[ExI] Protected Elites

[Damien Broderick]

A little more on this:

At 11:41 PM 5/16/2009 +1000, Stathis modestly proposed:

>"While few would deny that it is *possible* to start poor and end 
>rich, the > evidence suggests that this feat is more difficult to 
>accomplish in the > United States than in other high-income 
>nations." > ...[snip]

>The explanation leaps out at you: poor people are genetically lazy, 
>and poor black people at least doubly so.

It might be expected that to the extent intelligence and behavioral 
dispositions are strongly inherited, the more mobility in principle a 
society supports the less mobility will be seen after a few 
generations. Regression to the mean would tend to equilibrate 
individual surges up and down, but after a time the lazy and 
incorrigibly stupid *really would* settle into the lowest 
percentiles, and the smart and industrious (as well as the smart and 
unscrupulous and the sociopathic, etc) would rise to the 
"meritocratic" top. So there might be a tragic inevitability, over 
time: the more mobility is possible, the less mobility takes place... 
And perhaps America is leading the way here. On the other hand, this 
sort of explanation is limited unless it corrects for memetic 
barriers to mobility such as endemic cultural racism, sexism, etc.

(In any case, I think polygenic aspects of inheritance in the 
interesting characteristics might make this hard to detect except on 
a very large-scale analysis. And in the next half century, it will 
probably all be moot anyway, as science learns how to tweak those 
genes, epigenes, etc.)

Damien Broderick