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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

This phenomena (that children are not statistically independent of their grandparents even when controlling for parents) has already been found to be robustly true in Europe and some eastern countries. Gregory Clark wrote a book on it that was widely discussed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book)

The point is that families transmit something across multiple (> 5 generations) that's responsible for strong persistent effects on economic success, and it's almost certainly not money (which can be measured and decays faster).

How can the OP author honestly suggest conclusions about what this means for America without contrasting with Europe, and the known hypotheses? Indeed, Clark argues that multi-generational economic mobility is remarkably constant across vastly different political and economic systems.

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I'm skeptical about whether they can really account for available financial resources, broadly measured. Not just how much money you have, or your parents have, but how much money your more distant relatives have, and your friends and neighbors and their friends.

This can have implications that might not come out in the statistics. Even if you don't have any money, if most of the people you're connected to are mostly financially stable, they are (1) less likely to ask you for help and (2) more likely to help you if you need it. Being from a poor family in a poor neighborhood will likely have the opposite effects - they can't help you as much, and are more likely to need your help.

Do you think that hypothesis would hold up to twin studies and adoption studies? Or if you looked at immigrants who moved to countries with no familial ties?

Those sound like good ways to test it, though they have their limitations too. People looking to adopt probably have a stable situation, and immigrants are usually self-selected.

Often times people will compare with Europe when it advances their agenda, or ignore Asia if it advances their pov or just focus on America when it's convenient. Seldom will people do cross country comparisons.

So, whether your issue is guns, drugs, police brutality, censorship, inequality, bias, gender equality, etc. People tend to focus the studies in such a way to make their case and ignore things which would make things more muddled.

Part of the reason why I have not much respect of social sciences. Scientific rigor there seems rather flawed. Even the fact that the topics and tabus change like a slow fashion cycle shows that annealing the truth isn't really the highest commandment there.

A publishing system that treats repeating and potentially nullifying old studies the same as new findings, would go a long way though. There's also no reason why it has to be so linear. Why can't a reviewer accept, but ask the question 'what abou Europe?' publicly, to which thr same or other researchers could attach their studies and get on a fast track to acceptance as well? You know, like an Academic wikipedia in shape of a journal.

Gregory Clark has compared social mobility across the U.K., China and Sweden at the least. The rates of social mobility are almost identical in all of them.

It's genetics, why is this such a mystery? The whole point of evolution is that you pass on good traits. When people do well, they pair with other people who are good genetically, and through the generations, their children do well. Why is this such a mystery?

It's not only genetics. Parents who do well know how the system works and pass that knowledge on to their children. Children who come from poverty have a lot of learning to do and it's hard to do this without role models.

The compounding effects of this learning gap can't be overstated.

One of my best friends who is very intelligent and successful came from a working class family that didn't emphasize sound personal finance education to say the least.

He kept his savings in HS in his "sock in a drawer" account.

I came from an upper middle class family that was the opposite. I was given a share or two of stocks for birthday gifts sometimes (often at my request instead of toys) when I was young to educate me on their value and was taught from a very young age to invest, save in a bank, build credit, and live below my means.

While my friend is doing well financially, you can perhaps guess at how much of his money is invested vs mine.

This story plays out in numerous other ways that also can lead to compounding effects with things like education, health, criminal activity, etc.

These things are picked up on by children from all parts of the family. If your family generally has their act together, knows how to be smart with money, etc. there's probably a good chance of that rubbing off on kids which sets them down a certain path in life that might be very different otherwise.

I have a friend who keeps lots of money in bank accounts, too. He is aware that he could be investing it, but he just doesn't seem to care. It appears to be half "everyone is expecting another financial crisis anyway, if you buy now you're buying high" and half "I just can't be arsed".

Did you want to say "The compounding effects of this learning gap can't be overstated?"

Doh, thank you for the catch and pardon my sleep-deprived typo.

Don't forget connections. If your parents know the right people, even in passing, it can help you in substantial ways, and the compounding effects of such benefits early in life (e.g. being able to get into a good college, being able to find a decent job after college, etc.) can translate to significant social mobility.

The genetic explanation doesn't even require a correlation between the traits of people who pair up.

Suppose your grandparents genetic "quality" is statistically independent, so you have four quantities g1, g2, g3, g4. Your parents quality is approximately (g1 + g2) / 2 and (g3 + g4) / 2 and yours is (g1 + g2 + g3 + g4) / 4.

Now if we assume that income is a noisy measure of your "g" then it will follow that your income is correlated with your grandparents' even after accounting for your parents' income.

Genetics do not work that way.

The problem is that there is too little variation inside families and too much among families.

Let's say that there are exactly two alleles: successful and not successful. So, successful people pairs with successful people and have successful offspring, as you propose. But then, there should be little variability among successful unrelated families, and that is just not so.

Let's say that there are many different alleles that combine in lots of ways: then, there should be lots of variability inside families.

"But then, there should be little variability among successful unrelated families, and that is just not so."

This does not follow from your first statement. It's not a logical conclusion. For your reduction to a binary set of alleles it does, but it does not come close to being an analogy for real life.

Let me try to be more clear: I make two opposite hypotheses: two alleles versus many alleles. The two alleles hypothesis would imply little variability among families, many alleles would imply much variability inside families. Where is my logical error?

Many alleles does not imply more variability if there's a chance of some of those alleles cancelling out.

Think about it in terms of coin flips. One coin flip is random: you get heads or tails with 50% probability. A small number of coin flips can lead to large swings. However, many coin flips reliably produces a Gaussian, with only small statistical fluctuations.

Now imagine that you decree that for the first ten coin flips, if the result comes up tails you'll ignore it. With many flips, you will still get a (somewhat smaller) Gaussian, but with the mean # of heads shifted over by 5.

This is what natural selection & assortative mating does: it doesn't prevent the millions of coin flips from happening, but it eliminates some number of "known bad" outcomes, which will shift the mean over by some amount even as variability remains roughly constant.

Assortative mating: it would tend to reduce variability within families, while preserving inter-family variability.

What about Epigenetics? We may all have the genes reauired for success, but they could get activated/deactivated in a manner that is inheritable.

While I agree that genetics can play a part, it's certainly not the case that people who 'do well' necessarily 'pair with other people who are good genetically.'

> The point is that families transmit something across multiple (> 5 generations) that's responsible for strong persistent effects on economic success, and it's almost certainly not money (which can be measured and decays faster).

Has it actually been proven that it is not money or stuff that money can buy?

It's been awhile since I was reading into this stuff, but I believe the idea is that these familial success correlations last a long time (Maybe multiple centuries? Certainly at least one) where as money and other forms of success (which are the things we are actually measuring) have significant noise on much shorter timescales. Those fluctuations would kill the long-term correlations if money were doing the heavy lifting.

In other words, if this were being transmitted through money, you'd just condition on the parents (or grandparents) amount of money and expect to find that the success of children to then be independent (unless, e.g., children were all digging up gold secretly left to them by their long-dead great-great-grandparents). But instead, I think the idea is that even after you condition on success of parents and grand parents, the success of great-great-grandparents still has strong predictive ability.

Indeed, if you thought money was playing a significant role, you'd expect that exogenous injections of money would lead to long lasting effects, but in fact they decay very quickly.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/26/compound-interest-is-th...

That still allows for the possibility that money is buying something that one's ancestors can robustly transmit across many generations (often bundled up under the term "culture"), but then you could test that hypothesis with twin studies and adoption studies.

Anyways, that's a cartoon version, and undoubtedly simplified and biased by the small number of people I was reading. Would love to get counter data.

I liked Gladwell's take in Outliers on this topic.

Impoverished immigrants are more successful than American born poor because of the belief that amount of effort has a high correlation with success/results. This belief is cultivated through culture values (ex: Chinese proverbs on working hard) and working in a profession with a direct link between effort and result (owning tailor shops, dry cleaners, restaurants, etc.).

That mentality is transferred to the immigrant's children, who end up becoming more successful than the children of the American poor despite their parents' inability to teach them English or American culture (advantages that the children of American born poor comparatively have).

And, well, immigrants are somewhat more motivated than non-immigrants, all other factors held constant.

This is kind of pre-selection. Immigrants are, by definition the people who were brave and clever enough to get out of their own country and come to their destination. Therefore they are better mentally prepared to succeed in life than general population.

There is also selection bias among them. I.e. It takes motivation/drive/purpose to become an immigrant and travel to another country for work, permanently.

Its rare for family firms to last for 5 generations on one of the rare exception that I know in the UK is Charles wells (the brewer) when one of the board is a family member.

Isn't it super rare for firms of all kinds to last for 5 generations?

Are you seriously suggesting that Humans who have migrated to America are somehow 100% identical to Europeans who have not migrated?

Of course. After all he is seriously suggesting that:

There are genes that are present in every rich person across the planet but absent in every poor one.

That the human genome is so poorly understood, there's plenty room for that hidden in it.

That these genes evolved in the last 15k years (because before agriculture, wealth was limited to what you could carry and everyone was a generalist and so there was no selective pressure)

That they did not evolve at a single site like every other gene (because then we would find all the rich people on earth clustered in one spot with no poor people around with a density spreading outward) so...

The genes appeared coincidentally in every civilization and society independently the same time. In the last 15k years. With very mild or no selective pressure.

And this was discovered by one person (Gregory Clark) with no background in genetics and in opposition to near universal criticism while, coincidentally, telling a story that comforts the rich.

But at least it's not eugenics.

I believe these type of statements beg the question with culture giving rise to monetary success.

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