Talking About Money Podcast Club: Hidden Brain "Between Two Worlds"
From the Hidden Brain Podcast: “Determination, hard work and sacrifice are core ingredients in the story of the American dream. But philosopher Jennifer Morton argues there is another, more painful requirement to getting ahead: a willingness to leave family and friends behind.”
Hello Talking About Money Community, how are you?
In this post I want to talk about the journey that your client takes while they are in your financial capability and asset building program. It might be a literal journey or a figurative journey, or it might be a journey that they choose not take at all.
Related to this, the journey that I am talking about is one that you may have taken yourself. Or maybe it’s a journey that a close family member of yours has taken. I watched this play out in my own life with my father, who took the journey and brought my family along with him.
What is this mysterious journey that I am hinting at? It’s the journey of upward mobility.
This post is inspired from a November 9, 2020, Hidden Brain podcast episode entitled Between Two Worlds. After listening to it I looked up Jennifer Morton, associate professor of philosophy at the City College of New York and author of Moving Up without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility. Please check out both the podcast episode and the book.
But first, here’s a story for you about my father’s journey of upward mobility.
The Bumpy Journey of Upward Mobility
My father grew up on a dairy and tobacco farm in Eli, Kentucky. His father had an 8th grade education while his mother – my grandmother – had completed a two-year degree (the first in our family to have gone to college) and had worked as a teacher in a two-room schoolhouse before becoming a wife and mother.
My father grew up amongst a vast extended family. My grandfather was the 10th of 13 children, while my grandmother was the 2nd of 9 brothers and sisters. My father had 50 first cousins(!) and grew up going to family dinners at his grandparents’ house every Sunday after church. In high school my father’s part-time job was to rise each morning and head over to his grandfather’s house, where he milked all of his cows. He then came home and helped his own father milk their cows. And then he got on the bus and went to school.
My father and his sisters were excellent students and graduated at the top of their respective high school classes. There seemed to be no limit to what they could achieve. My father received a scholarship to Yale, and in 1959 headed north to Connecticut to realize his dream of an Ivy League education.
He dropped out and came home after his freshman year. The story my grandmother told me was told was that he was homesick.
My father went on to complete his bachelors and master’s degrees in economics in the Kentucky state university system, but the allure of an Ivy League degree had not abated. Ten years after that first journey he headed north again, this time with his new bride – my mother – to start a PhD program in economics at Brown University.
My father dropped out of Brown two years later, never finishing the PhD he had strived for. The story I was told was that his thesis advisor left for another university, had asked my father to follow him, but that he was tired of moving. There was also the small detail that my father now had a new baby (me) to support. So with a second master’s degree in hand (he already had one from the University of Kentucky) he took a job at a nonprofit consulting firm and settled in a blue-collar suburb of Providence, 1,000 miles away from his parents, sisters, and 50 first cousins.
What Happens After You Have Arrived?
On paper my father had “made it.” He had gone from a tobacco and dairy farm in Kentucky to earning an advanced degree and working as an economist and a consultant, first at the nonprofit consulting firm and then in his own business. He owned a home, and after a while, a small sailboat. He sent money back to Kentucky to his mother-in-law – my other grandmother – to help her pay rent, and later, the nursing home. My sister and I grew up in the suburbs, went to something much larger than a two-room schoolhouse, and got to do things like dance classes, figure skating, and Girl Scouts.
Summer vacations meant going back to the farm, where I was reunited with my cousins (only 2 in my generation). I rose each morning before the sun came up to “help” my grandmother milk the cows, and later in the day I attempted to collect the eggs from the chicken coop without breaking any (I almost have a perfect record). Afternoon snacks consisted of Concord grapes hanging in bunches off the arbor, blackberries picked from bushes 10 feet high, or watermelons picked by my grandfather and hacked open with a old knife on an old tree stump, leading to the invariable contest of watermelon seed spitting.
For each visit my father (the only son) was given his annual list of chores, compiled throughout the year in anticipation of his return. I spent 100° days watching him repair barn roofs, dig fence posts, and even once move an outbuilding across a lot by rolling it on logs (yes, this really did happen). Once I hit my teenage years, relatives would pull me aside and ask, “Now, what is it that your father does again? I just don’t get it.” And I’d do my best to explain to them certificate of need, cost/benefit analysis, and calculating loss of future earnings.
Winter holidays were small and quiet; the four of us spending time at home in Rhode Island while seemingly everyone around us reveled with their extended families, going to parties and begrudgingly attending Midnight Mass. Our neighbors didn’t seem to know where my parents were from, only that they weren’t from Rhode Island. And once that initial “So who are you, anyway?” small talk/interrogation was completed, many of our neighbors didn’t appear to see enough commonalities between them and us to justify a tighter bond.
Making the Journey Smoother for Those Who Come After You
So why am I telling you the story of my father?
After listening to Shankar Vedantam interview Jennifer Morton about both her academic research as well as her owned lived experience (she moved from Colombia to the United States to pursue her education), I felt a resonance with my own lived experience. What I always knew as true — but had never heard discussed out load — had a new clarity for me.
And then I thought of the work you do with your clients. While the field of financial capability and asset building strives to expand opportunities for upward mobility of your clients, do you prepare them for how their lives might change once they get to the end of their bumpy journey? Do you talk to them about what it might be like to change their environment in order to take advantage of economic opportunity?
And when they look like that they are not going to achieve their financial goals, do you talk to them about the choices that they are consciously or unconsciously making? Do you acknowledge that by remaining woven within the social fabric of their place of origin, this might provide them with the most enriching and valuable life?
I can say with relative certainty that no one had this conversation with my father, and I wonder what difference it might have made, if any, if they had.