Reviewing "This is Forty" in the New Yorker, Megham Daum makes it clear she doesn't know many (orthodox) Jews:
So what is it about the(Orthodox) Jews? I know dozens, if not tens of dozens, of comfortably well-off one-percenter Jews with four, five and even six children, children they started having immediately after marriage. Is the answer simply that non-Jewish one-percenters could have also simultaneously acquired wealth and children had they tried? Or is there something else at play?
Update: Joe makes a solid comment. Obviously, I've made the error of discounting all the OJs who aren't very rich. If I want to claim having kids isn't an obstacle to financial success, I have to do a whole lot more than point at the cases I know about. But has Meghan Daun done any better? She also claims to have identified a truth about the universe - kids !=wealth - based on nothing but he own anecdotes.
Some implausibilities, however, deserve some dissection. Let’s take those children. They are eight and thirteen. Their parents, Pete and Debbie, are turning forty. That means they had their first child at twenty-seven. You don’t see that very often in people with three million dollar houses, unconventional careers and no trust funds.She goes on to argue that you just can't have too many children - and certainly not before age 30 - and expect to make very much money. Speaking of the kiddie one-percenters she knows, Daum asserts:
You will also find that their moms and dads were generally not having babies in their twenties, since acquiring that kind of real estate almost always means delaying childbearing (and in many cases marriage) in favor of building the careers that will pay for it.
So what is it about the(Orthodox) Jews? I know dozens, if not tens of dozens, of comfortably well-off one-percenter Jews with four, five and even six children, children they started having immediately after marriage. Is the answer simply that non-Jewish one-percenters could have also simultaneously acquired wealth and children had they tried? Or is there something else at play?
Update: Joe makes a solid comment. Obviously, I've made the error of discounting all the OJs who aren't very rich. If I want to claim having kids isn't an obstacle to financial success, I have to do a whole lot more than point at the cases I know about. But has Meghan Daun done any better? She also claims to have identified a truth about the universe - kids !=wealth - based on nothing but he own anecdotes.
