IQ is highly hereditable and has a higher correlation with income than the 5% here.

Soft skills, have been shown to be a higher predictor of income than IQ.

You are right that something's been passed down - but it's not the genes. It's the social connection to:

* Get jobs without applying for them.

* To learn important economic news before anyone hears them. E.g. President bought 1200 Cuban cigar just before banning imports from CUBA. Read this: https://www.cigaraficionado.com/index.php/article/great-mome...

* To get contracts regardless of ones qualifications. I've read that Aristocrats ensure their kids have ivy league degrees to maintain a illusion of fairness.

There's an article I read here on HN that says, Ivy league schools are successful because they select applicants who would be successful without them.

If genetics doesn't affect income, why is there a correlation between identical twins raised separately?

See e.g. https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/38881/HECER...

It wasn't stated there is no effect, just that social class has a larger impact at the highest rungs of society.

>You are right that something's been passed down - but it's not the genes.

That sounds like a claim that there's no causal connection running through genes.

I would posit the other question, how could they not?

Propensity to lying, cheating, saving, nepotism, length of life, fecundity, access to healthcare, intelligence, math ability and so many more factors are easily inheritable.

It's been nurtured so long that it feels like nature.

Yeah. Even if they were genetically dispossessed to have higher IQs, better health and extreme motivation it should have been pretty genetically diluted after 600 years.

Assortative mating can help maintain or increase any endowment. Think of that as being a within-family/smaller-scale version of the existing genetic gradient by SES (eg "The Genetics of Success: How Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms Associated With Educational Attainment Relate to Life-Course Development" https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/correlation/2016-belsky.... , Belsky et al 2016; "Genetic analysis of social-class mobility in five longitudinal studies" http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/07/03/1801238115 , Belsky et al 2018a.)