Insert quote about countless potential geniuses dying in toil and poverty here.

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

• Stephen Jay Gould

This reminded me of an exception to this which is the portuguese communist writer Jose Saramago, he grew up very poor and won the nobel prize in literature 25 years ago TODAY!

Here's a quote from when he visited Palestine

During the Second Intifada, while visiting Ramallah in March 2002, Saramago said that "what is happening in Palestine is a crime we can put on the same plane as what happened at Auschwitz ... A sense of impunity characterizes the Israeli people and its army. They have turned into rentiers of the Holocaust." In an essay he wrote expanding on his views, Saramago wrote of Jews: "educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted . . . on everyone else . . . will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner."

roughly normal

Roughly uniform you mean? Most people aren't near the 50th percentile, there's the same number of people in the 45th to 55th percentiles as the 0th to 10th and 90th to 100th.

I know, but the size of the effect is really staggering.

Honestly, not really. I think it's less about wealth directly as it is about the overly particular academic path. I think there is high heritibility among professors because their kids get a much better idea of how to become a professor, and have a built-in network. There's probably a similar trend with lawyers and doctors.

To be honest, you could replicate this same graph for everything and anything in life. To me personally, it really isn't news, neither is the size of the effect. Social mobility in western society is insanely low (and honestly not amazing anywhere). :same-graph:

However, this fact really does need to be hammered into peoples' heads: Even if you only care about meritocracy, capitalism is an awful system as we're clearly denying ~90% of potential achievers from achieving by allowing this kind of inequality. The wealth you're born into is the biggest indicator of success in life, to such an insane degree that it's borderline the ONLY indicator of your chance of success in life.

Even revolutionary leaders are most typically bourgeoisie-born class traitors. Turns out having food, education, stable family, reliable shelter and healthcare, and opportunities in life really, really helps.

I know it's really not the same thing, but I wonder what that graph is like for literature.

Holy shit. This is supposed to be a bell curve, and it looks like this. Grim.

I hope the person who did this study gets an ig nobel.

Also I would love to see this same study done on ig nobel winners

Higher Education always favors people from a rich background, this is the case in almost all countries.

This is the issue with not allowing free education. Next Einstein or Tesla could be working a dead end job not reaching their potential.

I would like to see the same graph for The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.