The Most Important Factor In How Rich You Are Is The Family You Were Born Into
Wealth & Poverty Are Far More The Product Of Your Family Than Your Intelligence Or Your Work Ethic
By David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
The Myth Of The Survival Of The Fittest Society
If you compress conservatives’, libertarians’, and anarchists’ notion of the fundamental principle upon which a society should operate, it is this:
The Survival Of The Fittest, where by “fittest” they mean “richest.”
This is a completely materialist view of the value and purpose of human beings and society, and its assumption that the “best/fittest” people are the ones who accrue the most money is completely wrong.
This theoretical, perfect society sees no value, or even a negative value, in human beings beyond their ability to gain wealth or generate profit for others.
The Government’s Only Job Is To Protect Companies’ Ability To Get And Keep Money
This philosophy sees no role for a country or a government or a society beyond operating institutions (police, military, courts, banking, etc.) that promote businesses’ and individuals’ ability to gain and keep wealth.
It believes that government has no business promoting widespread prosperity, social mobility, individual freedom, increased education, financial or occupational opportunity, good health, scientific advancement, clean air and water, low levels of discrimination, or anything else beyond fostering the getting and keeping of wealth.
All of those other values are seen as foreign to the role of government and as things that should only exist to the extent that they happen automatically on their own.
Business Can Do Whatever It Wants Without Any Rules
The people who think this way believe that:
- The air should be clean only to the extent that people voluntarily decide not to pollute it.
- People should be healthy only to the extent that they can pay for their own medical care.
- There should be no discrimination only to the extent that people voluntarily decide that they aren’t going to discriminate.
- Products should be safe and non-toxic only to the extent that manufacturers decide that they want to make safe, non-toxic goods.
Poverty Does Not Necessarily Mean You Are Stupid Or Lazy
This is a flawed philosophy because it is based on the false belief that a person’s wealth is an accurate measure of their quality/value, that wealth is the primary indicator of an individual’s intelligence, talent, character and willingness to hard work.
Sorry, but wealth is secondarily, not primarily derived from intelligence, talent, and hard work.
Today, an individual’s intelligence, talent, character and willingness to work hard are of limited value without expensive, advanced education and training.
While intelligence, talent, and hard work are all helpful in becoming financially successful, it’s common for people to be smart, talented and willing to work hard and also be poor.
Rather than intelligence, your wealth is most reliably an indicator of the ability and willingness of your family to educate you.
The Failures Of The Survival Of The Fittest Philosophy
The Survival Of The Fittest philosophy is based on the fictions that:
- Wealth is gained primarily from an individual’s intelligence, talent and hard work
- Everyone starts out with an equal chance to be successful
- An unregulated society is a sieve where poor people fall to the bottom because they are lazy, stupid, and weak
- Rich people stay on the top because they are talented, intelligent and hard working
- Because their wealth means that rich people are talented, strong and good, rich people morally deserve what they have
- Because their poverty means that poor people are lazy, stupid, and weak, poor people morally deserve what they don’t have
- Wealth and poverty are a reflection of a person’s moral values, talent, intelligence and willingness to work.
All of those beliefs are materially false.
This philosophy
- Falsely assumes that the most important factors in gaining wealth are intelligence, talent and hard work, and
- Ignores the fact that the most important factor for personal success is being born into a family that can and does train and nurture its children for a successful life
- Ignores the fact that without offsetting systems, far more than intelligence, talent or hard work, wealth begets wealth
- Falsely assumes that the most important factors in being poor are stupidity and laziness, and
- Ignores the fact that the foundation for most poverty is being born into a family that cannot or does not train and nurture its children for a successful life.
- Ignores the fact that without offsetting systems, far more than stupidity or laziness, poverty begets poverty.
The fact is that financial success is not primarily a reflection of a person’s moral values, intelligence or hard work, but rather is primarily an expression of the family they happened to be born into, the culture they happened to be born into, and the native intelligence and talents they happened to be born with.
These are not aspects of moral value or moral entitlement. These are all elements of luck rather than effort.
Good Luck + Effort → Financial success
Bad Luck + Effort → Financial Failure
The Difference A Family Makes
An Average Person In A Successful Family
If your family can afford to feed you, house you, clothe you, and provide medical care for the first twenty-five years of your life, if it pays for your college and graduate-school tuition, your dorm-room fees, your books, your meals, if it makes sure you have a car and clothes and walking around money, then, all other things being equal, you will get good training and a college degree and if you’ve chosen your field of study well, a good career.
When you graduate, your family will tap into their network of friends, call in favors, get their friends to write letters of recommendation, get you job interviews, and loan you money (or guarantees loans) so that you can buy a car or a house.
An Average Person In A Poor Family
On the other hand, if your family has no money (and 40% of American households have less than $400 in savings) your family can’t feed you, house you, clothe you or provide medical care for you beyond high school.
That 40%-family can’t pay your college tuition, and even if they could or even if you got a free-tuition scholarship, they would have no ability to pay for a dorm room, meals, or books. They can’t buy your clothes or give you a car or provide medical care for four years of college leastwise for two or three more years of graduate school.
On top of that they have no way to give you additional money for all the other things you need for all those years like a computer, a phone, laundry, gas, auto insurance, toothpaste, shoes, etc.
The Rich Get Richer, The Poor Get Poorer
Economic advantages and disadvantages concatenate. The more advantages a person has, the more advantages he/she is likely to get, and the fewer advantages he/she has, the fewer advantages he/she is likely to get.
It’s a feedback system.
Other family-wealth factors that reinforce the rich-get-richer, the poor-get-poorer rule are:
- Good diet vs. bad diet
- Good health care vs. poor health care
- Safe neighborhoods vs. gang neighborhoods
- Good role models vs. bad role models
- Intact families vs. broken families
- Middle-class cultural values vs. lower-class cultural values
The person in the middle of the normal curve who has a successful family will get an education, a career and a good start in life. If they’re successful, their kids will likely have the same chance at a good life that they did.
That very same middle-of-the-normal-curve person who is born into one of those 40% no-savings families will likely enter the job market with nothing more than a high-school education, and, unless their kids are in the top 10% of intelligence and determination, they and most of their kids and their kid’s kids will all end up in the same low-paid unskilled or semi-skilled labor pool.
Financial success for most people, those in the middle of the normal curve of intelligence and talent, is not mainly a reflection of their intelligence, talent and determination. It is mostly a reflection of the wealth of the family they happened to be born into.
The Extraordinary Person
Sure, some people are really smart, clever or determined and can succeed without family support, but most people, the people in the middle of the normal curve, aren’t and can’t.
Yes, extraordinarily talented, clever, intelligent, determined poor people will often find a way to move up and extraordinarily stupid, lazy and foolish rich people will sometimes find a way to fall down, but those are the people at the edges of the normal curve.
They just trade places with each other at the margins leaving the bulk of the rich to get richer and the bulk of the poor to get poorer.
A Computer Model Of The Rich-Get-Richer Syndrome
To test the idea that even small advantages lead to more advantages and small disadvantages lead to more disadvantages, I created a computer simulation where a Winner’s Bowl held 1,050 red marbles (a slight advantage for red), 1000 green marbles and 950 black marbles (a slight disadvantage for black), and a Loser’s Bowl that held 950 red marbles (a slight advantage for red), 1000 green marbles and 1050 black marbles (a slight disadvantage for black).
The computer randomly picked one marble from the Winner’s Bowl, let’s say it’s red, and another from the Loser’s Bowl, let’s say it’s black.
Because the color from the Winner’s Bowl was red and the color from the Loser’s Bowl was black, Red was the winner and Black was the loser.
The program then removed one black marble (the loser color) from the Winner’s Bowl and replaced it with one red marble (the winner color) and it removed one red marble from the Loser’s Bowl (the winner color) and replaced it with one black marble (the loser color).
This made the Winner’s Bowl a little more red and a little less black and it made the Loser’s Bowl a little more black and a little less red.
As the program continued to randomly draw marbles from the Winner’s and Loser’s Bowls, the Winner’s Bowl became increasingly more red and the Loser’s Bowl became increasingly more black.
After 6,000 iterations the Winner’s Bowl increased from 35% red to 45.7% red and the Winner’s Bowl went from 31.67% black to only 20.6% black. So while starting at an initial 35% Red and 31.67% Black, the Winner’s Bowl ended up 45.7% Red and 20.6% Black. The rich (Winner’s Bowl) got richer (Redder), the poor (Loser’s Bowl) got poorer (Blacker).
Here’s a chart that shows the increasing of success of Red and failure of Black stemming from that slight initial Red advantage and Black disadvantage.
Without institutional or societal systems that break this cycle, societies exhibit this same “rich get richer” effect.
The Rich & Poor In America Today
To see this rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer rule in action we need only look at the destruction of the American middle class and the massive growth of America’s very rich on one end of our economy and the increase in the percentage of the food-stamp poor on the other.
To break the American Rich-Get-Richer cycle you need a social/governmental mechanism that identifies talent and human potential and supplies all those people, regardless of wealth, with access to the training necessary to turn their raw talent into a skilled person who can get a good-paying job, a governmental program that conservatives, libertarians and anarchists view as absolutely, totally and completely a violation of their philosophy.
Survival Of The Fittest principles don’t take our society or our country anywhere we should want either of them to go.
— David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
