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Re:The perils of short-termism by danaris on Monday September 30, 2019 @08:40AM (#21114680)
> Greg Clark’s work on social class persistence suggests that’s wasted effort. The heritability of social class is 0.7...

...which is not because social class is genetic, but because the things you do while raising your child are, by and large, the things of your social class.

If you say, "Well, my child will be middle-class either way, so I don't have to worry!" and do nothing to help them...then they don't get the middle-class upbringing.

Sure, there are still aspects of "being middle-class" that come along "for free," but there's enough that requires actual effort on the parents' part that your apparent philosophy would be quite counterproductive.

Re:The perils of short-termism by barry-cotter on Monday September 30, 2019 @09:29AM (#21115110)
If something maintains its behavior across continents, centuries, language groups and religions I’m going to bet it’s a normal psychological trait in being highly heritable, rather than the only example of one that’s culturally transmitted.

I don’t know exactly what the contributors to high social class are but intelligence and conscientiousness are no doubt among them and they’re highly heritable.

There are aspects of being middle class that come for free, they’re the ones children are born with. That’s why adoptive siblings are as similar in their educational outcomes as strangers and biological siblings are far more similar.

The mechanism is genetic, not cultural. If you can disprove it there’s a lot of publications in it for you.

Re:The perils of short-termism by danaris on Monday September 30, 2019 @03:27PM (#21118821)
Your argument is compelling.

I'm not completely convinced, but you certainly raise some good points.

However, I do have some questions. What, exactly, is it that you say "maintains its behavior" in that way? Because from my perspective, what we have is not obviously a single thing that can be said to track across all those shifts for a given individual or family, but rather a metric that maintains a high degree of stability from generation A to generation A+1—and thus, a moderate degree of stability to generation A+2, and so on.

Furthermore, my understanding of that 0.7 number is that it's true for the US, now, not something that's static worldwide and across history.

Finally, I would note that there's probably just as much publication in conclusively proving it is genetic.