Genes play a major role

SURPRISE! IT WAS A EUGENICS POST ALL ALONG!

This fascist belongs in a hole.

Yeah, I used to date someone from one of the richest families in Guangzhou (at least pre revolution). When the revolution came they hid a shitload of wealth, in the form of antiques, gold, and foreign assets.

Don't get me wrong. They got shipped off to camps, and lost most of their money. But those that survived the cultural revolution were still richer than almost everyone else.

Social capital is important, but real capital helps a lot too.

Genes play a major role

yeah... thats a fascist

Alternatively, basically everyone in the PRC wore something equivalent to denim for a while, jeans have nothing to do with this

Look at Russian/Soviet income inequality after revolution and counter-revolution

Elite is a nonsense concept. The "elites" of the Communist party in China or the USSR cannot be compared to western capitalists.

And yea inequality in China did increase drastically after liberalization but you can't compare modern China which is highly developed with high employment to pre-revolution China.

cool, so what are the rich so scared of? Let's equalize everything, and all the wealth will just come tumbling back to its previous owners due to their superior rich white english speaking genes

Not that I've done the in-depth research, but I'm not sure his data is true. For one thing, I know the Pre-Putin oligarchs of modern Russia generally came from the upper-middle strata of the Soviet Nomenklatura class, because they had the easiest access to steal Soviet assets during privatization. They later got boxed out of power by Putin's Siloviki clique, and they were all middle-ranked KGB guys. None of these people have any connection to the pre-revolution Russian aristocracy, even if they kind of larp as them in their aesthetics.

This is complete nonsense. To prove even one of the points they're making, they'd need at least as much evidence and analysis as the entire thread. They're just cherry-picking random pieces of data and jumping from one case to the next, acting as if they've sufficiently proven each one in turn. It's just a gish gallop.

Probably the most absurd piece of "evidence" they present is the picture of the night sky of the USSR, which is correlated with the number of prisoners from various areas. Because both of those are correlated with total population, obviously. This is literally their sole piece of evidence regarding the question of whether "elites bounced back" in the USSR, before moving on to the next point!

The next point is about the landed gentry in the South after the abolition of slavery. Everything they say about this is irrelvant because there was never any attempt to eliminate these people as a class. There was no land reform or anything like that, and because of it, freed slaves sometimes found themselves in a position where they had little choice but to keep working for their former slavers, for a wage. Of course the rich "bounced back" from that.

This is how conspiracy theories work. You find one extremely tenuous piece of evidence that shows how a major event validates what you want to believe, then, without any consideration of other explanations for the evidence, or other evidence that might invalidate your conclusion, you immediately move on to the next thing.

Imma say this, twitter threads are not worth the toilet paper you could print them on. Unless the source is an actual academic, with a specialized focus, then they are just spewing out random nonsense. For something this controversial, you’d want to see not just individual studies but meta analysis looking at genetics and “success” with clear definitions.

Anybody attributing familial success and status to genes is ultimately a eugenicist, and not much else.

Genes play a major role.

No

Drawing nonsense correlations using god knows what sources

First of all this strikes me as the kind of study that would be very difficult to complete over this time period even in a country that was fully developed. There are so many places where judgement will have come into place.

Also, I feel the need to ask the obvious: did they actually measure the same families over time, or did they do something much easier, and much less indicative of the point they are trying to make.

Even then though obviously genetics is the stupidest explanation. Of the top of my head I would suggest education, contacts, retained wealth, or the same old bullshit: shit floats to the top.

This might not even be a real phenomenon, never mind the supposed causes. Several of those charts are very unclear about any relationships between the pre-Mao and post-Deng “elites” or other supposedly similar situations in the other regions covered. The definition of who “elites” are is also wildly different throughout the thread and fluctuates from income percentiles to “intellectuals” to feudal soldiers and beyond. This whole thing is dressed up as hardcore logic brainscience but is filled with nothing but shitty infographics that don’t say what the tweets claim they do, compare poorly with each other, and are used to justify a conclusion that is fucking eugenics. I don’t think there’s actually anything here except for a big stinking pile of bullshit.

Assuming that there is a "success gene" it means they're genetically predisposed to be a sociopath and this guy is framing it as a good thing.

When someone uses completely different types of handwavy analysis in different areas, it smacks of motivated reasoning.

What's the Y axis motherfucker?

So wealth is a particular, transhistoric genetic trait of elites? And this is all supported by graphs that show lots of…things.

It really seems like this person's politics are that we shouldn’t do anything ever because nothing changes so don’t even try i.e. JBP-tier shit commentary

going off completely unsubstantiated folk sayings, it takes around 3 generations of failsons to destroy a family's wealth

i choose to interpret this as an approximation of the half life of personal wealth under about the worst conditions possible (my made up justification being that most social structures are more vulnerable to internal risks rather than external, see: every empire in history), so given this it would make sense that accumulated wealth will not instantly evaporate to baseline when exposed to mere adverse external pressures. also, like, the sheer amount of wealth hoarded by feudal ruling class people probably would take way more than 3 generations of failsons and a cultural revolution to reduce down to pleb level in absolute terms.

The cultural revolution failed. That's it.

how many elite southern planter families regained their status after the Civil War

This one is rather simple because the official policy was to never punish the south. But as you quoted

i see this as evidence that social/human capital is persistent and important for economic development

The north needed as much capital following a devastating civil war. Reprimanding the traitors would’ve ignited another conflict. Not to mention basic racist solidarity

To the extent this is even try, there are a few straightforward explanations why elite status is inherited that doesn't involve eugenics and similar disingenuous pseudoscience:

• Elites are hoarding wealth, especially in uncertain times. They might lose their formal positions and their land and their factories but they still have the ability to stash some gold coins away unnoticed. This hoard helps them get ahead in the future.
• Elites have access to better education. In turn this means they are able to provide their children with better education, giving them a head start. Even in the best most well-founded educational system, students from homes with high education have an easier time than students from homes that are lacking education. The education gap also makes the labour of former elites interesting to the new regime who might otherwise have a hard time finding skilled officers, specialists, etc. This creates a base for them rising up and achieving eller status in the new system.
• Elites knows other elites. When given the chance they have connections to people at home and abroad who are better connected and richer than common people, giving them the ability to get ahead.

behold the absurd follies the liberal stoops to by blindfolding themselves to analysis of capital and political economy. tracts and tracts about cum and cherry picked metrics of success and 'elite status'

we shall neither print it nor reply

talks about the persistence of SES in Kazoku and Samurai families

then immediately talks about the home ownership rate of Japanese-Americans

doesn't present anything about SES trends in Japanese-American families with Kazoku/Samurai surnames

Fucking coward.

We've known for a long time about generational wealth and generational poverty. It's rather clear how social factors and habits play into this, and that these are transmitted by families.

Suggesting that epigenetics might play a role in "wealth impairment" is plausible but far from being demonstrated. Suggesting that genetics themselves play a role is an extraordinary claim, with a small dungheap of evidence.

Scrolled through all that to find the bibliography and was seeing shit about american slaves and Japanese samurai fly by and I'm like

Bibliography was a pastebin to more links mostly nber.org. But not in the pastebin, worthy of its own link was this: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/how-do-elite-groups-form

It starts by citing the Entebbe raids to argu that Bibi is genetically elite. Also it goes on to talk about Coptic Christians and Japanese Samurai.

Genetics are a factor in so much as neurological vulnerabilities to developing/embracing anti-social behaviors, which still have to be taught. In the case of rich elite families, this would likely be handed down through generations along with some vindictive feelings about the change. And we know empirically that engaging in capital accumulation and indeed acting as a capitalist requires anti-social behaviors. I want to be clear, anyone could become much more wealthy if they have no regard for the rights of others and understood the true mechanisms of capitalism (plus some start up capital usually, but there's always exceptions - most of which are from before neoliberal economics took over). Social connections between the dethroned families still very much exist after many of these reforms, so when capitalist structures were reintroduced, there was still a cadre of people who had been raised to be ruthless to fill the power vacuum which requires a ruling class.

The genetics piece that the poster is trying to suggest is phrenological and racist at it's core. It's a shift from the divine right of kings being ordained by God, to nature being a stand in for God to justify the idea these people are better in an immutable way. It's not informed by economic, biological, or sociological factors in any academic sense, but has a veneer of having been well researched. Actually settled research shows us otherwise - innate intelligence has no variability between demographics. The behaviors necessary to gain these levels of prominence have to be learned, and the vast majority of people find it rightfully distasteful to engage in these behaviors. It boils down to this: these people are not our betters, they were taught to be predators and how take advantage of the inherent structures of capitalism - they are class conscious, the working class is not and has actual morals - wealth and power corrupts the mind and soul.

genetics is a factor, seems a stretch to conclude it is a "major" factor. do they have sources for the chinese stats for example?

New race science just dropped

heredity is what you want, genes started as a concept and a material basis was found after.

doesn't take into account rna (rnaseq), proteins (proteomics), epigenetics, only the genome which is a picture of an arrow in flight, nothing dynamic or honestly really material.

heredity would also include behavior, environment, status or rank, finances, etc. though at present the view is gene-centric and adaptationist (which is wrong) and little more than a reformation of eugenics and platonic forms which are idealistic (there is no best genes, only what is well suited at a particular time and place) and have been thoroughly moved on from for decades if not centuries.

what can trace heredity or traits, whatever you would like to call the apparent continuation of characteristics both physical and social, is stuff like what your parents voting preferences are (or the area one is from, or income) and what faith if any one's parents have. look into US data, this is a robust and known phenomena, yet no one talks about therr being a faith gene or political gene.

richard c lewontin is a marxist evolutionary biologist, has some pretty high honours and a great record of activism. id read his dialectical biologist, or listen to his massey lecture biology as ideology: the doctrine of dna.

EDIT also women and people who give birth are left out because development is crucial, the field is often called evo-devo, evolution and development.

does a zygote develop under ideal circumstances? did the mtdna and mitochondrion from (typically) the mother transfer without issue? if a mutant mitochondrion is given with certain mutations (quite unlikely) the baby can sometimes survive a few years and then die because essentially their energy production or usage could not keep up with their increase in mass–square cube law stuff.