Greetings from the LHH! I made my last in-person trips to check on my students this past week - I have one more virtual visit next week, and then I will be done for the year - just in time for fall semester. As usual, I don’t know where the summer went. I have a ton of work to do to prepare for the fall semester - especially because I just agreed to pick up an additional class because we had an unexpected departure of a faculty member. Luckily it’s a course I have taught before, but it still requires preparation.
This week’s links are all on the theme of upward mobility. I wanted to write a bit more about success, and the Universe decided to slide me a few pieces this past week that helped me shape my thoughts - specifically the interview with Senator Tim Scott, and the piece in City Journal. I’ve been sitting on the Franklin piece for a while, and I may have shared the Learn Liberty video once before - I lose track after a couple hundred of these letters.
Back when I first started teaching - maybe 10 years ago - one of the first courses I taught was macroeconomics in the Army-Baylor MBA program. I don’t recall the specifics of the conversation we were having in class, but one of the students commented that the American Dream was to own your own home, have a nice car, and take a nice vacation once a year. It was a materialistic articulation, focused on consumption. I don’t think I argued with the student at the time, but I have thought about this interpretation ever since. The comment really spun me around because I had never thought of the American Dream that way. Instead, I had always thought of the American Dream as pursuing your own potential to become something more than what your parents or grandparents could have. Yes, there was a material component - house, car, vacation - but that was more of a side effect of the pursuit of your potential. If you read the Franklin piece below, you will get a sense of what I have always thought:
If they are poor, they begin first as Servants or Journeymen, and if they are sober, industrious & frugal, they soon become Masters, establish themselves in Business, marry, raise Families, and become respectable Citizens.
It was the American Dream because in most countries there are so many more obstacles to upward mobility. That continues to be true today. Most of world’s population faces more obstacles than people who live in America. That’s not to say that there aren’t obstacles, or that anyone can rise from the bottom quintile to the top, but the chance of making something of yourself with a little discipline and a lot of effort is quite good here. That to me is the American Dream - to take what you have and do something with it.
As a professor at a state university, my personal mission is to help as many kids as I can follow the American Dream - to make something of themselves - by helping them understand the opportunity that is in front of them. That is one of the challenges we face in this country - there is so much opportunity - but many people come from backgrounds where they don’t know how to take advantage of it (see the City Journal article below).
So with that, willing good for all of you, I present you with the links!
(pic above is a water lilly - one last shot from my trip to Mollidgewock - I didn’t get to do anything fun this past week worth photographing).
Read
What: Benjamin Franklin, Information to Those Who Would Remove to America
https://americainclass.org/sources/makingrevolution/independence/text8/franklininfoamerica.pdf
Why: As referenced above in the intro. Franklin wrote this essay in 1782 while in France. So many people had the illusion that all you had to do was move to America and you would automatically be successful without effort that he felt the need to say what it actually took, even back then.
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What: City Journal, The Secret to Upward Mobility
https://www.city-journal.org/the-secret-to-upward-mobility
Why: Harvard economist Raj Chetty has been working on the challenges of upward mobility for years. He and a group of co-authors have published a couple of studies about the social factors leading to upward mobility recently, using unique new data sets, including data from FaceBook connections. This is a quick summary of the work.
One of the key findings is if you want your kids to be successful, you need to have them be around successful people.
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Watch
What: Learn Liberty, Is there Income Mobility in America? (4 min)
Why: This short video summarizes a study looking at income mobility from the 1960s to the late 2000’s. It’s about 10 years old, but the ideas are useful.
One thing they do not talk about is the natural movement of households through different income levels. Think about this: in the year a typical person graduates from college and enters the workforce, they are probably not earning that much money. Over the next 40 years, their income likely rises until they reach their late 40’s/early 50’s when they hit their career earning peak. They typically stay at this plateau until they retire when their income falls dramatically. If they have been wise, they have significant savings that they begin to draw down in retirement, but that would not show up as income. If, for example, when you retire, you own your house without a mortgage, that is significant wealth, but the value of the imputed rent is not included in your income.
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Listen
What: Honestly with Bari Weiss, The Senate’s Only Black Republican Says: Stop Being Pessimistic (60 min)
Why: from the description:
Tim Scott is a rare bird: He is the only black Republican in the Senate. But the quality that makes him arguably more unique at the moment is his optimism.
Much of that optimism comes from his own story. Scott’s grandfather picked cotton in the segregated south. He never learned to read or write. Within two generations, without money or connections, his grandson became a U.S. senator from South Carolina.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://markbonica.substack.com/welcome
See you next week!
Mark
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” – Pablo Picaso