In which direction is causality flowing here, and how do you justify it? We didn't choose our brains––so how do we differentiate the privilege we got from our "class" from the traits we were born with?
Does privilege imply that you got it from your "class"? This seems like a classic nature/nurture fallacy.
>In which direction is causality flowing here, and how do you justify it? We didn't choose our brains
No, but our privileged parents did contribute to them, and their our upbringing, early months, lack of childhood stress over things as food and war, familial support, good schools, and so on.
Brains is hardly the best contributor to entrepreneurial success. In fact a plot of IQ vs success I've seen plotted looked like random noise except below a certain threshold (obviously seriously cognitive impaired people will have much more trouble becoming entrepreneurs). But aside from that, whether you are 105 or 120 or 150 didn't seem to make much of a difference.
Induction gets you nowhere though: where did our privileged parents get their brains from? You're proving my point here: we inherit roughly 50% of our traits through our parent's genes.
I never claimed IQ was the best measure (surprised it looked like random noise though), but certainly our cognitive traits matter. So to my question: How do you distinguish that privilege from the privilege you got from your "class"?
Edit: Sorry if I came across snarky here, I appreciate your answer!
>Induction gets you nowhere though: where did our privileged parents get their brains from? You're proving my point here: we inherit roughly 50% of our traits through our parent's genes.
Well, of people with equal IQs, isn't a potential 0-50% penalty from nurture/privilege still huge enough to make points about "self-made men taking risks" (and implying that others are "lazy" or whatever) moot?
Privilege is not a trait. You cannot look at a person in isolation and say whether they have it or not. It's a property of how other people relate to them in society.
White skin is something you're born with. White privilege is what happens when you live in a society that assumes that black people are more likely to be criminals than white people, so you get a more favourable reception when you walk in a room.
Do you really think someone's ending point as an adult is largely limited to their "brains"? Like, how are you going to completely exclude the upbringing environment and the scarcity and struggle for resources that some folks face.
It's not "what I think", it's what we know. One of the most well established facts in sociology is that IQ is the best predictor for life success: Firkowska-Mankiewicz, Anna, and Jerzyna Słomczyńska. Intelligence (IQ) as a Predictor of Life Success. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20628656
You reiterate my question in the second sentence: How do we weight these different privileges?
>For instance, IQ was believed to be one generic measure of human intelligence, on which Young’s meritocracy was based. But a century of research on IQ and life success has largely dispelled the once widely spread myth about the importance of IQ (Arrow et al., 2000; Gardner, 1983; Goleman, 1995; Gould, 1996; Zhao, 2016). Based on longitudinal studies on IQ and life’s success that lasted multiple decades, researchers conclude that: “the value of the IQ scores should not be overestimated” (Firkowska-Mankiewicz, 2002, p. 41).
Besides that, even if an analytical weighting cannot be given, it doesn't mean we can't examine the effects qualitatively.
>The results demonstrate that intelligence is a powerful predictor of success but, on the whole, not an overwhelmingly better predictor than parental SES or grades. Moderator analyses showed that the relationship between intelligence and success is dependent on the age of the sample but there is little evidence of any historical trend in the relationship.
Perhaps, but the paper also concludes "that the importance of the role of IQ in predicting life success should not be overestimated". Furthermore while IQ did to some degree predict objective life success it does not seem to predict subjective life success, ie how happy you are with how your life turned out.
Also, they only compared those who scored very low to those that scored very high. The study says nothing about the predictive power of IQ for those who are within 'normal' ranges. All you can really conclude is that 13-year-olds with a WISC score above 130 tend to do better in life than kids with a WISC score below 85. It says nothing about if we can extrapolate that to conclude the kids scoring 115 do better than kids scoring 95.
And again we're back at my original question... This is just a never ending loop. My whole point is this: How do we separate our inherited traits from the privilege brought on by our "class"?
Does privilege imply that you got it from your "class"? This seems like a classic nature/nurture fallacy.