, perhaps in smaller numbers).


So how do you explain the article I posted on the last page?

I found a copy. I only took a skim through (I'll try to read it in more detail later), but I don't see how a weakly predictive/significant grandfather effect in a huge sample in a model that explains 20% of the response variable (years of education) is evidence that anything I've said is false, or is strong evidence that social mobility isn't alive.

There's a big difference between practical significance and statistical significance. That said, I'll look over it in more detail later to make sure I fully understand their model and give better conclusions later.


Ok so what you mean when you say, "reasonably fair" and "can reliably rise" is that a person with the (considerable) fortitude and determination to succeed could rise from the 4th quintile to the 1st through hard work, at least most of the time, if we ran the simulation 100 times, assuming everyone else made "normal" decisions and had "normal" ambition, resilience, and fortitude.

When you say social mobility is "alive" you mean it's possible, not that it actually happens frequently.

Now let's think at a systems level please and start to consider why most people don't "reliably rise," how human beings make decisions, why kids don't "spend as much time" on their homework and "productive extracurriculars" as you think they should, whether competition can reach a system-level equilibrium, etc.
The unrealistic sound of these propositions is indicative, not of their utopian character, but of the strength of the forces which prevent their realization.
Nyxisto
Profile Joined August 2010
Germany6287 Posts
Last Edited: 2017-07-14 00:47:03
July 14 2017 00:46 GMT
#161789
On July 14 2017 08:37 Leporello wrote:
Show nested quote +
On July 14 2017 08:09 Nyxisto wrote:
I wish we could just ditch the idea of 'social mobility'. It's not really a thing. A study on Denmark showed that, if not adjusted for social welfare, Denmark showed the same lack of mobility as the US does. In other words, the huge mobility of some European countries is simply a social welfare program that compresses the income ladder.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/the-american-dream-isnt-alive-in-denmark/494141/

You're better off adjusting for social inequality through the commons rather than trying to turn everybody into a nuclear physicist.


I mean, of course. If there's mobility upwards -- then there's mobility downwards. Not everyone can have top-paying jobs.

So, I agree, the term "mobility" is kind of a misnomer. Although, I think the article misses some points. Primarily on education. Actually -- it doesn't even mention education. That's kind of a crazy-large blind-spot to have on the issue.

Because it is easier for a low-income Dane to receive top-quality education, compared to a low-income American. And that does mean more opportunity for all.


And, of course, we shouldn't ignore that social-welfare simply does improve people's lives, and that, at its surface, is a perfectly good thing.


The pointer is rather that there is not much mobility at all, even in Denmark. Children of non-academics still overwhelmingly don't pursue a degree, even if their cognitive ability improves.

I mean the reasons aren't really surprising. All the institutions that keep you where you are, family, marriage, religion, geographical limitation, self-segregation and so on are all intact. If you want real mobility you'd have to go full communist or whatever and destroy those institutions.

If you're not willing to go that far you're better off distributing things more equally.
mozoku
Profile Joined September 2012
United States708 Posts
Last Edited: 2017-07-14 01:23:51
July 14 2017 00:57 GMT
#161790
On July 14 2017 09:33 IgnE wrote:
Show nested quote +
On July 14 2017 08:45 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:59 IgnE wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:41 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:37 Gorsameth wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:17 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 06:45 Gorsameth wrote:
On July 14 2017 06:39 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 06:29 GreenHorizons wrote:
I think the conversation on privilege has reinforced my belief that it's so hard for many white people to accept, acknowledge, and address white privilege in large part because of their being tethered to the American meritocracy myth.

I'd argue a lot of people (not everyone) who thinks American meritocracy is a myth simply made poor decisions and are blaming the system for their own problems.

Check statistics for social mobility and compare it to the rest of the first world.
There is your answer to meritocracy in the US.

The world isn't split into "meritocracies" and "non-meritocracies." Nor is only the world's purest meritocracy the only meritocracy.

If you are born in the US in, say, the 20th percentile or above, then you can reliably rise to 70th or 80th percentile income by your mid-30s. Most people don't, but most people don't spend as much time on their schoolwork and productive extracurricular activities as they could/should either. I define that as a rough meritocracy. Of course, it can always be improved.

I'm making these numbers up, but I'm confident enough that they're roughly true based on personal experience.

Some people are truly unfortunate and it's very difficult to climb the socioeconomic ladder for them due to the situation they were placed in. That's sad, and worth trying to fix as best as we can.

No where am I talking in absolutes, way to try and dismiss the argument.

Social mobility in the US is shit compared to many other first world nations as shown by numerous statistics and studies.
Does that mean is doesn't exist? No, it means its worse then in other developed nations.

I misunderstood your phrase "There is your answer to meritocracy in the US" and took it to mean absolutes. My bad.

Other than that, I don't think we disagree. I think the system I described is reasonably fair for most people. I should also note that, if one is intelligent and/or lucky, it's quite possible can rise far beyond the 70-80th percentile from 20th or so. My original statement was under the assumption of someone of average intelligence without well-connected parents, freakish athletic skills, etc.

Of course it can be improved. Kudos for Europe if they're doing better on the meritocracy part. That doesn't make America's system broken or horribly unfair (with unfortunate exceptions that I'm sure occur in Europe as well, perhaps in smaller numbers).


So how do you explain the article I posted on the last page?

I found a copy. I only took a skim through (I'll try to read it in more detail later), but I don't see how a weakly predictive/significant grandfather effect in a huge sample in a model that explains 20% of the response variable (years of education) is evidence that anything I've said is false, or is strong evidence that social mobility isn't alive.

There's a big difference between practical significance and statistical significance. That said, I'll look over it in more detail later to make sure I fully understand their model and give better conclusions later.


Ok so what you mean when you say, "reasonably fair" and "can reliably rise" is that a person with the (considerable) fortitude and determination to succeed could rise from the 4th quintile to the 1st through hard work, at least most of the time, if we ran the simulation 100 times, assuming everyone else made "normal" decisions and had "normal" ambition, resilience, and fortitude.

When you say social mobility is "alive" you mean it's possible, not that it actually happens frequently.

Now let's think at a systems level please and start to consider why most people don't "reliably rise," how human beings make decisions, why kids don't "spend as much time" on their homework and "productive extracurriculars" as you think they should, whether competition can reach a system-level equilibrium, etc.

Nice timing, I just finished a more in-depth read of the article.

My opinion on the article hasn't changed from before. The grandfather effect is barely measurable--even the authors themselves caution it may only be due to measurement error. They do find an effect (I dislike a lot of how they perform their statistical analysis, but what they do is fairly common practice and is reasonable given their limitations), but I never claimed that coming from a higher socioeconomic class isn't an advantage. I've maintained that it's a sizable advantage since the beginning.

My claim, which is entirely supported by the article given how little variance grandparent education explains, is that it's entirely possible for most individuals to reliably raise his socioeconomic status by making good life decisions and working hard.

I don't see an system-wide issue with that at all. If one works hard, one will likely get ahead. If one does not work hard, one will likely fall behind. Yes, some people are born with advantages, but there's a very valid argument that if a parent wants to work hard and get ahead, he/she should be able to give an advantage to their children.

In theory, if everyone works equally as hard as they possibly could, nobody advances.... but a) that doesn't match what we see in real life at all, and b) if everyone actually worked that hard, the economy would grow so fast that I doubt anybody would be worried about class mobility anyway.

EDIT: I realize class mobility almost certainly breaks down at the tails of the income/wealth distribution, and I've advocated for trying to deal with that throughout this entire discussion. My post is primarily aimed at the 20th-90th percentile of wealth/income, which is where most people come from. And also where most people complaining about the system come from.

EDIT2: Below: I totally agree with your sentiment. The class mobility discussion came up when GH tied it to our previous long discussion on privilege and race relations, so I was trying to avoid diverging from the discussion at hand.
Falling
Profile Blog Joined June 2009
Canada11367 Posts
Last Edited: 2017-07-14 01:17:30
July 14 2017 01:13 GMT
#161791
Well there's social mobility or lack thereof, but that's not in isolation or else capitalism really would be a lousy system: there's a set amount of things and it's just a matter of who you push off the ladder to occupy the higher position of statically finite resources. The important thing is that capitalism pairs some modicum of social mobility (even the ever hated Walton's started small) with raising the standard of living for everyone. So that the experience of the working poor today is substantially improved compared to the working poor of the 50 years ago, and those in turn, better than the turn of the century and those in turn better than in the 1850's. I mean, my grandma on my mother's side- her first house she bought was a converted chicken coop and almost no one of her generation could finish high school because they needed to work full time at the age of 14 or 15 to support the family. That really isn't the case anymore except in extreme circumstance.

So I don't really like the terminology of 'distribution' very much. But I think there is great value in taking edge of capitalism with social safety nets. Because while it's very great at raising the standard of living for everyone, it can be quite harsh if you suddenly find yourself out of work, or unable to work, or as with the robber baron's of the past, injured from work because profit > worker safety.

It'd obviously be better if there was more mobility for those with a great drive, but one cannot look at mobility in isolation. And then, there's a great many things that aren't even evenly distributed- I think its the Pareto Principle that something like 20% of the workers contribute to 80% of the output. I mean, there are some real workhorses out there and the Pareto Principle is all over the place with this unequal distribution of output- Stephen King writes 2000 words a day, I'm lucky if I do 500 and today I'm such a lazy bastard I've yet to a single sentence.
Moderator"In Trump We Trust," says the Golden Goat of Mars Lago. Have faith and believe! Trump moves in mysterious ways. Like the wind he blows where he pleases...
ZerOCoolSC2
Profile Blog Joined February 2015
9005 Posts
July 14 2017 01:35 GMT
#161792
If you know what you want to write about, then the words flow easily. How many words did you write in that response? Translate that to your work. I know I suffer from that. I'm 4 books behind schedule with one to release this year at some point. Probably not going to do it with everything else going on. But I'll pull something out in September and release December. It just happens.

Falling, I sent you a PM
IgnE
Profile Joined November 2010
United States7681 Posts
Last Edited: 2017-07-14 02:27:38
July 14 2017 02:25 GMT
#161793
On July 14 2017 09:57 mozoku wrote:
Show nested quote +
On July 14 2017 09:33 IgnE wrote:
On July 14 2017 08:45 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:59 IgnE wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:41 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:37 Gorsameth wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:17 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 06:45 Gorsameth wrote:
On July 14 2017 06:39 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 06:29 GreenHorizons wrote:
I think the conversation on privilege has reinforced my belief that it's so hard for many white people to accept, acknowledge, and address white privilege in large part because of their being tethered to the American meritocracy myth.

I'd argue a lot of people (not everyone) who thinks American meritocracy is a myth simply made poor decisions and are blaming the system for their own problems.

Check statistics for social mobility and compare it to the rest of the first world.
There is your answer to meritocracy in the US.

The world isn't split into "meritocracies" and "non-meritocracies." Nor is only the world's purest meritocracy the only meritocracy.

If you are born in the US in, say, the 20th percentile or above, then you can reliably rise to 70th or 80th percentile income by your mid-30s. Most people don't, but most people don't spend as much time on their schoolwork and productive extracurricular activities as they could/should either. I define that as a rough meritocracy. Of course, it can always be improved.

I'm making these numbers up, but I'm confident enough that they're roughly true based on personal experience.

Some people are truly unfortunate and it's very difficult to climb the socioeconomic ladder for them due to the situation they were placed in. That's sad, and worth trying to fix as best as we can.

No where am I talking in absolutes, way to try and dismiss the argument.

Social mobility in the US is shit compared to many other first world nations as shown by numerous statistics and studies.
Does that mean is doesn't exist? No, it means its worse then in other developed nations.

I misunderstood your phrase "There is your answer to meritocracy in the US" and took it to mean absolutes. My bad.

Other than that, I don't think we disagree. I think the system I described is reasonably fair for most people. I should also note that, if one is intelligent and/or lucky, it's quite possible can rise far beyond the 70-80th percentile from 20th or so. My original statement was under the assumption of someone of average intelligence without well-connected parents, freakish athletic skills, etc.

Of course it can be improved. Kudos for Europe if they're doing better on the meritocracy part. That doesn't make America's system broken or horribly unfair (with unfortunate exceptions that I'm sure occur in Europe as well, perhaps in smaller numbers).


So how do you explain the article I posted on the last page?

I found a copy. I only took a skim through (I'll try to read it in more detail later), but I don't see how a weakly predictive/significant grandfather effect in a huge sample in a model that explains 20% of the response variable (years of education) is evidence that anything I've said is false, or is strong evidence that social mobility isn't alive.

There's a big difference between practical significance and statistical significance. That said, I'll look over it in more detail later to make sure I fully understand their model and give better conclusions later.


Ok so what you mean when you say, "reasonably fair" and "can reliably rise" is that a person with the (considerable) fortitude and determination to succeed could rise from the 4th quintile to the 1st through hard work, at least most of the time, if we ran the simulation 100 times, assuming everyone else made "normal" decisions and had "normal" ambition, resilience, and fortitude.

When you say social mobility is "alive" you mean it's possible, not that it actually happens frequently.

Now let's think at a systems level please and start to consider why most people don't "reliably rise," how human beings make decisions, why kids don't "spend as much time" on their homework and "productive extracurriculars" as you think they should, whether competition can reach a system-level equilibrium, etc.

Nice timing, I just finished a more in-depth read of the article.

My opinion on the article hasn't changed from before. The grandfather effect is barely measurable--even the authors themselves caution it may only be due to measurement error. They do find an effect (I dislike a lot of how they perform their statistical analysis, but what they do is fairly common practice and is reasonable given their limitations), but I never claimed that coming from a higher socioeconomic class isn't an advantage. I've maintained that it's a sizable advantage since the beginning.

My claim, which is entirely supported by the article given how little variance grandparent education explains, is that it's entirely possible for most individuals to reliably raise his socioeconomic status by making good life decisions and working hard.

I don't see an system-wide issue with that at all. If one works hard, one will likely get ahead. If one does not work hard, one will likely fall behind. Yes, some people are born with advantages, but there's a very valid argument that if a parent wants to work hard and get ahead, he/she should be able to give an advantage to their children.

In theory, if everyone works equally as hard as they possibly could, nobody advances.... but a) that doesn't match what we see in real life at all, and b) if everyone actually worked that hard, the economy would grow so fast that I doubt anybody would be worried about class mobility anyway.

EDIT: I realize class mobility almost certainly breaks down at the tails of the income/wealth distribution, and I've advocated for trying to deal with that throughout this entire discussion. My post is primarily aimed at the 20th-90th percentile of wealth/income, which is where most people come from. And also where most people complaining about the system come from.

EDIT2: Below: I totally agree with your sentiment. The class mobility discussion came up when GH tied it to our previous long discussion on privilege and race relations, so I was trying to avoid diverging from the discussion at hand.


Ok, so I disagree with your downplaying of a measurable, significant grandparent effect, at least insofar as you characterize it as "fair" for a measurable, significant predictor of your success to be attributable to your grandparents. But you also ignore the much more massive impact that parents have on a child's success, writing it off as defensible under some theory of ethics in which parents' hard work should be rewarded through their childrens' "unfair" advantages. The fact that doubing-back to justify asymmetrical starting points vitiates your "fairness" and "reliability" argument from the get-go seems to be lost.

But here are some more articles about how social mobility seems to be decreasing quickly with inequality:

www.theatlantic.com
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-mobility-america/491240/

It’s not an exaggeration: It really is getting harder to move up in America. Those who make very little money in their first jobs will probably still be making very little decades later, and those who start off making middle-class wages have similarly limited paths. Only those who start out at the top are likely to continue making good money throughout their working lives.

That’s the conclusion of a new paper by Michael D. Carr and Emily E. Wiemers, two economists at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. In the paper, Carr and Wiemers used earnings data to measure how fluidly people move up and down the income ladder over the course of their careers. “It is increasingly the case that no matter what your educational background is, where you start has become increasingly important for where you end,” Carr told me. “The general amount of movement around the distribution has decreased by a statistically significant amount.”


It might make sense then to see a "small" grandparent effect, when most grandparents are from the baby-boomer generation, an historically anomalous generation where mobility might have been higher than others preceding it and those following it.

Here's another one from a conservative, orthodox economic website:

https://www.ft.com/content/7de9165e-c3d2-11e6-9bca-2b93a6856354?mhq5j=e2

[image loading]


Here is where I think you go wrong, if I may be so bold. You are looking at "your experience," which includes your homogeneous high school peer group. Looking out at that experience, it seems like meritocracy is in working order: the smart, hard-working ones seem to be doing better on average than those who "didn't spend as much time on their homework as they should have" (or at least that's how you remember it). Those who chose to work hard tend to get rewarded.

Now let's compare your school to some notorious inner-city schools where the outcomes for all the kids are much worse. Those schools have a large sample size, wherein the only linking attribute seems to be place of birth, which, I hope you will agree, should not affect natural or in-born traits like intelligence, persistence, resilience, etc. And yet the outcomes for all these kids turns out to be much worse? Is it because they all happened to freely make bad choices? I am not trying to put words in your mouth, of course, but that seems to be the logical result of your meritocratic theory: that heterogeneous groups across the system just all happen to make bad choices.

Now maybe you mean something else when you say "merit" or "hard work." Maybe you aren't referring to the reasonable or probable range of behaviors that might be expected from a population set loose in the wild of their environment. Maybe you are referring to an objectively attainable standard based on knowledge and instilled discipline. But then what are we talking about when you say it's "fair" and "reliable" for a person who chooses to work hard to rise within the system? I mean if your only point is that if someone has the good fortune to be born into a family that instills in them from a young age the habits and behaviors they will need, the discipline they need, the knowledge they need (perhaps foremost the knowledge about how to find the knowledge they will need; the intellectual milieu in which they live), will oftentimes outperform a rich kid without those advantages, then yes, meritocracy is "alive and well." But when I said we need to think about "systems" and how human beings work, how they make choices, I meant that you haven't explained anything, and haven't actually defended any meaningful thesis about meritocracy at all.
The unrealistic sound of these propositions is indicative, not of their utopian character, but of the strength of the forces which prevent their realization.
{CC}StealthBlue
Profile Blog Joined January 2003
United States41117 Posts
July 14 2017 03:06 GMT
#161794
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Environmental and public health groups asked a U.S. Appeals Court in a lawsuit filed on Wednesday to force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reverse its decision to delay issuing a set of smog cleanup rules.

The groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and Earthjustice, argued the agency's June 6 announcement that it would wait to identify areas of the country where smog pollution is especially heavy until it gathered more information and reviewed existing pollution standards was illegal.

At issue in the lawsuit is a provision in the Clean Air Act that requires the EPA to decide what levels of smog pollution are acceptable, then identify parts of the country where pollution exceeds those levels and enforce their cleanup. The agency released standards and designations in 2008 and 2015, and was due to update them this year.

"Simply put, delay of designations delays the stronger pollution controls Congress mandated to protect people in communities with unhealthy air," said the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Liz Bowman, a spokeswoman for the EPA said the agency had asked lawyers representing the groups in a phone call on Tuesday to delay filing their suit for two weeks. She said the EPA was still working on the designations and its lawyers believed the suit would be unnecessary once the groups saw the results of the agency's work.

Bowman said the groups were reading too much into the delay. "The agency was not going to meet the original deadline for all 50 states," she said. "This administrator doesn't like being outside the bounds of statutory deadlines so he said extend it. We're continuing our work."

The topic has been a recent source of dispute. Environmental groups and representatives of industries that contribute to smog, like power plants, sparred in court over whether the previous designations were too lax or too strict.

Mustafa Ali, a former assistant associate administrator for environmental justice at the EPA, criticized the delay and said the suit, in which he was not involved, was warranted. If the EPA needed more time to deal with certain states over their designations, the agency could do so without the overall delay, he said.

"You can always work with states that are not moving quickly, you can build some accommodation into the process," he said.

"How long do these communities need to wait? What we're really doing is playing with their lives."


Source
"Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules."
mozoku
Profile Joined September 2012
United States708 Posts
July 14 2017 04:44 GMT
#161795
On July 14 2017 11:25 IgnE wrote:
Show nested quote +
On July 14 2017 09:57 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 09:33 IgnE wrote:
On July 14 2017 08:45 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:59 IgnE wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:41 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:37 Gorsameth wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:17 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 06:45 Gorsameth wrote:
On July 14 2017 06:39 mozoku wrote:
[quote]
I'd argue a lot of people (not everyone) who thinks American meritocracy is a myth simply made poor decisions and are blaming the system for their own problems.

Check statistics for social mobility and compare it to the rest of the first world.
There is your answer to meritocracy in the US.

The world isn't split into "meritocracies" and "non-meritocracies." Nor is only the world's purest meritocracy the only meritocracy.

If you are born in the US in, say, the 20th percentile or above, then you can reliably rise to 70th or 80th percentile income by your mid-30s. Most people don't, but most people don't spend as much time on their schoolwork and productive extracurricular activities as they could/should either. I define that as a rough meritocracy. Of course, it can always be improved.

I'm making these numbers up, but I'm confident enough that they're roughly true based on personal experience.

Some people are truly unfortunate and it's very difficult to climb the socioeconomic ladder for them due to the situation they were placed in. That's sad, and worth trying to fix as best as we can.

No where am I talking in absolutes, way to try and dismiss the argument.

Social mobility in the US is shit compared to many other first world nations as shown by numerous statistics and studies.
Does that mean is doesn't exist? No, it means its worse then in other developed nations.

I misunderstood your phrase "There is your answer to meritocracy in the US" and took it to mean absolutes. My bad.

Other than that, I don't think we disagree. I think the system I described is reasonably fair for most people. I should also note that, if one is intelligent and/or lucky, it's quite possible can rise far beyond the 70-80th percentile from 20th or so. My original statement was under the assumption of someone of average intelligence without well-connected parents, freakish athletic skills, etc.

Of course it can be improved. Kudos for Europe if they're doing better on the meritocracy part. That doesn't make America's system broken or horribly unfair (with unfortunate exceptions that I'm sure occur in Europe as well, perhaps in smaller numbers).


So how do you explain the article I posted on the last page?

I found a copy. I only took a skim through (I'll try to read it in more detail later), but I don't see how a weakly predictive/significant grandfather effect in a huge sample in a model that explains 20% of the response variable (years of education) is evidence that anything I've said is false, or is strong evidence that social mobility isn't alive.

There's a big difference between practical significance and statistical significance. That said, I'll look over it in more detail later to make sure I fully understand their model and give better conclusions later.


Ok so what you mean when you say, "reasonably fair" and "can reliably rise" is that a person with the (considerable) fortitude and determination to succeed could rise from the 4th quintile to the 1st through hard work, at least most of the time, if we ran the simulation 100 times, assuming everyone else made "normal" decisions and had "normal" ambition, resilience, and fortitude.

When you say social mobility is "alive" you mean it's possible, not that it actually happens frequently.

Now let's think at a systems level please and start to consider why most people don't "reliably rise," how human beings make decisions, why kids don't "spend as much time" on their homework and "productive extracurriculars" as you think they should, whether competition can reach a system-level equilibrium, etc.

Nice timing, I just finished a more in-depth read of the article.

My opinion on the article hasn't changed from before. The grandfather effect is barely measurable--even the authors themselves caution it may only be due to measurement error. They do find an effect (I dislike a lot of how they perform their statistical analysis, but what they do is fairly common practice and is reasonable given their limitations), but I never claimed that coming from a higher socioeconomic class isn't an advantage. I've maintained that it's a sizable advantage since the beginning.

My claim, which is entirely supported by the article given how little variance grandparent education explains, is that it's entirely possible for most individuals to reliably raise his socioeconomic status by making good life decisions and working hard.

I don't see an system-wide issue with that at all. If one works hard, one will likely get ahead. If one does not work hard, one will likely fall behind. Yes, some people are born with advantages, but there's a very valid argument that if a parent wants to work hard and get ahead, he/she should be able to give an advantage to their children.

In theory, if everyone works equally as hard as they possibly could, nobody advances.... but a) that doesn't match what we see in real life at all, and b) if everyone actually worked that hard, the economy would grow so fast that I doubt anybody would be worried about class mobility anyway.

EDIT: I realize class mobility almost certainly breaks down at the tails of the income/wealth distribution, and I've advocated for trying to deal with that throughout this entire discussion. My post is primarily aimed at the 20th-90th percentile of wealth/income, which is where most people come from. And also where most people complaining about the system come from.

EDIT2: Below: I totally agree with your sentiment. The class mobility discussion came up when GH tied it to our previous long discussion on privilege and race relations, so I was trying to avoid diverging from the discussion at hand.


Ok, so I disagree with your downplaying of a measurable, significant grandparent effect, at least insofar as you characterize it as "fair" for a measurable, significant predictor of your success to be attributable to your grandparents. But you also ignore the much more massive impact that parents have on a child's success, writing it off as defensible under some theory of ethics in which parents' hard work should be rewarded through their childrens' "unfair" advantages. The fact that doubing-back to justify asymmetrical starting points vitiates your "fairness" and "reliability" argument from the get-go seems to be lost.

But here are some more articles about how social mobility seems to be decreasing quickly with inequality:

www.theatlantic.com
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-mobility-america/491240/

Show nested quote +
It’s not an exaggeration: It really is getting harder to move up in America. Those who make very little money in their first jobs will probably still be making very little decades later, and those who start off making middle-class wages have similarly limited paths. Only those who start out at the top are likely to continue making good money throughout their working lives.

That’s the conclusion of a new paper by Michael D. Carr and Emily E. Wiemers, two economists at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. In the paper, Carr and Wiemers used earnings data to measure how fluidly people move up and down the income ladder over the course of their careers. “It is increasingly the case that no matter what your educational background is, where you start has become increasingly important for where you end,” Carr told me. “The general amount of movement around the distribution has decreased by a statistically significant amount.”


It might make sense then to see a "small" grandparent effect, when most grandparents are from the baby-boomer generation, an historically anomalous generation where mobility might have been higher than others preceding it and those following it.

Here's another one from a conservative, orthodox economic website:

https://www.ft.com/content/7de9165e-c3d2-11e6-9bca-2b93a6856354?mhq5j=e2

[image loading]


Here is where I think you go wrong, if I may be so bold. You are looking at "your experience," which includes your homogeneous high school peer group. Looking out at that experience, it seems like meritocracy is in working order: the smart, hard-working ones seem to be doing better on average than those who "didn't spend as much time on their homework as they should have" (or at least that's how you remember it). Those who chose to work hard tend to get rewarded.

Now let's compare your school to some notorious inner-city schools where the outcomes for all the kids are much worse. Those schools have a large sample size, wherein the only linking attribute seems to be place of birth, which, I hope you will agree, should not affect natural or in-born traits like intelligence, persistence, resilience, etc. And yet the outcomes for all these kids turns out to be much worse? Is it because they all happened to freely make bad choices? I am not trying to put words in your mouth, of course, but that seems to be the logical result of your meritocratic theory: that heterogeneous groups across the system just all happen to make bad choices.

Now maybe you mean something else when you say "merit" or "hard work." Maybe you aren't referring to the reasonable or probable range of behaviors that might be expected from a population set loose in the wild of their environment. Maybe you are referring to an objectively attainable standard based on knowledge and instilled discipline. But then what are we talking about when you say it's "fair" and "reliable" for a person who chooses to work hard to rise within the system? I mean if your only point is that if someone has the good fortune to be born into a family that instills in them from a young age the habits and behaviors they will need, the discipline they need, the knowledge they need (perhaps foremost the knowledge about how to find the knowledge they will need; the intellectual milieu in which they live), will oftentimes outperform a rich kid without those advantages, then yes, meritocracy is "alive and well." But when I said we need to think about "systems" and how human beings work, how they make choices, I meant that you haven't explained anything, and haven't actually defended any meaningful thesis about meritocracy at all.

It's late, so this is going to be short.

I looked at the Atlantic article. It doesn't deal with intergenerational mobility at all, to start with. It deals with the rise in people incomes during their career (i.e. after school). This isn't really what we've been discussing, but whatever. Anyway, it's another case of practical significance vs statistical significance. The rank-rank correlation in the 15-year difference in people's incomes went from 0.59 to 0.64 overall. Hardly something to worth even bothering to write about. To make matters worse, they reference a mention a separate publication which finds results that contradicts theirs. So we have a tiny "significant" difference from another giant sample, and conflicting results between papers. The media loves to publish this stuff because it draws views and looks "sophisticated," but statisticians such as Andrew Gelman, Uri Simohnson, etc. have been critical of this sort of nonsense for years.

As far as the second article, it's talking about absolute mobility as opposed to relative mobility. We've been discussing the latter this whole time; the former is a different issue, and it's closely related with rising income inequality (which has its own set of drivers that are largely due to changes in how the economy functions in the past several decades).

The data in the appendix of the first paper confirms what I've been saying as well. If you had an income in the 3rd decile in 1993, you have a 15% chance of reaching the 7th decile or above in 2008. That roughly jives what I was saying earlier--significant class mobility is possible for individuals if they work hard. However, the way was the data is systematically underestimating class mobility anyway: it only looks at individuals who had an income at the start of the period. The most common way that class mobility is achieved intergenerationally (largely due to education reasons). So again, the numbers are largely painting a picture fairly close to what I had described earlier (i.e., someone in the ~20th percentile can reliably rise to 70-80th percentile through good life decisions and hard work). Obviously, the most crucial years to achieving class mobility are going to be high school through college/grad school.
Biff The Understudy
Profile Blog Joined February 2008
France7914 Posts
Last Edited: 2017-07-14 05:41:36
July 14 2017 05:36 GMT
#161796
On July 14 2017 08:37 Leporello wrote:
Show nested quote +
On July 14 2017 08:09 Nyxisto wrote:
I wish we could just ditch the idea of 'social mobility'. It's not really a thing. A study on Denmark showed that, if not adjusted for social welfare, Denmark showed the same lack of mobility as the US does. In other words, the huge mobility of some European countries is simply a social welfare program that compresses the income ladder.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/the-american-dream-isnt-alive-in-denmark/494141/

You're better off adjusting for social inequality through the commons rather than trying to turn everybody into a nuclear physicist.


I mean, of course. If there's mobility upwards -- then there's mobility downwards. Not everyone can have top-paying jobs.

So, I agree, the term "mobility" is kind of a misnomer. Although, I think the article misses some points. Primarily on education. Actually -- it doesn't even mention education. That's kind of a crazy-large blind-spot to have on the issue.

Because it is easier for a low-income Dane to receive top-quality education, compared to a low-income American. And that does mean more opportunity for all.


And, of course, we shouldn't ignore that social-welfare simply does improve people's lives, and that, at its surface, is a perfectly good thing.

According to every source I found, the Great Gatsby curve correlates near perfectly level of inequalities and level of social mobility.

[image loading]

Not saying Denmark is perfect, but it looks a hell lot better than the US in that regard.


Oh and Trump "complimenting" Brigitte Macron for "being in good shape" (despite her age.) Always classy.
The fellow who is out to burn things up is the counterpart of the fool who thinks he can save the world. The world needs neither to be burned up nor to be saved. The world is, we are. Transients, if we buck it; here to stay if we accept it. ~H.Miller
IgnE
Profile Joined November 2010
United States7681 Posts
Last Edited: 2017-07-14 05:44:30
July 14 2017 05:38 GMT
#161797
On July 14 2017 13:44 mozoku wrote:
Show nested quote +
On July 14 2017 11:25 IgnE wrote:
On July 14 2017 09:57 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 09:33 IgnE wrote:
On July 14 2017 08:45 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:59 IgnE wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:41 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:37 Gorsameth wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:17 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 06:45 Gorsameth wrote:
[quote]
Check statistics for social mobility and compare it to the rest of the first world.
There is your answer to meritocracy in the US.

The world isn't split into "meritocracies" and "non-meritocracies." Nor is only the world's purest meritocracy the only meritocracy.

If you are born in the US in, say, the 20th percentile or above, then you can reliably rise to 70th or 80th percentile income by your mid-30s. Most people don't, but most people don't spend as much time on their schoolwork and productive extracurricular activities as they could/should either. I define that as a rough meritocracy. Of course, it can always be improved.

I'm making these numbers up, but I'm confident enough that they're roughly true based on personal experience.

Some people are truly unfortunate and it's very difficult to climb the socioeconomic ladder for them due to the situation they were placed in. That's sad, and worth trying to fix as best as we can.

No where am I talking in absolutes, way to try and dismiss the argument.

Social mobility in the US is shit compared to many other first world nations as shown by numerous statistics and studies.
Does that mean is doesn't exist? No, it means its worse then in other developed nations.

I misunderstood your phrase "There is your answer to meritocracy in the US" and took it to mean absolutes. My bad.

Other than that, I don't think we disagree. I think the system I described is reasonably fair for most people. I should also note that, if one is intelligent and/or lucky, it's quite possible can rise far beyond the 70-80th percentile from 20th or so. My original statement was under the assumption of someone of average intelligence without well-connected parents, freakish athletic skills, etc.

Of course it can be improved. Kudos for Europe if they're doing better on the meritocracy part. That doesn't make America's system broken or horribly unfair (with unfortunate exceptions that I'm sure occur in Europe as well, perhaps in smaller numbers).


So how do you explain the article I posted on the last page?

I found a copy. I only took a skim through (I'll try to read it in more detail later), but I don't see how a weakly predictive/significant grandfather effect in a huge sample in a model that explains 20% of the response variable (years of education) is evidence that anything I've said is false, or is strong evidence that social mobility isn't alive.

There's a big difference between practical significance and statistical significance. That said, I'll look over it in more detail later to make sure I fully understand their model and give better conclusions later.


Ok so what you mean when you say, "reasonably fair" and "can reliably rise" is that a person with the (considerable) fortitude and determination to succeed could rise from the 4th quintile to the 1st through hard work, at least most of the time, if we ran the simulation 100 times, assuming everyone else made "normal" decisions and had "normal" ambition, resilience, and fortitude.

When you say social mobility is "alive" you mean it's possible, not that it actually happens frequently.

Now let's think at a systems level please and start to consider why most people don't "reliably rise," how human beings make decisions, why kids don't "spend as much time" on their homework and "productive extracurriculars" as you think they should, whether competition can reach a system-level equilibrium, etc.

Nice timing, I just finished a more in-depth read of the article.

My opinion on the article hasn't changed from before. The grandfather effect is barely measurable--even the authors themselves caution it may only be due to measurement error. They do find an effect (I dislike a lot of how they perform their statistical analysis, but what they do is fairly common practice and is reasonable given their limitations), but I never claimed that coming from a higher socioeconomic class isn't an advantage. I've maintained that it's a sizable advantage since the beginning.

My claim, which is entirely supported by the article given how little variance grandparent education explains, is that it's entirely possible for most individuals to reliably raise his socioeconomic status by making good life decisions and working hard.

I don't see an system-wide issue with that at all. If one works hard, one will likely get ahead. If one does not work hard, one will likely fall behind. Yes, some people are born with advantages, but there's a very valid argument that if a parent wants to work hard and get ahead, he/she should be able to give an advantage to their children.

In theory, if everyone works equally as hard as they possibly could, nobody advances.... but a) that doesn't match what we see in real life at all, and b) if everyone actually worked that hard, the economy would grow so fast that I doubt anybody would be worried about class mobility anyway.

EDIT: I realize class mobility almost certainly breaks down at the tails of the income/wealth distribution, and I've advocated for trying to deal with that throughout this entire discussion. My post is primarily aimed at the 20th-90th percentile of wealth/income, which is where most people come from. And also where most people complaining about the system come from.

EDIT2: Below: I totally agree with your sentiment. The class mobility discussion came up when GH tied it to our previous long discussion on privilege and race relations, so I was trying to avoid diverging from the discussion at hand.


Ok, so I disagree with your downplaying of a measurable, significant grandparent effect, at least insofar as you characterize it as "fair" for a measurable, significant predictor of your success to be attributable to your grandparents. But you also ignore the much more massive impact that parents have on a child's success, writing it off as defensible under some theory of ethics in which parents' hard work should be rewarded through their childrens' "unfair" advantages. The fact that doubing-back to justify asymmetrical starting points vitiates your "fairness" and "reliability" argument from the get-go seems to be lost.

But here are some more articles about how social mobility seems to be decreasing quickly with inequality:

www.theatlantic.com
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-mobility-america/491240/

It’s not an exaggeration: It really is getting harder to move up in America. Those who make very little money in their first jobs will probably still be making very little decades later, and those who start off making middle-class wages have similarly limited paths. Only those who start out at the top are likely to continue making good money throughout their working lives.

That’s the conclusion of a new paper by Michael D. Carr and Emily E. Wiemers, two economists at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. In the paper, Carr and Wiemers used earnings data to measure how fluidly people move up and down the income ladder over the course of their careers. “It is increasingly the case that no matter what your educational background is, where you start has become increasingly important for where you end,” Carr told me. “The general amount of movement around the distribution has decreased by a statistically significant amount.”


It might make sense then to see a "small" grandparent effect, when most grandparents are from the baby-boomer generation, an historically anomalous generation where mobility might have been higher than others preceding it and those following it.

Here's another one from a conservative, orthodox economic website:

https://www.ft.com/content/7de9165e-c3d2-11e6-9bca-2b93a6856354?mhq5j=e2

[image loading]


Here is where I think you go wrong, if I may be so bold. You are looking at "your experience," which includes your homogeneous high school peer group. Looking out at that experience, it seems like meritocracy is in working order: the smart, hard-working ones seem to be doing better on average than those who "didn't spend as much time on their homework as they should have" (or at least that's how you remember it). Those who chose to work hard tend to get rewarded.

Now let's compare your school to some notorious inner-city schools where the outcomes for all the kids are much worse. Those schools have a large sample size, wherein the only linking attribute seems to be place of birth, which, I hope you will agree, should not affect natural or in-born traits like intelligence, persistence, resilience, etc. And yet the outcomes for all these kids turns out to be much worse? Is it because they all happened to freely make bad choices? I am not trying to put words in your mouth, of course, but that seems to be the logical result of your meritocratic theory: that heterogeneous groups across the system just all happen to make bad choices.

Now maybe you mean something else when you say "merit" or "hard work." Maybe you aren't referring to the reasonable or probable range of behaviors that might be expected from a population set loose in the wild of their environment. Maybe you are referring to an objectively attainable standard based on knowledge and instilled discipline. But then what are we talking about when you say it's "fair" and "reliable" for a person who chooses to work hard to rise within the system? I mean if your only point is that if someone has the good fortune to be born into a family that instills in them from a young age the habits and behaviors they will need, the discipline they need, the knowledge they need (perhaps foremost the knowledge about how to find the knowledge they will need; the intellectual milieu in which they live), will oftentimes outperform a rich kid without those advantages, then yes, meritocracy is "alive and well." But when I said we need to think about "systems" and how human beings work, how they make choices, I meant that you haven't explained anything, and haven't actually defended any meaningful thesis about meritocracy at all.

It's late, so this is going to be short.

I looked at the Atlantic article. It doesn't deal with intergenerational mobility at all, to start with. It deals with the rise in people incomes during their career (i.e. after school). This isn't really what we've been discussing, but whatever. Anyway, it's another case of practical significance vs statistical significance. The rank-rank correlation in the 15-year difference in people's incomes went from 0.59 to 0.64 overall. Hardly something to worth even bothering to write about. To make matters worse, they reference a mention a separate publication which finds results that contradicts theirs. So we have a tiny "significant" difference from another giant sample, and conflicting results between papers. The media loves to publish this stuff because it draws views and looks "sophisticated," but statisticians such as Andrew Gelman, Uri Simohnson, etc. have been critical of this sort of nonsense for years.

As far as the second article, it's talking about absolute mobility as opposed to relative mobility. We've been discussing the latter this whole time; the former is a different issue, and it's closely related with rising income inequality (which has its own set of drivers that are largely due to changes in how the economy functions in the past several decades).

The data in the appendix of the first paper confirms what I've been saying as well. If you had an income in the 3rd decile in 1993, you have a 15% chance of reaching the 7th decile or above in 2008. That roughly jives what I was saying earlier--significant class mobility is possible for individuals if they work hard. However, the way was the data is systematically underestimating class mobility anyway: it only looks at individuals who had an income at the start of the period. The most common way that class mobility is achieved intergenerationally (largely due to education reasons). So again, the numbers are largely painting a picture fairly close to what I had described earlier (i.e., someone in the ~20th percentile can reliably rise to 70-80th percentile through good life decisions and hard work). Obviously, the most crucial years to achieving class mobility are going to be high school through college/grad school.


Yeah I mean I guess if you think 10% changes in mobility (on top of already low measures of mobility: 0.59??) in the span of a couple decades over "giant" samples is nonsense then there isn't much to talk about.

I too have a thesis: someone can reliably rise from the 99th percentile to the 10th percentile through accumulation of money. It's just common sense.
The unrealistic sound of these propositions is indicative, not of their utopian character, but of the strength of the forces which prevent their realization.
Sr18
Profile Joined April 2006
Netherlands1141 Posts
July 14 2017 08:35 GMT
#161798
On July 14 2017 11:25 IgnE wrote:
Show nested quote +
On July 14 2017 09:57 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 09:33 IgnE wrote:
On July 14 2017 08:45 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:59 IgnE wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:41 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:37 Gorsameth wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:17 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 06:45 Gorsameth wrote:
On July 14 2017 06:39 mozoku wrote:
[quote]
I'd argue a lot of people (not everyone) who thinks American meritocracy is a myth simply made poor decisions and are blaming the system for their own problems.

Check statistics for social mobility and compare it to the rest of the first world.
There is your answer to meritocracy in the US.

The world isn't split into "meritocracies" and "non-meritocracies." Nor is only the world's purest meritocracy the only meritocracy.

If you are born in the US in, say, the 20th percentile or above, then you can reliably rise to 70th or 80th percentile income by your mid-30s. Most people don't, but most people don't spend as much time on their schoolwork and productive extracurricular activities as they could/should either. I define that as a rough meritocracy. Of course, it can always be improved.

I'm making these numbers up, but I'm confident enough that they're roughly true based on personal experience.

Some people are truly unfortunate and it's very difficult to climb the socioeconomic ladder for them due to the situation they were placed in. That's sad, and worth trying to fix as best as we can.

No where am I talking in absolutes, way to try and dismiss the argument.

Social mobility in the US is shit compared to many other first world nations as shown by numerous statistics and studies.
Does that mean is doesn't exist? No, it means its worse then in other developed nations.

I misunderstood your phrase "There is your answer to meritocracy in the US" and took it to mean absolutes. My bad.

Other than that, I don't think we disagree. I think the system I described is reasonably fair for most people. I should also note that, if one is intelligent and/or lucky, it's quite possible can rise far beyond the 70-80th percentile from 20th or so. My original statement was under the assumption of someone of average intelligence without well-connected parents, freakish athletic skills, etc.

Of course it can be improved. Kudos for Europe if they're doing better on the meritocracy part. That doesn't make America's system broken or horribly unfair (with unfortunate exceptions that I'm sure occur in Europe as well, perhaps in smaller numbers).


So how do you explain the article I posted on the last page?

I found a copy. I only took a skim through (I'll try to read it in more detail later), but I don't see how a weakly predictive/significant grandfather effect in a huge sample in a model that explains 20% of the response variable (years of education) is evidence that anything I've said is false, or is strong evidence that social mobility isn't alive.

There's a big difference between practical significance and statistical significance. That said, I'll look over it in more detail later to make sure I fully understand their model and give better conclusions later.


Ok so what you mean when you say, "reasonably fair" and "can reliably rise" is that a person with the (considerable) fortitude and determination to succeed could rise from the 4th quintile to the 1st through hard work, at least most of the time, if we ran the simulation 100 times, assuming everyone else made "normal" decisions and had "normal" ambition, resilience, and fortitude.

When you say social mobility is "alive" you mean it's possible, not that it actually happens frequently.

Now let's think at a systems level please and start to consider why most people don't "reliably rise," how human beings make decisions, why kids don't "spend as much time" on their homework and "productive extracurriculars" as you think they should, whether competition can reach a system-level equilibrium, etc.

Nice timing, I just finished a more in-depth read of the article.

My opinion on the article hasn't changed from before. The grandfather effect is barely measurable--even the authors themselves caution it may only be due to measurement error. They do find an effect (I dislike a lot of how they perform their statistical analysis, but what they do is fairly common practice and is reasonable given their limitations), but I never claimed that coming from a higher socioeconomic class isn't an advantage. I've maintained that it's a sizable advantage since the beginning.

My claim, which is entirely supported by the article given how little variance grandparent education explains, is that it's entirely possible for most individuals to reliably raise his socioeconomic status by making good life decisions and working hard.

I don't see an system-wide issue with that at all. If one works hard, one will likely get ahead. If one does not work hard, one will likely fall behind. Yes, some people are born with advantages, but there's a very valid argument that if a parent wants to work hard and get ahead, he/she should be able to give an advantage to their children.

In theory, if everyone works equally as hard as they possibly could, nobody advances.... but a) that doesn't match what we see in real life at all, and b) if everyone actually worked that hard, the economy would grow so fast that I doubt anybody would be worried about class mobility anyway.

EDIT: I realize class mobility almost certainly breaks down at the tails of the income/wealth distribution, and I've advocated for trying to deal with that throughout this entire discussion. My post is primarily aimed at the 20th-90th percentile of wealth/income, which is where most people come from. And also where most people complaining about the system come from.

EDIT2: Below: I totally agree with your sentiment. The class mobility discussion came up when GH tied it to our previous long discussion on privilege and race relations, so I was trying to avoid diverging from the discussion at hand.


Ok, so I disagree with your downplaying of a measurable, significant grandparent effect, at least insofar as you characterize it as "fair" for a measurable, significant predictor of your success to be attributable to your grandparents. But you also ignore the much more massive impact that parents have on a child's success, writing it off as defensible under some theory of ethics in which parents' hard work should be rewarded through their childrens' "unfair" advantages. The fact that doubing-back to justify asymmetrical starting points vitiates your "fairness" and "reliability" argument from the get-go seems to be lost.

But here are some more articles about how social mobility seems to be decreasing quickly with inequality:

www.theatlantic.com
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-mobility-america/491240/

Show nested quote +
It’s not an exaggeration: It really is getting harder to move up in America. Those who make very little money in their first jobs will probably still be making very little decades later, and those who start off making middle-class wages have similarly limited paths. Only those who start out at the top are likely to continue making good money throughout their working lives.

That’s the conclusion of a new paper by Michael D. Carr and Emily E. Wiemers, two economists at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. In the paper, Carr and Wiemers used earnings data to measure how fluidly people move up and down the income ladder over the course of their careers. “It is increasingly the case that no matter what your educational background is, where you start has become increasingly important for where you end,” Carr told me. “The general amount of movement around the distribution has decreased by a statistically significant amount.”


It might make sense then to see a "small" grandparent effect, when most grandparents are from the baby-boomer generation, an historically anomalous generation where mobility might have been higher than others preceding it and those following it.

Here's another one from a conservative, orthodox economic website:

https://www.ft.com/content/7de9165e-c3d2-11e6-9bca-2b93a6856354?mhq5j=e2

[image loading]


Here is where I think you go wrong, if I may be so bold. You are looking at "your experience," which includes your homogeneous high school peer group. Looking out at that experience, it seems like meritocracy is in working order: the smart, hard-working ones seem to be doing better on average than those who "didn't spend as much time on their homework as they should have" (or at least that's how you remember it). Those who chose to work hard tend to get rewarded.

Now let's compare your school to some notorious inner-city schools where the outcomes for all the kids are much worse. Those schools have a large sample size, wherein the only linking attribute seems to be place of birth, which, I hope you will agree, should not affect natural or in-born traits like intelligence, persistence, resilience, etc. And yet the outcomes for all these kids turns out to be much worse? Is it because they all happened to freely make bad choices? I am not trying to put words in your mouth, of course, but that seems to be the logical result of your meritocratic theory: that heterogeneous groups across the system just all happen to make bad choices.

Now maybe you mean something else when you say "merit" or "hard work." Maybe you aren't referring to the reasonable or probable range of behaviors that might be expected from a population set loose in the wild of their environment. Maybe you are referring to an objectively attainable standard based on knowledge and instilled discipline. But then what are we talking about when you say it's "fair" and "reliable" for a person who chooses to work hard to rise within the system? I mean if your only point is that if someone has the good fortune to be born into a family that instills in them from a young age the habits and behaviors they will need, the discipline they need, the knowledge they need (perhaps foremost the knowledge about how to find the knowledge they will need; the intellectual milieu in which they live), will oftentimes outperform a rich kid without those advantages, then yes, meritocracy is "alive and well." But when I said we need to think about "systems" and how human beings work, how they make choices, I meant that you haven't explained anything, and haven't actually defended any meaningful thesis about meritocracy at all.


If we assume that many of the traits that will make you succesful in a meritocracy are ones that you are born with (like intelligence) and that 100 years ago merit was a less important indicator of success than it is now, wouldn't it make sense that it is harder now to outperform your grandparents than it was before? Considering that your grandparents grandparents didn't have a chance to use their merit to gain success, your grandparents have had an easier time to outperform their grandparents than you have to outperform your own. The competition has been getting harder, so to speak.

Also, 'hard work' often not being enough to overcome your biological traits, does not mean that performing better is not the main reason for societal succes.
If it ain't Dutch, it ain't Park Yeong Min - CJ fighting!
{CC}StealthBlue
Profile Blog Joined January 2003
United States41117 Posts
July 14 2017 09:10 GMT
#161799
A scramble by White House aides to respond to the brewing controversy over Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer may have exposed those aides to special counsel scrutiny.

They can now be called on by investigators led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller to explain what they may have learned about the meeting that the President's eldest son, Trump Jr., his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had with the Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign.

White House aides and Kushner's legal team began strategizing in late June over how to manage the disclosure of newly discovered emails setting up that meeting, according to sources close to Kushner's legal team.

Their public relations efforts culminated in a series of stumbles over the weekend in response to inquiries from The New York Times, which was working to publish a story about the meeting. Initial statements by Trump Jr., who organized the meeting, were undermined by more reporting from the paper.

Some of the President's closest aides, who were traveling with him back from Europe, then helped strategize about a response for Trump Jr., according to people briefed on the matter. The Times first reported on the crafting of the statement.

A sensitive legal matter such as this would normally have been handled by the attorneys, given that it was about the Russia investigation.

But the President's lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, who is designated to handle personal legal issues, was not traveling with the President and was largely uninvolved, according to the people familiar with the matter. The Times reported Wednesday that the President himself approved the statement, raising the possibility the President may have opened himself up to new legal issues not covered by attorney-client privilege. Jay Sekulow, the President's attorney, denied that Trump was involved.

"I wasn't involved in the statement drafting at all, nor was the President. I'm assuming that was between Mr. Donald Trump Jr., between Don Jr. and his lawyer. I'm sure his lawyer was involved, that's how you do it," said Sekulow in an interview on CNN's New Day.

Kasowitz's hiring was specifically intended to help shield White House aides from having to become witnesses in the ongoing investigation. As government employees, they aren't supposed to be involved in the President's personal matters.

The White House and lawyers for Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. did not comment for this story.

Multiple changing explanations for the meeting attributed to Donald Trump Jr. made a complex set of events spiral.

"It was a public relations disaster," one person close to Kushner's team told CNN.

Now, White House aides are pointing fingers at one another. Some of the discord is over a public relations strategy that seemed aimed in part at protecting Kushner, the only person in the June 2016 meeting who works in the White House and who already was under scrutiny for failing to disclose contacts with Russians. Donald Trump Jr., a private citizen, does not have an obligation to disclose the Russian meeting.

"Who do you have to protect? You have to protect the guy who filled out the form saying I never took this meeting," one of the sources said, referring to Kushner's SF-86 application for security clearance where meetings with foreigners need to be listed.

People close to the matter said that strategy went awry because Trump Jr. released misleading press statements.


Source
"Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules."
Danglars
Profile Blog Joined August 2010
United States12133 Posts
July 14 2017 09:20 GMT
#161800
On July 14 2017 13:44 mozoku wrote:
Show nested quote +
On July 14 2017 11:25 IgnE wrote:
On July 14 2017 09:57 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 09:33 IgnE wrote:
On July 14 2017 08:45 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:59 IgnE wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:41 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:37 Gorsameth wrote:
On July 14 2017 07:17 mozoku wrote:
On July 14 2017 06:45 Gorsameth wrote:
[quote]
Check statistics for social mobility and compare it to the rest of the first world.
There is your answer to meritocracy in the US.

The world isn't split into "meritocracies" and "non-meritocracies." Nor is only the world's purest meritocracy the only meritocracy.

If you are born in the US in, say, the 20th percentile or above, then you can reliably rise to 70th or 80th percentile income by your mid-30s. Most people don't, but most people don't spend as much time on their schoolwork and productive extracurricular activities as they could/should either. I define that as a rough meritocracy. Of course, it can always be improved.

I'm making these numbers up, but I'm confident enough that they're roughly true based on personal experience.

Some people are truly unfortunate and it's very difficult to climb the socioeconomic ladder for them due to the situation they were placed in. That's sad, and worth trying to fix as best as we can.

No where am I talking in absolutes, way to try and dismiss the argument.

Social mobility in the US is shit compared to many other first world nations as shown by numerous statistics and studies.
Does that mean is doesn't exist? No, it means its worse then in other developed nations.

I misunderstood your phrase "There is your answer to meritocracy in the US" and took it to mean absolutes. My bad.

Other than that, I don't think we disagree. I think the system I described is reasonably fair for most people. I should also note that, if one is intelligent and/or lucky, it's quite possible can rise far beyond the 70-80th percentile from 20th or so. My original statement was under the assumption of someone of average intelligence without well-connected parents, freakish athletic skills, etc.

Of course it can be improved. Kudos for Europe if they're doing better on the meritocracy part. That doesn't make America's system broken or horribly unfair (with unfortunate exceptions that I'm sure occur in Europe as well, perhaps in smaller numbers).


So how do you explain the article I posted on the last page?

I found a copy. I only took a skim through (I'll try to read it in more detail later), but I don't see how a weakly predictive/significant grandfather effect in a huge sample in a model that explains 20% of the response variable (years of education) is evidence that anything I've said is false, or is strong evidence that social mobility isn't alive.

There's a big difference between practical significance and statistical significance. That said, I'll look over it in more detail later to make sure I fully understand their model and give better conclusions later.


Ok so what you mean when you say, "reasonably fair" and "can reliably rise" is that a person with the (considerable) fortitude and determination to succeed could rise from the 4th quintile to the 1st through hard work, at least most of the time, if we ran the simulation 100 times, assuming everyone else made "normal" decisions and had "normal" ambition, resilience, and fortitude.

When you say social mobility is "alive" you mean it's possible, not that it actually happens frequently.

Now let's think at a systems level please and start to consider why most people don't "reliably rise," how human beings make decisions, why kids don't "spend as much time" on their homework and "productive extracurriculars" as you think they should, whether competition can reach a system-level equilibrium, etc.

Nice timing, I just finished a more in-depth read of the article.

My opinion on the article hasn't changed from before. The grandfather effect is barely measurable--even the authors themselves caution it may only be due to measurement error. They do find an effect (I dislike a lot of how they perform their statistical analysis, but what they do is fairly common practice and is reasonable given their limitations), but I never claimed that coming from a higher socioeconomic class isn't an advantage. I've maintained that it's a sizable advantage since the beginning.

My claim, which is entirely supported by the article given how little variance grandparent education explains, is that it's entirely possible for most individuals to reliably raise his socioeconomic status by making good life decisions and working hard.

I don't see an system-wide issue with that at all. If one works hard, one will likely get ahead. If one does not work hard, one will likely fall behind. Yes, some people are born with advantages, but there's a very valid argument that if a parent wants to work hard and get ahead, he/she should be able to give an advantage to their children.

In theory, if everyone works equally as hard as they possibly could, nobody advances.... but a) that doesn't match what we see in real life at all, and b) if everyone actually worked that hard, the economy would grow so fast that I doubt anybody would be worried about class mobility anyway.

EDIT: I realize class mobility almost certainly breaks down at the tails of the income/wealth distribution, and I've advocated for trying to deal with that throughout this entire discussion. My post is primarily aimed at the 20th-90th percentile of wealth/income, which is where most people come from. And also where most people complaining about the system come from.

EDIT2: Below: I totally agree with your sentiment. The class mobility discussion came up when GH tied it to our previous long discussion on privilege and race relations, so I was trying to avoid diverging from the discussion at hand.


Ok, so I disagree with your downplaying of a measurable, significant grandparent effect, at least insofar as you characterize it as "fair" for a measurable, significant predictor of your success to be attributable to your grandparents. But you also ignore the much more massive impact that parents have on a child's success, writing it off as defensible under some theory of ethics in which parents' hard work should be rewarded through their childrens' "unfair" advantages. The fact that doubing-back to justify asymmetrical starting points vitiates your "fairness" and "reliability" argument from the get-go seems to be lost.

But here are some more articles about how social mobility seems to be decreasing quickly with inequality:

www.theatlantic.com
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-mobility-america/491240/

It’s not an exaggeration: It really is getting harder to move up in America. Those who make very little money in their first jobs will probably still be making very little decades later, and those who start off making middle-class wages have similarly limited paths. Only those who start out at the top are likely to continue making good money throughout their working lives.

That’s the conclusion of a new paper by Michael D. Carr and Emily E. Wiemers, two economists at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. In the paper, Carr and Wiemers used earnings data to measure how fluidly people move up and down the income ladder over the course of their careers. “It is increasingly the case that no matter what your educational background is, where you start has become increasingly important for where you end,” Carr told me. “The general amount of movement around the distribution has decreased by a statistically significant amount.”


It might make sense then to see a "small" grandparent effect, when most grandparents are from the baby-boomer generation, an historically anomalous generation where mobility might have been higher than others preceding it and those following it.

Here's another one from a conservative, orthodox economic website:

https://www.ft.com/content/7de9165e-c3d2-11e6-9bca-2b93a6856354?mhq5j=e2

[image loading]


Here is where I think you go wrong, if I may be so bold. You are looking at "your experience," which includes your homogeneous high school peer group. Looking out at that experience, it seems like meritocracy is in working order: the smart, hard-working ones seem to be doing better on average than those who "didn't spend as much time on their homework as they should have" (or at least that's how you remember it). Those who chose to work hard tend to get rewarded.

Now let's compare your school to some notorious inner-city schools where the outcomes for all the kids are much worse. Those schools have a large sample size, wherein the only linking attribute seems to be place of birth, which, I hope you will agree, should not affect natural or in-born traits like intelligence, persistence, resilience, etc. And yet the outcomes for all these kids turns out to be much worse? Is it because they all happened to freely make bad choices? I am not trying to put words in your mouth, of course, but that seems to be the logical result of your meritocratic theory: that heterogeneous groups across the system just all happen to make bad choices.

Now maybe you mean something else when you say "merit" or "hard work." Maybe you aren't referring to the reasonable or probable range of behaviors that might be expected from a population set loose in the wild of their environment. Maybe you are referring to an objectively attainable standard based on knowledge and instilled discipline. But then what are we talking about when you say it's "fair" and "reliable" for a person who chooses to work hard to rise within the system? I mean if your only point is that if someone has the good fortune to be born into a family that instills in them from a young age the habits and behaviors they will need, the discipline they need, the knowledge they need (perhaps foremost the knowledge about how to find the knowledge they will need; the intellectual milieu in which they live), will oftentimes outperform a rich kid without those advantages, then yes, meritocracy is "alive and well." But when I said we need to think about "systems" and how human beings work, how they make choices, I meant that you haven't explained anything, and haven't actually defended any meaningful thesis about meritocracy at all.

It's late, so this is going to be short.

I looked at the Atlantic article. It doesn't deal with intergenerational mobility at all, to start with. It deals with the rise in people incomes during their career (i.e. after school). This isn't really what we've been discussing, but whatever. Anyway, it's another case of practical significance vs statistical significance. The rank-rank correlation in the 15-year difference in people's incomes went from 0.59 to 0.64 overall. Hardly something to worth even bothering to write about. To make matters worse, they reference a mention a separate publication which finds results that contradicts theirs. So we have a tiny "significant" difference from another giant sample, and conflicting results between papers. The media loves to publish this stuff because it draws views and looks "sophisticated," but statisticians such as Andrew Gelman, Uri Simohnson, etc. have been critical of this sort of nonsense for years.

As far as the second article, it's talking about absolute mobility as opposed to relative mobility. We've been discussing the latter this whole time; the former is a different issue, and it's closely related with rising income inequality (which has its own set of drivers that are largely due to changes in how the economy functions in the past several decades).

The data in the appendix of the first paper confirms what I've been saying as well. If you had an income in the 3rd decile in 1993, you have a 15% chance of reaching the 7th decile or above in 2008. That roughly jives what I was saying earlier--significant class mobility is possible for individuals if they work hard. However, the way was the data is systematically underestimating class mobility anyway: it only looks at individuals who had an income at the start of the period. The most common way that class mobility is achieved intergenerationally (largely due to education reasons). So again, the numbers are largely painting a picture fairly close to what I had described earlier (i.e., someone in the ~20th percentile can reliably rise to 70-80th percentile through good life decisions and hard work). Obviously, the most crucial years to achieving class mobility are going to be high school through college/grad school.

Good spotting on the absolute versus relative mobility measures. We shouldn't mix in the changed economy and distorting effects of income inequality by looking at things in absolute terms instead of relative.

Education gating incomes is also a good point. Ideally you sacrifice for your kids so they can achieve better educational outcomes and comfortable lifestyles. And tbh I wasn't expecting that moderate of an influence on grandparents predicting breadth of opportunity, but that's the good thing about research proving all kinds of wild or expected conclusions.
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