Fast time and the aging mind
• By MILES CORAK
Gus Wenner runs Rollingstone. his father gave him the job. But Jann Wenner, the magazine’s cofounder and publisher, was quick to assure critics of the appointment process that his son is terribly talented and had to prove himself before being given the reins. Apparently Gus worked his way up from more junior positions with the company, and demonstrated, according to his father, the “drive and discipline and charm, and all the things that show leadership.” Gus Wenner is 22 years old.
He is certainly not the only kid just out of college, or even out of high school, working at daddy’s firm. Family contacts are a common way of finding both temporary internships and longtime careers. But whether because of blatant nepotism, or a privileged head start in life that nurtures talent and ambition, opportunities for the children of the top 1 percent are not the same as they are for the 99 percent.
This is hardly a shock, but it is precisely the type of inequality that reveals the elusive promise of the “Just Do It” version of the American dream and deepens our cynicism about how people get ahead. As a consequence, it dilutes support for public policies that could address the lack of upward mobility among children born at the bottom, who ought to be given priority.
A strong tie between adult outcomes and family background rubs Americans the wrong way. When the Pew Charitable Trusts conducted a nationally representative poll asking about the meaning of “the American dream,” some typical answers included: “Being free to say or do what you want” and “Being free to accomplish almost anything you want with hard work;” but also “Being able to succeed regardless of the economic circumstances in which you were born.” This is exactly the reason that “the American dream” is not only a defining metaphor for the country, but also why Americans have long been willing to tolerate a good deal more economic inequality than citizens of many other rich countries. A belief in the possibility of upward mobility not only morally justifies inequality as the expression of talents and energies, but also extends a promise to those with lower incomes. After all, why would you be a strong advocate for reducing inequality if you believe that you, or eventually your children, were likely to climb the income ladder?
Hard work and perseverance will always be ingredients for success, but higher inequality has sharply tilted the landscape and made having successful parents, if not essential, certainly a central part of the recipe.
A child’s prospects are actually more fluid elsewhere, not just in the most equal countries, like Denmark or Sweden, but even in countries like Canada that have moderate levels of inequality, as I demonstrate in a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
American children raised at the top, and at the bottom, are more likely to land on the same rung of the income ladder as their fathers than their Canadian counterparts. More than one-quarter of sons raised by fathers in the top 10 percent stay in the top 10 percent as adults, and another quarter fall no further than the top third. Meanwhile, half of those raised by fathers in the bottom 10 percent remain at the bottom or rise no further than the bottom third. In Canada there is less stickiness at the top, and children raised in the bottom are more likely to rise to the top half in earnings.
Maternal income was left out of this study and others like it because many women were out of the workforce in past generations. This may have made sense once, but no longer. The achievements of the next generations reaching adulthood will reflect the steep rise in the number of working mothers as well as the increasing tendency of high earners to marry each other. Both these trends have raised family incomes in a way that will reinforce privilege and position.
But American parents with high aspirations for their children are not packing their bags for Denmark, or even crossing the Canadian border, particularly if they find any appeal in Jann Wenner’s belief in the virtues of talent and energy.
Children, after all, inherit a good deal
Job opportunities for children
of the 1 percent
from their parents: height, beauty, personality, to saying nothing of drive, discipline and perhaps even charm. It should be no surprise that a parent’s and a child’s incomes are correlated if certain genetic traits or aspects of family culture continue to be as important for success now as they were a generation ago. The relatively small and homogeneous Danish population can hardly be compared to a large and ethnically diverse country like America: Perhaps there are just fewer visionary and driven entrepreneurs on the coasts of the North Sea who have equally talented children?
The belief that talent is bred in the bone, and that opportunities are open to anyone with ambition and energy, also has a dangerous corollary. When the lens of public policy is focused on the plight of the poor, this belief can help revive the laissez-faire conception of the poor as “undeserving,” the authors of their own predicament. Yet we actually know a good deal about why children of the poor have a higher chance of being stuck in poverty as adults.
The recipes for breaking this intergenerational trap are clear: A nurturing environment in the early years combined with accessible and high-quality health care and education promote the capacities of young children, heighten the development of their skills as they grow older, and ultimately raise their chances of upward mobility.
Talent is nurtured and developed, and even genes are expressed differently depending upon environmental influences.
It is not just demography and inbred entrepreneurial spirit that make the tie between parent and child incomes stronger in America than any other rich country to which it is commonly compared. Differences in public policies also play a role. Less inequality makes opportunity-enhancing policies that are of relatively larger benefit to lower-income families easier to introduce and sustain. Ontario, the most populous Canadian province, is introducing full-day kindergarten, accessible to all 4- and 5-year-olds, without fanfare or a hint of the kind of rhetorical rancor and calamitous opposition that the Obama administration has faced for its proposal to do the same.
The Danish and Canadian top 1 percent certainly have their share of privilege: The Gus Wenners of the world, talented or not, are not rare. A recent study published by the Russell Sage Foundation showed that about 30 percent of young Danes and 40 percent of Canadians had worked with a firm that at some point also employed their fathers. This is more likely the higher the father’s place on the income ladder, rising distinctly and sharply for top earners. In Denmark more than half of sons born to the top 1 percent of fathers had worked for an employer for whom the father also worked, and in Canada the proportion is even higher at nearly 7 of every 10.
This is on a par with the United States, where, according to a 2006 study, up to half of jobs are found through families, friends or acquaintances, with higher wages being paid to those who found jobs through “prior generation male relatives” who actually knew the potential employer or served as a reference.
The difference is that Danes, Swedes and even Canadians are able to promote mobility for the majority while continuing to live with a dynasty at the top. It is the lack of a cleareyed focus on the top, free from rhetoric about talent and the pursuit of dreams, that is keeping Americans from effectively promoting upward mobility.
This intergenerational transmission of employers has little to do with the exceptional talent that produces the next Steve Jobs. There is more than a one-in-three chance that newly appointed CEOs of American family firms will have a family connection. Yet these firms are more likely to experience a subsequent decline in performance than those promoting from outside.
Family members do not on average have a distinctly more valuable set of skills or managerial talent, but the belief that they do remains an important thread running through the American dream and sustains the aspirations of Americans in, roughly speaking, the top fifth of the income distribution.
The 1 percent are an important touchstone for these upper-middle-class families, who after all have also experienced significant growth in their relative standing. The graduate and other higher degrees that they hold, and for which they exerted considerable effort, have put them on the upside of the wave of globalization and technical change that has transformed the American job market.
An era of higher inequality gives them both more resources to promote the capacities of their children, and more incentive to make these investments since their children now have all the more to gain. It is not unreasonable for these aspiring families to believe that with a little more effort they may yet cross the threshold into the top 1 percent, and they can certainly imagine that their children stand just as good a chance, if not better.
For them, an American dream based on effort, talent and just deserts still lives, and as a result they are likely to be less and less predisposed, with their considerable cultural and political influence, to support the recasting of American public policy to meet its most pressing need: the prospects of those at the bottom.
Miles Corak is a professor of economics at the University of Ottawa.
– © 2013 The New York Times Courtesy: The New York Times Syndicate
Ah, the languorous days of endless summer! Who among us doesn’t remember those days and wonder wistfully where they’ve gone? Why does time seem to speed up as we age? Even the summer solstice – the longest, sunniest day of the year – seems to have passed in a flash.
No less than the great William James opined on the matter, thinking that the apparent speed of time’s passage was a result of adults’ experiencing fewer memorable events: “Each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.” Don’t despair. I am happy to tell you that the apparent velocity of time is a big fat cognitive illusion and happy to say there may be a way
Does learning new things slow our
internal sense of time?
to slow the velocity of our later lives.
Although the sense that we perceive time as accelerating as we age is very common, it is hard to prove experimentally. In one of the largest studies to date, Dr. Marc Wittmann of the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health, in Germany, interviewed 499 German and Austrian subjects ranging in age from 14 to 94 years; he asked each subject how quickly time seemed to pass during the previous week, month, year and decade. Surprisingly, there were few differences related to age. With one exception: When researchers asked the subjects about the 10-year interval, older subjects were far more likely than the younger subjects to report that the last decade had passed quickly.
Other, non-age-related factors influence our perception of time. Recent research shows that emotions affect our perception of time. For example, Dr. Sylvie Droit-Volet, a psychology professor at Blaise Pascal University, in France, manipulated subjects’ emotional state by showing them movies that excited fear or sadness and then asked them to estimate the duration of the visual stimulus. She found that time appears to pass more slowly when we are afraid.
Attention and memory play a part in our perception of time. To accurately gauge the passage of time required to accomplish a given task, you have to be able to focus and remember a sequence of information. That’s partly why someone with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder has trouble judging time intervals and grows impatient with what seems like the slow passage of time.
The neurotransmitter dopamine is critically important to our ability to process time. Stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall, which increase dopamine function in the brain, have the effect of speeding up time perception; antipsychotic drugs, which block dopamine receptors, have the opposite effect.
On the whole, most of us perceive short intervals of time similarly, regardless of age. Why, then, do older people look back at long stretches of their lives and feel it’s a race to the finish?
Here’s a possible answer: Think about what it’s like when you learn something for the first time – for example how, when you are young, you learn to ride a bike or navigate your way home from school. It takes time to learn new tasks and to encode them in your memory. And when you are learning about the world for the first time, you are forming a fairly steady stream of new memories of events, places and people.
When, as an adult, you look back at your childhood experiences, they appear to unfold in slow motion probably because the sheer number of them gives you the impression that they must have taken forever to acquire. So when you recall the summer vacation when you first learned to swim or row a boat, it feels endless.
But this is merely an illusion, the way adults understand the past when they look through the telescope of lost time. This, though, is not an illusion: Almost all of us faced far steeper learning curves when we were young. Most adults do not explore and learn about the world the way they did when they were young; adult life lacks the constant discovery and endless novelty of childhood.
Studies have shown that the greater the cognitive demands of a task, the longer its duration is perceived to be. Dr. David Eagleman at Baylor College of Medicine found that repeated stimuli appear briefer in duration than novel stimuli of equal duration. Is it possible that learning new things might slow down our internal sense of time?
The question and the possibility it presents put me in mind of my father, who died a few years ago at age 86. An engineer by training, he read constantly after he retired. His range was enormous; he read about everything from astronomy to natural history, travel and gardening. I remember once discovering dozens of magazines and journals in the house and was convinced that my parents had become the victims of a mail-order scam.
Thinking I’d help with the clutter, I began to bundle up the magazines for recycling when my father angrily confronted me, demanding to know what the hell I was doing. “I read all of these,” he said.
And then it dawned on me. I cannot recall his ever having remarked on how fast or slow his life seemed to be going. He was constantly learning, always alive to new ideas and experience. Maybe that’s why he never seemed to notice that time was passing.
So what, you might say, if we have an illusion about time speeding up? But it matters, I think, because the distortion signals that we might squeeze more out of life.
It’s simple: If you want time to slow down, become a student again. Learn something that requires sustained effort; do something novel. Put down the thriller when you’re sitting on the beach and break out a book on evolutionary theory or Spanish for beginners or a how-to book on something you’ve always wanted to do. Take a new route to work; vacation at an unknown spot. And take your sweet time about it.
– © 2013 The New York Times Courtesy: The New York Times Syndicate