Half Sigma

Should "sagging pants" be illegal?

The NY Times has an article about how some jurisdictions are outlawing "sagging pants."

Since June 11, sagging pants have been against the law in Delcambre, La., a town of 2,231 that is 80 miles southwest of Baton Rouge. The style carries a fine of as much as $500 or up to a six-month sentence. “We used to wear long hair, but I don’t think our trends were ever as bad as sagging,” said Mayor Carol Broussard.

I hate sagging pants and other ghetto-inspired fashion trends as much as the next guy. Even more so because I'm somewhat nerdy.

But is outlawing the practice the way to go? You can make the pants illegal, but underneath non-sagging pants will still be an obnoxious punk who will find some other way to annoy respectable people. There's also the danger that someone will wander into town wearing sagging pants, not knowing about the ordinance, and wind up in jail. That result doesn't seem fair.

Richard Jewell dies

Richard Jewell died. As you hopefully recall, he was the hero of the Atlanta Olympic Games bombing incident of 1996. But soon after, he was wrongly accused of being the bomber. Why? For no reason other than the fact that he was a loser. (I forgot why he was a loser. Maybe he lived with his parents, was fat and without a girlfriend, and couldn't hold a job, or something like that? Anyone who works as a security guard is a loser. Take Gary Coleman for example.) The FBI figured that a guy who's a loser must be the bomber.

You're not allowed to assume someone committed a crime because of the color of his skin, but it's apparently OK to make that assumption if someone's a loser. Even if there's no other evidence.

Read more about bisexual girls at Stuy

TJIC has an in-depth blog post about the bisexual girls at Stuyvesant High School.

The Death of the Grown-Up

From a NY Times book review with the headline "Dress Like Your Child, and the Terrorists Win":

Fathers in America used to have sons. Now they have mini-me’s. Pop and his offspring head out to the mall dressed in the same outfits: baggy shorts, sneakers, athletic socks and T-shirt, topped by a baseball cap. At home they watch Cartoon Network, play video games and eat lots of breakfast cereal. One is older and bigger, the other smaller and younger, but their tastes overlap to a remarkable degree. Today’s child truly is father to the man.

I think there's an anti-male bias. It would be in bad taste write something similar about women and daughters. Men's hobbies, such as playing video games, are mocked, but what about women's similarly pointless hobbies, such as shopping?

Affirmative action and law school

A reader emailed me a link to an OpinionJournal article about how law school affirmative action "backfires":

Three years ago, UCLA law professor Richard Sander published an explosive, fact-based study of the consequences of affirmative action in American law schools in the Stanford Law Review. Most of his findings were grim, and they caused dismay among many of the champions of affirmative action--and indeed, among those who were not.

Easily the most startling conclusion of his research: Mr. Sander calculated that there are fewer black attorneys today than there would have been if law schools had practiced color-blind admissions--about 7.9% fewer by his reckoning. He identified the culprit as the practice of admitting minority students to schools for which they are inadequately prepared. In essence, they have been "matched" to the wrong school.

. . .

Mr. Sander's original article noted that when elite law schools lower their academic standards in order to admit a more racially diverse class, schools one or two tiers down feel they must do the same. As a result, there is now a serious gap in academic credentials between minority and non-minority law students across the pecking order, with the average black student's academic index more than two standard deviations below that of his average white classmate.

Not surprisingly, such a gap leads to problems. Students who attend schools where their academic credentials are substantially below those of their fellow students tend to perform poorly.

The reason is simple: While some students will outperform their entering academic credentials, just as some students will underperform theirs, most students will perform in the range that their academic credentials predict. As a result, in elite law schools, 51.6% of black students had first-year grade point averages in the bottom 10% of their class as opposed to only 5.6% of white students. Nearly identical performance gaps existed at law schools at all levels. This much is uncontroversial.

Supporters of race-based admissions argue that, despite the likelihood of poor grades, minority students are still better off accepting the benefit of a preference and graduating from a more prestigious school. But Mr. Sander's research suggests that just the opposite may be true--that law students, no matter what their race, may learn less, not more, when they enroll in schools for which they are not academically prepared. Students who could have performed well at less competitive schools may end up lost and demoralized. As a result, they may fail the bar.

I agree with the bolded sentence above. It's better to graduate at the bottom 10% of the class from a top 14 law school than in the middle of the class at mediocre state law school.

I also think that even people two standard deviations below the average white student at at top 14 school are capable of passing the bar exam. Many of the black students who graduated from Arizona State University passed the bar exam.

The explanation offered for why affirmative action hurts black performance on the bar exam is true:

[A]s a result of affirmative action, black and white students with similar credentials are not attending the same schools. The white students are more likely to be attending a school that takes things a little more slowly and spends more time on matters that are covered on the bar exam. They are learning, while their minority peers are struggling at more elite schools.

At the more prestigious law schools, the curriculum is not bar exam focused, because the theory is that any idiot (or at least any idiot qualified to get admitted to a decent law school) can learn what they need to know for the bar at a bar review course. Even Arizona State University took this approach.

RESPONSE TO COMMENTS

There are a few comments below saying that law school isn't that difficult. People who say that have obviously never attended law school.

I had the opportunity to attend both the MBA and JD programs at the same state school, and the MBA program was a joke in comparison to the JD program.

Excelling at the law requires the ability to understand subtle differences of wording. It's not just about rote memorization. On the other hand, maybe you don't need to be a legal whiz to be a trial level criminal prosecutor or defender, and maybe not even to do document review at BIGLAW.

Going back to the issue of the law school curriculum and bar passage rates, it's definitely plausible that the same person attending a lower ranked law school would do better on the bar exam because at lower ranked law schools the professors don't play "hide the ball." They are more likely to teach black letter law, and the curriculum will cover all the topics on the local bar exam. For people on the borderline of failing or passing the bar exam, having two bar review classes (law school plus BarBri) is better than just having one bar review class.

It's true that you can take the exam again if you fail the first time, but failing the first time often means getting fired from your job (if you're lucky enough to have one), or being ineligible for any jobs until you pass. By the time you pass, it may be too late: it's hard enough to find a legal job even if you pass the exam on the first try.

NY Times says home prices to fall

The most emailed article in the NY Times says that economists predict a "1 percent to 2 percent" decline in nationwide housing prices.

Unfortunately for people who don't own homes, a mere 2% drop in price isn't going to make them much more affordable.

Bisexual girls at Stuyvesant High School

This is the article my blog readers probably want to read and discuss.

Stuyvesant High School

There's book review in The New York Observer reviewing a book about Stuyvesant High School. That's my alma mater.

Stuyvesant still selects students based only on the score on an exam. (There used to be a little known exception for a handful of minority students, and this is probably still in effect.) The conventional wisdom is that this is a bad way to select applicants because ignores the "whole student," but it's inexpensive and avoids favoritism and who can say that the results are any worse than a more expensive and less egalitarian "whole student" process?

Maybe online poker will come back the U.S.

The U.S. ban on internet gambling violates the rules of the World Trade Organization:

The general rule in the world of international trade agreements is that a country must treat foreign goods and services in the same manner as it treats domestic ones. The United States, the trade body found, permits online wagering through sites like Youbet.com, a publicly traded company that allows visitors to place bets at horse racing tracks around the globe.

And, of course, some form of casino gambling is legal in more than 30 states, and even local governments advertise gambling services when states encourage people to buy a lottery ticket.

“This isn’t a case of forcing gambling on a population that has decided they don’t like it,” Mr. Mendel said. “This is the world’s biggest consumer and exporter of gambling services trying to prohibit a small country from developing its economy by offering these same services. And we find that deeply hypocritical.”

I sure hope that online poker comes back to the United States. I miss it.

Furthermore, I don't really see how the ban is protecting the public. The poor stupid people tend to gamble by buying lottery tickets. Most online poker players are sophisticated enough to protect their own interests. The barriers to entry--a computer with an internet connection, a credit card, and complicated rules--prevent the dumbest elements of society from playing. But someone without a credit card, without a computer, and too stupid to figure out Texas Hold'em, can still blow his paycheck (cashed at a ripoff check cashing place) on lottery tickets.

If the anti-gambling laws were to make any sense, lotteries would be illegal and not online poker.

Students who take 7 years to graduate high school

There's an article in the NY Times about high school students who need more than four years to graduate:

Faced with 70,000 students or more who are years behind in obtaining the credits needed to graduate from high school, New York City is at the forefront of a movement to recognize that for a significant number, high school might stretch into five, six, even seven years.

Also in the article is the depressing statistic that "city’s four-year graduation rate hovers at 50 percent despite an uptick in recent years."

Should taxpayer dollars be wasted on students who can't graudate high school in four years? Five years? Six years?

The real decade of greed

Leona Helmsley, "the Queen of Mean," is dead at 87. Her obituary says that her "conviction on federal tax evasion charges in 1989 became an emblem of the excesses of the 1980s."

I don't understand why the 1980s has that reputation. My observation is that there was a lot more greed in the 1990s. In the 1980s, MBAs wanted to get into investment banking. In the 1990s, they wanted to get into startup internet companies because investment banking didn't pay enough. Now that's greedy! The 1990s led to the collapse of Enron and Arthur Andersen on account of their greedy accounting lies, as well as the collapse of the stock market price of most of those internet companies where the MBAs hoped to become rich.

The only explanation that makes sense is that the 1980s was the decade of Ronald Reagan, while the 1990s was the decade of Bill Clinton. Liberals who write for newspapers can't fathom the idea that a beloved Democratic president led a decade of much greater greed than a hated Republican.

Civilization IV

This review is pretty late considering that the computer game Civilization IV (Civ4) was released at the end of 2005. But I had a lot of free time this month, between the bar exam and the start of my LL.M. in Taxation program, so I bought the game two weeks ago. (Civ4 seemed like a better idea than trying a possibly addictive game such as World of Warcraft.)

Sexbots

Roissy in DC wrote a sexbot blog post. I liked his link to a video about Japanese sex dolls.

Japan's Sex Volunteer Corps

Here's an article about Japan's Sex Volunteer Corps; an organization devoted to providing sex to Japanese women in sexless marriages. There are even a lot of cases of married Japanese women who are virgins:

Kim adds that members of his Corps have also solved another problem - that of an increasing number of middle-aged married women who're still virgins.

"Most of them have been career-oriented types who've submerged their femininity to try and compete on a level footing with men. But there're also a lot of married women who were virgins when they wed, usually to husbands who had also never experienced sex before, and then they simply lost the chance to ever make love together and the years went by," Kim tells Asahi Geino.

I think this phenomenon is indicative of the lower average sex drive of Japanese men. This isn't a problem you hear about much in the United States, but all Japanese women know about the problem of husbands who allegedly don't have time to have sex because they are too busy working. I don't buy that explanation at all. The typical young horny male is never too busy too have sex.

Do rich kids squander their money?

I just finished reading this post and its many comments in the WSJ Wealth Blog about rich kids who don’t stay rich:

What if growing up rich actually has disadvantages? And what if rich kids’ penchant for spending — and their lack of experience at earning — catches up with them, and that unlimited ATM machine winds up empty? (Not to feel sorry for these people, just to point out a reality.)

That’s the premise behind my article in the Los Angeles Times today, which profiles a wealth-education camp designed to teach today’s rich kids how to manage their money. My conclusion is that despite all their supposed advantages, today’s rich kids have grown up in such bubbles of privilege that they’re not prepared for today’s increasingly competitive job market. They don’t make good investors, they don’t compete well for the top jobs, and they’re not hungry for success like kids who grow up in middle-class homes can be.

Eventually, I argue, their money will run out. And much of the inherited wealth in America will flow back to people who actually earn it — as it has throughout history. This is what makes wealth in America dynamic, rather than dynastic.

I think that Robert Frank’s (not the same Robert Frank who is an economics professor at Cornell) not-unique idea that rich kids somehow suffer in comparison to their middle class peers is easily believed because those who are not rich want to believe they are somehow superior to those in higher classes. But wishful thinking isn’t reality. Of course some rich kids waste their money, especially female rich kids, but I believe that the silent majority of rich kids act responsibly and put their elite educations and family contacts to good use.

Quality of education and economic growth

Via Cafe Hayek, I came across this page of information about "educational quality" and economic growth.

I only had time to briefly skim the papers, but the point seems to be that "quality of education" is a much better predictor of a country's economic growth than years of education.

"Quality of education" is measured by standardized tests, and thus is very highly correlated with IQ. These papers about education are really just lending support the IQ and the Wealth of Nations effect.

The message I get from this is that letting low-IQ immigrants into the U.S. will result in lower economic growth.

Evolutionary biology and men who lie on surveys

There’s some encouraging news from the NY Times about evolutionary biology:

Everyone knows men are promiscuous by nature. It’s part of the genetic strategy that evolved to help men spread their genes far and wide. The strategy is different for a woman, who has to go through so much just to have a baby and then nurture it. She is genetically programmed to want just one man who will stick with her and help raise their children.

It used to be that you were a “reactionary” or a “Nazi” for saying stuff like that, but now it’s what “everyone knows.” Times are changing for the better.

But there is also news about men who lie on surveys:

One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. Another study, by British researchers, stated that men had 12.7 heterosexual partners in their lifetimes and women had 6.5.

But there is just one problem, mathematicians say. It is logically impossible for heterosexual men to have more partners on average than heterosexual women. Those survey results cannot be correct.

Actually, it’s only impossible for the arithmetic means to be different (assuming men aren’t having sex with foreigners or prostitutes who don’t take surveys). The medians might be different. If a much higher percentage of men are virgins compared to women, this would have the ironic effect of boosting the median number of male sex partners.

However, I think it’s likely that most of the disparity is a result of lying. I previously blogged about how men lie on surveys. The NY Times is catching up with my leadership in this area.

Exercise harmful to the planet

Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated.

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. [Times Online]

Organic milk is also bad for the planet:

Organic dairy cows are worse for the climate. They produce less milk so their methane emissions per litre are higher.

My own observation: as a general rule of thumb, the more something costs, the worse it is for the planet. After all, a higher price means that more resources went into its production. Yuppies, by buying expensive organic food, are using their money to harm the environment.

Public school for Muslims

The principal of New York City’s first public school dedicated to the study of Arabic language and culture resigned under pressure yesterday, days after she was quoted defending the use of the word “intifada” as a T-shirt slogan. [NYT]

Why are my tax dollars paying for this school?

Bottled water and liberal guilt

I've previously blogged about liberal hypocrites and their bottled water.

The anti-bottled water message seems to be working. Now some liberals feel intense guilt whenever they drink bottled water. From an article in tomorrow's NY Times:

On a recent family vacation in Cape Cod, Jenny Pollack, 40, a novelist and public relations associate from Brooklyn, did something she knew she would come to regret. She did it on the spur of the moment. She did it because she felt desperate.

Besides, the giant illuminated Dasani vending machine was just standing there, like a beacon.

So, with her reusable plastic Nalgene bottles dry and her son Charlie working up a thirst in an indoor playground, she broke down and bought a bottle of water. To most people it would be a simple act of self-refreshment, but to Ms. Pollack it was also a minor offense against the planet — think of all the oil used to package, transport and refrigerate that water.

“Something about it felt like a betrayal,” said Ms. Pollack, who otherwise does not consider herself an ardent environmentalist. She said she decided to stop buying water after hearing friends talk about the impact of America’s bottled water habit.

Liberals and their guilt! I certainly wouldn't feel guilt about buying a bottle of water. On the other hand, I'd be annoyed at being charged $2 for something that used to be provided for free via water fountains.

Pay kids to do well in school?

There's an article about it in the NY Times. It sounds like a good idea to me. I agree with Joel Klein:

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein responds to skeptics by arguing that no one has figured out how to get more poorer children engaged in learning. Trumpeting the long-term benefits of education, the better jobs and lives well lived has not worked. Cash just might.

I disagree with Suzanne Windland, "a homeowner raising three children in a placid enclave of eastern Queens":

“It’s like giving kids an allowance because they wake up every morning and brush their teeth and go off to school,” she said. “That’s their job. That’s what they’re supposed to be doing.”

Adults get paid to do their job. Maybe there are some good reasons not to pay children for good school performance, but this job analogy is a really bad one.

Most poor children do not love learning for the sake of learning, and they do not have parents who value education, so this program sounds like a reasonable attempt to create better incentives.

Girls who eat meat

At the moment, it's the number one most emailed story at the NY Times.

My opinion: I hate finicky eaters.

Nerds, prole drift, and Gregory Clark

On another blog, "Mercy Vetsel" wrote the following comment in response to Greg Mankiw's post about the Gregory Clark book, which I previously wrote about:

Interesting thesis. This type of beneficial diffusion of successful values would seem to be the opposite of the modern trend defined by Paul Fussell as "Prole Creep" [ed: Mercy means prole drift] where low class attitudes and behaviors creep up into the middle and upper classes.

This made me think about a recent NY Times article about the theory that nerds are "hyperwhite."

In a 2001 paper, “The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness,” and other works, including a book in progress, Bucholtz notes that the “hegemonic” “cool white” kids use a limited amount of African-American vernacular English; they may say “blood” in lieu of “friend,” or drop the “g” in “playing.” But the nerds she has interviewed, mostly white kids, punctiliously adhere to Standard English. They often favor Greco-Latinate words over Germanic ones (“it’s my observation” instead of “I think”), a preference that lends an air of scientific detachment. They’re aware they speak distinctively, and they use language as a badge of membership in their cliques. One nerd girl Bucholtz observed performed a typically nerdy feat when asked to discuss “blood” as a slang term; she replied: “B-L-O-O-D. The word is blood,” evoking the format of a spelling bee. She went on, “That’s the stuff which is inside of your veins,” humorously using a literal definition. Nerds are not simply victims of the prevailing social codes about what’s appropriate and what’s cool; they actively shape their own identities and put those codes in question.

Though Bucholtz uses the term “hyperwhite” to describe nerd language in particular, she claims that the “symbolic resources of an extreme whiteness” can be used elsewhere. After all, “trends in music, dance, fashion, sports and language in a variety of youth subcultures are often traceable to an African-American source,” but “unlike the styles of cool European American students, in nerdiness, African-American culture and language [do] not play even a covert role.” Certainly, “hyperwhite” seems a good word for the sartorial choices of paradigmatic nerds. While a stereotypical black youth, from the zoot-suit era through the bling years, wears flashy clothes, chosen for their aesthetic value, nerdy clothing is purely practical: pocket protectors, belt sheaths for gadgets, short shorts for excessive heat, etc.

The "hyperwhite" theory seems like another way of saying that nerds reject prole drift. The worst of prole behaviors is African-American inspired. Rejecting prole drift is not cool.

On the other hand, maybe not. Nerds seem to partake in low class white activities like bowling, and may eat low class white food like McDonald's. Perhaps nerds only reject the African-American inspired elements of prole culture, such as rap music and "bling."

Going back to the topic of prole drift, it may be an inevitable result of the greater fertility of the lower classes. In pre-industrial times when lower class children were more likely to die before reaching adulthood, upper class behaviors drifted downward. Today, the opposite is happening.

Value priced food in Manhattan

A Washington Post article about Tyler Cowen (the guy from the Marginal Revolution blog) offers up some bad advice for finding good values for food in Manhattan:

Rule 1: For good value, avoid high-rent areas. Head for your local strip mall instead. Restaurants in ritzy areas will be either expensive or chains that can afford the rent but serve mediocre food for the masses.

In Manhattan, he explains in the book, that means steering clear of Midtown, where you're lunching with expense-account-fueled execs or the tourists at Applebee's.

Actually, some of the best food values in Manhattan can be found in Midtown along Ninth Avenue, only a two block walk from touristy Seventh Avenue.

Either Tyler Cowen doesn't know what he's talking about, or the article has done a poor job of summarizing his advice.

Furthermore, the strip mall advice sounds dubious. I've seldom had any decent food in a strip mall. This is because of the marketing principle of bundling of features. High quality features, in any product, tend to be bundled together. For example, location and food quality are usually bundled together, because the same people who want quality food also want a quality location.

Still independent

The New York Times now owns the Freakonomics Blog. But Half Sigma still remains independent.

NY Times says black people genetically programmed to be poor

In the most politically incorrect article printed in the NY Times in decades, reporter Nicholas Wade explains the thesis of economic historian Gregory Clark's book A Farewell to Alms.

Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, believes that the Industrial Revolution — the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 — occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues.

The most important part of the thesis is Clark's research which showed that rich people had more surviving children than poor people:

In support of the disease-resistance idea, cities like London were so filthy and disease ridden that a third of their populations died off every generation, and the losses were restored by immigrants from the countryside. That suggested to Dr. Clark that the surviving population of England might be the descendants of peasants.

A way to test the idea, he realized, was through analysis of ancient wills, which might reveal a connection between wealth and the number of progeny. The wills did that, , but in quite the opposite direction to what he had expected.

Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded.

If you are thinking that Dr. Clark might be too politically correct to see the genetic implications, fortunately you are thinking wrongly:

Dr. Clark says the middle-class values needed for productivity could have been transmitted either culturally or genetically. But in some passages, he seems to lean toward evolution as the explanation. “Through the long agrarian passage leading up to the Industrial Revolution, man was becoming biologically more adapted to the modern economic world,” he writes. And, “The triumph of capitalism in the modern world thus may lie as much in our genes as in ideology or rationality.”

Reading between the lines of the thesis, we learn that people who never moved beyond the stage of hunter-gatherer economies never evolved enough to support modern industrial economies. This explains why black Africa is unable to move into the modern world. It's because black Africa never moved into the agrarian world. This explains why black people in the United States are so much more violent than white people. Non-violence was one of the key features passed on by the upper class. It also explains why black people have such poor future time orientation. Future time orientation is another one of Dr. Clark's key behaviors.

One can make a case that non-violence and future time orientation are behaviors separate from intelligence, although I'm not entirely convinced because future time orientation seems to be strongly linked to intelligence. But there's no denying that literacy is a direct consequence of high intelligence. Dr. Clark's politically correct protestations to the contrary, the evolution of higher IQ is a key contributing factor to the modern economy.

Dr. Clark's research also explains the paradox of how the population grew smarter despite my own finding that smarter people have fewer children and lower sex drive. I previously theorized that "before the safety nets and advanced healthcare of modern civilization, the less intelligent and their children had a greater chance of dying. War, famine, disease, and accidents killed a greater share of the less intelligent, more than making up for their greater fertility." Dr. Clark's research has proved my theory.

Dr. Clark does not adequately explain thy the industrial revolution happened first in the West and not in the East. East Asians are more evolved than Whites when it comes to non-violence and future time orientation. In any event, Japan had no problem joining the industrial age when shown the way. The rest of Asia is still behind Japan, but they seem to be catching up pretty fast.

The medical billing maze

"Dr. Bob" has a very interesting and informative series of articles about medical billing.

Women's day

Women who think they have it bad in the United States should read about unequal opportunity in Japan.

This probably explains why there are quite a few young Japanese women moving to the United States, because there's no way they can ever have a career in Japan.

* * *

There's a NY Times article about autism and girls. The fact that autism manifests differently in girls than it does in boys is a clue to discovering the underlying biologically based behavioral differences between the sexes.

Lucky rich people feel who feel poor

A NY Times article tells us that rich people in Silicon Valley feel poor, because they are surrounded by people richer than themselves:

[M]any [] accomplished and ambitious members of the digital elite still do not think of themselves as particularly fortunate, in part because they are surrounded by people with more wealth — often a lot more.

When chief executives are routinely paid tens of millions of dollars a year and a hedge fund manager can collect $1 billion annually, those with a few million dollars often see their accumulated wealth as puny, a reflection of their modest status in the new Gilded Age, when hundreds of thousands of people have accumulated much vaster fortunes.

“Everyone around here looks at the people above them,” said Gary Kremen, the 43-year-old founder of Match.com, a popular online dating service. “It’s just like Wall Street, where there are all these financial guys worth $7 million wondering what’s so special about them when there are all these guys worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Mr. Kremen estimated his net worth at $10 million. That puts him firmly in the top half of 1 percent among Americans, according to wealth data from the Federal Reserve, but barely in the top echelons in affluent towns like Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Atherton. So he logs 60- to 80-hour workweeks because, he said, he does not think he has nearly enough money to ease up.

“You’re nobody here at $10 million,” Mr. Kremen said earnestly over a glass of pinot noir at an upscale wine bar here.

But at least its gratifying that many of these lucky rich people are honest enough to admit that their wealth is due as much to dumb luck as to any special skills or abilities they have:

Many of the more modest millionaires here feel sheepish, even guilty at times, about their piles of cash. Talent played in a role in their financial success, but so did being at the right place at the right time.

“They recognize that if they happened to walk into a different office,” said Marilyn Holland, a Menlo Park psychologist who has been counseling the Valley’s elite for 25 years, “things would have turned out very differently.”

That is one big difference between these working-class millionaires and the country’s wealthiest tycoons, who tend to see themselves as pillars of the community worthy of the hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps billions, they now possess.

“A lot of the money here is accidental money,” said Bruce Karsh, 51, an engineer who puts his net worth at $2 million to $4 million. “People weren’t setting out to become gazillionaires.”

Don't move to Staten Island!

On a NYC real estate forum, "Abbydo" says the following (which I pretty much agree with):

Trust me, you don't want to live on Staten Island unless you want your kids to grow up as gavone types who sound stupid the minute they open their mouths. Library is pronounced liberry, talk is tawk and words beginning in "s" are now beginning with the "sh" sound so that the word street sounds like shtreet. The people are classless and are always confrontation ready. Staten Island was once a nice place to live years ago when there were plenty of open spaces with normal people living there, but as soon as the Verrazano bridge was built that all changed. The island was then flooded with Brooklynites who brought their culture with them. All the females look cheap with their fake nails, fake tan and gum snapping habit. And even the guys get their nails done, eyebrows waxed and go to the tanning salon. They think they look good with their gold chains and wife beater tee shirts but no one from the rest of the world takes these people seriously. If you raise your kids there, they will inevitably become handicapped with this culture. No one appears intelligent. The people who are actually intelligent, move because they don't want to be associated with Staten Island. Do yourself a favor. Don't move to Staten Island.

Abbydo understands the strong influence that your children's friends and classmates have on them. That's one of the primary advantages of sending your children to private school.

Regarding the Staten Island accent that Abbydo writes about, even the hickest of white trash accents from the Deep South don't sound as low class as the Staten Island accent.