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This approach works well particularly well if the masses are decapitate by identifying anyone with high intelligence and “inviting” them into the 10% via educat
by danieltillett 6y ago
This approach works well particularly well if the masses are decapitate by identifying anyone with high intelligence and “inviting” them into the 10% via education.
Angry masses without a leader are not going to do anything.
- kulig 6y agoThey will only if they get desperate or frustrated enough. Leaders always emerge.
- tinco 6y agoI think you're overestimating the value of high intelligence. I don't believe we have any accurate means of identifying potent leaders, not even a 10% slice they might belong to.
- eanzenberg 6y agoStrip the wealthy if their wealth and most will probably become wealthy again. If you don’t call it intelligence what would you call it.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago> most will probably become wealthy again. Source?
- magicsmoke 6y agoThis sounds like something that a study of Chinese upper-class and their 1949 pre-revolution family history could shed some very interesting results on.
- arghnoname 6y agoThere's a book that attempts to look at this called, "The Son Also Rises." It tracks wealth by surnames and argues that the ability to gain (or regain) wealth is inheritable. This thesis is in contradiction to some of the ways I've experienced the world, but it is a source supporting the parent's claim. For my own political inclinations I'd be happy to hear many others that support the opposite claim.
- Talanes 6y agoI've only dug into the briefly, so forgive me if I'm missing something obvious, but it looks like his research was mostly just tracking surnames? How would you differentiate between family lines that actually lose and regain wealth over generations, and those that happen to maintain it over that span? Like say the Smith family was traditionally privileged and wealthy, but my great-great-grandfather lost his fortune. Am I actually any more likely to rise in fortune than the Jones' family next door that have been generationally poor for hundreds of years? Or does it only seem like that because I have many distant cousin's whose families maintained their advantages?
- xyzzyz 6y agoIt tracks rare surnames, so there aren’t many distant cousins to skew the results. The point of focusing on rare surnames is so that you can be more certain that people carrying them today are actually direct descendants of people in the old records. Second thing is that the fortune is typically not tracked here, because it’s really hard to get any historical data about fortune of any individuals, much less those not so famous. What Clark et al do is track status, and average out: for example, you can look at the people who graduated Oxford hundreds of years ago. As it turns out, their descendants today are overrepresented among UK’s doctors and lawyers. On the other hand, people carrying common job-related last names, like Smith or Taylor, are underrepresented as lawyers and doctors. In fact, in today’s UK, people carrying last names of Norman conquerors are still overrepresented among high status occupations in UK, although not by much, given a millennium of a regression towards the mean. I recommend reading the book, it’s great.
- Talanes 6y agoMaybe I was unclear because I picked a generically common surname for my example, but I was also assuming both people were descended from a common successful ancestor.
- xyzzyz 6y agoThe core of Clark’s argument is that the advantage is not due to accumulated fortune, but rather is genetic in nature.
- mrtnmcc 6y agoBrand recognition
- harimau777 6y agoI think that's likely untrue if you include connections, training, and education in your definition of wealth.
- jdavis703 6y agoAmerican wealth is closely tied to how wealthy a given persons parents were [0]. Given this, I’m skeptical that the wealthy would become wealthy again. The counterpoint is the richest Southern families quickly recovered their positions in the years after the Civil War [1]... but that relied heavily on racist policies, and of course these families still owned capital like land. 0: http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/assets/2015/07/fsm-irs-report_artfinal.pdf http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/assets/2015/07/fsm-irs-repo... 1: https://www.nber.org/papers/w25700?utm_campaign=ntwh&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ntwg2 https://www.nber.org/papers/w25700?utm_campaign=ntwh&utm_med...
- golergka 6y agoBut intelligence is directly connected to it, too. And I'm not even speaking about generic aspect: it's the cultural thing of how important education is perceived to be. In Russia, two generations after the revolution you could still guess where did the family originally come from originally by this cultural divide alone.
- ulucs 6y agoWealth is (obviously) corralated with many properties that make it easier to gain wealth. To look at the effect of parents' wealth (and solely that) on children, you need to look into lottery winners or Bitcoin/APPL holders.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThere is no significant relationship between any measurable attribute of someone and their wealth, except for the wealth of their parents. So no. There are a few relationships between IQ and conscientiousness and wealth, but they break down towards the extremes are not strong enough in magnitude to account for even single-quartile mobility.
- caseysoftware 6y agoIt doesn't have to be intelligence but really dissent in general. Check out the Hundred Flowers Campaign where Mao and the Chinese Communist Party encouraged debate and general criticism of the regime.. and then a few months later, rounded up all the dissenters and disappeared them into labor camps. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign