A friend pointed me at an extraordinarily well written series of articles in WaPo titled "Old South Goes With the Wind"

Rizwan Momin arrived in Atlanta in 1985 from the Indian state of Gujarat. He had $310 in his pocket. His uncle had just purchased a sagging, white-owned Dairy Queen in a black neighborhood in Atlanta. Riz went to work for his uncle, mopping, sweeping, saving, scheming, wearing $3 shirts from K-Mart, sleeping on the floor, working day and night at the DQ except when he went to his second job at a laminations factory on Buford Highway, where he tended the boiler. Seventeen years later, Riz owns nine Dairy Queens in the Atlanta metro area. He's one of the largest franchisees in the Southeast. Drives the Porsche on some days, the Infiniti SUV on others, Indian music blasting from the Bose speakers in the wood-grain console.

..."Forget the white kids with the studs in the tongue," Riz says. "Indians are gonna work for you. At the beginning, they work for minimum wage. Then little raise, little raise, slowly, slowly. Everyone live together; they are saving money, six people in household working, they bank 80 percent of their money and use 20 percent for expenses. They don't drink, no clubs, no fancy clothes. Suddenly, they have $60,000 in the bank. Then they will buy the Subway or the Blimpie."

Yet another classic immigrant success story stemming from dogged execution in an utterly unglamorous environment.   My direct family was comparatively privileged (dad was an Engineer working in Defense / Aerospace) but I certainly knew a couple of families who fit this mold.  

Education -- while virtuous -- isn't the fountainhead of this wealth, it's much more old fashioned, elbow grease and is something that represents the true source of much of the domestic wealth in the US.  Other country's schools may produce better math/science scores & pedigrees than ours (a debatable claim, BTW) but we've got a system that produces efficiently run Wal-Mart branches with better every day low prices.   And this *really* does matter more to the economy, on net, than most other comparatively intellectual pursuits.  (would GNXP christen this a form of Low IQ wealth?)

I'm not trying to denigrate the value of education -- esp as a geek myself -- but am just pointing out that there's a lot more to GNP than just a population that gets good grades and performs biomed or software work.   What class in school *really* measures & instills this type of doggedness and self sacrifice?  And the economy as a whole benefits far more from the distributed piecemeal contributions of a network of Dairy Queens than the latest government-backed prestige techno-science project.

But, in an almost Hollywood twist, there's something apparently sinister brewing in second, younger generation:

The source of [Rizwan's] worry is his cousin, Ali Momin, 22, who is the night supervisor at the Stockbridge store. Ali could be the heir apparent if he wanted.

...Ali came to Stockbridge from India when he was 16. He dropped out of Eagle's Landing High School his senior year. He wanted to hurry up and get started in the DQ pipeline.

But unlike Riz when Riz started out, Ali won't wear $3 shirts from K-Mart. His cologne is Dreamer by Versace. His savings account is zero. "Riz tells me a whole buncha times, 'Don't be wasting money,' " Ali says. "I keep that in my head for a couple of days, then it goes away."

This story, unfortunately, is also something I've seen play out repeatedly.   G2 gets wrapped up in the entitlement culture of his social teenage peers.  And if his peers are bitter, disenfranchised and don't equate money as the product of work, then G2 generally doesn't either.

As an aside, I've always wondered how much of the immigrant work ethic stems from social isolation in the new world? (among other factors of course).  The 6 guys living in Rizwan's household all earning minimum wage but somehow packing away 80% into savings clearly aren't aware of dominant US social norms.  Going out to movies, having nice clothes, etc. aren't a required part of life for them.  Consequently, Rizwan didn't feel like he's missing out on something by not meeting up with friends at some hot new restaurant.   Or working all day/night 6 days a week.

By contrast, the nephew is NOT as socially isolated and sees a large part of self actualization deriving from maintaining his relationships w/ his peers rather than securing success for his family.  His peers presumably appreciate his Dreamer cologne.  

(Alas, I'm personally a tad more like the nephew than the uncle here....  I can't go for too long without finding myself in some exquisite new SF restaurant)

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