(View this as a follow-on, not a counter. I agree with both you and the GP).
Wealthy kids will always have a leg up on poor kids. It can never become completely equalized, as whatever new attribute that does cause your children to do better will become a new aspect of wealth. That's one of the corollaries to what the GP was saying, and by its nature that leads to a system that leads to a system where the outcomes can never be entirely equalized as lone as you allow different wealth levels.
It's not that children from wealthy families do better (as any situation where that is not true points to a very sick society), but how much better they do, and how well we catch those that are disadvantaged when they fall. This is also complicated by the fact that poverty is relative (and when not, such as using official definitions, nobody can agree how useful it is), It's a very complicated topic, and in my opinion you are generally either stuck with so much nuance that it's hard to tease out some useful plan of action, or so little nuance that you risk taking away the wrong conclusion.
For example, in the end, is how wealthy your children are even the correct thing to be measuring for outcomes? What about happiness? What if we focused on increasing the number of people that reported being happy with their lives? That probably doesn't require people being in the top bracket for income, but it might require that most of the time they aren't in the lowest bracket.
Wealthy kids will always have a leg up on poor kids. It can never become completely equalized, as whatever new attribute that does cause your children to do better will become a new aspect of wealth. That's one of the corollaries to what the GP was saying, and by its nature that leads to a system that leads to a system where the outcomes can never be entirely equalized as lone as you allow different wealth levels.
It's not that children from wealthy families do better (as any situation where that is not true points to a very sick society), but how much better they do, and how well we catch those that are disadvantaged when they fall. This is also complicated by the fact that poverty is relative (and when not, such as using official definitions, nobody can agree how useful it is), It's a very complicated topic, and in my opinion you are generally either stuck with so much nuance that it's hard to tease out some useful plan of action, or so little nuance that you risk taking away the wrong conclusion.
For example, in the end, is how wealthy your children are even the correct thing to be measuring for outcomes? What about happiness? What if we focused on increasing the number of people that reported being happy with their lives? That probably doesn't require people being in the top bracket for income, but it might require that most of the time they aren't in the lowest bracket.