> huge part of wealth is determined by intellect.
Ignoring the huge problems inherent in this idea of "intellect" as some quantifiable quality, this isn't close to true. Parent education and income is by far the biggest predictor of future success.
> richer people would have smarter babies than poor people.
Let's see your evidence, please.
Actually, 42% of children in the US born in the bottom quintile are most likely to stay there, and another 42% move up to the second and middle quintile. This means that 16% end up in the 4th and 5th quintile. Hardly a "tiny, tiny percentage".
Source: http://www.economicmobility.org/assets/pdfs/EMP_Across_Gener...
Only 6% of the bottom 20% make it to the top 20%, so I’d guess a very small percentage become “self-made millionaires”.
That report you link is great, thanks.
The barriers between the lower class and the middle class (including its upper reaches, the professional class) are cultural, not economic. Even people who seem to be held back by economic barriers are held back because of cultural barriers -- they don't know how to play the game and inspire the trust (both personal trust and the kind of impersonal trust embodied in a good academic, criminal, and credit record) that allows them to overcome the economic barriers.
The barriers are easiest to see in extreme cases. For example, inner city adults who can't keep the jobs they're placed in because being ordered around fills them with rage, or because they don't realize they can't disappear for a week without telling anyone, even if they were dealing with their father's death and funeral in another state. Or poor kids who don't know there are lots of federal student loan programs with favorable terms. I know savvy kids who took loans they didn't need because the terms were ludicrously favorable, but some kids drop out of school and take menial jobs because they don't know that debt is a normal, accepted way of paying for college.
The extreme cases are easier to see, but there are milder cultural challenges that are much more pervasive. Having worked for bosses from other cultures, I know that the consequences for being late with work depend greatly on how the situation is framed, and the "right" way to say "I worked my butt off on this, but it's harder than I thought" or "I've barely worked on this because you've had me putting out fires for the last two weeks" is dependent on culture. Even something as simple as acknowledging criticism is culturally sensitive. If your boss thinks you are blowing off criticism or being disrespectful, it can be a huge disaster. Understanding the differences isn't always enough. I quit working for one guy because I just couldn't adjust to him. (It may have been cultural, or just personal.) He was very emotional and assumed a close personal relationship with me. I like to play things cool and assumed that our friendship outside of work and our working relationship were separate. If I played it cool and didn't get emotional when he did, he thought I was blowing him off or showing indifference to him and our work. I was extremely stressed out by his displays of emotion at work. I found it extremely draining to try to respond with the appropriate emotions when all I really felt was distress and resentment that he was polluting (as I saw it) our working relationship with his unfiltered emotions. My only idea of how to display unpleasant emotions in the workplace was to mute them and deal with them by dispassionately discussing the concrete issues from which they stemmed. I was utterly miserable until I quit -- probably he was, too. And this was between two people with similar liberal political and moral convictions who were both educated in American universities.
I think one of the biggest cultural questions that causes problems between people is what it means to have authority to give someone else orders. To me, the power to give orders is inherent in roles. If someone is my boss, they can tell me what to do. They might give me latitude, and I might try to persuade them to give me different orders, but if they give me orders, that's fine, I do what I'm told. It doesn't mean they're higher or better than me. It doesn't mean they're smarter or stronger. It's just a matter of the roles we play in the business (or sports team or what-not.) In some cultures, authority means personal superiority. Naturally, these different interpretations create anger, insult, and resentment when they come together.
The Republicans played on this expertly when they described Sonia Sotomayor as "bossy." It won't sink her nomination, but it evoked a stereotype that has very intense emotional connections. It worked perfectly on me. I grew up in a place with a sizable Hispanic population. In Hispanic culture, authority tends to mean superiority. (One book I read said that in Europe, cultures believe in authority in rough proportion to how strongly they were influenced by the Roman Empire.) Of course, teachers have authority over students. When my Hispanic teachers talked to me, they talked down -- down from their superior intelligence, wisdom, education... all assumed to be superior because they had authority over me. My non-Hispanic teachers largely did not talk to me that way -- their default assumption was that we were equals who happened to be playing roles (teacher and student) in which they had the authority to boss me around and grade my performance. (Of course, there were exceptions on both sides.) The anger I felt at the way my Hispanic teachers treated me... well, I can still feel it today. To my mind, they had no good reason to assume they were better than me, and their assumption interfered with my education because they maintained their pretense of superiority at the expense of their academic objectivity. To their minds, they had to maintain a pretense of personal superiority, because otherwise they would lose their authority to give orders and maintain order in the classroom. So they talked down to me, patronized me, and made a point of responding to any show of knowledge or intelligence on my part by bossing me around even more. Now I'm probably rambling because the anger is running away with me.... But you can imagine that a Hispanic kid dealing with non-Hispanic authority figures might misread their attitude and think they are weak and should be disregarded.
Anyway, I'm sure many white Americans have the same kind of painful culture-clash memories of Hispanic authority figures as I do, so describing Sonia Sotomayor as "bossy" and "overbearing" is a clever way of turning her, in my and other people's heads, into an authoritarian, patronizing Hispanic stereotype. Which, if true, would be a great reason for excluding her from the court, since the political ideals of the United States are (all my liberal tolerance aside) incompatible with belief in the natural superiority of those in power. But there's no reason to believe she is anything like that stereotype, and there are excellent reasons to believe otherwise. She was successful at Princeton and successful in the U.S. legal system. Along the way, she worked productively with, and earned the respect of, lots of people to whom authoritarianism is anathema. I'm sure that given what she has accomplished, she must be conscious of the issue, must understand it thoroughly, and probably comes down on the same side of it as most other Americans. But the stereotype retains its emotional power. Even after thinking through the issue and rationally reassuring myself, the stereotype still holds sway over my emotions. (Damn those culturally savvy Republican attack dogs! They've taken over a little part of my brain :-( )
Kids of professors have a whole host of social and material advantages that can't just be boiled down to “better culture.” I really don’t think that the ability of professors’ kids growing up to be lawyers or doctors really says all that much about overall “social mobility.”
The advantages I had were basically four:
1. My parents taught me to read before I went to school. It is a cultural difference. Some people take it for granted that the schools will teach their children to read. Some people regard it as borderline child abuse if you don't teach your kids to read before they start preschool. My parents were pretty chill, but I could read before I entered preschool at age four -- they took that for granted as one of their parental responsibilities.
2. My father was an academic, I had early academic success, and I took it for granted that I was smarter than other kids. That probably had two causes. First, reading. I was taught to read early, and everyone in my family read. It was just something that one did. Second, I was probably exposed to a more analytical style of discourse at home than other kids were. So I was effectively "smarter" when it came to academic stuff, though stupider at other stuff.
3. I had middle-class expectations. Of course I was going to college and going to enter a smart-person profession. I couldn't understand why other kids didn't glom on to that possibility as soon as it was presented to them. Why did other, less enjoyable, more painful prospects seem more probable or more natural to them? I could see an easy path for them to lots of different things: a college education, a good job, maybe a professional degree. They weren't stupid, but they seemed to assume a "stupid person" fate for themselves. It baffled me. This difference is also cultural. It wasn't a physical or systemic barrier that somebody placed in front of them. It was a barrier that was psychologically engrained in them.
4. I understood how school and college worked. Actually, I didn't really. I didn't know that you could ask for extensions and so forth. I didn't know you could ask professors for help; I thought only obnoxious stupid bimbos did that. I could have known these things if I had asked my dad, but I didn't. But I did know that you were supposed to study and read and turn in all your work on time, and you were supposed to read beyond the assigned work if you wanted to do really well. And I knew you couldn't trust other people or do what was "normal" because a lot of people were going to fail and fall by the wayside. That cynicism, I'm convinced, would save a lot of people. A lot of people are good enough, smart enough, disciplined enough, etc. but at some point naively follow the example of someone they shouldn't. I knew better than that. You do the work, you read, you do better than everybody else because half of them are going to fail. That isn't intellectual knowledge or insider information: that is a cultural attitude, a different but equally important form of knowledge.
So yes, culture is a huge deal. My culture was "better" in the sense that it resulted in a more secure, freer existence for me.
I really don’t think that the ability of professors’ kids growing up to be lawyers or doctors really says all that much about overall “social mobility.”
It says social mobility can be achieved with no social connections and only a modest amount of money. It says social mobility is socially and economically within the grasp of a huge number of people who miss out for other reasons, and those other reasons are cultural.
