"Their causal model is a sort of conspiracy theory where the elites control the educational institutions and prevent the unprivileged from using them, thus keep social inequality going."
Some aspects of Latin America institutions are kind of a conspiracy theory in action. I once spent a couple of hours talking to the South American free market economist De Soto about property rights. The picture I took away is that a lot of land ownership in Latin America traces back to huge land grants that the King of Spain signed over in the 1500-1700s. E.g., about ten or twenty guys owned most of huge Los Angeles County in 1840. Individual land grants in Southern California might be worth a few hundred billion dollars today.
These property holdings are so large that the heirs let the servant class live on what's nominally their land so the servants can be at hand to serve them instead of having to commute over the horizon. The servant class has developed informal rights to their plots of land that everybody recognizes are transmitted to their heirs. So it's not a totally abusive system. But ... the landowning class is averse to allowing their workers to have formal legal rights to their customary land, which they could then mortgage to finance their own businesses.
In other words, the lower class might have customary rights to $100,000 worth of property, but they can't move up to the middle class by borrowing $50,000 to start a business by risking it because they don't have formal legal title to their house.
Why are you convinced that their lack of ownership rights in the plots they occupy at the sufferance of their masters is the main obstacle that prevents such Latin American domestic servants from becoming more affluent? Could it not be largely due instead to lack of aptitude for higher-paying employment or innate lack of ambition?
"[A] lot of land ownership in Latin America traces back to huge land grants that the King of Spain signed over in the 1500-1700s."
A lot? What percent, I wonder, of current Latin American landowners obtained a substantial portion of their real property as a result of a long, unbroken chain of ancestral inheritance going back to recipients of grants from Spanish monarchs?
In certain parts of Mexico, a significant amount. Left-wing politicians in the 1930-1940s expropriated a lot of their landholdings, but many of the landowning families had capital stashed away or other alternatives that allowed them to keep their social status, and many prominent Mexicans today still descend from those original colonial landowners. Some ended up getting the land back, some didn't, but the majority of the descendants are very wealthy today.
The assertion that most currently-living descendants of recipients of royal land grants are wealthy doesn't answer the question I raised: viz., what fraction of current Latin American landowners obtained a substantial portion of their real property through an unbroken chain of inheritance going back to recipients of royal land grants? And it doesn't address the possibility that many of them became wealthy by dint of their own effort.
I don't have statistics handy, but knowing a good amount of elite Mexicans personally, it must be a considerable amount, even if more recent European/Middle Eastern immigrants have also amassed fortunes despite not having a long history of land-owning. In my view, the landowners obviously benefited from early advantages, but this does not mean that they are not smart, or undeserving of their prosperity. The key thing in Mexico is that the native or mostly native population are less prosperous, and I don't subscribe to the hypothesis that elite exclusion is fully responsible for this situation. Like Mediterranean and Latin American countries, mobility into the elite is a very uncommon phenomenon, and family "dynasties" remain prominent for longer times than in WEIRD countries.
> In other words, the lower class might have customary rights to $100,000 worth of property, but they can't move up to the middle class by borrowing $50,000 to start a business by risking it because they don't have formal legal title to their house.
I seem to recall that the British upper class used to devote immense effort to putting their own heirs into exactly this situation ("entailment" of the property), on the theory that otherwise the heirs were liable to pawn the land and become paupers. This same theory seems even more applicable to a family that has been domestic servants for the last ten generations.
"Their causal model is a sort of conspiracy theory where the elites control the educational institutions and prevent the unprivileged from using them, thus keep social inequality going."
Some aspects of Latin America institutions are kind of a conspiracy theory in action. I once spent a couple of hours talking to the South American free market economist De Soto about property rights. The picture I took away is that a lot of land ownership in Latin America traces back to huge land grants that the King of Spain signed over in the 1500-1700s. E.g., about ten or twenty guys owned most of huge Los Angeles County in 1840. Individual land grants in Southern California might be worth a few hundred billion dollars today.
These property holdings are so large that the heirs let the servant class live on what's nominally their land so the servants can be at hand to serve them instead of having to commute over the horizon. The servant class has developed informal rights to their plots of land that everybody recognizes are transmitted to their heirs. So it's not a totally abusive system. But ... the landowning class is averse to allowing their workers to have formal legal rights to their customary land, which they could then mortgage to finance their own businesses.
In other words, the lower class might have customary rights to $100,000 worth of property, but they can't move up to the middle class by borrowing $50,000 to start a business by risking it because they don't have formal legal title to their house.
Why are you convinced that their lack of ownership rights in the plots they occupy at the sufferance of their masters is the main obstacle that prevents such Latin American domestic servants from becoming more affluent? Could it not be largely due instead to lack of aptitude for higher-paying employment or innate lack of ambition?
"[A] lot of land ownership in Latin America traces back to huge land grants that the King of Spain signed over in the 1500-1700s."
A lot? What percent, I wonder, of current Latin American landowners obtained a substantial portion of their real property as a result of a long, unbroken chain of ancestral inheritance going back to recipients of grants from Spanish monarchs?
In certain parts of Mexico, a significant amount. Left-wing politicians in the 1930-1940s expropriated a lot of their landholdings, but many of the landowning families had capital stashed away or other alternatives that allowed them to keep their social status, and many prominent Mexicans today still descend from those original colonial landowners. Some ended up getting the land back, some didn't, but the majority of the descendants are very wealthy today.
The assertion that most currently-living descendants of recipients of royal land grants are wealthy doesn't answer the question I raised: viz., what fraction of current Latin American landowners obtained a substantial portion of their real property through an unbroken chain of inheritance going back to recipients of royal land grants? And it doesn't address the possibility that many of them became wealthy by dint of their own effort.
I don't have statistics handy, but knowing a good amount of elite Mexicans personally, it must be a considerable amount, even if more recent European/Middle Eastern immigrants have also amassed fortunes despite not having a long history of land-owning. In my view, the landowners obviously benefited from early advantages, but this does not mean that they are not smart, or undeserving of their prosperity. The key thing in Mexico is that the native or mostly native population are less prosperous, and I don't subscribe to the hypothesis that elite exclusion is fully responsible for this situation. Like Mediterranean and Latin American countries, mobility into the elite is a very uncommon phenomenon, and family "dynasties" remain prominent for longer times than in WEIRD countries.
> In other words, the lower class might have customary rights to $100,000 worth of property, but they can't move up to the middle class by borrowing $50,000 to start a business by risking it because they don't have formal legal title to their house.
I seem to recall that the British upper class used to devote immense effort to putting their own heirs into exactly this situation ("entailment" of the property), on the theory that otherwise the heirs were liable to pawn the land and become paupers. This same theory seems even more applicable to a family that has been domestic servants for the last ten generations.
I enjoyed the 'dry' commentary.
Would have loved to see the error bars on their "Relative representation" figures :-D .