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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

How can "merited economic brackets" span generations?

Genes. Of course people like you don't believe in genes, but it explains most things we see here. It is really hard to make poor people successful even if you give them resources, a top 10% childhood is extremely cheap compared to how much society derives from those, if it was that easy then Governments would already mass produce those.

70 years ago college was only for the elite. Today close to half of young adults go to college. Yet that didn't fix anything.

What's a "person like me" ? What do I believe? Or not believe?

I guess this is because we do not have blue blood:(

The answer to your comment is obviously genes, so the only reason anyone would write in such a comment is that they reject that explanation. Blank slate people are always everywhere in threads like this.

Wrong.

Just below is my response to someone else, and the point there is just as relevant as here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29537081

Culture / upbringing tend to be passed on to some extent from one generation to the next, unless every child is raised in state boarding schools. And on the innate side, whether one hits the genetic lottery is correlated with whether one's parents and grandparents hit the genetic lottery.

For all of its problems, the core concept of a meritocracy is that you don't get positions in life simply based on ancestry.

If the children of an astronomer really do turn out to be the best astronomers, then a meritocracy should theoretically allow them to become the best astronomers in the next generation.

But they do not get to be the astronomers JUST because they had a parent who was good at that. Every generation gets a reset; if genetics really do predict merit, then sure, the arrangement will look a bit like ancestry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com