Wealthy families tend to be wealthy not because of environment but because of inherited intelligence/other traits
Gregory Clark demonstrates a perfect correlation between genes and elite status
A main criticism of the bell curve was that it didn’t adjust for family background.
Which is like a study trying to analyze male vs female strength and concluding that strength differences are untenable after adjusting for muscle mass, an entirely pointless adjustment that is intended to destroy a real correlation
Naturally, family background operates as a strong predictor of genetics, thus generational inheritance of social status, occupational prestige and intelligence are mistakenly observed as inter-generational shared environment coalescing into stratified outcomes by different social classes.
As shown on pic 1, market oriented policies are strongly correlated with higher group intelligence, and this correlation holds among individuals, thus a reciprocal feedback loop occurs in which free markets -> meritocratic competition -> the reward of selling one’s talents -> an elite of individuals with high talents who consistently outperform (doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc).
This allowance of free market policies allows a hierarchical ordering of talents that rewards the most intelligent usually through a competitive offering of skills and economic compensation in return. Therefore a passionate recalcitrance among the lowest performing groups exists to a competitive free market.
It’s why that blacks are most likely to vote against the government cutting bureaucracy, as a huge fraction of even college educated black women occupy government jobs funded by the taxpayer, many of which have no purpose besides defending the status quo bureaucratic system.
Regulations exist for the sake of its own regulation in an economy where the less intelligent are allowed to participate in democracy, and vote to disintegrate the competition or else they’d be out of a real job. So they bargain on their own behalf, a sort of low IQ nepotism. The more competitive a market is allowed to be, the higher the reward to those who have higher skill, and the stronger the rank ordering. This means that a free market strongly helps higher IQ individuals to actualize their true potential and would increase the inequality between low and high IQ nations, analogous to how affirmative action being abrogated would radically increase white and Asian representation at top universities.
As Thomas Sowell in basic economics or Amy Chua in her book world on Fire have both noted, when markets are unrestricted to competition, even if discrimination societally is normative, employers are still incentivized to uphold a form of meritocracy if the skills of the given group satisfy their demands.
As Thomas Sowell noted about the Soviet Union, distribution efficiency and economic quality significantly deteriorated under a non competitive economy as the incentive to produce quality goods was diminished by the monopolization of competition
So what does this all mean? 1) the correlation coefficient between IQ, income and occupational prestige is underestimated due to regulations that stifle the reward of competitive intelligent behavior (gifted programs get funded much less than disadvantaged student programs), 2) so long as any amount of meritocracy exists, a generational rank ordering of groups will create social classes by genetic differences, 3) the stronger the meritocracy, the stronger these disparities and the higher the heritability correlation as environmental obstacles have been reduced by eliminating discrimination.
And we can see precisely this in Gregory Clark’s (2009, 2014, 2026) research, which shows the highest elite families are not caused by higher SES, but by pre-existing genetic ability, as he shows outcome similarities are 0.98 R2 correlated with genetic relatedness to a family member, shown below