"Jane Galt" over at Asymmetrical Information makes a point that has provoked heated discussion in the comments:
I don’t know about the rest of you, but when I was eighteen, if my peer group had taken up swallowing razor blades I would have been happily killed myself trying to set a world record. And if they had thought school was for losers and the cool thing to do was to hang out all day listening to music and running dime bags for the local narcotics emporium, I would have been right there with them. Lucky for me, my peer group thought that the most important thing in the entire world was to get an ivy league diploma, so I went to Penn and ended up shilling for drug companies on my blog.
Maybe you were different. But think back to the times–and you know there were times–when trying to win the approval of your peers convinced you to do things that were stupid, wrong, or both. Remember what it felt like to be sixteen and skinny and maybe not as charming and self confident as others around you, and ask yourself if you’d really be able to withstand their derision in order to go to college–especially if you didn’t even know anyone who’d ever been to college, or have any but the haziest idea of what one might do when one got out. Try to imagine deciding to get a BA when doing so means cutting yourself off from the only world you know and launching yourself into a scary new place where everyone’s wealthier, better educated, and more assured than you are.
Or take a minute right now and try to imagine how your friends would react if you announced that you’d decided to quit work, have a baby, and go on welfare. They’d make you feel like an outsider, wouldn’t they? And isn’t that at least part of the reason that you don’t step outside of any of the behavioural boundaries that the middle class has set for itself?
Bad peer groups, like good ones, create their own equilibrium. Doing things that prevent you from attaining material success outside the group can become an important sign off loyalty to the group, which of course just makes it harder to break out of a group, even if it is destined for prison and/or poverty. I think it is fine, even necessary, to recognize that these groups have value systems which make it very difficult for individual members to get a foothold on the economic ladder. But I think conservatives need to be a lot more humble about how easily they would break out of such groups if that is where they had happened to be born.
I had a lot of peer pressure when I was growing up: some negative, most what the majority of middle-to-upper-class people would call "positive." It’s amazing to look back now at how beholden to my peer group I was.
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