Poverty and empathy

Studies show an inverse relationship between socio-economic background and emotional intelligence.

http://geronimarion.posterous.com/emotional-intelligence-linked-to-socio-econom

In short, those privileged kids don’t give a damn how you feel, at work, that is.

Kids whose fathers fell from grace (Madoff, Skilling) committed suicide (former) or died a mysterious death (later). And we all knew what happened with Hearst and Getty‘s.

This brought to mind another paradox: parents can leave behind earthly belongings, but  can’t fill the kids’ void with stuffs. This applies to both rich and  poor families ( millions of rural Chinese children are left to be raised by relatives, while their parents went to work in the cities).

Mr Rifkin recently published a huge book entitled “the Empathic Civilization“.

In it, he traced human evolution, and recent discoveries in neuron sciences to illustrate our  latest stage: empathy. In other words, all those striving should result in better…