praha14

I understand the argument that, once free from work, a number of people will voluntarily choose to work as physicists or playwrights or mathematicians.

What I haven’t understood, though, is why someone would choose to work as a bricklayer or spend their 20s sitting in a fluorescent office designing an industrial process to make ball-bearing lubricant 0.4% more efficient. It’s that sort of menial, unglamorous labor that our society and quality of life is built on.

I'm not asking that.

I often see the fact that people of color are overrepresented in the prison system presented as an example of their marginalization. If overrepresentation in prison is an example of marginalization, then it seems contradictory to say that overrepresentation of men in prison is not a first-rate issue because they are not marginalized.

Isn't overrepresentation in the prison system an instance of marginalization? I often hear as cited as such regarding people of color.

Southern states are the most predominately black states in the country. Are you sure you want to bring this up?

1. Of course not, I referenced unintelligent wealthy people ("dumb nobility") in my post.

2. 70% of rich families lose their wealth by the second generation, 90% by the third. [A]

3. IQ is a greater predictor of income than parental SES. Someone in the 95th percentile for IQ has a higher EV for earnings than someone born into the 95th percentile for wealth.

4. A number of revolutions have happened. If you don't believe that modern France or Japan are freer than their feudal predecessors then I agree that we are probably not on the same page.

A. http://time.com/money/3925308/rich-families-lose-wealth/

1. No of course not, but if it's a factor at all we'd expect to see the pattern I described.

2. We're talking about social mobility, not the level of inequality.

One thing I've never understood- in a fair society in which people are not artificially limited, wouldn't we expect social mobility to decrease over time as successive generations "sort" themselves into the spots allowed by their genetics?

Let's say we've got a feudal society with dumb nobility that rules over a smart peasantry by force. If that society becomes free, we'll expect smart peasants to move up and dumb noblemen to move down across the first few generations... but once they've moved, they've moved. Ergo, declining social mobility.

"Gender quotas at board level in Europe have done little to boost corporate performance or to help women lower down"

Isn't the article saying that they didn't work?