That might be "the #1 predictor," but out of how many predictors? What "percentage" is it, if that term is even meaningful here? How do we decide what counts as "wealthy?" Is it income or assets? If income, what happens to people making $300,000 a year but spending it all (I have met these people). What happens to the Millionaires Next Door (http://www.amazon.com/The-Millionaire-Next-Door-Surprising/d... ; it has done more to shape my thinking about wealth than any other book. One surprising fact: most millionaires don't have extraordinary incomes but do consistently live below their means and save their extra money)?

If having "wealthy" parents is the #1 predictor and accounts for, say, 20% of the likelihood of the next generation's wealth, and, say, education accounts for another 10%, what happens if 40% is noise / randomness? Then noise accounts for twice as much as wealth! Most of the actual peer-reviewed studies I've read about this topic come to the conclusions they do through some dubious data decisions.

I'm not trying to pick a pointless, semantic fight here, but I see a lot of statements that try to compress a complex set of issues and questions into a single metric. As usually happens with this sort of thing, there's also an element of anecdote here: I have seen kids from wealthy families piss it all away and kids from poor families do the opposite. My own grandparents had virtually nothing and didn't speak English.