Donald Trump has a guy on his payroll whose job it is to add ‘billionaire’ before his name everywhere it appears on Wikipedia
Data on how personality varies around the world is puzzling. Take the dimension of conscientiousness. Among individuals within a particular country, those with higher conscientiousness tend to earn more money and live longer. […] Compare across countries, however, and what you find is that richer countries with longer life expectancy tend to have lower average conscientiousness. Now a new study has tested a possible explanation for this paradox - perhaps there’s a systematic bias between countries in people’s tendency to tick more extreme scores on questionnaires.
Using Swedish registry data, we study the impact of class origin on becoming part of the business elite between 1993 and 2007 for men aged 35–44 years. The elite is defined as the top 1 per cent of wage earners within large firms. We find a clear working class disadvantage and, with time, a polarization between those of working class origin and others. Decomposition analyses indicate that differences in educational attainment levels cause a large part of the gap, but less so over time. Differences in personality traits measured at around the age of 18 years also help explain the class origin differentials, and more so over time. The decomposition analyses indicate that the net effect of cognitive abilities is small. The results suggest a change in the value of education and personality in the labour market over time, but as men of working class origins have disadvantages in both domains, the relative disadvantage of coming from the working class was rather stable during the period 1993–2007.
photo { Duane Michals }
