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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

The more influence you have on your child economic outcomes the less merit based the society. Ideally it really should be close to 20%. Further, someone going from 19.9% to 20% is a tiny change. The most important number is from each quintuple to top 0.01%.

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I agree with this. The movement to and from the very top percentile is much more important that this talk of quintiles.

But I don't think my original statement is anti-merit. If I teach my five year old to use VI and write C, and she becomes some sort of genius due to the training I have given her, doesn't she therefore have more 'merit'? Certainly being in a higher quintile would make me more likely to teach her those things.

That's not merit. It's opportunity. A poor kid with absentee parents has as much merit as your daughter.

Do you mean intrinsic human worth or innate genetic potential to become highly skilled?

I thought merit typically meant a person's ambition and skill set, regardless if it comes from nature or nurture.

edit: Merit can't mean 'innate human worth'. If it did, then all humans on earth would have equal merit, and terms like 'merit-based scholarship' and 'meritocracy' would be meaningless.

The point is that as a result of being high income, you can provide opportunities for your child that someone of low income cannot. You can call that "merit" if you want, but it's in no sense fair or equal. If your daughter were raised by a poor family, why should her economic potential be worse? Why should Zuckerberg's daughter's economic potential be so much better?

It isn't fair. My only point is that everything a parent does, from the food they feed their children to the books they read them will affect the way that child grows and develops. These small changes have huge effects later in life. This is well documented. And of course humans will always tend to raise their children the way they were raised. And those postitive traits that can be instilled in a child will always reduce economic mobility. So what can be done about it? Can we prevent a person in the upper quintile (your typical HN reader) from feeding their child a balanced diet? Would that be fair? Can we assume that a person in the lowest quintile won't feed their child properly, and take away their ability to do so prematurely a la Minority Report?* That wouldn't be fair either. That's because nothing is fair.

So we are not going to reach 80% mobility out of a quintile. We can't, without producing some sci-fi dystopia. 66% might be ok, I don't really know. But I think the article's presentation of 66% as a problem without much further elaboration is troublesome. Also, I assume (without looking it up) that the author probably selected mobility out of the bottom 20% instead of 10% or 25% or whatever because it probably produced the best "stats" to bolster the claim that mobility is stagnant in the US.

*We can provide them financial support, but we can't make them do anything.

> So what can be done about it? Can we prevent a person in the upper quintile (your typical HN reader) from feeding their child a balanced diet? Would that be fair?

Of course not, and no one sane thinks we should actively hamper development of upper-class children. The argument is that we can and should do more to provide additional opportunity to lower-class children.

> So we are not going to reach 80% mobility out of a quintile. We can't, without producing some sci-fi dystopia.

I agree we aren't likely to see that.

> But I think the article's presentation of 66% as a problem without much further elaboration is troublesome.

56%, not 66%. And I don't know what the ideal number is, either, but almost half of people born into poverty staying there does seem high to me. I suspect there's a lot more nuance that needs to be captured, too. We'd see 100% "mobility" if we simply swapped the bottom two quintiles, but that wouldn't actually address real mobility.

You're right, the US can improve. 56% is low. I just dislike the entire metric of mobility out of the bottom quintile.

Generally being in top 10-5% in the 1600's is worse than being top 50-10% now which has little to do with individual merit. So, IMO the focus should be how good your children are off on the absolute scale not just relative to their peers. Because being 'poor' in the star trek universe may be much better than being 'rich' now.

Now, which tends to help society more when it's run by intelligent and well educated or peoples who's grand parents where intelligent and well educated? I would much rather have a CEO that's competent vs. one whose parents knew how to hack Harvard's admissions process. Continuing this line of thinking having a better public education system makes it harder for your child to reach the top X%, but on an absolute scale your child is better off in a well educated society.

Thus, all things being equal, the better influence you have on your child's success the worse off they will likely be.

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