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Emile comments on Review: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - Less Wrong
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On the other hand, maybe parents know that, and correctly expect that status will help their child more than intelligence.
Though you'd think that if that were the case, such effects would show up in income statistics. A better argument is that having a kid who does violin etc gives parents a status boost (this is how I originally interpreted Christian's statement).
I mostly agree; though there's also the aspect of having your kid associate with the kind of kids who get sent to violin lessons, which is probably a "better" peer group than what you'd get from many other activities.
Having a kid who plays violin is more about the parent's status than the kid's. This may help the kid learn to eventually jockey for status as adults. But I have to question how much that improves their quality of life, if that's what we care about.
I wouldn't say "Jockey for status" as much as "give him tastes and references that make it easier for him to come off as high status / associate with high-status people" (those might be ways of saying the same things, but "jockeying" calls to mind dominance and put-downs).
I expect it would improve their quality of life, all else being equal, but I don't know if Violin lessons would be a good way to improve one's status (probably far from the best one). I agree it's probably mostly about the parent's status, and the kind of kids the peers wants their kid to associate with.