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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it was the middle and upper classes that came in that first wave. But almost all of them did come with nothing, only small portions of the ultra rich were able to sneak out any signicant amount of wealth. The Castro regime did not allow you to take your worldly possessions with you. Bank accounts were frozen, homes were inventoried, and bags were searched. But they all felt lucky enough to escape with their lives and freedoms. And they did bring the values and virtues that served them well in their previous lives.

I also reject your premise that all of these people were profiting directly from the Batista dictatorship. There was corruption in Cuba, but there was also capitalism.

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>And they did bring the values and virtues that served them well in their previous lives.

And the skills, education, and practical know-how: how to manage money, how to start a business, how to get your kids a good education. And perhaps in some cases the vices that had served them well: how to find a loophole, how to trade favors, how to fudge the truth to your benefit.

In other words, the intangibles of privilege.

I think both you and the original commenter agree that the "intangibles" make a significant (perhaps decisive) contribution to the heritability on outcomes. But that's where you both disagree with the article, which argues for the importance of "tangible" factors (growing up in a neighborhood with exclusionary zoning; receiving an expensive college education; etc).

Like the OC, I've seen the dramatic impact of the "intangibles" in my own homeland, a former Communist state. Many of the leading businessmen and professionals today are descended from pre-communist elites, even though these elites were not only deprived of all their material wealth but actively discriminated upon during the five decades of communism (for example, by receiving "class background" penalties for university admissions). The idea that "money breeds money" is intuitively plausible, but turns out to be largely an illusion.

Mmm maybe. Are those intangibles themselves sort of a shibboleth indicating class membership? Could publicly funded education help transfer those "soft skills" to poorer people or would there be class-protective resistance?

You don't think they benefited developmentally from having grown up in the upper classes?

I don't have much material wealth, but I don't think that makes me the same as someone who never did and doesn't know how they ever could.

Absolutely. But if you accept that culture, rather than material privilege, is the key to human thriving, then you come to very different conclusions about how to lift people up.

So they left their education behind in Cuba?

Or what you're saying is that they went from middle and upper class to temporarily lower class due to escaping Communism, then back to middle and upper class where they started. Pretty amazing, but it actually proves the point of the article rather than disproves is. People in the middle and upper classes stay there. Often even when they migrate to a different country. It's what happened to my parents so it's not unique to any particular heritage. It's a class phenomenon.

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