yeah, but the less rich of the intelligent have better, safer and more widely respected jobs (I have met door to door salesmen that make more than members of parliament). They had opportunities to chose other more lucrative careers, but they didn't.
tl;dr ... a minor objection tough ... it is not at all impossible for 70 percent of drivers to be better than average, you just need the lower 30 percent to (on average) be really bad
you're being either difficult or dense ... nice gardens are nice, people generally agree that clean homes are too, this is a fact and it won't change cause it'd be neat if professionals did that and kept working even tough they would rather have a clean house than a bit more money (that isn't enough to have the house cleaned)
ability in sport = martial prowess / hunting skills / good health in general / good genes in general -- It has always been more or less universally respected.
Jazz players always had subculture specific social status, same with hip-hop pioneers, early rock musicians etc.
"Three and a half years and 70 countries later, I've gotten the equivalent of a Ph.D in general knowledge about the people and places of Planet Earth."
"Linking to PG's older posts to help you make a point."
The notion that this is bad is baffling. Citation is central to all serious science it also has a place in other forms of (rigorous/serious) thinking. If a scientific article proves something you cite it. If I think you're wrong in a way described by someone else, I'll cite that. This isn't as neat. You prove very little. But you do show what you think about the matter. The aversion against doing this (wich is normal for those who spend a lot of time reading and thinking about for example policy) is strange. It's not an appeal to authority if you agree with it, if it can serve as a description of your position. The fact that pgs essays in particular get cited alot may just be that 1) a lot of people here have read them 2) they're densely argued (you don't expect a lefty to read hayek cause you say he should, a paragraph of a pg essay is more reasonable and 3) they are carefully argued, wich makes it more likely you'll agree with it than more bombastic works or works built on the assumptions and arguments of other people (wich isn't necessarily a bad thing but it does create additional points of failure)
switzerland, the US and the UK haven't had any restarts for a long, long time. they are doing good. canada, australia and new zealand never had one (after the initial settlement). the wealth of germany and japan was a re-convergence in spite of bombing.. try again=)
An interesting comparison I'm not really qualified to make is between the relatively secure (?) and cohesive (!) chinese communist party elite and the chaotic free for all (?) in russia. The countries elites both help themselves to quite a bit of wealth but the russians seem to experience an unsolved tragedy of the commons issue. If this is true, will united russia (or whatever it's called) solve the problem of maximising returns from their control of the country (it did take the PRC communist party a few decades)? How could they?
I don't.. It's population is as big as russias and bigger than any other nation with a comparable average national IQ (besides the US) and some kind of capitalism. I can't think of a single example of this combination not leading to convergence with the highest gdp capita countries.