The reason why kids from rich families do well isn’t that mom and dad buy their way through life. The reason, rather, is that rich families have genes that cause financial success, and pass these genes on to their kids. (Casual consumers of this literature often get confused by the fact that the effect of IQ is far too small to explain the intergenerational income correlation. The key thing to remember is that there is a lot more to genetics and success than IQ)....Stage 1 was defensive: “Sure, life’s not fair. The children of the rich do better. But the unfairness is pretty small, and almost vanishes after two generations.” Stage 3, in contrast, is offensive: “Life is fair. The children of the rich do better because talent breeds talent, and under capitalism, the cream rises to the top.”
I'm not at all convinced that social networks aren't more important than almost anything else -- if you went to Harvard, you got to know a lot of people who are going to end up on top of leading businesses or government agencies, and thus you will more readily get a job from them. Still, heritability of intelligence isn't the whole story: whole sets of virtues seem to be heritable as well. You still have to do the work of training them and inculcating them in yourself to bring them from potential to actual, but the potential is there for some when it really doesn't seem to be for others.
What, if anything, should be done about that?
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Just spitballing: punish white men until everybody else feels better about fairness? And then punish anyone with brains or character.
Well, one thing that should not be done is allow the more successful to run the lives of the less successful. Just because someone is more successful than I am doesn't mean they know how to live my life better than I do.
The fact that the traits for success might be heritable makes the point even more forcefully. They really do not know how to live my life better because it's not about knowledge. Or, they know what was successful for them with their genetics, but not what would be successful for me with my genetics.
Not much into Plato, Tom?
Not into his political philosophy, anyway.
Marx too thought political philosophers knew how the proletariat should live better than the proletariat themselves. If the proles disagree, they must be suffering from false consciousness.
I would say that the first thing that should be done, is put a subject in that sentence! Because "what society should do", "what the government should do", and "what individuals should do" ... have very different answers. Before I go rocketing off:
What kind of answer are you interested in discussing?
--Janet
I constructed the question to allow freedom for the respondents. Should anyone do anything about it? Why, if so, and what? I am open to ideas, and curious about what you and other readers think.
I don't think virtue have anything to do with it- seems like scum rises to the top just as easily. Thing is, the traits of "success" get passed on regardless of any moral factors.
I concur with your assessment of what leads to success, and would add in that adaptability is increasingly important. As to what should be done, there are strong believers in heritability that consider it an argument for strong social safety nets. They reason that the passing on of better* traits may be good for the species in the long run, but really, our job is our own time and the near future - children, grandchildren, communities, institutions. Let evolution do its own work. So also with institutions. Redistribution may weaken some things we believe are important for prosperity especially, but institutions are subtler and longer-lasting than we consciously realise. We can't steer those battleships with spoons. Leave them be.
And, Gandalf tells the assembled Captains of the West, as they prepare to go into near-hopeless battle
Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule. (Lord of the Rings, Book V)
My initial thought is a return to teaching that fairness is a process rather than a result.
" but the potential is there for some when it really doesn't seem to be for others.
What, if anything, should be done about that? "
If there is no way to reliably measure it, no hard metric for it, how could you know if anything you did was efficacious, or harmful? IF you can't reliably measure it, maybe it's best not to try and play God.
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