> The qualifications for being a professor should be related to your capability as a scientist, your ability to teach, and quality as a mentor. It should not be related to your parent's income or education level.

You can stop listening after this (0:45) because this is where the blunder is. The complaint is that most professors have a parent with a PhD. They also make comparisons with the average population. First off, only 1.2% of Americans have a PhD. So we're likely working with outlier data to begin with and you can't compare with the average population in a simple way. Second off, we need to account for household trends. I'll claim that it is quite common that children follow in the footsteps of their parents and this isn't unique to academics. I say this as someone who is at the tail end of my PhD and where I am the only one on either side of my family that is even involved in STEM. My peers had very different childhoods than I did and it is unsurprising that growing up in an academic culture results in them following along. Most of my family followed the rest of my family in pursuing business and sales. I grew up hearing sales terms and strategies all my life. Friends learned calculus early because their parents knew it and taught it to them. Why the difference? Because both our families used different tools to navigate their lives and had a different set of objectives for what is important to success and thus taught their children that.

Why is this important? Because the premise is asking how to "resolve" this issue and create a more equitable system. There's two important factors we need to understand: what assumptions have been made and what is the causal graph. For the assumptions, one that seems fair was made but actually isn't. The assumption made is that your parent's education level does not correlate with your abilities as a scientist/educator/mentor. But this is a bad assumption. A better assumption to start with it: a randomly selected child has a similar upper bound in their capacity as a scientist/educator/mentor. Why are these different? Because the environments these children grew up in are different. Even if you are born of poor professors (or even grad students) then you're still going to grow up in an academic household, hearing academic terms and having academic frameworks for thinking. Grow up in a household like mine and you hear about the Ivory Tower and how stuck up academics are. We can't ignore 30 years of someone's life and make accurate conclusions about outcomes. The children who grew up in academic households likely got closer to their upper limit capacity as a scientist/educator/mentor than the child who didn't. They have gotten more education/training, even if everything else is held equal (income, schooling, health, etc). Given more training, we should expect a bias!

There is a lot of talk about equity, equality, and meritocracy going on these days but without real understanding of what any of these things are. I'm sorry, but none of these things exist and they cannot exist. To achieve any of these systems would result in revoke one's free will, to make humans robotic. This is a choice we need to make. It is incredibly hard to measure things, and if we rely just on measurements we'll make grave errors (see the state of ML). There is a lot of noise in the system and we can't ignore it. I'm not saying we shouldn't make the world better (including being more fair and reducing nepotism), but we can't pretend that the world is simple. This idea of "good enough" or "if you understand it you can explain it to a layman" are terrible notions and only take us steps back. Yes, they work for many cases but they do not work for complex systems. The history of human kind has been a history of increasing complexity. We are adaptable creatures, but this is something difficult to adapt to given our evolutionary constraints. But we need this culture to encourage nuance and recognition of complexity.