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Old 06-30-2008, 09:06 PM   #10 (permalink)
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Pardon me, but I think you are asking an irrelevant question. "Seems" to who, and....what is your definition of "successful"?

I am in my mid 50's, and I am not "successful", if the amount of money and possessions I have, is the yardstick you measure success, by. For the past ten years, I've traded stock and options, via the internet, on my own account, and I work as a member of the waitstaff of high end dining establishment in the evening.

Experience tells me that success has more to do with intellectual growth, with curiousity, than it does with material wealth. Currently, I am fascinated with the studies of Muncie, Indiana, which began back in 1924. Back then, the most affluent people awoke later in the morning than the less affluent did.

I think a measure of success is having an awareness of how indoctrinated you are. If you don't have that awareness, a curiousity about it, then who the hell are you, really? How do you know what you know, and why do you think what you think?

The mass of people are like lemmings, they get up at the same time, go to work at the same time, eat at the same time, etc....etc.., and thus, they perceive that the roads and grocery stores and restaurants are "too crowded", as they idle in traffic, stand in line, or receive shitty service, when in fact, the problem is that they are all so in synch with each other.

If you can adjust your own activities to say..... following just behind the wave, you can spot it at grocery stores and restaurants, or watch it coming the other way on the interstate. Have you ever entered a store when lines are long at the checkouts, but, when you have finished your shopping, there is no line to check out?

People with investment interests get up early, because of the hours the stock market operates, 9:30 to 4:00 in the American eastern time zone. Commuting to work to arrive by 9:00am, in the coastal and central population centers, means dealing with congestion related delays that force a 7:00am or earlier wake up:

Early in the last century. it was a sign of affluence and success to have the luxury of waking up later, not earlier:

Quote:
http://www.pbs.org/fmc/interviews/caplow.htm
New River Media Interview with: Theodore Caplow
Commonwealth Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia Co-Author, The First Measured Century

QUESTION: Explain a bit about the first Middletown study.

THEODORE CAPLOW: Robert and Helen Lynd went to Muncie, Indiana in 1924, with a commission to study grassroots religion. And they came back in 1925 with a marvelous study of social change, having used 1890 as the baseline and gotten all sorts of retrospective information from people who were still alive and from documents. And they constructed the authoritative story of what had happened to a typical American community in that generational period.

It's a wonderful book, Middletown, published in 1929. [It] almost didn't get published, because the sponsors, the Rockefeller Institute for Social and Religious Research were shocked by the fact that the little study of grassroots religion had turned into a comprehensive examination of a whole society. It took the intervention of Clark Wissler, who was chairman of the board of the Museum of Natural History to get the book published.

It then became the first sociological bestseller. It's been in print ever since. The whole 70 years it's never been out of print. It's a great book. ....

.... QUESTION: What were the main findings of the Lynds in the book?

THEODORE CAPLOW: They discovered the scandal of class. Most Americans at the time had been brought up to believe that we live in a democracy, where everybody is essentially equal, though admittedly some people are richer than others. The Lynds discovered in Middletown that there was a business class, as they called it, and a working class, and that they were as different as two different tribes. Their conditions of life were different. Their values were different. Their expectations were different. And there wasn't, they thought, much passage between the two. That was what made the book exciting.

But they did all sorts of other things. They looked at the influence of the automobile on the sex habits on the population. They considered the enormous stability that religion had showed from 1890 to 1924. It's a very comprehensive and careful examination.

It is based on not just one kind of sociological data, but everything they could think of, including some of the earliest good surveys that ever were done. Their attendance at all kinds of civic and private celebrations, a great deal of interviewing, a good deal of examination of documents, careful review of newspapers. There wasn't any phase of life in the community they didn't touch. They had a lot of assistance. It represents some thousands of man hours, and it's a very careful job.

I encountered Robert Lynd as an undergraduate of Columbia and was fascinated. I took to haunting his office, and he gave me more time than I'm afraid I would give to an undergraduate these days, and eventually suggested that I change my major from history to sociology and go to the University of Chicago to study with the people he admired there. And I had very little contact with him until he retired in 1959, I believe, and I came back to Columbia and took not exactly his place, but at least I took his office.

Some years after that, one of my graduate students suggested that the time had come to do another study of Middletown. I should have mentioned that Robert Lynd, not Helen, went back to Muncie in 1935 to trace the influence of the Depression on the community. And they published a book called Middletown in Transition. We call that Middletown II......

.. QUESTION: What kind of criteria were used to select Muncie?

THEODORE CAPLOW: They wanted a place that was as unexceptional as possible, with nothing outstanding about it, and that is true of Middletown to this day; less so perhaps than it was then, because at that time they could say that it had nothing outstanding, no famous historical events that ever occurred there. It had never been the home of a famous character. It had very few foreign-born people and practically no minorities. And that was what they liked about it. They were looking for in a sense the essence of plain Americanism.

The Middletown one study does not really contain a critique of consumerism. It contains a critique of class stratification, and the fact that the business class as they saw it were not only exploiting the working class, but also attempting to control them ideologically. There was a movement called "Magic Middletown." There was boosterism. Lynd devotes a lot of space to how squalid the typical working man's home was. And you have to remember that the great mechanization of the American home had barely started in 1924. Very few working class families would have had either running water or central heat. It's rather hard for us to realize. Since many of them lived in houses that are still occupied today, but the equipment was entirely different. ...

...QUESTION: What happened between Middletown II in the 1930s, and when the next study, Middletown III, took place in the 1970s?

THEODORE CAPLOW: We are still using the distinction between business class and working class, but two things have happened in the interim, had already happened by 1977, when we did Middletown III, and are even more salient today after Middletown IV [the current study].

The two things that happened were that the relative number of white collar occupations increased greatly between 1924 and 1977, not only in Middletown but in the United States, and not only in the United States but in the whole Western world. The other thing that happened is that many of the differences between the business class and the working class eroded rapidly. For example, in 1924 very few working class parents aspired or expected to send their children to college, whereas practically all business class parents did. In 1977 there was virtually no difference between the two groups in that respect, and the rates of college attendance were not all that different.

To some extent, certainly not identical, but to some - there was some convergence, a good deal of convergence. For example, no working class person would have dreamed of playing golf in 1924. In 1977 it was commonplace. But on the other hand, the incidence of golfers and membership in the country clubs still gave you a pretty sharp division between the two groups.

There is still, for example, a conspicuous difference in exposure to unemployment. It's not as conspicuous as it was.
In 1924 it was pretty nearly absolute. That is, Lynd couldn't find anybody in the business class who had been unemployed, whereas it was a normal and routine occurrence in the working class. .....

....QUESTION: Why do you suppose the Lynds noted class differentiation in the way they did? And does the observation still hold?

THEODORE CAPLOW: It was forced upon them by the fact that they looked attentively at the community. You couldn't help seeing it. It was perfectly obvious that the community was bifurcated in that way. Middletown is only the first of a dozen important studies...


... Then there's another set of studies by Hollingshead that was a Midwestern community that he called Elmstown. And that too I doubt very much you could have looked at any American community in the 1920s and 1930s and been struck by the enormous gaps between the people on top and the people at the bottom.

[Since then] it's changed in an uneven fashion. With respect to the stratification of income and wealth, in the quality of income and wealth, we made considerable progress from the 1920s to the 1950s. We're now about back where we were in the 1920s with a great deal of dis-equalization going on, particularly in the last decade or so. If you look at the Gini coefficient, which as you know measures the inequality of a distribution, then the United States has now the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of any developed country by a very wide margin. ....

QUESTION: What about time spent with children?

THEODORE CAPLOW:...When you look at the details that becomes fairly explicable. Both men and women worked longer hours, longer weeks and longer years in 1924 than they do now. By wide margins. Remember, the work day in 1924 was anywhere from ten to twelve hours and typically five and a half or six days.......

....Consequently, both men and women were overstressed by comparison with their successors today; much more so in the working class than the business class because their hours were longer, their resources were less, they had no household help. Their hours, by the way, were spectacularly longer. People who worked in offices worked perhaps a third fewer hours than people who worked in factories at the time. And that's one of the things that's equalized.

So we found in the 1977 survey that working class people were getting up later in the morning than they had in 1924, when most of them were getting up in the dark for most of the year. Strangely enough in 1999 we find the women again moving in the other direction; they're getting up earlier. A surprising proportion get up before 5:00 A.M. ....

QUESTION: Can we tell anything about political attitudes?

THEODORE CAPLOW: I think what we conclude, looking at the 1999 data, is that it doesn't really make sense to talk about general attitudes of conservatism or liberalism, because the trends run opposite on very specific items. We have a question taken literally from the 1924 questionnaire that was asked in 1977 and 1999 about what is popularly called the Protestant ethic. I think it reads something like, "It's the fault of the man himself if he does not succeed." - and we didn't change the wording out of political correctness, because as far as possible we try never to change wordings. And more young people accept that proposition as true now than in 1977 or even 1924. That's really quite startling.

On the other hand, we have another question about "The fact that some people have so much more money than others, so there's something wrong with this country." And there we get more people taking the liberal point of view in 1999 than in either 1977 or 1924. So you really have to look at each item by itself and realize that the mosaic of attitudes that are current at any given time don't necessarily or normally represent a drift in one direction or another, but the reaction to specific ideas.

QUESTION: What about economic change?

THEODORE CAPLOW: Well, let's take the overall picture. In 1924 you had prosperity, but it was prosperity 1924 style with very frequent unemployment for working class people, and a large part of the population living in what we would now consider the subsistence level. And the 1930s saw about a third of the labor force unemployed and the failure of many local enterprises, and the first signs of federal intervention in local affairs. The 1940s brought prosperity; the war brought a wave of prosperity to Muncie that lasted for pretty nearly the next generation.

When we did the 1977 study, it was sort of taken for granted that the community was well off. Then in the 1980s it was hit by a kind of local depression that was chronicled in a brief documentary film by Ben Wattenberg. Unemployment got up to 18 percent at one point in the early 1980s. And what was happening was that the heavy industry, sort of basic manufacturing industry on which Middletown had always depended, was being phased out. A number of the local plants never recovered. Some of them staggered on for some years. But the Ball Glass Jar company moved away, Indiana Wire and Steel, and the packing houses shut down. The Delco reduced its workforce and eventually shut down. The local glass plants beside Ball began to work half shifts.

By 1999 this process was complete. Middletown is no longer a manufacturing city. It has no major manufacturing plant, none at all. It's still structured in such a way that the whole south side is sort of designed to be the residential area for a factory workforce, but there are no factories to speak of. Nonetheless, it is prosperous. And that represents a shift to service industry that on the whole has been successful by being piecemeal. Nobody completely understands the reasons for Muncie's or Middletown's current prosperity, but nobody's complaining about it either. ....
If anyone is curious this May 2008 article updates us about Middletown's and America's....decline:
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...050502738.html
Middletown, Teetering On the Divide
An Indiana City With an Average Past Anxiously Faces an Uncertain Future

By Libby Copeland
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 6, 2008; C01....
So, again, is there a balance of a desire to know the key ingredients for success and a curious nature in the question asked in the thread title, because I think it is easier to be successful, if wealth is the yardstick success is measured by, by being incurious.

I've met and talked with many people who have made a lot of money, but I've met and talked with only a few people who seem curious about how and why things are the way they are in the political-socio-economic pool they are swimming in.

Last edited by host; 06-30-2008 at 09:12 PM..
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