What's interesting about this is that it barely scratches the surface.
Assets and money are just some of the things that people inherit from their parents. Many people inherit their entire careers from their parents through social connections - These people would probably be classified as 'self made' which makes the statistics seem more benign than they actually are.
I bet if you counted out all those people who were raised with a silver spoon, the percentage of real 'self made' people would probably be less than 1%.
Fortunately, we don’t have to rely on guesses, we have measures of economic mobility. In particular, how likely is it that someone born into a particular quintile moves to a higher (or lower) quintile?
> If a parent's income had no effect on a child's opportunity for future upward mobility, approximately 20% of poor children who started in the bottom quintile (in the bottom 20% of the US range of incomes) would remain there as poor adults. At the other end of income spectrum, if children were born into wealthy families in the top 20%, only 20% would stay in that top income category if their mobility opportunities were equal to every other child's in the country.
> But long-term income statistics show this isn't happening. Mobility opportunities are different for poor and wealthy children in the US. Parental incomes and parental choices of home locations while raising children appear to be major factors in that difference. According to a 2012 Pew Economic Mobility Project study[19] 43% of children born into the bottom quintile (bottom 20%) remain in that bottom quintile as adults. Similarly, 40% of children raised in the top quintile (top 20%) will remain there as adults. Looking at larger moves, only 4% of those raised in the bottom quintile moved up to the top quintile as adults. Around twice as many (8%) of children born into the top quintile fell to the bottom.[19] 37% of children born into the top quintile will fall below the middle. These findings have led researchers to conclude that "opportunity structures create and determine future generations' chances for success. Hence, our lot in life is at least partially determined by where we grow up, and this is partially determined by where our parents grew up, and so on."[20]
This would all be true if we were all genetically identical. However psychometrics has proven and now cognitive genomics is confirming that valuable mental characteristics have very large genetic components.
Intelligence is the capacity to achieve your goals. Intelligence is highly heritable. A goal of most people is to become wealthy. So people who acquire wealth tend to be much more intelligent than average, as wealth is graded on a curve. Thus though there is regression to the mean, their children will be more intelligent than average, and so worth more as employees and more likely to succeed even if they were put up for adoption.
This has unfortunate class implications, but putting cotten in our ears is not going to help. We must separate the normative from the descriptive. This is horrible and unfair. But natural selection is heartless algorithm literally running on death and suffering. We should not expect it to distribute capacities in a manner that is aligned with the prescriptions of our flimsy ideologies.
Wealth distribution would not fix this.
But let us seize the high-IQ alleles and distribute them to the proletariat!
Such thoughts are verboten now, even as our tools for such interventions get ever sharper and assortative mating magnifies these differences to a point where it is getting difficult to ignore.
> Intelligence is the capacity to achieve your goals. Intelligence is highly heritable. A goal of most people is to become wealthy. So people who acquire wealth tend to be much more intelligent than average, as wealth is graded on a curve
> improve the life quality of those born with less potential
While a noble goal, I don't believe this is a goal shared by the majority of the population. I think if you ran a poll between "improve the life quality of those born with less potential" and "improve the progress of humanity", the results would favor the later.
Is it better to bring fresh cold water to all, or hot and cold water to some? If it cost $100 to each person for either, I believe that those who possessed $100 would pay for hot water for themselves.
There's an argument for "do both", but that's not always realistic. Those without can force the issue with democracy, but if they force the issue too far, bad things are known to happen from history. I'd be wary of forcing it too far, but your opinion is your own.
> While a noble goal, I don't believe this is a goal shared by the majority of the population.
Then why do most countries have welfare for the poor?
> I think if you ran a poll between "improve the life quality of those born with less potential" and "improve the progress of humanity", the results would favor the later.
What's the point of improving the progress of humanity if not to actually make life better for the majority of humans?
In a few decades the majority of the population might find _themselves_ poor due to not being born with enough potential to compete with automation and robots. Should we keep engineering the economy such as to only improve life quality for the most fortunate?
> Then why do most countries have welfare for the poor?
Because of democracy.
The rest of your points are good and I agree with them. Just pointing out that "improve the life quality of those born with less potential" is probably not a goal most people strive for. I do hope I am wrong, but I don't believe I am.
This idea was explored over a century ago in H. G. Wells' classic "The Time Machine" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine), in which over time humanity split into two distinct species by the process you describe.
There's a fairly strong correlation between IQ and income. Yes, IQ is not the exact same thing as intelligence, but it's the best measure we have available.
Also you're conflating "value-creation" with "make money" in your comment which muddles the issue. Making more money is often associated with greater value creation, but it's not strictly necessary.
Assets and money are just some of the things that people inherit from their parents. Many people inherit their entire careers from their parents through social connections - These people would probably be classified as 'self made' which makes the statistics seem more benign than they actually are.
I bet if you counted out all those people who were raised with a silver spoon, the percentage of real 'self made' people would probably be less than 1%.