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> That an immigrant, often a racial and religious minority, can come to the United States and become rich and powerful, while only having college-educated pare

> That an immigrant, often a racial and religious minority, can come to the United States and become rich and powerful, while only having college-educated parents and an upper middle class income as privileges, is astonishing! We take that for granted. But in much of the world, its not enough to have college educated parents and and enough spare income to afford test prep classes. You need that plus belonging to the right caste or social class, having the right family ties and political connections, belonging to the right ethnic or religious subgroup, etc. Do you think that someone in the United States that is not in one of these subgroups have the same opportunities to get the education, the spare income, the credit, the community that even has the prep classes? It looks like you’re suffering from survivorship bias, when in fact you should be looking at averages. Assuming individual talent is uniformly distributed across groups, you’d expect to see success uniformly distributes, but it’s not.

rayiner 6y ago
> Do you think that someone in the United States that is not in one of these subgroups have the same opportunities to get the education, the spare income, the credit, the community that even has the prep classes? Sometimes they do: while white protestants are the financially and politically dominant American subgroup, Indian, Korean, Taiwanese, Japanese, Chinese, Iranian Americans, Jewish Americans, etc. are the highest earning. Often, however, those subgroups do not have the same opportunities. That means we're an imperfect meritocracy. But we can acknowledge that without overlooking how remarkable it is to have a semblance meritocracy in the first place. Asian Americans, for example, have incredible upward mobility. An Asian American who grows up in the bottom 20% of income has a 27% chance of ending up in the top 20% of income. That's well over double the rate for white Americans. To be sure, they often have substantial cultural capital even if they come to the country without much in the way of financial capital. Maybe their parents are college educated, or were professionals back home. But they certainly do not belong to the dominant ethnicity, they probably don't belong to the dominant religion, they lack ties to important families (they may even lack extended family support at all), they lack political connections, etc. In the parts of the world that don't embrace meritocracy as an ideal, those shortcomings would be fatal. In those parts of the world, nobody even pretends that belonging to the wrong ethnic group or religion shouldn't hold you back.

rayiner 6y ago

> Do you think that someone in the United States that is not in one of these subgroups have the same opportunities to get the education, the spare income, the credit, the community that even has the prep classes? Sometimes they do: while white protestants are the financially and politically dominant American subgroup, Indian, Korean, Taiwanese, Japanese, Chinese, Iranian Americans, Jewish Americans, etc. are the highest earning. Often, however, those subgroups do not have the same opportunities. That means we're an imperfect meritocracy. But we can acknowledge that without overlooking how remarkable it is to have a semblance meritocracy in the first place. Asian Americans, for example, have incredible upward mobility. An Asian American who grows up in the bottom 20% of income has a 27% chance of ending up in the top 20% of income. That's well over double the rate for white Americans. To be sure, they often have substantial cultural capital even if they come to the country without much in the way of financial capital. Maybe their parents are college educated, or were professionals back home. But they certainly do not belong to the dominant ethnicity, they probably don't belong to the dominant religion, they lack ties to important families (they may even lack extended family support at all), they lack political connections, etc. In the parts of the world that don't embrace meritocracy as an ideal, those shortcomings would be fatal. In those parts of the world, nobody even pretends that belonging to the wrong ethnic group or religion shouldn't hold you back.