Nah, in 2081 we commie liberals would just shoot enemies of the people like you :).
Maybe this percentage varies depending on occupation. I’ve been exposed to three various professional environments lately – fellow grad students, professors, and mental health workers in applied clinical settings. The vast majority of grad students and professors I’ve been exposed to are qualified to hold that position – easily 95% or higher. They work hard, are knowledgeable in their area, and can pick up new information faster than the average person. I don’t know what percentage come from priviledged backgrounds, but even if they do, they are competent at the job. I think most of us are concerned with cases where people are incompetent, but power and connections gets them a position for which they aren’t qualified. If a person is a great English professor, who cares if she’s tenth in line to inherit the Rockefeller fortune?
I’ve encountered more variation in quality in clinical settings. I’ve seen a significant minority (maybe 25%) have a limitation in quality (limited ability to connect with clients, not corresponding with other team members on a patient’s progress, limited assessment or case conceptualization skills, etc.) I don’t know how these folks got these positions, and don’t normally ask about economic backgrounds of coworkers, but a plausible explanation for some is coming from the right families and knowing the right people. I don’t think this can account for all the limited folks. I find it hard to believe that people from the top 1% SES make up 25% of practicing clinicians.
Overall, my experience leads me to Robert’s conclusion – the net effect of these folks isn’t a significant portion of the work force. If you work hard, do well at the school that takes you, and get work experience at a competent firm (maybe not the most elite), I believe you’ll find sustainable employment regardless of your background. But my field may be less subject to this – maybe business has more of this practice.
There’s a large literature on the intergenerational transfer of income (recent example). The results are quite variable. A number that gets thrown about a lot for the elasticity of child’s income to family income is 0.4. That is, a 10% increase in your parent’s income is associated with a 4% increase in your income.
That association reflects all of the possible mechanisms generating a positive correlation between parents’ and children’s income. They include: transfer of genetic endowments of abilities and tastes (e.g., the genetic component of intelligence); common environmental influences; cultural transfers of income-related abilities and tastes; investment in “human capital” (e.g., fancy private schools), and transfer of social capital. All but the last of these effects work through improving the child’s characteristics in such a way as to increase the child’s income. That is, the child obtains more skills because his family is wealthy, but holding skills constant the family background has no effect on the child’s outcome.
Only the last of these mechanisms, “social capital,” refers to a mechanism through which parental income has a direct effect on children’s outcomes – this is the George W. getting a good job because he meets his dad’s friends effect. I don’t know of any evidence that the last effect is empirically significant.
On the thread topic, I agree with Sidd that, in academia at the graduate level, where you came from is irrelevant. I don’t know how my university lets undergraduates in, but I sometimes have to sit on the committee that lets grad students into my department. I couldn’t care less about extracurricular activities or whatnot: I want to see their grades, standardized test scores, which courses they took, which undergraduate institution they went to, and how strong their letters are. Anything else on the application – like whether they play sports – is completely irrelevant. Same goes for academic hiring. I don’t care whether your daddy’s rich or even about your grades: show me some quality research papers.
Nonetheless, I expect that grad students’ and professors’ parents are much more highly educated and high income, on average, than the general population. But none (or vanishingly little, anyways) of that correlation can be attributed to a direct effect of parental wealth on children’s outcomes.
For what it’s worth, there are some incredible public schools out there.
I was lucky enough to go to one.
Literally, the school was better than the private schools some of the people I know went to instead to get the prep school experience; they’d have had a better education and prep imo going to the school I went to.
So there are some public schools out there that do it right. It’s a pity that lesson can’t be applied more broadly.
I just don’t understand why people keep saying this. Daddy directly getting you the appointment because he is rich is small potatoes. I could care less about that.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that the kids have the grades, standardized test scores, etc., because Daddy bought him the ability to do that over the last 18 years. No one is saying that rich kids are somehow inherently stupid, and that is being waived away once they turn 18.
I’m saying that the poor kid won’t have the grades and standardized test score because he didn’t get 18 years of special tutoring, SAT preparation courses in high school, etc.
To say all I care about are the grades and the test scores (and the ability to write good papers) once 18 years of inequality has already occurred to allow the rich kid to beat the poor kid in those areas is missing the point entirely.
I believe this thread has touched on multiple points. At the least, there has been discussion of:
- whether valuing extracurriculars on college applications indirectly benefits candidates from wealthy families more than poor families (the original topic)
- whether the advantages given to rich offspring lead to a significant number of positions occupied by unqualified people who were lucky to be born into wealthy families
- discussion of the unfairness that wealthy kids will have years of access to better instruction, relative to poorer kids, which provides an early lifetime advantage to wealthy kids
I find all three points interesting, but I’m most concerned about point 2, and have addressed my comments primarily to that. You are more concerned with point 3, but that’s not the only topic of this thread. I can’t agree with you that “No one is saying that rich kids are somehow inherently stupid, and that is being waived away once they turn 18.” Some of us have been discussing whether relatively stupid rich kids get positions for which others would be more qualified. You’re emphasizing a different point, but there’s not just one point to this thread that some of us are potentially missing.
I was responding to TSG’s comments on “ding-bat stupid” people who get great jobs because of daddy’s connections.
In contrast, you are saying that people obtain more skills because of family background, and to some extend that is certainly the case. It is certainly wise to choose good parents. But notice that only part of the effect of parental characteristics on children’s outcomes is due to investments such as “special tutoring” and such. Transfer of genetic endowments and preferences is probably considerably more important. That is, we would expect wealthy parents to be more likely to have kids who wind up with high incomes even if we were able to shut down the ability of parents to buy higher quality education.
I think you also overestimate the effect of quality of education on eventual outcomes. It turns out to be suprisingly difficult to show that school quality, as measured by inputs such as student-teacher ratios, proportion of teachers with graduate degrees, and so forth, have any effect, much less a dramatic effect, on student outcomes. Example of a paper in this literature.
I think Sly is talking about changing the culture so that the poorer kids get the encouragement and tutoring and such that wealthier kids are currently getting. In other words, if we could get in there and change their lives so that they have a similar enough first 18 years of life to compete with the wealthier children, then they wouldn’t be at such a huge disadvantage. That’s true, and falls under some form of fair-opportunity rule, but almost impossible to implement in practice.
Still, I’m all for trying, if someone can come up with a plan.
It’s called adoption.
The problem is, the only way adoption is a good system is when it is completely voluntary. And the idiot tools that keep breeding but are incapable of properly raising children tend not to be the most rational sort so short of forcing them to give up their offspring for adoption, there will always be scads of underpriveleged kids growing up with shitty parents.
Also… there are plenty of wealthy adults that make shitty parents… their offspring tend to grow up to be the spoiled brats that make people look at them and go HEY IT SUCKS KIDS CAN BENEFIT FROM THEIR PARENTS WEALTH which actually completely misses the point.
The good news is that thanks to current trends in wealth concentration, there will be fewer and fewer rich kids every year! So, chin up, guys!
No, that’s a fair point (and akin I think to what Sidd was saying).
I think I did project my own thoughts on to that separate discussion. I don’t think that all (or even most) children of the wealth owe their success (if they have it) to simple name dropping and references. At the same time, I doubt the others here who brought up that point really believe it happens all or even most of the time.
I was just making the point that you do not have to think that rich people have moron children who are only successful due to daddy buying them a job at age 25 in order to think there are still problems in the system.
Robert Sharp is pretty spot on. If we are going to pretend that it is a meritocracy (such that everyone has an equal shot, and it is based on effort and brains), than we need an even playing field with respect to training and education. Because one thing I will say, in my private education experiences, I met far too many rich kids who were decent kids, but who really did believe that they owed it all to some innate ability and talent. They weren’t jerks, they just believed that they were there solely due to their intelligence and hard work, and that they beat the “other kids” on a level playing field. I don’t think that’s horrible; most of us want to believe that we achieved the good things we did through our own superior abilities, not outside benefits and advantages.