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Originally Posted by Enoch Root
Yeah, no surprises here.
However, correlation isn't causation. Maybe the reason that having rich parents is advantageous could be that they have passed on good genes to their children?
Regardless, there is no doubt that having rich parents is advantageous, but again, what should we do about that? Punish them?
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As I’ve said already, the degree to which having rich parents ensures rich children varies substantially by country. It matters less in Canada than in the U.S. But more than in Denmark. So there must be social mechanisms that strengthen intergenerational wealth stickiness and mechanisms that weaken it.
Schooling is a big one. In highly stratified countries like the U.S. and UK, parental income plays a bigger part in educational attainment than in Canada. Schools vary dramatically in quality depending on community and neighbourhood.
That has traditionally not been the case in Canada. But we’re going down that road. My kids go to different schools - my son a GATE/science school in an upper-middle class neighbourhood, and my daughter a regular school in a middle/working class neighbourhood. The difference in parental involvement and fundraising is dramatic. One schools has dozens of parents running fundraisers and donating thousands of dollars to buy iPads and build a courtyard garden. An active committee of educated parents who engage with the school over curriculum and and field trips. The other a handful of parents doing bottle drives to try to buy library books. One parent committee has literally 10 times the money as the other.
And those schools are both in the public system. When you bring in charter and private schools, the differences in parental resources brought to bear on education get even starker.
This was not always the case in Canada. This is new. We’re aping the social norms of America’s upper middle class, and we shouldn’t be surprised if they yield the same ugly inequities and divisions.