PROMOTING POTENTIAL 313lyzed by considering the way in which the social world is structured and
shape people’s experiences.... Institutions refl ect and promote ideas and
values (e.g., equal opportunities, meritocracy, etc.), and thereby infl uence
the way people think about themselves, others and society.”^35 Most casual
observers— and that includes psychologists as well as politicians— seem to
be unaware of the deep psychological consequences of a class structure
and its durable negative consequences for the development of potential.
A dynamical perspective, then, suggests that the prob lem of individ-
ual diff erences in intelligence does not lie in the characteristics of a
par tic u lar class at all. Nor can they be attributed to environments per-
ceived as quasi- horticultural factors. Instead they have their roots in the
relations being maintained across classes— and, of course, the ideology
that maintains them. It is those social structural relations that constitute
the key environments of cognitive development. So let us look at a few
examples of those relations and consider their consequences.
WEALTH RELATIONS“Of course, environments per se are not inherited,” says Robert Plomin
and colleagues in their widely used textbook, Behavioral Ge ne tics. Such
is the penalty of looking at the environment only in terms of a collection
of in de pen dent factors “left over” in a statistical model.
Of course, what those authors really mean is inherited “like the genes.”
But the environment is inherited in many others ways. I mentioned epi-
ge ne tics in earlier chapters. Th ese are the eff ects of environmental stress
experienced by parents on gene transcription in children. We are as yet
uncertain about the extent of such inheritance. But it almost certainly ex-
ists and creates individual diff erences. Yet in the behavioral ge ne ticists’
equations, they will be described as ge ne tic inheritance.
Far more con spic u ous is the inheritance of wealth. Wealth includes
all forms of individually stored up “goods” produced by the society as a
whole but unevenly distributed. In the modern world, it includes savings
from income, land and property, com pany shares, cars and boats, art, and
so on. It is passed from parents to off spring to create enormous advantages
in terms of income stream, power, and privilege, irrespective of actual
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