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> Jews last generation, come from elites from their previous family homeland who successfully migrated to escape bad government or seeking greater opportunity, when it was tactically hard to do so for the average person. It's a natural filter for smart, capable, effective people who can raise children to be same.

The large majority of the US Jewish population came after the 1850s. They were not selected for wealth. Like the Irish immigrants were negatively selected. They were less educated than those who stayed at home, on average. Similarly Italians in the relevant period of mass migration. The middle class were doing well so they were more likely to stay home.

> The effect tends to fade over time (shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, or docks to docks, in three generations).

This has no basis in evidence. Every psychological trait I’m aware of is strongly heritable, including ones with obvious impacts on earnings like intelligence, conscientiousness and extraversion[1]. Social class is so heritable the only society to make a dent were the Chinese during the cultural revolution[2]. If you want to know more about the extraordinary persistence of social class see Gregory Clark’s work[3].

[1] Genetic Influence on Human Psychological Traits

https://utahpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/bouchard.0...

[2] Persistence Despite Revolutions

http://davidyyang.com/pdfs/revolutions_draft.pdf

[3] https://faithandheritage.com/2017/06/the-heritability-of-soc...

> Now that Jewish immigration has mostly ended, their great-grandchildren (and the descendants of previous generations of Asian immigrants) are, as a cohort, not performing academically as well as today's Asian immigrant children and children of immigrants.

Source? Judging by elite college representation [1], they're doing at least as well if not better than Asian Americans (which granted, is not limited to just Asian immigrant children).

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24166064

Judging by elite college representation

Elite college representation is a poor metric because of legacy admissions, influence of donors, and the reported efforts to limit Asian admissions.

Look at schools with more merit-based admissions (MIT, Caltech, etc.). Asians are overrepresented to a much higher degree.

It's not clear if you're trying to contest with the parent or agree with him, but you are doing the latter.

> you are doing the latter

Not necessarily. If intelligence is genetic, then by OP's hypothesis, immigrants are more likely to be intelligent and pass that on to their children - whereas GP's hypothesis (seems to suggest) that intelligence is effectively random but determination is what's passed down from parent to child. Of course, it's probably a combination of both.

It depends on the degree of regression to the mean, and to which mean the children are regressing to. Due to selection criteria bias of immigrants they are more likely to be outliers than non immigrants. While it's very likely that the outliers have a genetic advantage it seems that important combinations of genes are often lost and on average subsequent generations do regress to the mean intelligence of the general population that they come from more. If intelligence was a single gene or the average of multiple genes what would normally be expected would be an average of the parents intelligence. It appears that the actual results are the mix of the two which could be readily explained by important combinations of genes not being lost some of the time.

In the future when the important combinations of genes yielding more intelligence are known it'll be possible to select for certain combinations and children selected this way would be expected to have a higher intelligence than either parent. i.e. making multiple draws from a distribution and picking the highest value.

And I'd argue it doesn't really matter because whether it is one or the other, it is highly transmissible, and there isn't much you can do about it as a matter of public policy, unless you take away children from their parents.