It is entrenched because only those on the top can afford to pay for good education for their children so they can become good in their professions. Doctors can afford to send their kids to top tier private-schools and Ivy League universities, which means their kids have a better shot at being a good doctor or engineer learning under Nobel Laureates compared to the kids of auto-mechanics and park rangers, whose teachers might not have the best credentials.
What I would agree with you on, is that this isn't too different from the past when children of top ranking military generals got better training and ended up being better soldiers and generals than the children of farmers and blacksmiths. Nobody's saying children of farmers or auto-mechanics are any less able. They just don't get the best training.
The article seems to contradict that:
"Using one-generation measures of social mobility—how much a father’s relative income influences that of his adult son—America does half as well as Nordic countries, and about the same as Britain and Italy, Europe’s least-mobile places."
It's also true, though, that to whatever extent that genetics influence relative income (and despite counter examples such as the Romney family, I'd like to hope that intelligence has _some_ correlation with income) that might explain some of the correlation between parental income and the income of their children. A proper study should try to study the correlation of parental income with the income of the income of adopted children (preferably adopted under the age of two). This is why sociological research is so difficult....
And then;
>Nobody's saying children of farmers or auto-mechanics are any less able. They just don't get the best training.
So it's a meritocracy but the training isn't available to all? Doesn't sound like a meritocracy to me.
Yes, but nothing made out of organized humans ever adheres to mathematically rigorous definition. (1)
Our lot is loads better than that of some poor orphan in Haiti, and our opportunities were distributed with tons more equity. That said, it's far from perfect. There are parts of our messy society that are close to meritocracy, and there's other parts that are headache inducing doppelgangers of it. It's a mess, but you can also think of it as opportunity.
((1) - In fact, whenever you think you are about to make a clever or skeptical point in a societally based intellectual discussion, tell yourself this first, then see if you still want to. Same goes for biology and software engineering.)
How? Please explain what magical elevator makes this happen, because VC-istan seems to be a combination of connections and luck, large organizations tend to be clueless and political, and academia has been dying for at least a generation and a half. What I've seen may be limited and atypical, but I haven't seen anything that looks like this. I've seen the same nonsense that humanity has been repeating for thousands of years.
A good programmer can make 2-3x a poor programmer.
That has more to do with the fact that the good programmers tend to gravitate toward high-COL places. Even those good programmers can't raise a family (in NYC or Silicon Valley) on what they make unless (a) they beat the VC-istan game (see above) or (b) they work for those large companies, in which case advancement is 90% political.
The closest thing to a meritocracy seems to be finance, which is seriously flawed but is more honest about its shortcomings.
So, "most people"?
The problem may well be the "human condition" as substrate. In addition to talent in whatever domain or particular desirable skill-set, a person also needs to negotiate other people. If a large project is to be accomplished, the talents and effort of large numbers of people need to be marshaled. Unfortunately, our heuristics for interaction were tuned to keeping together small bands of people primarily concerned with food and defense. ("Paleo" BS notwithstanding, but this much is certainly true.)
What we have isn't a magical elevator. It's more like our brains doing Boolean algebra and predicate calculus. On average, we humans are notoriously unreliable at logic. So much so, we have terms for dozens of dysfunctions which happen all the time. (Fallacies.) With proper training and attention, we can be quite good, however. So it is with "meritocracy" and all of its various doppelgangers. The "cream" does rise to the top, but so does the scum. Talent can help you. "Talent" in the form of attributes that let you sleep your way to the top also help you. You can make it on sheer talent, but the ability to wage subtle, deniable psychological warfare on your rivals to diminish their confidence and shine will help you too. So will realpolitik maneuverings or just being physically attractive.
Many will just put it down to getting older and bitter, but the older I get, the more I realize that we really are (mostly metaphorical) feces-flinging, screeching, long-legged savannah-apes that just so happen to have exceptional individuals and exceptional moments of godlike beauty, wisdom, and insight. Neal Stephenson: “The difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.” The muck and mess of human interaction is every bit as subtle as it is unsavory.
(And the older I get, the stupider I feel.)
Marathons actually get a lot harder as you go on. Miles 0-16 are no different from regular short runs, 17-20 is hard and you start to flag, 21-24 is brutally difficult, and 24-26.2 is easier for psychological reasons.
I don't know you, so I can't; can you provide numbers, or at least an argument with some intuitive strength, rather than just asserting it?
It is a tautology to say that you can lose more money the more money you have, because anyone (rich or poor) can simply choose to throw it away. That doesn't change the mathematical fact that interest compounds and that more wealth translates into more income in our economic system.
First, we aren't the real elite. Founders are yeoman project managers at best, engineers are less than that-- not even able to raise a family in the Valley-- and even the venture capitalists are, for the most part, merely junior elite.
I'm not so sure about that claim, anyway, given that IQ is relative. The intellectual edge of the modern elite is quite thin, by historical standards.
The upper-class average IQ is generally held to be in the upper 100s-- no higher than 110-- even if class is defined to include social connections, respectability, and educational pedigree in addition to income.
So the upper class is only about 0.5-0.7 standard deviations smarter than the general population. That's not that much. They're also a small elite: less than 0.1% is running the world. For every Davos Man, there are 10,000 people wanting to see him fall. In any pool of that size, there are some fiercely smart people.
Compare that to the medieval elite, which had superior nutrition by far. They had what would be close to average height and intelligence today. Charlemagne (Charles the Great) was considered a giant. He was about 6 feet tall. Average people were a foot shorter, and were probably at an IQ level around 70-75.
A foot shorter, yes (we know this from all sorts of physical evidence) but how do we know the average IQ?
They also might have spent their mental processing power differently. Medieval people trained their memory much more - I think this also extended to the average peasant, but I can't find a reference right now.
In the wilds of Papua New Guinea, lots of highlanders meeting us there would consider us clumsy and stupid and wonder how we run a complex civilization.
I bet a lot of folks in France between 1789 and 1799 were paraphrasing, "I'm not a real aristo," or "I'm only a minor aristo."
Note that the junior elite is more likely to be left as scapegoats to the mob, while the real elites will have the resources to escape.
And you do realize, as a smart, hip, dare I say elite person, that the ;) was a signal of sarcasm.