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Comment by ColanR | Hacker News Reader

To me it falls in a similar category as how highly intelligent people are less likely to be overweight. I think that with intelligence comes a better sense of how to control oneself. Ever seen the stats on how often lottery winners end up going broke? Not that many people have the capacity and knowledge to control their emotions with their reason. Being wealthy is not a question of making money, it's a question of keeping it.

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This is the type of statistic that embarrasses statistics. How many of those rated "highly intelligent" (I would be fascinated on how they measured that!) were in an elevated economic group and so now we're reduced to tautology.

Lottery winners have had no experience in managing wealth, often have had years and decades of being impoverished and wishing for products like jewelry that was always out of reach, and then they get inundated with money. They found that who marshmallow experiment was literally kids who have their needs met aren't rushing to consume what's in front of them and that patience pays off.

You're not making any argument here other than when you're born wealthy you're more likely to be wealthy, and that we know.

I'm genuinely curious what point you are getting at. It seems like you are agreeing with the parent post.

>How many of those rated "highly intelligent" (I would be fascinated on how they measured that!) were in an elevated economic group and so now we're reduced to tautology

>They found that who marshmallow experiment was literally kids who have their needs met aren't rushing to consume what's in front of them and that patience pays off.

Yes, this is what they are saying. There are traits that rich people have that seriously help them maintain and acquire wealth.

> There are traits that rich people have that seriously help them maintain and acquire wealth.

I'm saying the only traits that rich people have "that seriously help them maintain and acquire wealth" is that they almost exclusively tend to be born to rich people. That's it. That's the trait.

So are you saying that has nothing to do with their upbringing? If someone were born to Rich parents, but adopted by poor parents they would still have those same traits? Seems like there's a lot more to it than what womb you came out of.

I agree genetics could play a small role, but I think developmental environment is a much larger part of the picture

How did you get that I'm arguing nature over nurture here?

I'm literally saying the opposite. Rich people nurture and help their children with connections, etc.

I think your use of birth is the hangup. It's not who you're born to, it's how you're raised

>I'm saying the only traits that rich people have "that seriously help them maintain and acquire wealth" is that they almost exclusively tend to be born to rich people. That's it. That's the trait.

This is saying that self control and delayed gratification isn't a trait. It's saying that financial literacy isn't a trait.

At best it's a gross oversimplification that ignores the fact that a huge number of poor people have acquired these traits

I'm completely agreeing with you. I've argued this in the worst possible way because everyone is assuming I'm saying the opposite. I'm not saying the seed is different, I'm saying those seeds have more fertile ground.

And I didn't mean "genetic trait" but rather "behavioral trait." Of course it's available to everyone just more likely to be found where it's been nurtured. There are dandelions growing in the cracks of a sidewalk; it's possible, just harder.

I think another aspect that a lot of discussions miss is a feeling of hope. Rich kids tend to have hope. Very poor kids can feel stuck and hopeless. When you have a child who, at a young age (think five or six, even) doesn't feel hope for their future, they don't try as hard and they're more likely to give up sooner.

You don't have to be rich to have your needs met as a child such that you don't need to gobble up marshmallows as soon as you see them, unless you mean rich in the sense that the vast majority of the people in the US are rich compared to the global average. US middle class would be just fine in that regard.

That would be an interesting test to do internationally.

This is all much easier if you grow up wealthy. If you start life with a trust fund and people around you who know how to manage wealth, you have a huge advantage

Sometimes you develop a crippling drug addiction and go bankrupt.

I personally don't no. I have been ill, I have had to give up on a career in an industry that died and retrain. I have been subject to a very costly legal challenge that was not even close to being of my own making. I am moderately intelligent, but luck didn't care.

Luck can be a bastard like that

I’m sorry to hear that, and I’m agree it isn’t your fault or the result of some personal flaw on your part that you’re not personally rich. What I’m saying is that on a larger statistical level, when we are talking about entire populations, those random factors still exist but nonrandom factors also exist, and the nonrandom ones are the ones that show up in aggregate once you have enough of a sample size.

Many children of the UHNW families I know are raised by a rotating cast of nannies and emotionally neglected by their parents. It's heartbreaking to watch the psychological damage being done. Given a choice for my embryonic self I'd choose an upper middle class couple with high degrees of empathy, one mostly stay at home parent and an obsessive focus on curiosity, knowledge, and self-education.

If you’re going to use that example, surely you’ve heard of “wealth barely lasts 3 generations”? Surely smart gene rich people could sustain it indefinitely?

More - https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/generational-wealth%3A-why-d...

No because "smart" genes don't sustain. Like 50% is volatile noise. So that would actually line up. I.e. Two 150 IQ don't have a 150 IQ on avg. They have a 125 IQ, and then the two 125 IQ have a 112, and the two 112 IQ have a 106 and voila.

I was being sarcastic to OP; but your math would imply that our ancestors were 1000 IQ and every generation decreases IQ further to 0.

No, because this regression towards the mean tends to pull the children of below-mean parents up, just as much as it pulls the children of above-the-mean parents down.

That said, the grandparent's figure are rather wrong, for two reasons. First is that the heritability of IQ is typically estimated to be around 0.8 instead of 0.5, which means that the expected IQ of parents with IQ of 150 is 140, instead of 125. Second is that this is only the expected IQ. If they have multiple children, some will typically be above the expectation, and some below. More specifically, given standard deviation of 15, around a quarter of children of parents of 150 IQ will have IQ of 150 or higher.

That post is also wrong because "heritable" doesn't mean "caused by genetic differences".

No, in fact it means exactly that. This word has a technical meaning.

Should get a different word then, since you can't get rid of confounders like prenatal diet and environment that aren't genetic but can cause you to be the same as your parents.

In fact, you can. See, for example ACE model, which explicitly attempts to separate generic causation from shared environment and from non-shared environment. This can be done using twin studies, by comparing correlations between monozygotic vs dizygotic twins on various variables of interest, see Falconer’s formula for example.

This research is not new, it has been done for many decades now. The word “heritability” has a well established technical meaning.

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