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Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

nautil.us

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Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#51

Post by mattnewton »

phkahler wrote: post #10

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.

Also it encourages hoarding and less spending of the upper class, which is a major economic problem in it's own right.

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#52

Post by AndrewKemendo »

dv_dt wrote: post #23

I think this touches upon one of the biggest weaknesses of the current economic system. We systematically waste the human capability of millions of people because the system essentially randomly gives much better opportunity to some over others. Meritocracy somewhat exists but mostly to the extent that people can maximize the opportunity they've drawn as their lot in life. I like the idea of Basic Income, but it's a…

We systematically waste the human capability of millions of people because the system essentially randomly gives much better opportunity to some over others.

We don't do anything. The nature of reality is that there is not equal distribution of [anything]. The universe is a dynamical system - portions of the system will through probability always get stuck at local/global minima.

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#53

Post by willholloway »

ergothus wrote: post #33

My father and I have somewhat productive political conversations: He's fiscally conservative, I tend towards the liberal side of the scale. Drilling in to find what we really disagree about, it seems to boil down to two concepts: (1) I view success as a matter of luck that your effort can make better or worse. He views effort as the single most important deciding factor in success in life (2) I'm willing to tolerate…

The liberal view of this issue may have the virtue of being correct, but it's very counterproductive from the individual's standpoint.

I know that the ideology espoused on sites such as dailykos.com were very detrimental to personal drive and success in my college years of 18-22.

That ideology kept pounding home the idea of the unfairness of the economy, of the lower share of the pie allocated to labor vs capital and the increasing inequality of American society.

All of those things were true no doubt, but they were not useful for someone who had been hacking since 4th grade.

I file it under bad luck that the same people that had a correct analysis and opposition to the great mistake of that time, the Iraq invasion and occupation, also had such a neurotic and self-limiting and destructive view towards work, productivity and the modern economy, and that I was too inexperienced in the ways of the world at the time to understand this very important concept.

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#54

Post by minikites »

acchow wrote: post #47
minikites wrote: post #9

I think a lot of people are emotionally unable to deal with a world that is as dramatically unfair as ours is, so they fall back to the childish notion that people who have fallen on hard times deserve it and successful people controlled their own destiny to get there, because the alternative is too uncomfortable to think about.

A lot of people? I doubt it, otherwise we wouldn't have such widespread use of "you're so lucky!".

That's true, but I think of people saying "You're so lucky!" in the same way that I think of people asking "How are you?". There isn't any actual meaning behind it, it's just the airy rituals of small talk.

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#55

Post by minikites »

kyleschiller wrote: post #25
minikites wrote: post #9

I think a lot of people are emotionally unable to deal with a world that is as dramatically unfair as ours is, so they fall back to the childish notion that people who have fallen on hard times deserve it and successful people controlled their own destiny to get there, because the alternative is too uncomfortable to think about.

Yeah, that's probably part of it, but remember also that the people controlling narratives are by definition in power, and that people in power have strong incentives to justify their position.

I'm not sure what you're getting at, do you mean the ends justify the means?

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#57

Post by mediaman »

ergothus wrote: post #33

My father and I have somewhat productive political conversations: He's fiscally conservative, I tend towards the liberal side of the scale. Drilling in to find what we really disagree about, it seems to boil down to two concepts: (1) I view success as a matter of luck that your effort can make better or worse. He views effort as the single most important deciding factor in success in life (2) I'm willing to tolerate…

I agree. I talk with a number of business owners in a more traditionally conservative industry (agriculture). Many of them feel that America's problem is that we let people "get off the hook" for not "putting the work and smarts into something" like "we do." Many of these people are quite smart and run their business extremely well, and put in long hours, though many of them inherited businesses, or at least knowledge and support about a particular line of business.

Their view appears to be heavily reliant on meritocratic outcomes, which of course assigns a low weight to luck. I would think that this world view would not be supported by a higher weighting to luck, but I do not know if the low assignment to luck is a result of cognitive dissonance with respect to their own hard work and long hours to sustain their success.

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#58

Post by andrewclunn »

A lot of this "luck" can be traced back very easily to causes like "had two parents who gave a damn" or "had enough to eat eat growing up." The people pushing this narrative that you're not really responsible for your failure / success want it both ways. They want to make you admit that you benefit from living in a peaceful stable society with infrastructure, while also not wanting to hold parents accountable for having too many kids too early, or admit that impact that divorce has on young children. It always comes down to pushing some narrative that is meant to justify further state intrusion into our lives and the dismantling of the family unit, all with pseudo-scientific (see "the gray sciences") justifications and emotional appeals. Spare me the bullshit, I aint buying it.

EDIT -

Looking for another example of this obvious propaganda? Try the latest episode of RadioLab:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/radiolab-presents-media-busted...

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#60

Post by [deleted] »

Shivetya wrote: post #41
ergothus wrote: post #33

My father and I have somewhat productive political conversations: He's fiscally conservative, I tend towards the liberal side of the scale. Drilling in to find what we really disagree about, it seems to boil down to two concepts: (1) I view success as a matter of luck that your effort can make better or worse. He views effort as the single most important deciding factor in success in life (2) I'm willing to tolerate…

I would tend to favor your father's position; I'm a libertarian. I put in the context of some are our industries brightest and best have had some remarkable ideas and luck but how many times did it take them to get there? Like an old Ted Turner story about his smart quotes and the remarks of just how many bad ones it took to get there. the issue with this in society is the ability of people to have enough bad outcome…

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