> None of the studies I've seen have even considered whether a privileged background does translate to higher than average merit. And why wouldn't it? We alread

> None of the studies I've seen have even considered whether a privileged background does translate to higher than average merit. And why wouldn't it? We already know household income is correlated with IQ, and growing up having access to better schools, better extracurriculars, less influence from crime, etc is likely, or at least possibly going to build a more competent child. We don't know where brilliance will come from. We do know that high stress levels early in life are detrimental to achieving it, though. By not offering high quality, low stress education to all children, we are probably leaving a lot of creativity and innovation on the table. A good example of such a phenomenon that succeeded would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan, however, there are far more examples of brilliance rising from blue collar/impovershed beginnings. If we instead just leave education to the whims of wealth access, then it should be pretty obvious that while education would be better for people who are wealthy, it wouldn't guarantee that it would be effective for generating the most competent people possible, since the input was limited by wealth.