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army1987 comments on Politics Discussion Thread August 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion

0 Post author: OrphanWilde 01 August 2012 03:25PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 03 August 2012 07:18:49AM *  2 points [-]

It is supposed that ability in managing wealth is necessary merely to maintain it, and therefore class mobility is not as rigid as opponents of wealth inequality would argue.

How many people born to very rich parents end up very poor because they are bad at managing wealth?

Seriously, when I look at wealthy people, I mostly see people born from the right vagina. Or in some case people with good genes but mediocre memes (think about sportspeople or models).

Comment author: OrphanWilde 03 August 2012 11:41:21AM 2 points [-]

The plural of anecdote isn't data; are you basing this statement on an objective analysis of wealthy people, or a subjective case-by-case analysis subject to confirmation bias and selectivity biases? How do you "look" at wealthy people, for example? What do you even define as wealthy?

Was a wealthy person who grew up in an abusive home and was driven to succeed through neurosis merely born from the right vagina? What if it was simply a middle-class home with strong ethics?

Do you think mediocre memes win?

Comment author: [deleted] 03 August 2012 11:11:23PM 3 points [-]

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility:

Research on American mobility published in 2006 and based on collecting data on the economic mobility of families across generations looked at the probability of reaching a particular income-distribution with regard to where their parents were ranked. The study found that 42 percent of those whose parents were in the bottom quintile ended up in the bottom quintile themselves, 23 percent of them ended in the second quintile, 19 percent in the middle quintile, 11 percent in the fourth quintile and 6 percent in the top quintile.

(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.)

Comment author: OrphanWilde 06 August 2012 03:57:19PM 0 points [-]

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.

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