Today my wife read to me an excerpt from a thread at one of her favorite discussion sites regarding the socioeconomic makeup of non-vaccinators and breastfeeders. A study concluded that people who either breastfeed, didn’t vaccinate or a combination of both had a tendency to be well educated, high income earners. These findings set off a flaming thread debating the well educated/high income earning findings.
One argument in particular is that high income earners do not come in contact with individuals that have had complications resulting from not vaccinating. Look, here’s my take on it. It all comes down to the fact that generally speaking, most people are stupid, ignorant, poorly educated, or just plain dumb. The correlation between high income earning and higher education is that smarter people make more money (for the most part, perhaps with the glaring exception of the Spears family). The only exception that I find to the more education/more income argument is that if the individual has decided to become a professor and therefore has taken a vow of poverty.
All you have to do is look around you to see examples of how stupid our society is. Most people are searching the web for pictures of Britney Spear’s pudenda (it’s Latin, look it up) rather than for information regarding the perils of vaccination. MySpace and Facebook are far more exciting for the average web user than La Leche League’s homepage. Who is the individual who rises above the din and reads sites that actually matter? The well educated (and subsequently higher earner) is the surfer that reads sites that matter, and furthermore it is the well educated surfer that understands what they are reading. The general populous wouldn’t understand the information even if you were able to get them to read the sites in the first place.
It all comes down to the truth; something that most people are entirely unwilling to mention in public. Most people are stupid, and it’s the well educated (read: smarter) minority that rise above the crap in the media, and search for answers on their own. Oh, and that’s another point. Finding these answers require some level of effort. A willingness to put in extra effort to accomplish something is often a prerequisite to being a high earner. Remember, psychology is the study of the obvious and sociology is the study of the painfully obvious. The answers are right in front of you if you are willing to look for them.
UPDATE:
I had another idea. Top wage earners tend to afford themselves better health care. Better health care comes from better educated doctors. Low wage earners are often relegated to clinic level care, and at that level, they shoot everyone, and as fast possible because they have no way of knowing if the child will ever come back for the balance of their shots. Again, just the truth.
