During the Renaissance, many elite noble children were polymaths who distinguished themselves in many disparate fields. If they had been switched at birth with the children of peasants on their fiefs, the peasant babies would have become polymaths. True then, true now.
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A kid trained from birth in multiple languages, instruments, battlefield techniques, rhetoric and other skills will excel (at those skills) over a kid who spent his life with a wheat field. If a study is required to prove it, I shiver at the wasted money going into studies.
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I know powerful dingbats who passed through the best educational institutions in the world, and genius level folks who spent their childhood in the equivalent of a wheat field, so I am not entirely convinced by your intuition, but I will rest my case.
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Michelangelo was raised at the court of the Medici. Pretty sure if he'd stayed in the quarry, we wouldn't know his name right now.
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There were quite a few folks raised at the court of the Medici. Most of their names are not known to us. And as you know, Michelangelo's father very much discouraged his studies of the arts.
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To dissuade you from the position that rich people are born with extra skills?
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To support your position that the children of many generations of robber barons have the same innate dispositions as the children of peasants. I like that position, but if I like something, it makes me suspicious of my own motivated reasoning, and I want to see evidence.
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You can start with The Book of the Courtier, one of the first bestsellers, written about four days at the glorious Court of Urbino, which caused a stir by suggesting that the "sprezzatura" of the elite is learned, not innate.
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Obviously no study exists in which peasants and elites are deliberately swapped for study. When people realized that sprezzatura, the art of concealing the effort that goes into mastery, can be learned, it triggered a class crisis.
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This is partly why sumptuary laws went into effect so that highly educated cultured courtesans in gems & fur couldn't pass themselves off as noble. And educated men only had the family name to keep them in power. A name isn't the same as innate capacity for becoming a polymath.
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Conversely, you can look at the consequences of powerful dingbats who happened to be born rich and draw your own conclusions.
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