[adventured]

No, it's very obvious causation.

The variance is extreme, not subtle, and it shows dramatic improvement for all races. It moves upwards step by step with education attainment. Incomes similarly follow that path. Which is another way of saying, everything aligns. The income you can reach on average without a high school diploma, will radically implode your chances of ever being able to amass millionaire status.

Need to save $50,000 to start a business? Good luck without a high school diploma. You're going to spend your life barely getting by, much less generating a surplus of savings.

Want to become a millionaire via a mixture of 401k, company stock grants, savings, real-estate investment? You have a near zero shot at that without a high school diploma.

[misja111]

That doesn't prove causation. There can be many underlying causes that explain the success of educated people just as well. For instance, as already mentioned, it might be that kids that are smart or work hard tend to finish a higher education. It could also be that kids who are born in wealthier families do both get access to better education and get more opportunities afterwards because of their better network.

That last possibility does a much better job at explaining what the Bloomberg article is about: the different chances of success based on the color of your skin. Black students that graduate still have only 6.7% chance of becoming millionaires comparing to 37% for white people.

[adventured]

You're context dropping at the end. The critical context for the causation in question, is that for all races, education stepping higher coincides to substantial increases in likelihood of wealth attainment.

There are no exceptions that see a backwards regression (ie move up in education and down in wealth likelihood), which further boosts that it is very clear causation. Each step sees the average move considerably higher for all races.

[jcranmer]

No. It's correlation that's not a statistical fluke, but it's not causation. There are other potential explanations that the data doesn't rule out, such as wealth being highly inherited (i.e., rich people are begat from rich people) and wealthy children being pushed into higher tiers of education than poor people.

The existence of these other explanations show that the data is not necessarily indicative of causation.

[TheOtherHobbes]

It's correlation. The cause is rationed access to the cultural - never mind the economic - resources needed to get into a graduate program.

Success after the program is an effect - and partly down to luck, as the SA article suggests.

Of course you'll have problems if you don't have a high school diploma. But by the time you've failed to get your diploma, the chances are excellent that your access to resources will have been severely constrained and rationed for your entire life, even if you start off with exceptional talents.

[adventured]

It's cause. What you're referring to is the cause of education deprivation. That education deprivation is the cause of the far lower likelihood of reaching higher wealth status.

A chain of things or events can - typically does - possess multiple causes along the pathing. A cause of a cause, is a legitimate, normal and required logical concept. Practically any outcome or condition you can name has a cause, which has a cause.

Alternatively you'd have to claim that there can only be one cause in an entire chain of events. An absurd notion.

[abecedarius]

It can be causal and still be a wasteful signaling game. I think that to first order that's what's going on.

[Retric]

Someone with an IQ of 70 is not going to have a graduate education. In this case education and wealth would both be results not causes.

Similarly, having well off parents drastically increases the chances of getting a graduate degree.