CHAPTER 1
"Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief."
The Principle of Imbalance and My Own Family
Admittedly, I am the rich man from the rhyme, but on several occasions in my life, I have been the poor man as well. While I have been blessed to never be a beggar man (if you don't count my college years) or as desperate as the thief, I have been both rich and poor, so I believe I speak from experience when I discuss these various imbalances and how they factor into our lives, socioeconomically and otherwise.
I was born to a socially disgraced, unwed high-school teenager in a rural geographic part of eastern North Carolina almost fifty years ago. Our young American family (of two) lived in relative poverty for several years before eventually achieving social upward mobility by becoming a household family through the combined power of a second marriage, solid values, and higher education.
My first personal awareness of any significant inequality within America came as a child in middle school (notice how there is hierarchy built into the educational system early on). I was incredibly fortunate at that time to have the opportunity to switch from a public school education to a private school where my mother taught for a vital few years of my primary education. Our family was unable to afford the private school tuition, but because she was an educator there, I was fortunate and grateful to be afforded entrance. While there I witnessed not only a higher level of general educational quality but more importantly a difference in the value of achievement. More people, as a relative percentage, seemed to truly enjoy being there. Teachers in that particular environment were clearly more passionate about their efforts as educators for eagerly receptive and ambitious students. In hindsight this was what we refer to as a biased and privileged socioeconomic population, and I was graciously along for the free ride. While this would seem to offer an easy explanation for my future success, life is rarely ever that simple. A few years later, my mother became pregnant once more (this was planned) and chose to quit teaching, forcing me for financial reasons back into a more typical public school. But the lessons I learned during my five-year stay at the private school have remained imprinted on me for life, and for that I am grateful.
I later chose to attain a college degree at a very affordable and respectable public university and did so efficiently (within four years) before accepting my first full-time job. While my starting salary at that time ranked me in the bottom 20 percent of incomes within America, I was nonetheless grateful to become employed and blessed to learn self-sufficiency. I was able to eventually rise in rank socially and economically through the power of my further consistent educational attainment (earning an advanced college degree in medicine), academic achievement (graduating number one in rank from my medical school), and later marriage, similar to my own family of reference.
While I don't believe I am smarter than anyone else or better than others, I do believe my family has enjoyed better opportunities than others and better outcomes thanks in part to our families of origin and what they chose to model in value to us (and thus what became our frames of reference), coupled with a vital few choices we also made. I am also fortunate to be disproportionately rewarded highly within society based on my achievement and occupational choice, and I am grateful to the degree that I want to help others, including our children, who hopefully care enough to learn from this information.
In the course of my reference lifetime I have personally therefore been through two cycles of poor to rich, with both instances disproportionately assisted by the consistently valued inputs of (1) educational achievement and (2) quality values, as they relate to the individual and to society.
During my own half century of experience of cyclical social mobility, I have realized that our country (indeed, the world) is also socially and economically imbalanced, but I did not at first realize to what degree. I don't mean to imply this is a bad thing, just that life seems repetitious and even somehow predictable and quantifiable to my analytical way of thinking.
What you now think or thought you knew may be similar to my thoughts. I was like most Americans who significantly underestimate the true extent of our societal inequalities and their recurring nature. In fact, I only became interested in the idea when I discovered I had a problem and after it affected the health of my own wealthy family. We often hear from the media and the governing elite what it is they want to subjectively convey about all these ideas, and we only really tune in when it seems to apply to us. Since I am a bit suspicious of conclusions from the media or the governing elite, I decided to research these ideas objectively on my own. This book is the result.
I first began this project by examining objective US Census data, specifically looking at various and sundry databases for annual incomes in early 2012, as I wanted to learn the natural spread of incomes for our population and the distribution of income for the various occupational decisions facing our children. I decided to review this issue myself to better understand this particular imbalance as presented in the popular media and how it might change in the future to affect my four growing children, one of whom recently decided postsecondary education was not the right choice for him.
I am fortunate that my job highly reimburses me for my academic degrees, and yes, I am truly grateful to be in the highest income group for all occupations within America. It is ironic, therefore, that I chose to live in a geography consistently ranked among the poorest and the most uneducated within America. This Dickensian paradox seems to have further magnified the disturbing effects of these imbalances to my eyes, giving me quite a unique perspective of my family and even our country. I have truly been blessed as an American, and for most of my family of origin it has been the best of times, but for the majority of the people in our state, my son included, it has simultaneously been the worst of times.
I consider myself a realist, nicely balanced by a wife who is an optimist, and we have concluded that not all our children are likely destined for either of our career paths or either of our unusually high levels of educational achievement. And so I wanted to educate myself about (household) income and occupational data in order to help our children in their own unique career paths and in their related educational efforts. This gave me a selfish motive to find some link between income and the many other variables that correlate besides simple occupational choices. What I learned was even more valuable.
My children are just like most other kids within modern American culture. They like the easy, simple paths to success—as shown by my oldest child who decided to simply forego a college education. Easy is more popular within American culture, as exemplified by less educational attainment seen statistically in the general American population. This is, in part, why I picked the title for this book: Getting More for Less. This title implies easy, and we all seem to be able to relate to that concept.
My son has in fact learned to prefer the easier approach, having seen (1) the way our popular culture rewards musicians who are often uneducated (his preferred form of musical entertainment is gangster rap), (2) how we glorify certain alternative lifestyles (through our less-filtered modern media), and (3) the way we disproportionately reimburse entertainers such as movie stars and super-athletes. I am certain my desire to make his life easier than my own did not help the situation favorably, but as I often reiterate, I am still learning!
My other children similarly have observed how our society rewards outward visual appeal in skewed ways and how sexiness, individualism, athleticism, and consumerism are disproportionately valued while American culture discourages the pursuit of many worthy professions, such as the social service industry (my wife is a social worker), our protective police and firefighting forces, our military (the soldier and sailor), and our educators. Within each of these, there are exceptions, but in general the rewards are not proportional to the value these occupations merit within our society, but rather to the occupations' popularity and simple math (like supply and demand).
My children witness how disproportionately we reward effortless random events, like winning the state lottery by easily spending a few bucks, while we scarcely reward predictable hard work, such as manual labor or other similar lifelong productive efforts. While there is much to understand about the supply-and-demand economic model of labor efficiency, the invisible motor that drives these inequalities is most often simple human nature. However, much of the disparity we currently see in America currently—income being merely one example—is because of what we have learned to value within our nation, as well as what we model to our own children through these many machinations of popular culture.
What I hope to teach my kids through my additional research efforts is that a few simple and consistently good values and decisions (like education, marriage, solid core moral and religious values, and yes, even some hard work and achievement) combined with their own unique passions and abilities can help them statistically achieve more happiness and success. And while my children may not realistically ever become athlete superstars, famous rappers, supermodels, or ever win the state lottery on a probability basis, they are capable of making more-efficient choices that will allow them to attain the American dream (e.g., being in the upper middle class), which is much easier (and more probably) to achieve than these other childhood fantasies.
While I do not discourage a super-elite career for anyone, as I am not one to judge our population by any occupation, I do believe a minimum level of educational achievement is a more efficient choice for most American children, and getting this early on will pay off disproportionately in the long term.
The main impetus for my colossal effort was my own deficiency in showing my firstborn child the powerful link between a valuable education beyond high school and his probability of future success and happiness. I emphasized this repeatedly during his early formative years, and I always assumed college was a given choice and outcome. However, our local culture of under-education influenced his perceptions through the medium of his peers, and he was unable to learn the importance of higher education. Instead of blaming him for his failed ability to learn, I wanted to find an explanation for my own inability to teach him. In reality, the reason is likely somewhere in between, disproportionately affected by something in both of our lives that hopefully we can change together for the better.
The end result was that 25 percent of my children (one of four) ironically became the source of most of my perceived failure as a parent (this is an example of a skewed principle that I will describe later). In my son's skewed way of thinking, not only was he determined to simply forego higher education, but he was also willing to abandon our family's core values. He decided instead to mimic the local popular culture by more effortlessly finding a low-wage job requiring less education while regularly trying his random luck playing the state lottery, among a few other similarly nonproductive choices. As they say, "When in Rome, we should do as the Romans do." In fact my son observed this general cultural disinterest in education everywhere around him (and copied it) and concluded that I was the oddball and not the norm. In a way, he was correct.
As he struggled within our local culture, I began to examine my own life imbalances, and while trying to find something useful (like a higher-paying career) for his own advancement, I discovered these repeating principles that were more widely applicable to all of us. These are all related concepts that I have discovered have similar reasons for their outcomes. But to understand them in the generic sense (i.e., basic human behavior), I needed to link these ideas with something we all could understand. So I therefore decided to begin this project by examining something all my children (and readers) could relate to—money, and more specifically, income. My kids, like Daisy, have all learned the relative utility of money in our culture, and I want to show it to them in the context of the modern American family (using mine as an example), which is why I chose household income in the United States as the basic model.
The Principle of Imbalance for American households (Income)
Presently, my household income is consistently high and is in what is called the fifth quintile (a quintile is a grouping of 20 percent, of the population in this instance) when compared to the typical American household income group. Income clusters, more generally known as quantiles, are very imbalanced distributions within America (our household unit would be considered to be in the eightieth percentile or higher—meaning 80 percent or more families earn less than we do as a household). I suspected some form of imbalance, but the federal government actually has terms for examining this skewed income data since they have been aware of this relationship for quite a long time. I used to be even a bit embarrassed by this fact, especially living in such an impoverished state, but when I realized over twenty-five million households (roughly seventy-five million people) represent the top 20 percent, I felt a little better! So let me summarize what all this means.
I first examined the typical distribution of income for a given year to see how it is distributed or balanced within our country. I initially did this a few years ago using 2011 data and then later for 2012 (and several other years as well), and since I saw no appreciable change (it was always the same shape), I used the 2012 annual census data as shown. You can pick any year, and the relationship is roughly the same. This is an important point. The imbalance is consistent.
This graph shows the income distribution using US Census data for all American households as increments of $50,000. The number of households earning within each of the levels is graphed on the left (y-axis in thousands) and the dollar amounts earned are on the bottom (x-axis). The curve as graphed shows a distribution of the population within a range of $0 to greater than $250,000, where it is truncated for ease (we all like easy, including the US government). It is important to note that the money people earn is not spread out evenly. It is imbalanced, lopsided, or clustered within certain families. This is called a skewed distribution and is also known as a Pareto distribution of income (named for the person who first analytically described it), and the numbers are relatively important (20 percent and 80 percent) as repeating relationships, as you will see.
