I have been thinking about this problem for a long time, and I think it's cultural. I don't limit it to American or Western culture; I think this a human behavi

I have been thinking about this problem for a long time, and I think it's cultural. I don't limit it to American or Western culture; I think this a human behavior. My thesis is that quantitative and spatial intelligences, which are required to build things, are rarer than verbal intelligence and thus more likely to regress to the mean. This makes them harder to pass on to progeny and less reliable as conduits of status. Highly verbal careers like law and to a lesser extent finance (which is more about networking than crunching numbers at the high level) are more accessible to the average heir, because they require more common skills. If being an engineer or doctor were the pinnacle of social status, it would be harder to pass on social status because it would be less likely that your child would be able to perform those functions. So elites decided to build societies that gave structural advantages to the so-called FIRE economy because that gave them the best chance at locking in their status. This relegated builder careers to second or third tier status.