Welcome to General Chat - GAW Community Area

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Yesterdays General Chat

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– Plebbitimmigrant 2 points 107 days ago +2 / -0

Little known fact. The Children of the Upper and Middle Class make up the majority of Modern U.S Military recruits. The poor and low-income families generally have children enlist at far, far lower rates.

Which defeats the popular modern misconception many people. Including many Americans have. Of the U.S Military being this mass of the poor conned into enlisting for three squares, a bed, and a meager salary/benefits.

In essence. The people doing the bulk of the fighting and dying are the Middle and Upper Class. And the wealthy are in fact statistically more likely to send their kids to war than the poor.

Edit: Please disregard this comment. I misread the data and sample size included in the study I used as a basis for the comment. As u/Bubble_Bursts pointed out during his own review of the data. So it seemed more statistically significant than it actually was.

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– bubble_bursts [S] 3 points 107 days ago +3 / -0

Sauce for this?

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– Plebbitimmigrant 2 points 107 days ago +2 / -0

https://www.afba.com/military-life/new-research-debunks-myths-about-who-enlists-and-why/

(Link to study referenced in above article is below)

https://ia800501.us.archive.org/29/items/us-army-draft-policy/asoni2022.pdf

https://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/whos-joining-military-myth-vs-fact.html

https://depts.washington.edu/wcpc/class-raceethnicity-and-military-service-recent-wars

(Secondary study linked in above link. Shows bulk of data skews towards lower-middle class. But nonetheless still middle class)

Probably one of those things where things can vary a bit depending on specific parameters.

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– bubble_bursts [S] 1 point 107 days ago +1 / -0

Phew, had to go down 20 pages before I can see what data they are using:

Our main source of data is the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997
cohort (NLSY97). The NLSY97 is a nationally representative survey maintained
by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics which contains a rich set of data about
the participants, including labour market history, cognitive and non-cognitive
skill test scores, socioeconomic background, and military service. The sample
is comprised of 8,984 youths born between 1980 and 1984 initially interviewed in 1997 and in every year since. The individual is determined to have
joined the military if he or she reports to having served at least one year in the
regular military or the reserve. Socioeconomic status is estimated through
family income and family wealth in 1997, when nearly the entire sample still
lived with their parents. We also calculate education as the number of years of
education completed by 2014.

In an effort to test whether the change in technology, tactics, operations
and doctrines embraced by the U.S. military since the late 1970s has driven a
change in the demographic composition of the U.S. military, we compare our
results from the NLSY97 data to similar figures calculated using the National
Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 cohort (NLSY79) data. Similar to the
NLSY97, the NLSY79 data is also a nationally representative sample of
young men and women, all between 14 and 21 years of age in 1979, maintained by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The survey includes 12,686
individuals interviewed annually until 1994 and then every two years thereafter. The BLS collected data on labour market history, cognitive and noncognitive skill test scores, socioeconomic background, and military service.
We use the information in the NLSY79 survey data to build measures of
parental socio-economic background and military enlistment analogous to
those constructed using the NLSY97 data.

N=8984 and 12686. Honestly, thats a very small sample, probably the poor families didnt even take part in that survey.

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– Plebbitimmigrant 2 points 107 days ago +2 / -0

Huh. Now I seem kinda silly. I now realize I misread it the first time and thought it said 126,686.

12,686 is in fact peanuts in comparison to the overall number of people who served.

Still an interesting datapoint. But statistically not exceptionally useful

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