It seem that your critique shows Alger's books to be fundamentally conservative, by the way.  The social structure is celebrated, not challenged.  Had he written books about young men (or women) achieving against the odds and through hard work, they would in fact have been slightly more progressive.

On the other, they are used to support a claim or myth about the efficacy of industry and hard work, though the stories themselves contain nothing of the kind.  

Which myth sides-steps the fact that the actual socio-economic playing field is not "level." and "hard work" really has nothing to do with social status, respect, or success.  

Which further side-steps the fact that a just society is fair to everybody, and not just the few who happen or manage to be "upwardly mobile."  

Further, the real core of "conservative values" seems to be a commitment to (committing or enabling) abuse.  

Which closes the largest Chinese box inside the smallest, and around again.  

The Fates are kind.

"...got a big head start, an opportunity they neither deserved nor earned. And that opportunity played a critical role in their success."

And the advantage is cumulative, these boys start off doing marginally better, and get more attention, support and direction than the rest. They are put into the hockey "stream." The advantage continues accumulating all the way through that person's career. Those who make it into the NHL exhibit the same pattern of birthdate distribution as those in the Juniors. Those born 5 or 6 months later have little chance right from the start.

Alger was right. It's not a moral, it's a dynamic.

"It Can't Be Just About Us"
--Frank Schnittger, ETian Extraordinaire

The myth has a life of its own. The myth is that hard work leads to rewards in life, that's why I coupled it with the studies which show that inter-class mobility has decreased in the past few decades.

If you want to discuss the fact that the myth is, well, a myth that's fine, but this is irrelevant to the main point.

Mobility has declined and my thesis is that it is not due to an increase in wealth disparity, but that wealth disparity is yet another symptom of the power disparity in the US.

Policies not Politics
---- Daily Landscape

In point of fact the strongest correlation between birth rate is the level of education of women, not their income. The west has done a very poor job of supporting education in poor countries, preferring instead to supply arms.

The US, especially under Bush, has worked to make family planning worse by putting arbitrary restrictions on what such money could be used for. Obama has now reversed the worst of these policies.

Get women educated and able to earn their own money and the birth rate falls within a generation.

Should you be treated seriously when you post under a pseudonym and with a phony email address? I have little respect for people who can't put their name on their opinions.

Policies not Politics
---- Daily Landscape

Suppose someone from a poor family gets into Harvard or Oxford (or French/German/Spanish equivalent), but doesn't know how to hold his fork correctly, or wear makeup correctly. How is society to fix this problem?

That chimes in with a comment I heard about All Souls College, Oxford, alleging that any prospective fellows had their table manners scrutinized during dinner in hall, prior to their election.

You're clearly a dangerous pinko commie pragmatist.

I believe that in the good old days organizations like the BBC and CBS made an effort to use their nationally received version of English pronunciation, for example, so at least in theory a kid from Wales or the East End or Mississippi or Yonkers would have an example of how to talk "properly." But now we have traded that in for more realistic entertainment, taking away this one small example of support for upward mobility...  

interesting take i never heard before.

it's a tricky issue, the standardisation of dialects to some common norm.

it is sad to see a child born and raised in hawaii, (say), is told not to speak pidgin when that's the vernacular with which she is comfortable. it seems like 'whitefella-isation' and brings back redolent memories of 'missionary colonialism', the same ignorant force that planted thorn trees on the beaches there to prevent 'unchristian' behaviour in the tropical moonlight.

this rootcutting has always really offended me, as it cuts to the core identity of a person, effectively depersonalising him, to force 'received' english for example... it always sounded so phoney, the diction of bbc presenters, it was cartoon toffee nose, plummy stuff, and it they wore it like a moss bros rentatux.

so i grew up kinda despising what it symbolised. those are the cons.

the pros are obvious, there's no way a cornishman would have understood much coming out of the mouth of someone from the isle of mull, 200 years ago.

same here in italy, though the italian spoken by tv anchors aren't trying to sound like arch duchesses, imitating the royal cutglass!

i see the good too, that's why i think a global language is optimal for all. the strides toward understanding between nations have been ginormous, as more and more people have access to the text based world, images and music aren't enough.

it's just hard to hear the bland, unrooted, cadences of tv language and feel much. while listening to the tones of people speaking dialects, well, it's the music of the area, w-a-a-ay pre-textual, and has effects like music. the welsh are amazing like that, they sing while they talk. many primitive peoples were perceived to have 'singsong' voices for the same reasons.

tv talk has so much less soul, but it works...

god knows we need all the unity we can conjure right now.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Expectations, networks of support, exposure, and guidance are all vital parts of later success.

"It Can't Be Just About Us"
--Frank Schnittger, ETian Extraordinaire

Western laws are much more friendly to social mobility than in India or China

that's true, and one of the positive forces released by early industrialism, new money earned in the factories enabled the peasants to aspire to a middle class life, less tied down to land and season.

there was more social justice in the meritocracy of money than when monarchy and aristocracy were the only rule.

the problem came with pollution on the ground and in the skies and waters, and in the psychology of the last century, where the relative good of money was claimed as absolute, ala ayn rand.

here's an opinion you may enjoy, martin

The Archdruid Report

It's easy to turn scientism into the villain of this particular piece, but scientism is simply a recent example of the human habit of using successful technique to define the universe. Hunting and gathering peoples see the animals they hunt and the plants they gather as the building blocks of the cosmos; farming cultures see their world in terms of soil, seed, and the cycle of the year; the efforts of classical civilization to inhabit a wholly logical world, and those of modern industrial civilization to build a wholly scientific one, are simply two more examples. Nor was scientism always as maladaptive as it is today. During the heyday of the industrial age, it directed human effort toward what was, at that time, a successful human ecology. In retrospect, scientism's limitless faith in the power of human reason turned out to be a case study in what the ancient Greeks called hubris, the overweening pride of the doomed. At the time, though, this wasn't obvious at all, and there's a valid sense in which scientism has become problematic today simply because its time of usefulness is over.

Still, the cultures best suited to the deindustrial age will have to embrace an attitude toward nature differing sharply from scientism: an attitude that starts from humility rather than hubris, remembering that "humility" shares the same root as "humus," the soil on which we depend for the food that keeps us alive. That attitude offers few justifications for today's arrogant notions about humanity's place in nature. Still, just as Greek logic was pulled out of the rubble of the classical world and put to use in a string of successor civilizations, the scientific method is worth hauling out of the wreckage of the industrial age, and could function just as well in a culture of environmental humility as it does in today's culture of environmental hubris. My guess, for what it's worth, is that the environmental sciences offer the most likely meeting ground for such a project of rescue.