Social status doesn't make you get bad grades on exams. Being stupid does. You can expect kids with poorer parents to do worse on exams in any place where smart people are better at making money.

Are you suggesting that children in poorer families are born less smart than children from wealthier families?

Absolutely. Because smart people are better at making money and intelligence is a heritable trait.

I don't think anybody would seriously dispute that relationship. Rather, I think people are disputing the directionality.

You seem to be suggesting some sort of natural selection process, whereas it's also legitimate to posit that status contributes to higher IQ (or g, if you prefer) in the form of:

- fewer chemical contaminants in utero and in early life (i.e. living in a less chemically polluted environment)

- access to better nutrition

- access to better medical care

- less stress in utero and in early life

- less exposure to disease

- less exposure to psycho-physiological toxicity (e.g.: poor sleep quality due to a noisy environment)

The list goes on.

tl;dr: you're assuming causation from correlation.

The average American has more wealth than pretty much everyone on Earth. You can't seriously think that it's because Americans are all genetically smarter than everyone else?

Variation within a group can be explained by different factors than variation between groups. That is, it could be completely true that Americans with higher IQs are more likely to become wealthy. But as a group America's success is due to other factors than IQ.

Only if you simplistically ignore that social status and wealth are also heritable and make it much easier to make money regardless of intelligence.

If intelligence matters at all to making money, the wealth + intelligence combo probably beats wealth on its own.

Unless, of course, intelligence is "bad" for the wealthy and "good" for the poor, but I doubt that's the case...

Sure - wealth + intelligence can be highly lucrative e.g. Bill Gates

But intelligence without wealth can easily be beaten by average intelligence plus wealth and status. E.g. Trump

Just to be clear - I'm comparing two billionaires who started off as millionaires, and suggesting that Gates is of above average intelligence whereas Trump is not.

Is social status and wealth really heritable? There are studies of lottery winners that show their children and grandchildren aren't any better off.

This comment makes no sense. Wealthy families clearly pass down money and social status to their children.

But it doesn't last long. After 3 generations, maybe less, there's little statistical difference between those descended from wealth and those not (all else equal!) The super wealthy may leave billion dollar empires to their children, sure. But if we are talking about the upper middle class, a moderate inheritance from your parents isn't going to make or break your life's outcome.

A moderate inheritance plus support during your education may well make or break your life's outcome vs someone born to a poor family.

'Inheritance' doesn't have to mean just what was passed down at death - it must also include all the additional resources available during development to have any meaning.

But it doesn't! That's the point. Otherwise the lottery winners kids would be better off since they could go to better schools and afford college. In general there's little evidence that education makes any difference at all.

Seriously, your lottery winners example is meaningless.

But if you are saying that education makes little difference to lifetime earnings, you're going to have to back that up with a reference because it's an extraordinary claim.

The result isn't necessarily surprising, but it does show a point. Not all lottery winners blow the money immediately and foolishly. You would expect there to be at least some statistical effect. But it doesn't seem to matter. And it's probably the best randomized experiment we can do to compare the effects of wealth and not wealth, all other variables equal. Wealth doesn't' seem to matter as much as people think it does.

It goes back in time too. Winners of 1832 Georgia land lottery were given free land of significant value by the government to settle and farm. After a few decades, they weren't any better off than the nonwinners.

One does not preclude the other.

There are no places where social status does not make it easier to make money.

There are also no places (at least not to my knowledge) where social status is completely decoupled from intelligence.

Maybe part of what makes a good family offers is encouragement/tendency to work hard and make good choices?

Worth thinking about what a level playing field really looks like.

You can go even further. Think about how your live would have been if you were born in most of Africa.