A New Aristocracy: Yale Law School Commencement Address (2015) [pdf]

I found the link on archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20191023044540/https://law.yale....

If one is to feel good about meritocracy, it is that the ambitious, talented and hardworking have the greatest chance of changing the system for everyone's shared benefit.

If only there was evidence to support that assertion.

My school and work experience span working class coal power plant techs (a friend used to climb through exhaust channels) to Ivy League educated lawyers and founders.

Most people’s career trajectory will be set by the time they are in high school, so the importance of secondary school education and resources of your parents is paramount.

Also, wealth from family of origin allows risk taking, funding for law or medical degrees, which for lower income students represent a huge risk so they go to safer less lucrative fields.

I have noticed the reverse actually. In 1999 we had tens of thousands of people in the streets regularly against the WTO, against the IMF, against the World Bank.

Working class folks, environmentalists, labor leaders, anarchists and socialists, even fairly mainstream Dems were criticizing that a pure free trade model was letting capital gain too much power at the expense of people (especially as people are locked behind borders largely), locking developing countries into unsustainable and brutal debt and austerity programs, and resulting in inequality ramping up.

These days, it would be nearly unthinkable to have that many people in the streets at a WTO meeting (never-mind that they shifted the meetings to far away authoritarian countries).

Granted, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren do sound more critical of unfettered capitalism and the idea that capitalism is a meritocracy than Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did (and so does Trump, in his own way), but they haven't been elected yet.

FWIW, the issue with life experience anecdotes is that they don't control for genetic confounding. Most rich kids have both the environment their parent created for them, as well as the genes their parents gave them. So it's impossible to tell which is more important in determining the life outcomes we see.

There is a whole discipline called behavioral genetics that uses twin and adoption studies and, increasingly, genome wide association studies (GWAS) to tease these things apart. Most of these studies seem to point to most outcomes being about half genetic and half random (that is, something other than the environment created by the parents).