An hereditary meritocracy. The children of the rich and powerful are increasingly well suited to earning wealth and power themselves. That’s a problem.

chairman55 · 4時間前

The way our education system functions is really almost designed to limit social mobility. Most people don't really understand how the world and the job market works when they're teenagers, which is now the time of people's lives where they are pretty much deciding their entire futures via how they react to the education system. Do well in high school, probably go to a good college -- even better if you have some kind of idea of what the most valuable courses of study are and are doing well enough in science/math classes to viably pursue them. All this is very dependent on having parents who invest attention and energy into your education and who can help you make the right choices. And there is really very little opportunity for people past their late teens and early 20s to go back and study a more lucrative field if they didn't do so. It's easy to miss the bus -- and not missing the bus is of monumental importance in how your entire life will turn our career-wise and there's a huge premium there for having attentive, knowledgeable parents. Just look how wealthy, successful parents approach their children's education.

I think what would be needed to fix this would be a radical, fundamental change of the education system. I don't think it's a system that functions well at all, really.

pigsnoutman · 8時間前

The result is that America is one of only three advanced countries that spends more on richer pupils than poor ones, according to the OECD (the other two are Turkey and Israel).

The most solvable problem. Government spending should be at least neutral if not progressive.

Not_Pictured · 7時間前

We need to redistribute good parenting.

OliverSparrow · 11時間前

Lack of social mobility "matters" economically only if human potential is being lost. You would expect high mobility societies - Denmark - to outperform low mobility ones (US). That regularity doesn't show up in the data. If human potential is not being lost, then the issue becomes one of political concenr. The key is to know whether social class is a reflection of assortative mating, in which the gene complex that defines fluid intelligence is strongly selected by social background. We know that about 60-75% of the difference in fluid IQ is defined genetically, so the question is whether bright people and the less bright tend to marry in accord with their intelligence or despite it. This seems to be generally the case:

[Reports a] study, carried out in a Cambridge suburb, which measured the similarity in IQ and some personality traits between spouses. In both sexes mean IQ scores tended to diminish from social class I to V. [...] Assortative marriage was found for IQ components.

However, the outcome social mobility seems to vary sharply between countries. The Economist reports a major study on mobility in the US. The study showed that (1) this had not changed since 1971 - contrary to popular opinion - and that (2) the US has low mobility as compared to other nations. Models of the US population largely agree on the key variables, which emphasise the role of genetics and the crystallisation of IQ through access to education and ability in it.

An OECD study confirms marked differences between countries. (Fig 5.10 repeats the chart shown above for EU conuntries.) Unlike the model that is shown in daigram form above, the OECD did not measure biological variables, such as intelligence. It notes that parental social class has a major effect on that of their offspring, but attributes this to access to education and other effects.

The correlation between crystalised intelligence and social mobility is statistically robust. The question is whether underlying, fluid intelligence is equally strong, or thwarted by poor relative education. Clearly, international differences in mobility imply that this has some validity. However, many studies eg this point to innate mental ability as the dominant feature of real world mobility.

The results show that intelligence test scores in childhood are associated with class mobility in adulthood uniformly across all social classes. There is no evidence that those from underprivileged backgrounds have to be disproportionately able in order to reach the professional classes.

It's worth noting that if (1) intelligence is largely inherited and if (2) intelligent people tend to inter-marry, then nations that offer broad access to economic activities will become more unequal, and sediment into strata. Nations which hold back such access - eg by slow growth, a very focused economy and so on - will have low mobility, generating a spurt in mobility when this situation changes.

jamesqau · 13時間前

Wait... It's wrong to meet a suitable mate, and raise intelligent children and bestow on them knowledge to succeed, because it causes further success?

I'm confused. I don't know how to society anymore.

Jokes aside, there is definitely a problem with donations creating preferences, but let's be honest, the college system isn't the only way to success, far from it. Attitude/mentality is the deciding factor and can be learned, and is readily available for free across the internet. (I went to a community college for 1 week and dropped out, but I've done well for myself, by my standards.)

Never before has it been easier to learn how to compound wealth, but not that that matters.

If the suggestion is anything other than a meritocracy (which is absurd), then I'm not even sure what's being said. Equal opportunity and equal outcome are not the same. Opportunity is everywhere. Always has been, always will be. Telling yourself that it isn't (even if that were true), wouldn't help anyways.

Edit for holy wow the circle jerk here is huge. TIL that insane amounts of people despise rich people and truly believe they cannot be successful. This narrative as opposed to when I was younger where most seemed to believe they could be anything. Truly worrisome indeed, for when people begin to hate the rich, revolutions have happened, and truly horrific events thereafter (Nazi Germany, Communist China, French Revolution).

sangjmoon · 6時間前

South Korea, after the Korean War, was totally devastated. People were struggling to make enough food to survive, but one thing the parents put above almost everything else was the education of their children. Even if all they could do was build something a little better than a shack for a schoolhouse and pay any teacher they could find whatever they could grow on their farms, they did it.

The point is that being rich and powerful helps, but having parents who put their children's education as a priority independent of what anybody else, including the government, says or does is far more important.

alpha_as_f-ck · 7時間前

Charles Murray wrote extensively about this in his book Coming Apart) - which is an interested read based on the demographic and cultural shifts in America since the 1960s.

mrhymer · 3時間前

How is it a problem? How does someone else being rich do any kind of harm to you?

CommodoreKrusty · 8時間前

It's the Matthew Effect. It's human nature and it'll be a very difficult thing to change.

zparks · 7時間前

Perhaps we need additional standards for measuring "success." For example, the article assumes that measures like SAT scores are an indicator of success, but what about measures for happiness, indications of compassion or scores that reflect the subjects propensity for greed or other socio-pathological patterns. I want to raise my son to be successful in his profession because I want him to be wealthy enough to live comfortably, but I also want him to be happy and to care for neighbors and humanity.

nbnb3131 · 5時間前

So long as there are rich parents there will always be advantaged kids. It's just an aspect of free society that I believe will always exist. Equal opportunity can only go so far, the only way to truly achieve perfectly equal opportunity would be to have a mandatory system of homogeneous public schooling and very significant wealth redistribution - essentially we'd be looking at a form of communism/socialism or whatever.

The good news is that in our free society if you're exceptionally hardworking or smart or lucky you can become one of those rich parents and your kids can be advantaged. And more importantly, at the same time if those advantaged kids don't make the most of what they are given they can easily be knocked off their perch (albeit usually only down a couple rungs, there aren't many riches to rags stories).

Freedom doesn't mean utopia, freedom means we'll see a normal distribution of success across a society... the best we can do is try to skew things a little.

LilacRuby · 13時間前

Wasn't there a study posted a few days ago that showed smart poor kids do worse than rich dumbfuck kids.

hippiechan · 5時間前

As much as people (myself included) dislike his conclusions and "solutions" to the problem, this is part of the point that Piketty was making in Capital. Inheritance of wealth helps fortunes grow between generations, and given the fact that wealthy children are better able to accumulate more wealth independent of their parents fortunes, this effect is likely only accelarated.

I'm not saying that we should implement inheritance taxes or have a global wealth tax or anything of the sort, but at the very least, we should recognize that it's a problem when the meritocracy's wealth grows disproportionately more than the rest of society.

SammyD1st · 5時間前

Another great article on this topic:

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2015/09/fall-meritocracy/

Also, anything by Gregory Clark.

California_Viking · 10時間前

The issues, the majority of them, are created by the government.

High education costs due to lack of money going to schools. Inner city schools ignored. Private schools and universities having to jump through hoops while standards are not upheld for public schools. Growing costs and no accountability.

Then slow adaptation of education, not pushing STEM to having little in terms of SKILL training.

Then you have corporate welfare and barriers created by the government.

I could go on and on the rich do get richer and it's because the system in place allows them to do that.

FactimusMaximus · 6時間前

"Who is your daddy and what does he do?"

TotesMessenger · 6時間前

I'm a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:

[/r/socialism] There is so much reddit in this post on r/economy about us low social mobility.

^{If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads.} ^(Info ^/ ^Contact)

almond_butt · 4時間前

editorialized title? it's a problem for whom? not everyone

FailosoRaptor · 4時間前

I am all for policies that help level out the playing field for children. Yeah we should have finance classes in basic education and we should actively try create an environment where school quality is more equal.

However a lot of this disparity is on the parents themselves. You can rephrase this title and have it say that responsible families have responsible children.

Parents who take push education/fiscal responsibility on their children will have children who are educated/fiscally responsible. And generally if these parents believe in these values then they are also going to be well off.

TurtlesAllTheW4yDown · 9時間前

Why is inequality a bad thing?

Or, why is equality a good thing?

It seems that there could be two possible answers to these questions: 1) equality is a good in and of itself or 2) equality is a means to some end. If 1, then the question of 'why is equality good' is unnecessary, because it is being assumed as a first principal. But if two, then what is equality for?

One possible answer to this is that equality is the best way to ensure that the most possible people are excellent. If wealth is not zero-sum, then wealth and power seeming to be hereditary is a good thing. It is good that lots of people have a high chance of making money, so long as their high chance is not lowering the chances of others. So this is not necessarily a problem.

Why do you guys think that equality is a good thing? 1 or 2? And if 2, then why?

Economics

Featured Related Subreddit

Subreddit Rules

調停者