America's elite is mostly a meritocracy
Nepotism is overstated
What predicts wealth and power? Some claim it’s all nepotism or in group preference. There are many lines of evidence showing that, to the contrary, the mundane truth is that wealth acquisition is mostly a meritocracy revolving around IQ and conscientiousness. There are multiple lines of evidence for this.
A recent paper studied the causal impact of being admitted to an Ivy+ university in the US. To do this, it decomposed wealth accumulation into merit and networking, essentially. Consequently, this paper gives us an estimate of how much of a meritocracy we live in.
Most of the causal effect is on tail end effects, not the mean.
If we suppose that elites, who are elite by nature, go to HYPSM+ or not HYPSM+, and HYPSM+ causally increases their chance of becoming wealthy (top 10%) by 8%, and only elites become wealthy, then the line y=1.08x represents the how many of the wealthy are from HYPSM+ at different levels of elite attendance , while the line y=x is the fair counterfactual where there are no causal effects from HYPSM+ attendance; rather, only being elite by nature matters.
For the top 10%, HYPSM+ matters very little. The red dotted line is the percent of elites who are there due to nepotism. At the extreme, it’s not more than 10%.
Among the 1%, the situation is a bit more nepotistic.
Here, at the extremes, up to about 30% of the elite can be there due to nepotism. That’s still 70% due to merit.
This is consistent with Gregory Clark’s work on social status, in which he claims SES is essentially transmitted by additive genetics (natural merit) and not social nepotism. He finds, among other things, that it matters very little as to the correlation of son and father SES when a man’s father dies, something nepotistically transmitted SES would not predict.
He also finds mother is as predictive as father, consistent with genetics but not a nepotistic patriarchy, and that SES correlations with other family members are tightly predicted by genetic, not social, degrees of relatedness.
In addition to Clark, there is a type of study that backs up the genetic merit idea, which looks at Communist countries and the effects of persecuting natural elites.
This happened in China (above) and the USSR (below).
Now we have evidence that we live in a meritocracy, and it has something to do with HYPSM+ and genetics. HYPSM+ selects for IQ and conscientiousness, and these traits are highly heritable.
This is evidenced by a paper that found that the more paid a CEO was, the more his IQ and conscientiousness were. Top CEOs are basically the top 1% of the multiplication of these traits, which makes them in the top 10% on either.
This goes with Smart Fraction Theory. Smart Fraction Theory (see above) is basically the finding that the 95th percentile of a county’s IQ distribution is more predictive than national wealth than just the mean IQ. This is interpreted to mean that a country’s wealth depends mostly on the very few who produce most the wealth, and these few are overwhelmingly smart. It is well known that wealth falls along a Pareto distribution in basically every country, meaning most of it goes to very few people.
There’s also a good amount of class recirculation as predicted by this theory. Every generation, the elite is only 50% to 66% composed of those born to existing elites. This is consistent with Clark showing the correlation of offspring SES with parent SES is about 0.70 at almost all times and places surveyed. This means there is the rises that one expects in a meritocracy, though it is not complete every generation since the offspring of the elite tend to be more meritorious than the offspring of the underclasses.
Based on the totality of evidence, it would seem that those people are the smart and conscientiousness. In other words, the elite is a meritocracy.