I'm not sure what leads to defensive questions loaded down with so many false dichotomies and strawmen, but I would not ask anyone to feel bad about winning what Warren Buffett calls the "birth lottery." What I'm saying is that it's useful to recognize its existence.
The other thing that's useful to recognize is that while where we start is not destiny, you really can study what happens to entire populations of people. It is absolutely not difficult or "hand wavy" to quantify early childhood privilege to a meaningful extent. Nobody is saying the correlation between privilege, academic performance, economic performance, even crime and so on explain "all" of anything or treating them as "the global predictor of what one will achieve."
I assume people are defensive about this stuff because they're sick of feeling like they're being accused of having something they haven't virtuously earned, or perhaps more thoughtfully, because being studied sociologically as part of a population makes people feel like ants instead of beautiful, unique snowflakes. Well.
The other thing that's useful to recognize is that while where we start is not destiny, you really can study what happens to entire populations of people. It is absolutely not difficult or "hand wavy" to quantify early childhood privilege to a meaningful extent. Nobody is saying the correlation between privilege, academic performance, economic performance, even crime and so on explain "all" of anything or treating them as "the global predictor of what one will achieve."
I assume people are defensive about this stuff because they're sick of feeling like they're being accused of having something they haven't virtuously earned, or perhaps more thoughtfully, because being studied sociologically as part of a population makes people feel like ants instead of beautiful, unique snowflakes. Well.