OAKLAND, Calif. — I suppose this could apply to any political movement. However, considering that the raids on Occupy Wall Street are happening in this very city where my children’s school is located, a lot of kids here are talking about it with each other and at home with their parents.
The other day, my kids and I spotted a couple helicopters. “I hope everything is okay,” I said out loud. “I bet they are there because of the protests.”
That’s when Ari replied (paraphrased), “Yeah, there are people protesting because one percent of the population was very greedy and did a bad thing in not sharing.”
“That’s right.”
I was surprised and also proud of my son, who at 8 years old was able to grasp the basic concept behind the Occupy Wall Street movement. But I can understand how all this shouting back and forth between the “1%” and “99%” could be confusing for small children.
Most recently, some of the parents at our school were discussing the matter online. One parent was concerned that the children were lumping people into groups of good and bad, which in many ways runs counter to our curriculum’s global philosophy.
Some of the kids don’t know what group they’re in. My own child asked me: “I don’t get it, Mama. Are we the 99% or the 1%?” Play the standard answer through the child’s mind: “You’re the 99%.” Translation: “I’m not bad. My parents aren’t bad. I’m on the right side. It’s somebody else who’s wrong.”
What are the consequences of lumping people into groups in a child’s mind?
I understand the 1%, and I can hold that information and respond to it without feeling my world divided. Can a child do that?
Another parent wrote a story to explain the “99% movement” to his first grader:
The Friends and the Cake (a story about the 99%)
Once upon a time there were 100 friends who had a yummy cake to share. (Graphic of friends and cake here.)1 of the friends cut a great big slice of the cake all for herself, (again, graphic of a quarter of the cake sliced off)
and told the other 99 friends to share what was left.
When they split the rest of the cake between them, the 99 friends each got a teeny tiny piece. They didn’t think this was very fair. (Graphic of one of the 99 percenters yelling, “No fair!”)
What do you think would be fair?
What do you think the 99 friends should do now?
You can write or draw your ideas on the next page.
I liked the exercise at the end of his story because it allowed his daughter to explore and make up her own mind rather than have her dad do it for her. What do you think? What have you told your children about Occupy Wall Street?
I talk to mine
about systemic issues/problems with capitalism and corporate greed. I stay away from good/bad people because my dad, stepmom, and some of our friends are in the 1%. It’s not THEIR fault, KWIM?
And also
many people in the 1% understand the frustration and support the efforts of the 99%. It isn’t good/bad but that is hard when kids do tend to sort that way.
Kids
are famous for being black and white thinkers. I’ve tried to be measured and explain other ways of thinking to my kids, and Simone is still a little zealot about the things we’ve taught her about right and wrong. I don’t think this is a reason to refrain from teaching them our morals, though. When kids are older, they will understand that life is complicated. For the time being, if their takeaway from OWS is that 1%=bad and 99%=good, I’m not sure it’s such a tragedy.
I think kids are very good
at understanding “fair”. Maybe it’s easier to explain in terms of “fairness” when they want to veer into good/bad territory.
my 12 year old asked me about Occupy
on the way to school. I just went over some different things – how we don’t resent smart, creative people like Steve Jobs for getting rich, but how investors were making money in corrupt ways, selling bad investments, corporations not paying taxes so that schools and roads etc suffer. I try to keep it to things in his life. I said, with a lot of people struggling just to pay for basics, my crafts business suffers because people don’t have money for “extras” that I make. But people selling private planes and yachts to the richest are doing fine.
We had a group of occupier anarchists who took over and abandoned building and a swat team was called out. I think they could have just gone in an asked them politely to leave, (this is a pretty genteel town!) but it created a stir. I reminded my son that breaking and entering isn’t usually a good tactic. In the end I said, because people are outside they are in the news, and if they are in the news, people are noticing that there are struggling people, instead of us just watching the Kardashians. And that is important.
Can we please not deify Jobs?
I’d say he was pretty definitively part of the problem. Blocked Apple making donations for a long, long time (Apple did make a significant donation to Bono’s (RED) campaign, but a cursory search didn’t show anything else, and nothing recent), blocked corporate matching programs. He was a great product designer, but he was staggeringly wealthy ($8.3bn personal wealth) and apart from making extremely profitable products, there’s no evidence of him contributing anything. Like any other millionaire or billionaire, he built is wealth on the backs of others’ hard work, and that there’s no evidence he gave back is the sort of thing I’d say exemplifies the problem.
That we can look at that wealth and say he earned it is part of the problem. I don’t care how hard you work, how talented you are, I don’t believe anyone can work hard enough and well enough to have earned $1bn, forget 8.
I don’t think
she was deifying him but giving her son an example of someone who used his smarts/creativity to accumulate wealth. Someone relevant that he can relate to, perhaps.
Interesting points
Especially regarding whether he deserved 8 billion or whatever.
However, as far as giving back, we don’t really know what Jobs would have done in his later years, if his life hadn’t been cut short by the cancer. He was really in his prime of working still, often, people hit the philanthropic stage later on in their lives. As far as I know, he lived in a relatively modest house, etc. Not that he was a saint, he was not, but we don’t know what he would have done with his fortune later.
That’s true.
Things might well have changed in the future, or he might have been donating anonymously all along. It was killing matching donations that really irks me. Maybe necessary originally when he came on board (Apple wasn’t in great financial shape) but they’re pretty flush for cash these days.
But the thing that really bugs me – and I think the big challenge we face as a society – is the $8bn. I really don’t believe anyone can conceivably have earned that sort of money. That’s the sort of concentration of wealth that is the problem. And I don’t know how you fix it. I think talking about tax in a lot of ways, while it would help, doesn’t change things because we still have this enormous stratified wealth and a system that’s funneling money upward, and it’s that system that’s broken. But what do you do about it?
What I wonder about
The first thing that comes to my mind with all this stuff is that shareholders are getting ripped off when the people at the top make this much money. Shareholders are not just rich people, but obviously many regular people with 401Ks and pension plan investments and all of that too.
So maybe shareholders need to start speaking out? Why are people accepting losses in their 401Ks, while these CEOs are still taking home millions upon millions? Makes no sense to me.
Here’s an example
This is from 2009, using pharma because that is the industry I know. Novo Nordisk is a Danish company that makes mostly insulin and a few other products:
They all make roughly the same profit margin, so it’s not that the CEOs at the American companies are actually performing better than the Danish CEO. And it’s not about taxation, because this is their pay before taxes. There must be something in the culture that realizes that 1.8 million is a perfectly reasonable amount for a CEO to make and $40 million is not reasonable.
Hey!
That’s the company that makes the kids’ growth hormone! We have all sorts of things with their logo on it all over our house…
Actually
it might be related to taxes. There is evidence that people living in high tax countries choose to receive less pay than people in lower tax countries — to avoid paying as much tax as they would otherwise.
To take an extreme (and simple) made-up example, if you will be taxed 90% of your income if you make $1000, or 80% of your income if you make $800, you will choose to make $800, because you will get to take home $640 as opposed to taking home $100 if you made $1000.
Now, that is a whole ‘nother discussion — the value that taxes pay in an economy & the role they play in what work a culture values and pays for.
Are there any tax systems that work like that?
Certainly those that I’m familiar with only tax the income earned over a certain amount at the higher rate. So if (very simple example) you have a basic rate of 30% tax up to $200,000, and 80% tax over $200,000, the $300,000 earner gets taxed $60,000 on his first $200,000 and then $80,000 on the remainder for a total of $140,000, not 80% of the whole thing for $240,000 tax. Sure, there’s absolutely an argument to be made that it encourages taking shares or dividends or somesuch if the system allows that, but I doubt there are many places with tax systems so stupid as to leave a higher earner with less than a lower earner net at the end of the day.
it seems to me
that performance has been decoupled from compensation to a very large extent. Look at the bonuses for those stuck-up “wizards” who crashed the economy with their bad bets.
I have been looking at some research about the economic flatness of various societies. The Scandinavians are about the flattest, meaning they don’t have the huge extremes of wealth and poverty that we do. The researchers in this area correlate more equitable distribution of resources with all kinds of social good, from lower infant mortality and obesity to better mental health and educational outcomes.
I belong in Scandinavia but I don’t have the right relatives.
asdf
I”ve never understood this either. I suppose it’s really hard for “rank and file” shareholders to be heard, to organize, etc, against the largest shareholders.
try to live in a 12 year old’s world
For him, the people who create his world, the Steve Jobs, the Mark Zuckerbergs, the sports heroes and musicians, are people he admires. I only use them as examples of creativity, hard work, lifelong learning. I compared them to people who bundled bad investments, drained pensions, made money off it. It isn’t easy to explain Wall Street to a 12 year old. Maybe I should rent the first Wall Street movie, except he might agree too much with “Greed is good.”
I don’t like the cake analogy
Because the counterargument becomes, “what if she was the one who baked the cake?” Which is kind of the claim that the 1% is making. Any child will agree that the person who baked the cake has the right to take as big a piece as she wants before sharing the rest. That’s not the line of reasoning we want to encourage.
Simple counter.
Everyone helped to bake the cake.
nope
The next step is, “ok, but then what if she really did bake the cake? What if they helped but used her ingredients? Or she was the only one who had a stove?” It would be hard to avoid an argument based on ownership of the cake, or proportional shares of effort, or something. And no kid over the age of 5 is going to believe everyone put equal effort into the cake anyway. Which is exactly the type of framing the right would prefer. Pretty soon you’re arguing communism vs Ayn Rand with a third grader. I hate it when that happens.
Alternative analogy
“She asked everyone if she could borrow their containers of ingredients and she said she was only going to take a little bit of each, like 1 egg from Emma and a teaspoon of flour from Jake and then she’d replace what she used after the cake was done and she had a chance to go to the store. But then she used up all their ingredients and never gave any back. Then she ate almost the whole cake and only gave each of them a tiny piece on a dirty plate she dug out of the garbage can. Plus she ate all the frosting.”
then she shat it out on their lawns
we’re getting warmer
but the dirty plate doesn’t work for me. It’s a tiny piece served with great fanfare on a festive holiday plate, made from melamine and imported from China, not dishwasher or microwave safe.
are there toxic metals in the paint on the plate?
Of course!
Sorry, I meant to include that detail. Not that it’s necessary to point it out, mind you. Most people understand that some compromises must be made in order to reduce costs so that everyone can have a nice piece of cake.
grin…
You clearly have children like mine. I can tell from your fear of the concrete analogy.
My son’s teacher the other day did that bullying crumple the paper demo. Oh boy. We heard about it ALL NIGHT LONG. It’s best to stick with plain facts with that boy.
who bakes a cake
NOT to share??
Republicans.
comment of the day, folks
+1
A friend of mine
posted this conversation her family had on Facebook and said I could post it here (but I’ve removed the names).
DS2: Are werewolves real?
DS1: No monsters are real.
Dad: Except Republicans.
DS1: What are Republicans?
Mom: Republicans are people who think it’s OK to use their power to hurt others and help only themselves.
DS1: I know another name for Republicans: Sneak Thieves.
DS2: Are Republicans real?
So okay, it’s a definite good/bad thing, but it is oh-so-right.
asdf
“Yeah, there are people protesting because one percent of the population was very greedy and did a bad thing in not sharing.”
“That’s right.”
No, sorry, that not right. Most of the 1% didn’t and doesn’t have any influence over the nation’s tax structure and have zero influence over the government. “They” are high wage earners and pay taxes on earned income from their jobs (which we can argue are too low, that’s valid).
This is a far cry from the fact that the lowest tax bracket possible is on money that money “earns” – not on paid work (although even this crowd mostly has jobs, too. Lost of people have investments). That is how people accumulate tens of millions of dollars and upward toward billions. Because investment income (stocks and stock options, etc) is taxed lower than money earned as wages or salary. This is the wack a doodle aspect of our tax structure. Plenty of people in the 1% think the country needs to rethink all of this.
Then there are Fortune 500 and similar CEO level salaries – 10s of millions and etc. That’s more like the .1% and where the real power lies.
1% is a slogan, because “the .1%, a couple of thousand guys and a few hundred in particular actually run the country, not our elected officials” doesn’t sound as good. And is harder to explain to kids. And a lot more daunting even to adults.
And it goes without saying that there plenty of Dems in the 1%.
I’ve been watching all this unfold, and thinking if we don’t get past slogans and simplistic thinking, it’s never going to go anywhere.
yeah
We don’t use the good guys/bad guys framing here. There’s more than enough good/bad right/wrong fair/unfair moral/immoral to work with without that. And both of my boys idolize Bill Gates, who to them is the ultimate real life fairy tale – a brilliant engineer who turned his invention into a wildly successful business and made a ton of money which he is using to cure diseases all around the world. So it’s was pretty easy for us to cut right to the question of whether we should rely on the altruism of the 1%, or whether we want to structure a more equitable society.
groups
We stay away from good guy/bad guy thinking too. It makes no sense to me to want the world to understand the groups I belong to, but not try to understand the diversity of groups that I don’t belong to. I’ve personally never seen any evidence of a monolithic group. Kids can get this.
it’s true, the beef is with
the top half of the 1%. Those are the people who “own” politicians and really do affect tax policy, have multi-generational dynastic wealth, etc.
I don’t think the Occupy movement is railing against highly compensated lawyers, doctors, or others who work for a living. There is huge dismay that very wealthy persons or corporations have more clout in the national conversation that people of average means, when we are supposed to be a 1 person 1 vote democracy.
yes
I agree with you …. most people are talking about the control, and how it affects our government and democracy. And the obscene inequity.
The 1% bit is clever, but arbitrary, and not really on the mark.