Thread by @cremieuxrecueil

One of the reasons it is unwise to assume that the relationship between variables like household income and kids' IQ is causal is because society is meritocratic

Smart (dull) people tend to move up (down), and they'll transmit ability to their kids regardless of household income

Meritocracy makes class confounded, and it shows that class is also not destiny, either

Thanks to modern genome-wide association studies, we now have molecular genetic evidence for genetic confounding

Consider these four cohorts: across them, polygenic scores predict mobility!

This holds up between siblings: the smarter sibling tends to move above their co-sibling, and this holds genetically.

This holds up comparing children to parents:

Best your parents? Tend to move up.
Worse than them? Tend to move down.

We've known this confounding is generated genetically for the better part of a century due to biometric modeling, but it's nice to have direct genetic evidence too

Anyway, this is a dominating reason why you cannot ascribe the correlates of class advantage *to class advantages*

Mobility matters. Keep it in mind!

Paragraph source: emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2018/12/soc…

And to learn more, see: cremieux.xyz/p/intelligence…