Don't say “they steal our manufacturing jobs” before your children!

In last commentary "culture is your destiny", I mentioned that our own children will be influenced by our own culture, and it is our responsibility to teach them the good virtues and good work ethics for them to be able to compete with others when the grow up.

There is empirical evidence that even if we don’t teach them, they will learn from us. Professors Raquel Fernandez and Alessandra Fogli study the work and fertility behavior of women 30-40 years old, born in the U.S., but whose parents were born elsewhere, and find that past female labor force participation and total fertility rates from the country of ancestry have strong explanatory power on the work and fertility outcome of these second-generation immigrants.

So, please behave yourself before your children! If you always talk before them about “they steal our manufacturing jobs”, they will start thinking that “other people steal my high school graduate certificate” or lying about "The dog eats my college degree" when they don’t study hard and fail the tests.

Culture: an empirical investigation of beliefs, work, and fertility (PDF file)
Abstract: We study the effect of culture on important economic outcomes by using the 1970 census to examine the work and fertility behavior of women born in the U.S. but whose parents were born elsewhere. We use past female labor force participation and total fertility rates from the country of ancestry as our cultural proxies. These variables should capture, in addition to past economic and institutional conditions, the beliefs commonly held about the role of women in society (i.e., culture). Given the different time and place, only the beliefs embodied in the cultural proxies should be potentially relevant. We show that these cultural proxies have positive and significant explanatory power for individual work and fertility outcomes, even after controlling for possible indirect effects of culture. We examine alternative hypotheses for these positive correlations and show that neither unobserved human capital nor networks are likely to be responsible.