A bit of self-selection here. Those two million Cuban-Americans were more likely to have been upper class Cubans (or descendants of upper class Cubans). Not only would upper class and upper middle class Cubans be the only ones to afford to flee Fidel Castro's dictatorship, but they would also be the ones most affected by Castro's communist policies and redistribution of wealth.

Exactly. There's no denying that especially at first, Cuban refugees were skewed toward the middle class. But no matter what they came from, they almost all came with nothing. Which is what my point is. It's not the money, it's all of the cultural things that correlate with it.

It seems to me that was precisely the point he tried to make.

It seems to me that if it was his point, he'd have mentioned it.

The "Mariel" people were not upper class Cubans. Many were petty criminals and mental health patients. So, just so people who might think they were all people who escaped back in '59, no, most were not those people.

The Mariel numbers were around 150,000 people, a small fraction of the 2 million or so Cubans who emigrated. In the upper middle class circles I traveled in in South Florida, my Cuban friends from the emigree generation and the generation that grew up in South Florida very much fit the mold of leaving comfort to start over with nothing.

I would agree it's not income. That's just correlation.

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.

Do you have data for that? It's a statement that sounds like it makes sense, but so do a lot of statements in this sort of discussion.

(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. :) )

I don't have data, only personal experience. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerted_cultivation

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...