> I think modern over-parenting by high income / HCOL area / high status couples takes sort of the worst of these approaches and produces a lot of precocious, stressed out, cardboard cutout, downwardly mobile youth.
The exceedingly rarely mentioned elephant in the room here is the phenomenon of regression towards the mean. It works for all polygenically heritable traits, including height and the g-factor.
To simplify it, first-generation children have to turn out more average than their parents, heredity-wise. And as their intelligence is often weaker than their parents', and our society hasn't really found any solid methods of raising it (the tutoring discussed in this thread helps surprisingly little in experiments), as you observe:
> The kids end up only getting into colleges at best as selective as their parents, and quite often less so.
Of course the highly intelligent, professional parents notice this law and pattern as well - and in our history we very often see lesser children of greatest men and women. What real options do they see for themselves here?
1. They can go all in on test-prep and resume padding with the extracurriculars - this is common and unsophisticated path due to little available gain...
2. Or they might ensure they are influential enough, so their children get admitted into top universities by one of various legacy programs. As a bonus the parents might oversee the marriage preferences and ensure the children avoid the second regression to the mean by marrying within the self-selected group with similar heritage (not meant as a praise, but this behavior of self-selecting into a tribe associated with a profession became more common & obvious nowadays).
3. ... Or they might pursue such novel techniques as IVF with polygenic embryo selection to compensate for the expected decline. This already happens, with first children having been born.
I think the old way was in founding & operating durable businesses which could be handed down to average-enough offspring. Farms, factories, local trades, etc. You still see this in some private businesses like real estate.
In conflict with this historical model is that most modern high paying jobs these days are high skill PMC which leaves the highly paid without ownership in any particular enterprise they can hand down.
The exceedingly rarely mentioned elephant in the room here is the phenomenon of regression towards the mean. It works for all polygenically heritable traits, including height and the g-factor.
To simplify it, first-generation children have to turn out more average than their parents, heredity-wise. And as their intelligence is often weaker than their parents', and our society hasn't really found any solid methods of raising it (the tutoring discussed in this thread helps surprisingly little in experiments), as you observe:
> The kids end up only getting into colleges at best as selective as their parents, and quite often less so.
Of course the highly intelligent, professional parents notice this law and pattern as well - and in our history we very often see lesser children of greatest men and women. What real options do they see for themselves here?
1. They can go all in on test-prep and resume padding with the extracurriculars - this is common and unsophisticated path due to little available gain...
2. Or they might ensure they are influential enough, so their children get admitted into top universities by one of various legacy programs. As a bonus the parents might oversee the marriage preferences and ensure the children avoid the second regression to the mean by marrying within the self-selected group with similar heritage (not meant as a praise, but this behavior of self-selecting into a tribe associated with a profession became more common & obvious nowadays).
3. ... Or they might pursue such novel techniques as IVF with polygenic embryo selection to compensate for the expected decline. This already happens, with first children having been born.