Opportunity hoarding
Giving our offspring the best is the secret sauce that has helped humanity progress but it does have some hidden costs
Welcome to the new subscribers who have joined us since the last post. We are now 535 strong!
If you’re reading this but haven’t subscribed, you may want to consider doing that. This will ensure future posts land straight in your inbox.
Hi there 👋🏽
Been a few weeks since I landed in your inbox. So before we dive into the essay there are 3 things I want to share with you.
1) In the last edition, I launched a new mini-series called Coffee Chat with Decks and Diapers. It was very well received and henceforth this will be a regular feature of the newsletter. If you happen to know an inspiring working parent who should be featured in a future edition (or if you yourself are one) - please do get in touch. ☕
2) I am very excited to share that from now on you can now hear my writing!! Thanks to the amazing folks at Ad-Auris Decks and Diapers will soon be available on all major podcast apps. For now, if you would like to hear today’s essay you can click here. 🎧
3) I also recently discovered a new product that I would like to share with everyone - a better inbox for reading newsletters!! 💡
I am someone who subscribes to at least 30 newsletters and managing all this on my primary email client is not the best experience. Turns out others face this issue too. It finally looks like someone is trying to do something about this.
@abhineetsays and @bharani91 are building a superior, privacy-first newsletter reading experience with some unique features not found in email clients or other newsletter reading apps such as a focus mode, Twitter-like feed, Newsletter summaries, discovery for newsletters, reader analytics, and a way to highlight and make notes!
They have been getting a strong response to their product launch video which can be seen here.
If you are someone who loves reading newsletters, do check them out at zeninbox.com
Now on to today's post.…
I have re-discovered my neighborhood since baby T came into our life. The twice a day walks pushing her stroller in and out of various streets in the neighborhood has made me realize how I live in a very interesting part of the city. On one side our neighborhood is surrounded by one of the most affluent zip codes in the country while the other side has a whole bunch of rent-controlled apartments.
This makes the idea of the ovarian lottery so real! While theoretically there is no limit on what each of the kids can achieve yet each kid has a separate starting point and a separate floor (a mythical point below which they cannot fall) which is uniquely theirs. And the floor for the kids born on the affluent side of town is significantly higher than the kids born on the other side of the tracks. Through nothing but a stroke of luck, these kids will have a wealthier, healthier, and safer life than those other kids. And their parents will do everything to ensure that happens.
What one’s parents are like is entirely a matter of luck. What one’s children are like is not. - Adam Swift, British political philosopher & sociologist
[Photo courtesy: Thanks to Kira auf der Heide for making this photo available freely on @unsplash]
Doing well for yourself and ensuring we give our off-springs the very best that we can has been the secret sauce that has helped humanity progress. However, when we try and better the circumstances for only our own off-springs do we make the collective worse off? Assuming the pie cannot always be expanded, when someone gets more of it that means someone else has very little. Here I am not referring to things which are obviously wrong like practicing nepotism or bribing to help your children get into college but those seemingly small acts that have great unintended consequences.
Take for example the Covid19 trend of creating "learning pods" for your children. Parents who have the means are opting to pull their children out of school, creating small pods with 1-2 other families, and hiring personal tutors to teach these kids. At the surface, there is nothing really wrong with this decision - after all these families are helping keep themselves and their children safe. However, there could be an unintended consequence - a greater divide between the haves and have-nots. In the short term, the children from less privileged backgrounds will deal with more school closures however it is the long-term implications of this decision that are scarier. There is enough research that states that the quality of education in public schools significantly drops when the privileged start pulling their children out of this system.
Sometimes there is a societal cost for securing what is best for your child, sociologists refer to this as "opportunity hoarding".
Opportunity hoarding does not result from the workings of a large machine but from the cumulative effect of individual choices and preferences. Taken in isolation, they may feel trivial. But, like many micro-preferences they can have strong effects on overall culture and collective outcomes.
- Richard V. Reeves in his book Dream Hoarders
I walk around the neighborhood these days, pushing the stroller along, and think a lot about this.
I love my baby to the moon and back and want to give her the best life possible. But would she have the best life possible in a world that is increasingly divided and unequal? While trying to give her everything I can would I in some part play a role in creating a more unequal world?
To want the best for your child is what makes you human. To do that we will all at some point make selfish decisions that somewhere slowly kill humanity.
I would love to hear from you, feedback is always welcome!
Disclaimer: All views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
Glad to hear that your family is ok. I know that had to be really tough for you!
You're right on the money, Rashi. It has been a very challenging year for all of us. It's brought about an absolute autopsy on the human condition and laid bare all our insecurities. Glad to hear your family has recovered and are doing better. I hope you get to meet them soon! :)