Read on Twitter
Since I keep contributing to inequality/IQ/meritocracy threads, let me state my own position. I have written these things on Twitter before; they are unoriginal.
What I see around me is that people usually have roughly the same socioeconomic status as their parents, sometimes even literally the same occupation. My friend's parents are professors of mathematics; his brother is a professor of mathematics (my friend is a software developer).
Yet, this is not universally true. This friend's eldest and middle child, about 28 and 25, both failed college. Their parents put them through Lambda School. The eldest got a programming job through nepotism, and his brother was still sitting on his butt, last time I heard.
Two things are obviously true. Being a mathematician's son raises one's chances of being a mathematician: the parent teaches the child what it is like to be a mathematician in addition to teaching any actual mathematics the child wants to learn. A janitor's son doesn't have this.
Yet, this is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition. Mathematician Paul Cohen's parents were a casual laborer and a seamstress. He received the Fields Medal. I am sure that one can find many more examples.
Differences in ability between people are real. Differences in motivation are real. They have significant effect on a person's socioeconomic status. Based on what I know about my friend's children, their problem was lack of motivation, not lack of ability.
Yes, privilege is also real, but it is not the only thing. We do not award Olympic medals to children of previous generation's Olympic medalists, even if they are more exposed to the world of sports than a random person.
My stepson, 27, also failed college, and failed to learn any programming language properly. A boy he was friends with around age 12, who grew up in the same milieu, graduated from Caltech with a CS degree, did graduate studies at Oxford, though doesn't seem to have finished them.
While I do realize that people's abilities differ, I do not share the HBD twitter's obsession with IQ and other standardized tests.
I am now learning C++20 and refreshing C++17, C++14 and C++11. Who can understand them? More importantly, who created them? Did they understand the effect of new features on the language as a whole?
Suppose you teach C++ to 1000 people, grade their exams, give them the WAIS-IV, and calculate the correlation with IQ scores. I don't know whether anyone has actually performed such an experiment, but I would expect the correlation to be positive but much less than 1.0.
Learning C++20 involves understanding real-world large-scale software systems. Solving Raven's Progressive Matrices involves second-guessing the rules by which the matrices were created (originally by John Raven), which don't come from the real world. Why would they be the same?
Finally, the factually true assertion that people differ in ability (e.g. to learn C++20) is irrelevant to the normative question of how much inequality society should have.
Counting by the Gini coefficient, the US is much more unequal than Germany and South Korea, and much more equal than Brazil and Mexico. What is the right level? The answer to this question cannot and should not be derived from the distribution of IQ scores.
