Unstacking the deck
seattlereviewofbooks.com
seattlereviewofbooks.com
I'm surprised though that the reviewer discounts legacy preferences at universities. Given the degree to which a well-qualified school can open up opportunities for someone this seems like a perfectly valid and effective policy proposal.
Perhaps it looks a bit like this:
- Some people you can't keep down no matter what you do. These people do things like work full time, go to school in the evenings, and graduate from college in four years.
- Some people will succeed if given the opportunity to succeed. That is, if you give them a scholarship or financial aid or if their parents pay for their education.
- Some people will succeed if you give them a big push. Take them to the financial aid office and help them fill out the form, ply them with encouraging words when they want to give up at midterms or finals, etc.
- Some people won't succeed no matter what you do. Usually, because they have so little faith in themselves that they give up even when success is all but guaranteed.
So yes, government programs are needed to get enough citizens across the finish line. But I don't think this is really about class, I think it is about motivating people -- helping them learn to believe in themselves.
My belief in my ability to succeed was briefly shattered by my dad's employment situation. He was a well qualified engineer laid off from manufacturing. That made us struggle.
I was always thinking about money and feeling the need to optimize for $2 meals instead of $4 meals, and wondering if my car would hold in long enough to be able to get me to school in a week. These are things that only your first, most motivated, category of people will overcome.
I didn't overcome these obstacles. I temporarily dropped out. Don't tell me that I just needed to believe in myself more.
My story only has a happy ending because state schools are cheap and engineering internships are paid.
I do believe that belief or trust is a necessary but inadequate precondition to success. Believing in yourself is not enough to help you succeed, but not believing in yourself is enough to help you not succeed.
As a society, we do a very poor job giving people that trust or belief.
So, do you address that with pep talks, proselytizing about "meritocracy", and "tough love"; or by actually addressing economic insecurity through safety nets that allow people to make a mistake or two without crashing and burning?
Empty cheerleading gives us no-doc jumbo loans at sub-prime rates... until the music stops and bad debts are revealed as the bad debts they are.
Or an objective economic capability to fail-and-retry. (As opposed to fail-and-starve.)
That's not a thing anymore. Working full time at the wages you can earn without a college degree, won't pay for college tuition, especially not in four years.
The biggest way to help inequality would be to radically bring down the cost of a college education. Not loans, which just place lower and middle income families in even greater financial risk. A fully funded public university system with low tuition, like many states used to have not too long ago.
Genetics do matter. Adult intelligence appears to be somewhere between 50 and 80% determined by genetics. Thus we should expect over time in a meritocracy for smart kids to come from the same families. This is compounded by assortative mating by IQ, which has become far more widespread in the last forty years. So things are going to look nepotistic (and they always will be to some extent, see my second point below) when, in fact, this is a natural phenomena.
So, what? Just let the people who lose the genetic lottery rot? No. Instead, we might want to focus on having a more balanced economy where, rather than everyone striving to become part of the elite, a working class person can have a perfectly reasonable life. Jordan Peterson discusses this problem in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0
Secondly, it is not immoral for parents to make large investments in their own children's lives. This behavior is no doubt somewhat driven by genetics (nearly everything appears to be at least 40% genetic) but it is also a learned behavior. Government programs that replace parental investment have been catastrophic for minorities in the united states: for example 73% of non-hispanic blacks are born out of wedlock. So delegating parental investment in children to the state, in the name of ending nepotism, may have some very detrimental effects that are difficult to predict.
All of this is to add context and suggest a different solution: making middle class non-elite life paths more attractive, not to deny that there is a problem.
That's curious. Is there any explanation why? Naively, I would assume the opposite, although I can imagine some factors that would point in that direction.
for example 73% of non-hispanic blacks are born out of wedlock.
Why is that catastrophic? Is there good evidence¹ that the kids would have been better off otherwise?
¹ (by good evidence, I'm discounting simple comparisons between children born into and out of wedlock, since it's pretty easy to see why many confounding variables might play into that.)
http://time.com/7442/wives-are-now-more-educated-than-husban...
You may not be the naive one, as we don't have any evidence
Citation desperately needed. An IQ test, if you've ever taken one, measures a whole bunch of things but not necessarily intelligence. It's a written test which a native speaker benefits tremendously from due to some of the sort of convoluted language used for some of the questions. And many of the mental tricks it tests are things which can be (and are) taught.
Also, even if you somehow proved that some aspects of intelligence were biologically inherited, that still doesn't prove genetics. Current understanding of epigenetics shows that you can pass on traits caused by your environment through mechanisms not in the DNA itself.
There are 'cultural bias free' IQ tests that has no words in it at all, and the correlation holds.
But that question is ultimately a red herring. IQ scores are partially biologically heritable. IQ scores are correlated with job performance. So there exists a biologically heritable factor that's correlated with job performance. That's very relevant for discussions about social mobility, whether or not you want to call that factor "intelligence".
You asked for a citation. The strongest evidence for the claim that IQ is biologically heritable comes from studies of twins. A meta-analysis of 111 separate studies (https://sci-hub.la/10.1126/science.7195071) found that when identical twins were separated and raised in different families, their IQs were correlated at 0.72. Fraternal twins raised together had IQs correlated at only 0.60. Biologically unrelated children raised together (an adopted child and a biological child) had IQs correlated at 0.29. (Side note: Before you demand someone provide a citation, try googling it for yourself. This result isn't hard to find.)
You have a good point that the mechanism could be epigenetic rather than genetic. Here's a study that found a hint of a link between epigentic factors and intelligence: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2892514/. Here's a study finding that epigenetics are correlated strongly between identical twins: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3063335/ On the other hand, the epigenetic correlation decreases as the twin pairs get older, but the IQ correlation actually increases as twin pairs get older. So it's not clear.
It's also worth noting that IQ correlates with income at only 0.23 according to http://www.emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intellige....
In general, I agree it's difficult to draw unambiguous conclusions from the data we have. I think the data are consistent with the possibility that genetic inheritance of intelligence plays a major role in reducing social mobility, and also consistent with the opposite possibility. But you are demanding a much higher standard of evidence for the claim that intelligence is genetic than for the claim that it isn't, and I don't think that's fair.
Or the person making a claim can actually provide a citation for their claim. It's not on a person challenging a claim to prove it, it's on the person making it.
Because when I see the top 20% as being described as making $112,000 or more, I don't see that as even close to feeling confident you'll have a secure retirement. Until that improves, I have a hard time criticizing a 20%-er or a 19%-er for having somewhat of an "every man for himself" attitude in getting ahead.
I went back and checked LinkedIn for some of my old HS people, and it's interesting how different that patterns are. The children of doctors are doctors or lawyers. Some of the really motivated children of first-generation immigrants ended up equally successful though. Both groups tended to go to private institutions though.
I wonder if the difference is how risk is evaluated. Middle classes see hard sciences and engineering as reliable, accessible, career paths that minimize risks of joblessness and allow them to leverage existing connections by staying in state while studying (since most working and middle class folks have a family support structure local to the area, also in-state discount) without burdening their family more by picking a field where paid internships are rare.
Meanwhile, richer folks are not worried about needing to work while studying, and they don't need to stay in any one place, especially if the careers of their parents gives them connections to in-demand places for jobs and study (or maybe money just makes connections unnecesary).
These two items are huge economic burdens, even for those in the top %20. But radically reducing their cost would also do wonders for improving economic opportunities.
As numerous financial books will testify, if you are frugal (no matter the income) and invest wisely, it is possible to accumulate some measure of fortune. If you teach your children to do the same (as they grow up in a frugal household), they will become the next tier of the pyramid.
I really, truly believe this. I was raised in a large family and inherited nothing of worth. I'm not done working yet, but I'm encouraged by the way things are progressing and have hopes all of my kids will go to college and emerge without a mountain of debt.
In America, the dream can be obtained. It will take time, though.