Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

I'm a strong determinist. Effort, hard work and skill is irrelevant (any relevance comes from the fact that you're already in your statistical band for expected success and are trying to maximize within that). I believe most of your success is determined before you even take one step on this planet. Step one is acknowledging the truth: your initial circumstances dictate your future. Once this is acknowledged, we as a species can begin focusing on making the initial conditions ideal for everyone.

Note: I am not saying you shouldn't work hard. I am just saying that it's not doing as much as you think. Individual examples of success (I've done decently despite two parents who didn't finish elementary school, live in inner city, etc) are not of relevance for planning the future of the human race. The world is chaotic, so there will be outliers in spite of the "determinist property" of the world.

Parents' own desperation to "set their children up" for success is anecdotal confirmation of this fact.

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Some examples:

Socioeconomic status v. Education http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/education.a...

Health v. Education http://www.nber.org/digest/mar07/w12352.html

Health v. Socioeconomic Status http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/work-stress...

Parent education v. child long term success https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2853053/

Skin color v. attractiveness http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0095798405278341

Height v. success http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/...

Weight (at birth) v. success http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/5882

Attractiveness v. success https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/games-primates-play/201...

Gender v. success https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...

Eye color v. alcoholism http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886900...

Geography v. socioeconomic success http://www.cid.harvard.edu/archive/andes/documents/bgpapers/...

"luck" is not a good choice as a word here. They mean something like a chaotic event that ended up being positive to them.

Also, just waiting for such a positive chaotic event to happen to you, is probably not the best strategy.

If you make good social interactions that you maintain, then those positive chaotic events are more likely to come your way.

Standard urban/casual intellectual uniform.

I would rather believe in Existentialism. I come from a very poor background. Much of my childhood friends are either dead, in prison or working minimum wage. If I would have "acknowledged" the truth, like most of them did, I would have ended in the same position.

Humans are not animals. We can evolve of our own free will. Statistics do not apply at the individual level.

Progressive consumption tax is ridiculous. It requires your tax rate at the point of sale to be dependent on all your purchases to that point in time. That's just not practical. Or it may require every purchase you make to be recorded for tax-time when you then pay the taxes. Either way it requires the government to know every purchase you make, or at least the price. This is not something anyone should want.