Japanese 'Prince' Switched at Birth Was Raised a Pauper

As long as people have bank accounts and can accumulate wealth, there will be a small percentage of people with savings and large percentage of people without. You can take money from people who have and give it to people who don’t, and we do quite a lot of that already.

As long as there are private schools which you can pay to send your children, and tutors your can hire to help them learn, and housekeepers you can hire to have more time to spend working or with family.... then those people who got high paying jobs and worked hard and saved money will be able to give their children a significant advantage in the world, in theory leading to higher functioning, higher achieving offspring.

When you consider that the top 1% of taxpayers pay more than the bottom 90% combined, I think that’s far from this “knives out” picture you are painting. The top 1% very literally have their wallets out to pay it forward.

The question is simple — is it legal to send your child to a private school? Is it legal to send your child to summer school and provide them tutors? If it remains legal to do that, then parents with the time and money and inclination will be able to provide a better and more personalized education for their children.

Keep in mind that when sending your children to private school, you still pay the same taxes and you are freeing up resources at the public school for other children. However I believe studies have shown when the highest achieving students leave the rest of the classroom performs worse without them, so it could still be a net negative for the public school.

The real privilege is the time parents spend with their children at home reinforcing the learning they did at school and providing the positive environment and encouragement a child needs to continue striving to learn. That typically requires a two-parent family that isn’t in financial turmoil.

I think intelligence is the most important prerequisite, at which point class exerts influence, and then finally wealth - self-made wealth - becomes a reflection of how much of a person's ambition is focused on that area. And luck, of course.

This raises the question of what to do about pre-implantation genetic testing and gene therapies once the genes influencing intelligence can be identified and selected (and eventually modified). I can see a future in which everyone who can afford it reproduces via IVF in order to leverage gene selection, and it's considered socially awkward among the upper class to have a naturally-conceived child (as in, you don't care enough about your child to pay for the best genes). Perhaps when it comes to discussions of inequality, "we ain't seen nothing yet".

if so, what particular mechanisms exist for some truly idiotic child born with a trust of $1M, $10M, or $100M to lose their wealth?

> For example: George Soros. Came from a wealthy family. Utterly destitute after the war. And now he's rich.

So he was likely aided by his class, which was never lost when he lost his wealth.

this whole charade that all billionaires in the entire world are geniuses who came from the bottom rungs of society is just a story to instill hope on those ambitious enough to believe there exists meritocratic societies. the media loves to talk about 'new money' billionaires who are, inarguably, quite intellectual (elon, zuckerburg, jobs, etc) - it's just so less sexy to focus on the much larger number of billionaires who just inherited it all...

let me guess, next you're going to tell me that everyone who is a celebrity movie star, tv actor, artist, and photographer is just the most talented in their respective fields and class and wealth had nothing to do with it?

Doesn't this miss the fact that a large amount of education - perhaps the majority of young childhood education - occurs at home, and is influenced by family environment?

How does the Government recreate a two parent household with the time and resources to cook healthy dinners and spend hours every night reading to their children, for children who are essentially "on their own" once they leave school? Is it even reasonable to expect this to be possible (i.e. reduce or replace the influence of families with Government or third-party involvement)?

The example of the USSR was already cited, the rich were still rich even though being "wealthy" _formally_ wasn't a thing.

People instead played political games to win positions that brought benefits from the State. Most workers aspired to reach a position that brought with it car ownership.

All of this serves to make the delivering peoples' needs and desires more inefficient and more purely decided by social and political power than by someone's ability to contribute to society.

You also have a built in assumption that education is what causes this success, when I posit it's the result of intelligence, which is the actual driver (and is seen in better results from education).

For example, this is exactly the sort of debate we've been having in Singapore, which prides itself on being a highly 'meritocratic', which consequently people have criticized for exacerbating income/social inequality.

You're right, I was intentionally being dichotomous.

> a "meritocracy" where merit is primarily earned by being born into a wealthy family is just smuggling aristocracy into the public consciousness

I agree, to some extent - but would also suggest that this is entirely inevitable. It's a natural desire to ensure your children have the best possible future. This can be accomplished through many means - here we are talking specifically about passing down wealth, or teaching discipline.

Should something be done to stop this? It's at least possible for passing down wealth.

Some would argue that there should be no such thing as inheritance - others would argue that such a policy would ruin the economy, by removing a large motivation of productivity.

I personally think the best a society can do is provide to the best of it's ability, equal access to education - and still permit generational wealth.

Wealth is a positive feedback loop. There's really no controversy in that either. "The rich get richer"

That's absolutely true, if we're talking about individual mobility, but I was commenting on the idea of intergenerational mobility as mentioned in the parent and also in other places in this thread.

If your parent's economic position is irrelevant to your own, then every generation effectively 'resets' and there is not intergenerational mobility, which I took to mean as the gradual economic mobility of a family over multiple generations.

> A society where your parent's economic position grants a large advantage on you and your potential is inherently less mobile

While there is very likely a correlation here, most economists agree that economics in society is not a zero-sum game and thus one person's advantage as a result of their parents won't necessitate another's disadvantage to an equal degree. It's not a direct correlation; and that's before we factor in the increased motivation to innovate for your children's futures that come with an economic inheritance system, so on and so forth.

Meritocracy would mean disregarding skin colour, background and gender in my book. I would like your sources and stats