Maybe when I was a wee child my parents bought presents for me to give to my friends on their birthdays. I honestly cannot remember. But I distinctly remember that many of my presents to my friends were things that I had earned by doing work, or were things that I enjoyed and wanted to share with them so I gave it to them.
As a parent I will never fret over buying my children’s friends birthday presents. I will be able to recommend a number of solutions that would still allow my child to give a gift, without me feeling like I’m obligated to buy a brand new toy for the friend. Whether that means helping my kid earn some extra cash by doing work, or helping them make something like a craft, or giving them ideas on their own things that they could “re-gift.”
Anyhow, the point is that if you are making over $100k a year between you and your spouse, and things like your child’s friends’ birthday presents are helping push you over the edge into not feeling like you have much money, you have completely lost perspective. Even having the money to burn on your kids’ friends is a luxury in and of itself, and if you couldn’t afford to do it, there are plenty of other ways to make sure your kid isn’t going to turn into some social pariah. I was simply balking at the notion that if a parent doesn’t spend somewhat lavishly on their child’s friends that some how this is going to lead to a sub-par childhood, and that’s simply not true.
I must admit, I’ve never encountered that particular fixation. Buying presents for kids is pretty well a no-brainer if you make an upper middle class income - well, there may be some anxiety over what the kid will like or what the parents would approve of (as in, is it okay to get a girl a Barbie Doll, or is that sending the wrong message gender-wise?), but not over spending cash on it.
If the kid is 17 that’s one thing, but for most birthday parties my kids went to we bought the present, with our kid going along to make suggestions. It is easy enough to keep the presents to a reasonable price level. If someone is going to go over the financial brink because of kids birthday presents either their kids have way too many friends, they don’t have self control in buying stuff, or they are so close to the brink that they had better not even sneeze.
In the US today it is quite the other way around. It is far more likely that people near retirement are paying for their kids. What kids do for older people is monitor their health, help with technology perhaps, and visit. (And deal with dementia, way too often.)
Now when the current crop of Baby Boomers with no pensions and $70K in their 401Ks hit retirement it might change.
But those best and brightest are brilliant, by definition. Apart from natural gifts, I think an important factor here is the luck of already knowing what you want to do with your life well before entering college. The vast majority of people don’t.
It’s all relative. I was doing great on 90K/year (single) until I became disabled earlier this year and had my income cut by 30%. I’m the first to admit that I’m fortunate to have a relatively good income on disability. I drive a 94 Honda, don’t own a smart phone - I really don’t spend on luxuries. It’s just that the mortgage, food, utilities and that damn credit card bill (racked up while I was unemployed for a bit) make my situation unsustainable. I get that.
BTW, for everyone saying that if you live in an expensive city (like I do) just move - well really, I could move to Idaho but even if I found a job as an architect it would be at of a fraction of the salary I was making. Not to mention the trauma of severing life important ties and connections to the area where you live.
I’ve spent most of my career working in or with top tier management consulting, accounting, law and investment banking firms. IME, the “principal factors” in making partner or MD are usually related to your ability to work 60-100 hours a week or 7-15 years, not get “counselled out” because business is slow or you accidently piss off some partner and not getting burned out from the tedium and stress. And keep in mind you are competing with a group of people where nearly everyone has the same prestigious education and high ambition in an industry where annual turnover can be as high as 15-25%.
Maybe a better question is why the professions that seem to have the highest income are ones that actually produce nothing.
I haven’t read every post on this thread, but quickly, one man’s take : so much of what’s under discussion here is at least in part based on region. The “hot” places to live, the hip places,–metro Boston, New York and San Francisco, just for starters–are phenomenally expensive. If you’re making 50K or less in such places you’re just barely scraping by, at or near the poverty level (seriously), but with that kind of money you could live pretty well in a small town in Arkansas, Kansas or Missouri. All television, all advertizing, is geared to people with money, preferably young people with few responsibilities, those in pursuit of the (elusive) Good Life. We seldom see, in the mass media, just how poor many Americans are. The income disparities are greater now than they have been in living memory. We’re not quite in the Gilded Age,–the government is too big for that, we have too many social programs-- butthe the rich and poor grap is wider than I’ve ever seen in my lifetimes, and I don’t see it getting any better.
All three of us have overlapping agreements - and disagreements.
You and he (mostly) agree on the factors that go into making partner - long hard hours, ability to live through stress. I disagree that this is enough in the specific case of law - what you need (I say) on top of that, is ability to put together a partner’s practice, which is becomming increasingly difficult as the nature of the business at the top firms changes - leading to much angst.
From his post, he and I appear to agree that making partner is very difficult because of the random and uncontrollable nature of the difficulties faced along the way and the high turnover rate, and you can’t reasonably count on doing it going in to the profession.
The manipulation of information will generally command a higher price than the physical manipulation of stuff. This has become increasingly true as technology has made the physical manipulation of stuff from a distance easier.
You can see this at work in the pharma drug manufacture business. Increasingly, actually making drugs is something you can program a machine to do. What is important, is (a) being able to prove that the drug does something useful; (b) being able to prove to the person who pays for it (often a public or private insurer) that it is worth its price; and (c) protecting the intellectual property involved. Without (a), (b) or (c), the price of actually making the pills would be negligible. Hence, the professionals involved in (a), (b) and (c) - the researchers who run clinical trials, the lawyers and economists who put together formulary proposals, the lawyers who defend patent rights - will tend to be paid more than the guys who actually run the machines that mix the powders together, or grow the biologicals in vats.
