prosaic, depressing, and somewhat shameful fact is that the secret to getting ahead is just what my parents told me it was. The whole miracle of the modern industrial economy is based upon the things that our folks were trying to drum into our heads before we went off to college to grow sideburns and leg hair—or, as the modern case is, get pierced eyebrows and neck tattoos. It’s the advice we received at the dinner table while the Jell-O dessert puddled and our friends were waiting for us at the mall. It’s the clumsy set-piece speech our parents made in the heart-to-hearts they’d spring on us when we were really high. It’s what we heard in capital letters when we brought home grades that looked like a collection of Baywatch bra cup sizes or wrecked the car.
• Hard work • Education
• Responsibility • Property rights • Rule of law • Democratic government
Actually, most parents didn’t get all those items into the lecture. In fact, I’ve never heard of a parent saying, “Listen here, if I catch you running around without property rights again, I’ll take away your cell phone.” But when our parents said, “Be honest,” they were assuming that property rights were real. And when our parents said, “Obey the law,” they were making a logical inference that the law existed and that it merited obeying. And many of our parents had served in the military, defending democracy, and would remind us of this at length. Of course, by “hard work” our parents didn’t mean that we should be doing the hard things that constitute work for the poor people in the world. Few parents hope that their children will get jobs carrying forty-pound buckets of water on their heads. Our parents wanted us to do hard work that was intelligent, fulfilling, and promised advancement in life. (Although they also wanted us to mow the lawn.) The hard work was linked to education. However, billions of people don’t have a chance to get an education, and some of them, like religious fundamentalists and deconstructionist college professors, don’t believe the education when they get one. This is one reason
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