Bryan Caplan at Econlog has been soliciting class autobiographies from bloggers. Being that is one of the many titles for which I barely qualify (for one of the others check the object of this blog’s title), I figured I’d get in on the action. Why not?
I was born in Houston, Texas. Saint Luke’s Hospital, third floor. I no longer recall the delivery room, although I was told once long ago. When I was born my dad had a job pretty similar to my current position: a decent entry-level gig that involved more pushing paper around than he’d really have liked, but offered pretty good advancement potential. This was mostly doing portfolio balancing and the like for the corporate trust division of Texas Commerce Bank. His boss was Ben Love, whom you’ll have heard of if you know about banking or about Texas.
My dad grew up all over the midwest, he was born on a dairy farm in Minnesota, where he lived for awhile. It’s been said, by my mother, that he didn’t speak anything but German until he was about four or five and started attending kindergarten, I have no way to verify this and dad doesn’t speak any German now. In any case, Dad’s life started in a rural Minnesota town, my grandfather was a travelling salesman. At one point it was ice machines for restaurants, I’ve no idea what else during his career, but he drove all over the midwest for work. I believe they moved from Minnesota to South Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio and then finally Texas before my dad finished high school.
My grandfather made enough to support his family (dad, his brother & sister, my grandmother), but they weren’t wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. At one point my grandfather sat Dad and his sister down, told them there was only enough money to help one of them, and that it sure wasn’t going to be Dad.
My grandmother, who I unfortunately did not know well before she died of Parkinson’s, was college educated and a dietician. After my father’s family moved to Houston in the late 1960s she taught at Rice, in high school Dad got into many NCAA football games for free by carrying lunches to the players.
After graduating from high school my dad was pretty much on his own in Houston, because his parents moved immediately (the same day, in fact) to Denver because they thought the dry air would be better for my grandmother with her Parkinson’s. Dad first enrolled in Stephen F Austin University in Nacadoches, but after a couple of semesters it was too expensive so he quit and transferred to University of Houston. During college he worked any number of jobs: Sears, UPS, waiting, pretty much anything to put himself through school and pay the bills. He spent a couple of semesters in Denver living with his parents and going to school to save money, but he hated being that far from my mother (who he was dating at the time) and moved back to Houston to finish school.
My mother’s upbringing was a little bit different than Dad’s, she was quite a bit more priviledged, frankly. My mom’s father grew up in Henderson, Tennessee. His uncle was Dorsey Hardeman. My grandfather attended Georgia Tech for all but one credit of a structural engineering degree after graduating high school at 16 in 1942. He attended Georgia Tech for a few semesters before joining the Navy, I believe he was stationed in the Pacific for the latter part of the war, always has said he didn’t really see anything interesting.
After returning from his small bit in the war, he eventually earned a JD from Vanderbilt (where he met my grandmother). After graduation he moved to San Angelo and joined a law practice with his uncle, Dorsey. In 1969 he moved to Houston with my grandmother, mother, and her brother. As he’s never really been one to talk about himself, I’m a bit fuzzy on the details, but I know he was with Bracewell & Patterson (now, much to his chagrin, Bracewell & Guiliani) for quite some time, he was general counsel for Houston Natural Gas, etc etc. I don’t really want to get into tedious, boring details, but the man had a quite distinguished career in oil & gas law.
Mom went to Texas A&M for a few semesters, then transferred to University of St. Thomas in Houston after taking a year off from school to find herself or something. She met my father because they were neighbors in Houston and his shady roommate hit on her first.
When I was six we moved out of Houston to Lake Oswego, Oregon, where I mostly grew up. I often joke that I grew up on the rough, needle-covered streets of Lake Oswego. If you’re familiar with the Portland area or Oregon more generally you’ll know that Lake Oswego is, perhaps, the whitest suburb of the whitest city in the whitest state in the country. I could count the number of non-white people I knew on one hand up until high school, then it took one hand for the non-white & non-asian students. In addition to being incredibly, boringly whitebread, it had extremely low crime and an awful lot amount of money.
When my parents moved there in 1988 they did it because the school district was good, and it was. We lived in a nice but not anywhere near extravagant home in a part of town called Lake Grove. This home would nearly double in value during the 12 years my parents owned it, and they had to sell in a bit of a slump. My dad started with Bank of California, then after a few years moved to US Bank. He was there through two mergers, the second of which drained every last bit of what had been good about working there. After I graduated from high school, my parents moved to San Antonio for dad to take a better job opportunity.
On the whole my childhood was easy, largely free of major hardship, and safe. My mother never worked outside the house while I was growing up, I lived in one of those safe suburban neighborhoods where you have 15 sets of parents and the kids pretty much have free run of the place so long as they don’t hurt anybody or break anything.
School was boring, unchallenging, and full of shallow dullards. One thing my parents and grandparents instilled in me, at great length over many years, is that the amount of money a person has or makes isn’t at all connected to how good a person he or she is. Many people in the suburbs don’t seem to get this, and it really bothers me. I don’t have a problem if people have a lot of money, or if they like to buy expensive stuff, but I have a real issue with lording it over people like it makes you some sort of superior being. This was a common happening from about junior high on, it got worse in high school.
I heard exactly the following in my high school, more than once: “You know I really like the [name of ridiculously expensive car here, often ‘Land Rover’] my parents got me, but it just isn’t the right colour.” I am not kidding. That’s crazy, ungrateful, and vain, frankly.
Full disclosure: my parents bought me a brand new car when I turned 17, it was a 1999 honda civic, I first got the key when it had 9 miles on it. Hell of a birthday gift, $15,000 car, I thought they’d lost their minds, and as I still drive that car today I couldn’t be more thankful for it.
But, anyway, it may seem odd that if I feel so strongly about how condescendingly and put-down the poorer kids in my high school were treated and yet I ended up a libertarian. I don’t really think it’s much of a conflict: I see government handouts as condescending, almost saying “there, there, you’re too dumb to shift for yourself so we’ll help you.” I sincerely do not believe this is the case. The vast majority of the poor could shift for themselves, but I think many have become habituated to the handouts…in short I subscribe to the pathology view. I also think people can be judged by the choices one makes, and if you repeatedly make bad choices I lose sympathy pretty damn quick. See: my feelings about beggars, drug addicts, and urchins with expensive piercings/tattoos.
But, I’m not kidding myself, most of the people in my high school were not in any way poor in absolute terms. Even the least affluent of them had at least one decent, employed parent and enough food to eat. There were some exceptions, sure, but I honestly didn’t know too many of them personally.
In high school I was one of those kids who was bored, tended to disrupt class a bit too often, and didn’t work very hard. In hindsight, I don’t actually think this hurt me much. Firstly, high school is mostly a useless series of jumping through hoops any fool with half a brain can master. Secondly, had I attended some big-name college instead of University of Oregon I’d have just been surrounded by the same jackasses I went to high school with. And, like everyone else, I’d have ended up with the same entry-level job in the same city my parents live in because free rent looks damn good when you graduate.
After high school I attended University of Oregon, with the intention of becoming a journalist and thinking of myself as a left-liberal. By the end of my Freshman year I’d changed my major and my politics. In winter of my that year I took EC 201 to satisfy a J-school requirement for economics…by the end of the term Ron Davies had me convinced that the J-school could suck it. I spent the rest of college working for a conservative/libertarian magazine and taking as many econ classes as I could pack into my schedule. I think I took 80 something hours of economics, I really don’t remember. Trade, International Finance, Multinational Corps, Econometrics (420, 421, 423), Intermediate Macro and Micro theory, Advanced Macro and Micro theory, Public Economics (441) that first section of Peter Lambert’s Taxation & Inequality class, Money & Banking, Game Theory, Evol. Econ Ideas…I ran out of time and never got around to taking Industrial Org or anything from Bill Harbaugh like I meant to. C’est La Vie.
Unlike Mark Thoma I missed quite a few classes but never a party, the magazine had a lot to do with this. Had I a do-over I’d have spent a fifth year shoring up my middling, completely my fault GPA so I could’ve gone to grad school right away.
As it is, I have a decent job that I like most days at a bank. I’m the analyst and administrator on an incentive comp plan designed by people who know a lot more than I do about banking, but think in a less economic fashion (yay, perverse incentives). I’m starting up some work on our commercial loan portfolio, and the deposit mix, but I still wish I did more math (and was better at it) than I do.
On the whole, though, my life has been easy and I’ve very little to complain about, and a lot to be thankful for. I owe a lot to my parents’ strong values, especially of self-reliance and finishing what one starts. They worked hard to get where they are, and made my easy life possible. Would that everyone could have the same sort of opportunity, and with less government intervention in their lives I bet they could.
