> Wealth does not pass three generations.
- Chinese proverb
Not true. Gregory Clark has an awesome book on this, The Son Also Rises. Social status has a heritability of 0.7ish in every society he measured it in. That's almost as high as the upper bound estimate for IQ. To give an idea of how powerful heritability of social status/roles is consider this: Norman surnames are over represented among the battlefield casualties of WW1 and 2 for the UK. Nearly a thousand years later a prospensity for organised violence lives on. And despite the Cultural Revolution and 30 years of Communism, the same surnames that were over represented among the Mandarins of Qing China are over represented among the upper echelons of today's Communist Party.
〉tl;dr = Generation 1 builds wealth from scratch, Gen 2 is inspired by the raw dedication of the first, but Gen 3 never meets Gen 1 and feels entitled and lazy and squanders everything.
Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers. -- Socrates
[I've revised this comment several times now, but I don't actually know where we disagree. I'm just leaving it as is for now.]
> Gregory Clark has an awesome book on this, The Son Also Rises.
I haven't read Clark's book personally. But a passage via SSC [1] (a link which I cited for you to follow and actually read):
> efforts to democratise education and eliminate discrimination over the past century appear to have had no discernible effect on mobility
which is, uh, sort of better relates to the toppish-level discussion.
SSC cited how Georgia raffled off the land they stole from the Cherokee. The white lotto-winning descendants weren't appreciably better off. This exemplifies how dynastic wealth can diminish because of a lack of some intangible value (work ethic? genes?), which incidentally Gen Y may not have inherited from Gen X and the Baby Boomers. I.e. I see no issues with my theory so far.
Also your Socrates quote is off point. The Greeks had this notion that civilization had descended from a Golden Age to a Silver Age, and from there a Bronze Age. They also believed civilization would continue to decline linearly. This is obviously silly since the Western World's economy has appreciated a wazzilion fold since the Renaissance. But the point of the Chinese Proverb was more consistent with the "Mandate of Heaven/Dynastic Cycle" meme. I.e. dynastic wealth ebbs and flows like a business cycle. This idea is incompatible with neither dynastic long-term growth nor societal long-term growth.
Not true. Gregory Clark has an awesome book on this, The Son Also Rises. Social status has a heritability of 0.7ish in every society he measured it in. That's almost as high as the upper bound estimate for IQ. To give an idea of how powerful heritability of social status/roles is consider this: Norman surnames are over represented among the battlefield casualties of WW1 and 2 for the UK. Nearly a thousand years later a prospensity for organised violence lives on. And despite the Cultural Revolution and 30 years of Communism, the same surnames that were over represented among the Mandarins of Qing China are over represented among the upper echelons of today's Communist Party.
〉tl;dr = Generation 1 builds wealth from scratch, Gen 2 is inspired by the raw dedication of the first, but Gen 3 never meets Gen 1 and feels entitled and lazy and squanders everything.
Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers. -- Socrates