army1987 comments on Politics Discussion Thread August 2012 - Less Wrong
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From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility:
(Now, it's possible that “ability in managing wealth” is heritable to some extent, but it seems unlikely that that alone would cause such an effect, without your parents being wealthy ‘directly’ causing you to be wealthy. And note that that study was across one country -- if they took quintiles worldwide I'd expect the results to be even more dramatic.)
Heritability in ability to manage wealth would explain this, actually. Assuming it's as likely to go down as it is to go up in any given generation, and assuming a lower bound on this ability, and assuming some percentage of people are already at that lower bound and their descendants can only improve, you'd expect something like this distribution.
Not to say it -does- explain this. I don't disagree that wealth is a factor. Where I disagree is in naming it as the most important factor.