The silver lining

Matt Phillips writes at Quartz,

Here’s a silver lining for parents of rule-breaking, defiant, disagreeable children: Such surly offspring could end up being a very good investment.

A recent study published in the journal Developmental Psychology looked at data on a cohort of 745 children in Luxembourg from the time they were about 12 years old in 1968 until 2008, when their average age was about 52. Researchers sought to connect the information collected on the children—including their socioeconomic background and questionnaires answered by both the children and their teachers—with their career outcomes four decades later.

The short version? Researchers from the University of Luxembourg, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and The Free University of Berlin found—perhaps unsurprisingly—that occupational success was closely associated with IQ, the socioeconomic status of parents, and a metric of “studiousness” based on teacher assessments. (To define occupational success, researchers used an index that ranked occupations on prestige and socioeconomic status.)

But when it came to income levels, researchers found a slightly different pattern. After accounting for the impact of IQ-level and class background, researchers found that “rule-breaking and defiance of parental authority” was the best predictor of which students ended up making higher incomes.

Read more here.

The author concludes this piece with a quote from Leo Durocher:

All the same, there’s something that rings true about this finding, which echoes the immortal Americanism oft-credited to legendary baseball manager Leo Durocher: “Nice guys finish last.” But who knows, maybe Durocher traced his ancestry back to Luxembourg.

I had an experience with Leo Durocher when I was a child. I was staying in a hotel in Chicago with my parents. I was an avid baseball fan, and especially a fan of the New York Giants (now the San Francisco Giants). The Giants were staying in the same hotel. We were riding in the elevator, and guess who gets on the elevator? Leo Durocher, the manager of the Giants! He was friendly to me, and when he found out I was a Giants fan, he personally took me over to get autographs from some of the Giants players when we got to the hotel lobby.

Nice guys finish last? You don't get much nicer than Leo Durocher was to me!