> Working towards bettering your children lives is a reason many of us get up in the morning. Absolutely! it's just that when someone has a lot of success bec

> Working towards bettering your children lives is a reason many of us get up in the morning. Absolutely! it's just that when someone has a lot of success because their family helped them, they are successful because of that help. It's not a "meritocracy". The same reasoning can be used to invalidate the claim that there is a "meritocracy" of families. If you claim "family X has more merit than family Y", well you can apply the same reasoning to show that just like person A got their privilege from family X, family X got their privilege from situation Q (not from an impoverished country, not from a persecuted ethnic or racial community, not ravaged by war or genocide, not enslaved, etc. etc.). Some of the comments here seem upset that the author is trying to link a correlation to a causation. That's not the case; the premise of the article is about the lack of a cause of something; e.g. that someone who is extremely successful cannot claim that such success is obviously due to merit. If anyone is to be accused of premature "correlation == causation" it would be those who claim that merit is the leading factor in one's success.