Is a Hard Life Inherited?

When I contrast the image I get by consuming American media and what I witness here, the contrast is astonishing. Social mobility seems to be much more prevalent here than in the states. Of course, the gap between "poors" and "rich" is much smaller. But I can legitimately say that everyone here has a chance to make it. It might be harder for some, but it's rare to really have your head under the water, as I've heard happens often to poor people in the states (too many accounts, both from traditional and social media, too discount as pure fancy).

It's shocking that education is not a right. Here, it costs less than half a month salary to get tuition for a year; and the level is good besides (w.r.t. the states, not saying it couldn't be better).

And in the end? The quality of life is I believe the same here as in most well off places in the states. But the people at the bottom suffer less. That's a win in my book.

PG makes a good point when he says that inequality is not intrinsically bad. It's not bad if the quality of life of both the poor and the rich increase. The fact is that it has been shown that the quality of life of the poor has in fact decreased. In this context, the rise of inequality doesn't seem agreeable.

Especially when you consider the source of this inequality: entrepreneurs are not out to eat the poor people's lunch; but if the crisis has shown anything, it's that greed at multiple strategic points in the system (esp. the banking system) had very bad consequences for the people ground by the wheels of said system.

I think it's useful to keep in mind the time at which those essays were written (first half of the 2000s), when such opinion may have been easier to form. I'm curious to know if PG would write the same today.

The ability to work hard (conscientiousness) and intelligence are also heritable to a significant degree. The central supposed conflict between inherited privilege and innate qualities simply doesn't exist because our qualities are inherited[1].

This always surprises me when I read about privilege and related subjects, the fixation on race, sex and, as in this case, class. I can name at least five factors that matter much more for your life outcomes:

1. conscientiousness,

2. being born in or able to move to the first world,

3. intelligence,

4. conscientiousness again,

5. and looks (face symmetry, height).

OK, I cheated a little but conscientiousness really matters a lot. I highly doubt music classes, or library card would crack the top 100. Maybe as a correlate for educated (ie. likely intelligent) parents.

Those used to be heavily influenced by class due to widespread malnutrition but this is now gone from the western world. Which is why we see diminishing returns from investments in education, or any intervention, really.

Let's take truancy and suspension as an example since it was mentioned in the story. Is suspension responsible for kids' later poor educational outcomes? Unlikely[2]:

while suspension is strongly associated with educational outcomes, the relationship is unlikely to be causal, but rather stems from differences in the characteristics of those suspended compared to those not suspended. Moreover, there is no evidence that suspension is associated with larger educational penalties for young people from disadvantaged family backgrounds compared to those from more advantaged family backgrounds

Even in the west you can simply be unlucky but as a society we're bumping against the limits of who we are. I'm not saying that the usual "get married, stay married, take care of your kids, don't inject H, crime doesn't pay" is not a good advice but let's not forget that we're just a bunch of clever apes and perhaps should ease up on the hubris that somehow we should be able to better manage never before seen levels of complexity ("Hey, here are a few steps I came up with!").

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8776880

[2] http://ftp.iza.org/dp7794.pdf

4 Things Politicians Will Never Understand About Poor People

http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-politicians-will-never-...

(When I posted the same link before, it generated a large number of responses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6383275)