Don’t leave us hanging!
My parents and sibs and I are all comfortably upper middle class. My wife’s family, OTOH, is definitely what you’d call working class.
Things go better with Penis-Cola! 
Our family is proud of our respective educational attainments, modest to high success as professionals, and filled with delightful small knowledge to spice up a serious reading room discussion or a beer bust. My wife’s family doesn’t put much stock in advance degrees or what they call “useless knowledge” and “pointless memories.” They like a clean, well-maintained house, sobriety, and strict practice of Catholicism.
So in their house, I’m a Pariah for being loud, opinionated, for forgetting to flush, or not washing the plates and clearing the table correctly.
Sorry to invade the privacy of this board but…
I’m a journalist at The Associated Press interested in how the national debate on the widening gap between the rich and rest plays out among siblings.
Does the shared upbringing and family ties lead to less anger, more light on the causes and consequences of the gap? Maybe not. Love to talk to a few of you, particularly if you’re from a big family.
I can be reached at bcondon@ap.org.
I’ve been a journalist for 20 years, the last four at AP, mostly writing features. Google my name to read samples, such as Great Reset series looking at seismic changes in the economy, lives around the world five years after the financial crisis.
I’d be grateful for any help, insight.
Y un cojón de pato. PEÑÍScola. Dude, it’s one of my favorite places in the world, I’m reasonably sure I know how to spell it. One of the best things about my year in Castellón (about the only good thing, actually) was being one hour away, I could go there as a day trip. Did you think I was talking about Pensacola? :rolleyes:
I don’t know about Dictir Hackson, but I didn’t have the first clyevwhatbyou were talking about. Your entire first post was a giant non sequitur about books and traveling, for some strange reason.
Let me try that again:
I don’t know about Doctor Jackson, but I didn’t have the first clue what you were talking about. (Much like most readers didn’t have the first clue what my mistake-riddled sentence meant.) Your entire first post was a giant non sequitur about books and traveling, for some strange reason.
I’d suggest hanging around here, and maybe starting a thread or two of your own. Your questions are vague enough that it’s making it hard to think “Oh, that’s ME he’s looking for.”
As for the OP, in my family, the divide is more along education lines than economic lines. My side - Mostly people started getting college degrees in my parents’ generation. So the 3rd and 4th generation is now in college or just out. Or my SO’s side, our generation is the first one to have many go on to college, and it’s probably only 50% among the 20ish age people.
Along with the education divide does come an income divide, but I think in my family, the education levels cause a bigger disconnect than the wealth does.
Let me try to Sesame Street it for you then:
my family doesn’t have big differences in terms of income but has very big differences in terms of how to spend it.
Then I gave a couple of examples.
That clear enough?
My daughter spent part of the summer in Spain. She brought back a suitcase-full of craft beers for dear old dad (how she got this thru customs remains a mystery, though). Among them was this one. Up to now, I thought “Peniscola” was the name of the beer, not the location. 
And yes, it was good. 
Pensacola Beach is great! They have more tattoo parlors than ANYWHERE!!!
That doesn’t clear up my question, which was why on earth you felt the need to post something completely off-topic here.
I kept restraining myself from jumping in with a comment about getting the continents right before commenting… 
uh, it certainly didn’t seem off-topic to me. The family doesn’t have a large range of incomes, but does have a large range of interests. One subset likes books-a lot. Made sense to me. A lot like my family in fact.
Just saw this, and had to register a mea culpa! All my life I had read that name as “Pensicola”, probably because of my familiarity with Pensacola, FL. I’ll never look at that part of the map the same way…
Thanks for the tip, responding.
My questions are vague because I’m open to my story having multiple voices, and conflicting ones.
The forces behind the widening income gap are various and complex. It’s difficult to see all them and separate the major causes from the minor ones, at least when talking on abstract, national level.
But I think we see the causes clearly, and weight each one easily, when explaining why siblings are richer or poorer than ourselves. After all, we grew up with them. The story we tell about fortunes diverging in our family may be black and white, or gray, but we “get it,” or at least think we do.
I’d love to talk to any of you on this thread. I won’t quote you unless you agree to it.
Again, the email is bcondon@ap.org. My work phone is 212 621 6941.
About me: I’m a 21 year old black-male whose a graduating senior from a fairly-good University with a high GPA; and I have a professional job lined up. I consider my family to be middle class. We’ve lived comfortably in a big house in a fairly good school district (though sometimes we’ve definitely lived above our means). My parents have been married for 23 years.
- Generally speaking, the descendants on my mothers side have been consistently middle-class for many many generations, even well before the Civil Rights Movement (which is rare for Black-American families).
- My aunts/uncles on this side range from lower-middle-class to wealthy.
- My mom is an mid-level office worker. Her highest educational attainment is a certificate from a state college.
- My grandma was a RN and my grandpa had a great government job and coached part-time.
- Generally speaking, the descendants on my fathers side have ranged from poor to lower-middle-class. My dad spent his early childhood growing up working class in Brooklyn but his parents ended up buying a decent house in the suburbs and have lived comfortably. However, my dad is still kinda stuck with ‘the ghetto mentality’.
- As for my aunts/uncles, they range from poor/ghetto to working class. Most of their kids have either gotten into serious legal troubles, have no more than a GED/HS Diploma and are just straight ghetto.
- My dad does various blue-collar work. His highest educ.attainment is a HS Diploma.
- My grandma did entry-level office work in the city and I don’t remember what my grandpa did since he died before I was born.
I am significantly poorer than my father and mother, but they are pretty well-off. He was a veterinarian and invested his money pretty well.
My siblings, aunt and uncle (I had only one aunt/uncle pair) were or are middle- or upper-middle class. My brother retired from a factory job and works part-time, as does my sister-in-law, but they own their own home and travel a bit. My younger sister was a school health aide and is now in nursing school, so she never earned a lot. She didn’t need to - my brother-in-law is quite wealthy. He was in commercial real estate, and president of a bank. My older sister is also retired. Her husband owns a couple of businesses, and makes quite a bit. I am somewhere in the middle.
My cousins are mostly middle-class, apart from my oldest cousin the doctor, who married a doctor. They are well above middle-class. My youngest cousin is a bookkeeper, and her husband a teacher. The middle cousin - I don’t know what he does for work nowadays.
Not really - we are almost all middle- to upper-middle class, depending on age. My great aunt was probably an outlier. She outlived two very wealthy husbands, and her will was quite considerable. My nephew is the outlier of the bunch - he is very, very rich. Like multimillionaire rich. (He plays in the NFL.)
They don’t. We don’t talk about money or try to borrow from each other. And there is no sense of competition. Nobody is genuinely needy, or irresponsible with funds, which no doubt helps.
Regards,
Shodan