ONE delusion common among America’s successful people is that they triumphed just because of hard work and intelligence. The ability to work hard (conscientiou

ONE delusion common among America’s successful people is that they triumphed just because of hard work and intelligence. The ability to work hard (conscientiousness) and intelligence are also heritable to a significant degree. The central supposed conflict between inherited privilege and innate qualities simply doesn't exist because our qualities are inherited[1]. This always surprises me when I read about privilege and related subjects, the fixation on race, sex and, as in this case, class. I can name at least five factors that matter much more for your life outcomes: 1. conscientiousness, 2. being born in or able to move to the first world, 3. intelligence, 4. conscientiousness again, 5. and looks (face symmetry, height). OK, I cheated a little but conscientiousness really matters a lot. I highly doubt music classes, or library card would crack the top 100. Maybe as a correlate for educated (ie. likely intelligent) parents. Those used to be heavily influenced by class due to widespread malnutrition but this is now gone from the western world. Which is why we see diminishing returns from investments in education, or any intervention, really. Let's take truancy and suspension as an example since it was mentioned in the story. Is suspension responsible for kids' later poor educational outcomes? Unlikely[2]: while suspension is strongly associated with educational outcomes, the relationship is unlikely to be causal, but rather stems from differences in the characteristics of those suspended compared to those not suspended. Moreover, there is no evidence that suspension is associated with larger educational penalties for young people from disadvantaged family backgrounds compared to those from more advantaged family backgrounds Even in the west you can simply be unlucky but as a society we're bumping against the limits of who we are. I'm not saying that the usual "get married, stay married, take care of your kids, don't inject H, crime doesn't pay" is not a good advice but let's not forget that we're just a bunch of clever apes and perhaps should ease up on the hubris that somehow we should be able to better manage never before seen levels of complexity ("Hey, here are a few steps I came up with!"). [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8776880 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8776880 [2] http://ftp.iza.org/dp7794.pdf http://ftp.iza.org/dp7794.pdf