Coming from an Eastern European country, my parents were making less than $10000 a year combined in the '80s and '90s. Nowhere near "wealthy" by western standards. However, they gifted me with a strong STEM education, which translated in material affluence 25 years later on a different continent.

Might consider that the biggest transferable wealth across generations is a good education and a life long example of thrift and hard work.

That's the very definition of anecdotal evidence and survivorship bias. Both things that a strong STEM education should help squash.

It's also based on a historical peculiarity. In the west, and in particular in the US, to get a good STEM education you statistically have to be middle class or wealthy in the first place. (It's not impossible to have one if you're not -- just more difficult and rare). That wasn't the case in Eastern Europe, where the state provided easier access to higher education.

I had cable internet very early in it's history, and I used to for things other than playing Half Life.

I did not end up going to Stanford, but I went to a decent state school and while I'm not rich, I'm certainly much better of than friends who had other majors.

> which translated in material affluence 25 years later on a different continent Yes. And that's why emigration has a big impact in improving world-wide socio-economic mobility.

But suppose that you have started your live in an already rich country. In that case that country socio-economic mobility, by definition, is what gives you how dependent is your wealth on your parents wealth.

World wide socio-economic mobility probably is quite good. As it is easier and cheaper to emigrate than ever and also because there has been a lot of growth in non-western countries. But the article was talking about North America. And in that case, as it is also true on all western countries, mobility is shrinking. In that scenario education, love, good habits are still important for your well being. But they are not strong indicators of your absolute wealth.

Direct ways of transferring wealth between generations never fail. And there's a lot of those going on too.

Transferring values is hard. Transferring cash is easy.

Sure it does.

Plenty of heirs "lose the farm."

It's been said that the first generation builds the business, the second generation manages it, and the third generation loses it.

Maintaining and growing wealth are different than receiving and spending.

The transfer still worked. And people who get success more on their own sometimes lose the farm too (more often, I'd bet - I don't think there are any low risk strategies of getting richer than your parents).

Maintaining and growing wealth are different than receiving and spending.

It's much easier than getting it in the first place, though.

Ah, but how diluted does it get with each increasing cohort of heirs?

Not always easy. There are disasters too - hyperinflation, nationalization, monetary/land reform, privatization.. any of them can cause you to lose large amount of wealth.

So many of my mid-to-highschool classmates mates had desite for, air quote, me "working all the time", end of air quote. Can't ignore that.

They do not involve asking people how intelligent they think they are, which is the only way Dunning-Kruger would influence the results.

On the contrary. A lot of the standard methods are crude and coarse measures of intelligence.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121219133334.h...

> ... whether general "intelligence", or g, even exists.

I'm talking about the one that is for example measured in standardized IQ tests.

Intelligence is a measure of aptitude, but aptitude applies to a broad range of activity, and not all aptitude is numerically quantifiable (in any meaningful sense, at least). For example, two broad categories of intelligence are academic intelligence and emotional intelligence. Excellence in one field does not necessarily transfer to all fields, otherwise socially gifted people would always make the best academic students, and from personal observation I can see this doesn't tie up with reality.

It's not the wealth. It's all of the cultural things that correlate strongly with wealth. Case in point: Two million Cuban-Americans came to the US with nothing but the clothes on their backs, within the last 60 years. Today, they've found their way to the middle and upper classes in about the same proportions as non-hispanic white people.

It's whether your parents taught you to read by age 5, cooked vegetables for dinner, encouraged you to play an instrument, drove you to tournaments on weekends, picked a neighbourhood with an IB program even if that means no yard, paid for braces, etc etc.

Patents with low income can choose to do formative things, with personal sacrifice.

Anecdotally, social mobility happens when your parents choose to prioritize you, and you also somehow get introduced to the good life and determine to 'make it' at whatever cost.

(I'm not disagreeing. Intuitively I'd tend to agree with you that those things would have a measureable effect. I just don't trust intuition in this sort of thing. :) )

Malcolm Gladwell writes about this too, in Outliers [1] (chapters 3 and 4). His aim was to dispel the myth that success derives from intelligence.

[1]: https://www.amazon.ca/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwel...

Edit: while I'm sure I'm smart (who isn't sure the are?), luck has a lot to do with any success I've had.

Does anyone expect that by sitting around doing nothing they'll get lucky and become successful? Do one's choices mean nothing?

I know (and admire) many many less successful people who work a lot harder than me, who display most of the traits that are meant to make people successful, but the halo effect, being white and male, getting easily bored, and being brought up in an environment where suggesting I could be the Prime Minister one day was met not with derision but with book suggestions were surely the keys to my success, and also the basis for all my choices.

The key belief - in my experience - between the Left and the Right is that the Right doesn't believe in luck, good or bad.

Getting easily bored was helpful?

Working hard on non-productive things is not going to get one anywhere. Everybody has choices on what to work on. Working hard waiting tables is not going to help create a hit album - working hard on guitar skills might.

To be successful, you have to have a plan that makes sense, then work that plan, not something else.

Talk about a non sequitur. Grandparent said, essentially, that luck is necessary for success. You seem to be arguing against a strawman who you imagine claims that luck is sufficient for success.

You have accomplished much, Walter, and you deserve to feel proud. You also should feel lucky, however.

I know a number of successes and failures. The successes tend to be people who take responsibility for their lot in life, the bad as well as the good. The failures tend to be people who blame others or bad luck for their lot.

The empowering thing about taking responsibility is then you can do something about it.

Also not being a billionaire!= not being successful.

I.e. if you're not out there swinging, you are never ever going to hit the ball.

No one denies that Facebook was built through hard work and perseverance, but how many people have doctor parents, a software engineer for a private tutor in middle school, admittance to the richest private boarding school in the country, a (former) best friend whose father is a wealthy industrialist, and a number of other untold privileges?

Using Zuckerberg as an example of a self-made person really hurts your argument.

Where are all the multibillion unicorn startups created by people from working class backgrounds?

Meanwhile:

Elon Musk - engineer father, privately educated

Jeff Bezos - landowning grandfather who was also regional director of the Atomic Energy Commission, engineer father

Bill Gates - father lawyer, mother on the board of IBM, privately educated

Steve Jobs - working class adoptive parents (but a complicated and interesting genetic background), father not an engineer but encouraged tinkering

Larry Page - father had PhD in CS and encouraged tinkering on hardware around the house

Sergey Brin - father maths professor, mother NASA researcher

I'm not sure if this has been researched, but it looks as if success in tech correlates with high IQ parents and plenty of opportunities for experimentation and hands-on tinkering.

I'm sure there are people doing okay in tech who had no parental input at all, but I'd guess they're much rarer than those who had opportunities and encouragement.

I'm looking at my FB friends list, counts well over 600 people, the bulk are from well to-do families all privately educated, top unis, top careers. I don't think any, would have their parents allow them to drop out of Uni irrespective of whether it was the next FB they were building and write them a $100k cheque to get going.

This is an example of luck that many ignore in the narrative. However major kudos to Zuck his ad product has basically guaranteed me a career for the rest of my life. For that alone I'm grateful for FB being invented.

Yes, that of their employees, who proceeded to get bread-crumbs compared to the "owners" (ie: mostly outside investors) who did a tiny fraction of the work.