[Jill_the_Pill]

>And they did bring the values and virtues that served them well in their previous lives.

And the skills, education, and practical know-how: how to manage money, how to start a business, how to get your kids a good education. And perhaps in some cases the vices that had served them well: how to find a loophole, how to trade favors, how to fudge the truth to your benefit.

In other words, the intangibles of privilege.

[tpudlik]

I think both you and the original commenter agree that the "intangibles" make a significant (perhaps decisive) contribution to the heritability on outcomes. But that's where you both disagree with the article, which argues for the importance of "tangible" factors (growing up in a neighborhood with exclusionary zoning; receiving an expensive college education; etc).

Like the OC, I've seen the dramatic impact of the "intangibles" in my own homeland, a former Communist state. Many of the leading businessmen and professionals today are descended from pre-communist elites, even though these elites were not only deprived of all their material wealth but actively discriminated upon during the five decades of communism (for example, by receiving "class background" penalties for university admissions). The idea that "money breeds money" is intuitively plausible, but turns out to be largely an illusion.

[Jill_the_Pill]

Mmm maybe. Are those intangibles themselves sort of a shibboleth indicating class membership? Could publicly funded education help transfer those "soft skills" to poorer people or would there be class-protective resistance?