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| 12/23 |
| 2007/6/4-10 [Transportation/Car/RoadHogs, Transportation/PublicTransit] UID:46845 Activity:high |
6/3 Ahh, that good 'ole suburban lifestyle:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/28quwx (Washington Post)
\_ I spend 20 minutes commuting each way. That's pretty short.
Having a short commute is the only way I have time to exercise
1+ hours/day, which is in turn the only reason I'm not
completely fat. (I'm only a little bit fat.) I don't know
how anyone can live the way this guy did.
\_ Plenty of people are fat, stressed and ulcerated.
\_ haven't we seen this before? motd necromancy!
\_ I think the last one was a NYT article.
\_ I live so far from the city my city friends never heard of the
place. I also commute < 15 minutes each way, have lunch with
my wife at least once a week and work no more than 40 hours a
week over time. Just because some people choose to live their
lives poorly doesn't mean everyone has.
\_ You must work in the same small town where you live.
\_ Wait, so you're saying you work between 40 and 80 hrs/wk?
What's your average, 60hrs/wk?
\_ I mean I have an odd schedule where I work 44 hours one week
then 36 hours the next, so 40 hours/week averaged out. It is
9 hours a day M-Th + 8 F, then 9 per day M-Th and Friday off.
I haven't done one of those 60-80 hour weeks in a few years.
I make a few $K less than I used to but not by much and have
a life now.
\_ Which company is this? We just started doing this
9/80 schedule as well.
\_ To be fair, not everyone has the skills that can give them that
kind of job. Tech work is really nice that way.
\_ When I used to BART into the city I'd see the same folks
every day and chat with a few of them. Mostly they were non-
tech people who would have been better off not coming in to
the city for work. One guy was a counter guy at a deli shop
who drove 30 minutes to BART and then another hour to the
city. I don't know what he made but c'mon... counter guy at
the deli with a 90 minute commute.
\_ Bart time, while still suck, is much less suck when
compared to driving.
\_ Depends on how many hours/week you get stuck standing
the whole way bodily pressed against smelly people.
\_ At one job I worked at, I used to always come in late
and work late, so I got to know the janitor. Turns out
he drove in from Stockton (!) every day and had three
kids. He made $17/hr as a janitor in SF and could only
make $6.15 in Stockton. I guess 3X your salary is worth
a 2+ hr/day commute.
\_ Or better would be to move to another state where he
could live on $5.25 and not waste 2+ hr/day commuting
which he could spend going to school, starting a
business or just enjoying time with his family.
\_ The cost of living is less in other states, but it
is not 1/3 the cost of living in Stockton. This
guy was buying his own house, which you can't do
on minimum wage anywhere.
\_ It isn't just pure cost of living but the value
of his time as well. If he spends it commuting
it is lost. If he spends it in school or doing
something useful he can move up in society and
stop working as a janitor or sandwich maker.
\_ I think that way and you think that way,
but not everyone does. Once you have three
kids, your options narrow considerably.
\_ Once you have three kids, the *last* thing
you should be doing is spending 3 hours a
day commuting. -tom
\_ Once you have +1 kid you're whipped
and your wife will forbid you to
make any drastic changes to their
lives. I presume you never had kids.
\_ Someone deleted my response, but the
best thing for the kids is if this
guy triples his salary and gives his
kids a better lifestyle. Do you
think the kids who have parents on
welfare (and who are home 100% of
the time) are better off? Studies
show that education and income
correlate to success, not "quality
time with the kids", even if that
seems illogical. I presume it's
because beyond a certain age kids
are influenced more by teachers and
peers than parents. Getting your
kids away from gangsters is worth 3
hours per day commuting.
\_ Correlation is not causation.
Kids need food, shelter, and
good relationships with their parents
far more than they need a huge
house in Dixon or the latest
Transformers toy. -tom
\_ You think this janitor is
working for a huge house in
Dixon and a Transformers toy?
What kids need are parents who
are able to care for them.
That doesn't mean being with
them 24/7. Do you think a 3
hour commute is hurting the
kids? Maybe a little, but it's
a net positive considering the
alternative is the dad at home
and the kids in the slums. Kids
need parents who care, not
necessarily parents who are
present.
\_ reference please. -tom
\_ I cannot find the study
right now, but it stated
that parents' income and
education are the TWO
most important factors
for having successful
children with everything
else having just a slight
effect. Here is one paper
that states that the effect
of employment of the father
is negative, but small.
http://tinyurl.com/2bga74
\_ uh, yeah, and how is
commuting 3 hours for
a minimum-wage job
improving parental
income or education?
You're also reading
the study wrong; it
says that the effect
of father's employment
is small--that is, if
the father is *unemployed*,
there is a small negative
effect. It doesn't say
anything about an employed
father who is spending
12 hours a day working and
commuting. The same study
also notes that children
who experience single
parenthood have
significantly lower
educational attainments.
-tom
\_ Why is it a choice of 3 hours
of commuting to a janitor job
vs. welfare and slums? He
can work for lower pay in a
cheaper place and spend that
wasted 3 hours bettering his
life so he won't be a friggin
janitor forever.
\_ As someone else said,
nowhere is cheap enough
to survive on minimum
wage and a lot of the
cheapest places are full
of redneck hicks, which
makes minorities
uncomfortable. (I am
assuming he is a
minority. Please correct
me if he is not.)
\_ Minimum wage and a family
of 4 puts you well below
the poverty line which
means you're getting
piles of government
assistance for food and
housing, as well as a
free education with those
2-3 saved hours a day so
you don't have to die as
a janitor or sandwich
maker.
\_ "Piles of government
assistance?"
\_ If I had 3 kids I'd definitely move far
far away from the city. My options would
narrow in favor of raising my kids away
from such an incredibly negative influence.
\_ Even plenty of us who think that The City
is an incredibly positive influence would
move away, because we wouldn't be able
to afford to live here. I am kind of
curious, have you ever talked to anyone
who was actually born and raised in
San Francisco? Most of them seemed to
have come out just fine.
\_ Yes, I have. What about it?
\_ If fine == gay.
\- you go past 19th ave, or on top
\- you know past 19th ave, or on top
of twin peaks, or beyond glen park
SF is a very different place from
the downtown, marina, pacheights,
mission, assland, western add,
inner sunset, noe areas. and
bayview type areas are in turn
different in a different way.
like someone i know who grew
up in st. francis wood and then
was ucb/tridelt, might as well
have grown up in menlo park or
mill valley. although i think
people form danville or saratoga
are a little different.
\_ While it may not be true of all
large cities, I've met
disproportionately larger number of
SF born/raised people who didn't
know how to swim or ride a bike.
While this doesn't make them "not
fine," it does give them slightly
different background with which to
view the world. |
| 12/23 |
|
| preview.tinyurl.com/28quwx -> www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/29/AR2007052902244.html?hpid=features1&hpv%3http://www.http://www.washingtonpost.com:80/ac2/wp-dyn?node=admin/registration/register&sub=AR section=/print/washpostmagazine Cover Story Driven to Extremes For their commutes of up to four hours a day, the Hierses of West Virginia and Marc Turner of Charlottesville enjoy cheaper housing and better pay. Page W18 AT 7:25, ABOUT 15 MINUTES INTO HIS TWO-HOUR-PLUS WEEKNIGHT COMMUTE, Marc Turner reached for his ringing cellphone. On the other end of the line, the younger of his two daughters, 7-year-old Catherine, had a question. I think it's probably going to be longer than two hours. Are you going to help set the table, then, or do something else? By the third time he answered the question, he wondered whether Cate was doing his wife's bidding. Post Magazine: The Long Road Home For their commutes of up to four hours a day, the Hiers of West Virginia and Marc Turner of Charlottesville have enjoyed better pay and more affordable housing. Driven to Extremes The Hierses of West Virginia and Marc Turner of Charlottesville are part of an ever-expanding group of American workers whose average one-way commute to their jobs is 90 minutes or more. The Census Bureau calls them "extreme commuters," and their ranks roughly doubled between 1990 and 2000 to more than 3 million, or a little more than 3 percent of all commuters. Tuesday generally presented a much less draining commute for Turner than, say, a Thursday night, when he was usually worn down by the first three days of the workweek -- three round-trip commutes that consumed four to five hours daily. By Thursday nights, running on fumes, he routinely avoided the evening commute entirely and stayed at a discount hotel near Tysons Corner to rest and recover. He usually had a drink on the concierge's floor, sometimes watched a film in his room, got an early night's sleep and readied himself for a normally busy Friday morning. Two years ago, when he took the job in Tysons Corner, he had secured his wife's blessing for Thursday night stay-overs, assuring her that he would have more to give to her and the children on weekends if he came home on Fridays refreshed. The rest of his workweek, Turner pointed out, offered almost no respite. Even on uneventful commuting nights, he seldom walked through the front door of his house until long after the kids had eaten and fallen asleep. As often as not, Julie was getting ready for bed herself, having only enough time to say hi and ask her husband hurried questions about household matters, such as what he had spent that day so that she could balance their checkbook. Turner's solitariness mirrored the lives of countless other commuters who have spent large portions of their working lives alone in cars -- alone with their dreams and anxieties, alone with worries about whether they will make it to their jobs or to the next appointment on time, alone pondering the complaints of alienated family members pointing out that they are not around often enough, alone with their own festering resentments over why the people closest to them can't better understand their mounting fatigue and stress. Doctors report a booming business in treating the neck and back pain of tense commuters. Studies have indicated a correlation between long, congested commutes and such stress-related maladies as high blood pressure. Other research has concluded that long commutes result in increased social isolation and greater dissatisfaction with jobs and life in general. As he headed toward home that evening, Turner estimated that more than 20 percent of his waking hours were spent commuting. Honda sedan with a personalized license plate here, a white business van there, an elegant black Bentley whose impassive driver sat ramrod straight. He regarded the strangers behind the steering wheels as comrades of sorts, all of them often caught in a hellish crawl. The Tysons Corner drive paled in awfulness to the often three-hour-plus commutes Turner had endured years earlier, while working in downtown Washington. In those days, his wife had regularly asked him not when but if he would be coming home; the job and commute had forced him into hotels two or three nights a week. Turner left the Washington job and took a moderately lower-paying position in Charlottesville to be closer to his family. But the work there, a brief detour from law firm work, quickly made him miserable. Soon, he was searching again for a new job closer to the city. In 2005, he accepted his paralegal position in Tysons, where his salary dwarfed what was available at any paralegal job he had then heard about in the Charlottesville area. He told Julie that his schedule could be worse, reminding her of his many nights in Washington hotels. But by last year, this point was no longer consolation for Julie, who thought that Turner's Tysons Corner commute had become symptomatic of a vast separation that she felt in their marriage. A 41-year-old associate professor at the University of Virginia Medical School, she had an intense schedule herself and very little energy and patience left over for a husband who had virtually no time for her on weeknights; she was generally managing their children's needs alone. The problems in their marriage, she told him, were "multi-factorial," which meant, among other things, that his work life was out of balance with his personal life. His commute had become, as she put it, "a chief separation issue." During the fall and winter, she broached the possibility of divorce. But, ultimately, he wanted to save his marriage and keep his family together. "It usually starts opening up a little past here, but not tonight, for some reason." A black SUV cut him off, swerving from left to right, its driver waving over his shoulder as if in apology or thanks. "You don't change lanes like that," Turner groused at the SUV driver. He took a deep breath and leaned back a bit on his heated leather seat, which felt good on a cool night like this one. The car also had satellite radio, a present a long while back from his family, who thought his commute could be more tolerable if he could listen commercial-free to any of 100-plus stations. Aside from the classical music station, it was little more than Muzak for him. "It's nice to feel a little pampered, but it gets to be no fun alone. Top 35 Most Viewed Post a Comment Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. |
| tinyurl.com/2bga74 -> 216.109.125.130/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=most+important+factors+success+%22parents%27+income%22+education&y=Search&fr=yfp-t-501&u=socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/%7Esedap/p/JErmisch.pdf&w=most+important+factors+success+%22parents+income%22+education&d=GpJfK-rn It's a snapshot of the page taken as our search engine crawled the Web. We've highlighted the words: most important factors success parents income education The web site itself may have changed. is not affiliated with the authors of this page or responsible for its content. How do parents affect the life chances of their children as adults? An idiosyncratic review John Ermisch ISER University of Essex April 2003 Abstract From genes to bequests, parents have important influences on the income, health and general living standards of their children as adults. The purpose of this paper is to review how parents affect the life chances of their children, with a particular focus on my own research in this area. Paper prepared for the SEDAP Conference, Moving Towards an Older Society, 10-11 April 2003, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. The low fertility associated with an older society means that the economic support of a larger retired population falls on a smaller working population. In these circumstances, productivity-enhancing investment in todays children becomes even more important for the support of the retired population. In addition, because incomes in old age are strongly linked with earnings during a persons working life, parental influences on the life chances of their adult children will eventually affect the latters economic welfare in their retirement. The purpose of this paper is to review how parents affect the life chances of their children, with a particular focus on my own research in this area. Section 1 discusses the role of genetic transmission in affecting the health and economic well-being during their childrens lifetime. The relatively lengthy second section examines how parents actions during childhood affect the life chances of children as adults, and the third considers how financial transfers to children and co- residence in young adulthood help them during a period of important human capital investment. The fourth section discusses financial transfers from parents to children beyond young adulthood, possibly in exchange for services, and the fifth discusses bequests from parents later in life. It is well known that various measures of economic welfare of parents and children, such as earnings, income and occupational status are correlated (see Solon 1999). Recent British evidence (Ermisch and Francesconi 2003) suggests that while this intergenerational persistence in economic wellbeing may be weakening somewhat for more recent birth cohorts, it remains significant. The mechanisms through which parents affect their children as adults discussed in the paper are also important in helping to explain this intergenerational correlation in income. We are learning more each day about how genetic inheritance from our parents affects many domains of human behaviour. Perhaps most well known is the genetic influence on our risks of suffering from various diseases later in life. Thus, genetic transmission is an important influence on a persons health throughout his or her life, and a persons health affects his/her earnings, labour supply, retirement age and the length of life itself. General cognitive ability predicts important social outcomes such as educational and occupational levels (thus, earnings and income) far better than any other behavioural trait, and it is also one of the most heritable behavioural traits (Plomin 1999). Furthermore, this measure of heritability is found to increase with age, from 20% in infancy to 60% or larger later in life (Plomin et al 1997; This may be because individuals seek out and create environments that are correlated with their genetic propensities, although it may also be partly due to better measurement of g The heritability calculation can be sensitive to the model used and the environment in which it is undertaken (Feldman et al 2000). Furthermore, it tells us nothing about the contribution of the environment to between-group differences or 1 Diverse measures of cognitive ability correlate substantially with each other, and g is what these diverse measures have in common (the first principal component in factor analysis of the measures). While cognitive testing has its critics, Plomin (1999, pC25) summarizes the experts in stating that g is one of the most reliable and valid measures in the behavioural domain; its long term stability after childhood is greater than for any other behavioural trait, 3 changes over time. As Plomin (1999) emphasizes, average differences in g between groups (eg ethnic, socio-economic) are small compared with individual differences within groups. General cognitive ability is also not immutable, but can be altered by the environment. Genes also affect personality traits, which in turn affect many aspects of social and economic behaviour. For example, consider another aspect of vital behaviour, human fertility. Miller et al (1999) develops a theory that suggests that genetic influences on fertility appear to operate, as least in part, through volitional fertility motivations and desires. Their argument is tied to several genetic loci, particularly dopamine receptor genes. When individuals have a wide choice concerning the number of children they have (ie fertility norms and birth control technology do little to constrain their choice), these fertility motivations, and therefore genetic influences, may play a large role in fertility outcomes (Kohler et al 1999). In other words, the genetic influences are allowed to express themselves in these situations. Estimating an additive genetic-environment model from information on 2 In analysis of variance language, heritability measures contribution to within-group variance, with group defined by environment. But this result holds in the absence of perturbing forces. In addition to genetic mutation, such forces are environmental changes that interact with genotype and its expression in phenotypes, and Rodgers et al (2001) point out that contraceptive innovation and changes in mating patterns, availability of abortion and norms regarding family size may be just such perturbing forces. Importantly for the theory, variance in a measure of fertility motivation, namely the age at which a woman first attempted to get pregnant, 4 also has a major genetic component. It is higher than for completed fertility and higher for women than men. Furthermore, this measure of fertility motivation is linked to completed fertility. Dunne et al (1997) have also found strong genetic influences on age at first sexual intercourse among Australians born between 1952 and 1966, accounting for half of the variance for women and 70% for men. Interestingly, they found the genetic heritability component was much lower for earlier cohorts, born before 1952. This may be because the more recent cohorts were subject to fewer social controls when they reached adolescence, thereby allowing inherited personality attributes, such as sociability and impulsivity, and heritable aspects of pubertal hormonal activity, physical development and attractiveness to express themselves more clearly in sexual behaviour. There also appear to be important genetic influences on divorce, with about one half of the variance in latent divorce risk attributed to genetic inheritance (McGue and Lykken 1992). The authors hypothesize that the genetic influence on divorce risk is mediated largely by inherited personality characteristics. They cite a study by Osborne (forthcoming) that shows that the Rotter Scale, which is a common measure of fatalism, has a large negative influence on earnings among a sample of American men (note that the scale was measured before their entry into the labour market). Furthermore, the Rotter 4 While age at first attempt to get pregnant may reflect constraints as well as motivation, it is a fertility behaviour indicator that is less contaminated by other factors such as contraceptive failure and 5 scores of parents and children are significantly correlated. Although the extent to which this intergenerational correlation is due to genetic or cultural transmission is unclear, it suggests that parents may shape important aspects of their off... |