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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

#111

Post by pmyteh »

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…

Your ability to handle the consequences of either making bad choices or being unlucky is dependent in large measure on factors like financial resilience (can you afford to take a risky project without running the chance of being homeless?) and social support (will your partner be prepared to support a change of direction, do your parents recognise the value of trying and failing at difficult things, will your country help you retrain if things go wrong?). These things are not evenly distributed.

I'm now in some senses on my third career (I'm 35). Each of those decisions to change direction, take risks and grow as a person were made a lot easier because I had a good enough salary to put money aside to cover the risks, and a wife who happens to be both adventure-loving and locationally-flexible. Not to mention that the most recent career change (moving into academic research) basically required a self-funded MSc as a preparatory to funded PhD study (I was moving into quite a different field, and there's basically no funding for taught Masters courses in the UK). That's more than half the people who could benefit from it priced out from the start.

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

#112

Post by Florin_Andrei »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #110
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the universe is also a place where it rains on your head, and then the sun burns your skin off, and wolves casually stroll in and eat your children. That's what the universe does when left to its own devices, and we don't like that, and we change it. "It is the way it is because it's natural" is a pretty naive fallacy.

You're reading my statement as saying that this is preferable when in fact I'm staying that it's improbable to expect we could do otherwise. Unless you want to go down the AGI/transhumanism path with me, which I doubt you do.

Is it "improbable" that we build houses and dams to try and correct traits of the universe that we deem undesirable?

Stop typing and look around you. You live in a huge improbability already.

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

#113

Post by thaumaturgy »

kyleschiller wrote: post #69
supremus_58 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wouldn't poverty largely be a product of inequality?

In the current system, yes, properly implemented, UBI would end poverty in America while still allowing for massive inequality. It sets a floor, not a ceiling.

I'm not sure that inequality is necessarily the thing to be fixed.

I suspect that when most people talk about inequality, what they mean is, "a few people are doing really good and a lot of people are doing really bad". If you can lessen or remove the "doing really bad" part, whether through UBI or some other means (progressive taxation to fund other programs, whatever your ideology prefers), then statements of inequality start to mean just "a few people are doing really good" and I think there are far fewer people that are bothered by that.

I also think these conversations tend to get stuck on the definition of poverty. Some people say, "well, it can't be poverty because they all have smartphones", and other people say, "well, it's poverty because they lack any opportunity". I think that if these discussions are going to get anywhere we have to start by convincing people that the definition of poverty is allowed to change and that we shouldn't in the 21st century be defining poverty in 19th-century terms.

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

#114

Post by dv_dt »

kyleschiller wrote: post #29
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…

At the risk of sounding too Paul Graham, how much of what you're talking about is due to poverty more than inequality?

I see poverty (and UBI) as fixing the problem of people not even having enough to live on, but inequality having a much wider range of impact. Maybe UBI could lead to fixes in other areas - but there is this other problem economically, of people making rational decisions based upon the limited resources they have to draw upon (capital, experience, network connections, family fallbacks, etc). How may good ideas are never explored because someone has an idea that is a 0.001% of success, but could benefit the world 1000x over? Then they look at their personal resources and just push that idea away? This isn't a problem just on an individual basis.

For instance, I sometimes idly wonder how many fairly sharp and/or self-driven people ended up working for the illegal drug industry vs how society (and those individuals) could have benefited had other paths been available to them. Maybe we've missed out on many exceptional CEOs because they were taken up by the illegal drug industry, became drug lords then somewhere along the line locked up or killed.

Or the looming Automation issue. We may take care of many basic economic activities by automation, and now many people will be out of work - we see that couched as a "jobs" problem, but looked at another way it's and extension that our economic system really doesn't know how to harness human capability. Our current economic system says only give people just enough resources - any excess is pulled away from people who lack leverage (like many who exchange labor for income). And increasingly I think the fact that allocating for leverage != allocating for potential is unbalancing our economy. Now most wealth has accumulated at the top to a very few - and, from world economic growth numbers, that group basically doesn't know how to more productively allocate it on a world-wide scale (or maybe doesn't want to to preserve the accumulated wealth, or some mix).

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

#115

Post by downandout »

charles-salvia wrote: post #80
downandout wrote: post #71

It's certainly true that you need to be very lucky to become a billionaire - generating wealth at that level usually involves tremendous numbers of other people loving whatever business you have decided to create. But if you're reasonably intelligent, at least in the US, it's quite possible to become a millionaire without much luck, through decades of hard work and discipline. Examples: software engineers at large co…

Then why is poverty concentrated geographically in inner-cities and rural areas instead of evenly spread out? Obviously location and environment affect opportunity, including the perception that breaking out of poverty is even possible to begin with.

Because breaking out of poverty is a hard thing to do. It is certainly possible, beginning with a focus on achieving at a high level early in school (which can be a difficult task when dealing with life issues imposed by poverty). Doing extremely well in high school, which can lead to college, scholarships, etc. is one of the few exits on the freeway to adult poverty for impoverished children. Once that ship has sailed, they could go into trades, such as electrical and plumbing/heating. Most, won't, instead bouncing from job to job with no hope of ever improving their station in life, and will have their own children, instantly worsening their own financial situation and continuing the cycle.

But none of that means it's impossible or that it requires luck to break out of (again, assuming they live in a country with abundant economic opportunity). It requires hard work, discipline, and perhaps most importantly, an understanding that the limits their parents ran into that resulted in their impoverished upbringing are not insurmountable.

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

#116

Post by hx87 »

AstralStorm wrote: post #81
hx87 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only the consumer needs to do so in this case, not the government, and if you don't keep track of your own purchases, no problem, you just don't get the rebate.

Tracking purchases requires time and skill, both of which are often lacking in the poorest. Rich would hire a person to do it. (and also to game the system)

It requires saving and organizing receipts and doing basic arithmetic. Surely even the poorest can do at least that?

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

#117

Post by Swizec »

colanderman wrote: post #103

The article (and some comments here) seem to conflate luck and what I will call lot . "Luck" I define as random happenstance during one's life. You can manage luck. Doing so is the central theme of many board games. You can increase your luck "surface area" by taking more chances. Entire industries (e.g. insurance) exist to manage luck. Your "lot", on the other hand, I define as what you were born with. How you were…

I would add a third category: fortune.

Lot is what you were born with.

Luck is when random things do or don't happen regardless of skill. You can manage it to an extent. Bad luck through being careful and various types of insurance, good luck mostly through participating. Buying bitcoin 3 years ago and selling at great profit now is pure luck. Maybe you influenced the market to grow, probably it was pure luck.

Fortune is the result of stochastic processes. You can do a thing, invest your skill and knowledge, and it can work out or not. Sometimes it works better, sometimes less. For instance, you launch a product that can do between $2k/month and $5k/month and it hits $4.5k/month instead of $2k. That's fortune. Your input affects your chances, but nothing is ever certain.

With time, fortunate events compound and the more often fortune works out for you, the higher your chance that it will continue to do so.

Or as Peter Dinklage says: "I hate that word—’lucky.’ It cheapens a lot of hard work. Living in Brooklyn in an apartment without any heat and paying for dinner at the bodega with dimes—I don’t think I felt myself lucky back then. Doing plays for 50 bucks and trying to be true to myself as an artist and turning down commercials where they wanted a leprechaun. Saying I was lucky negates the hard work I put in and spits on that guy who’s freezing his ass off back in Brooklyn. So I won’t say I’m lucky. I’m fortunate enough to find or attract very talented people. For some reason I found them, and they found me."

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

#118

Post by dv_dt »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #52
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.

The universe is a physical dynamic system, we humans overlay our own social dynamic system which inescapably lives within physical bounds. But that overlay may or may not accomplish things that we desire from a human perspective by the laying of those additional social constraints. We should always question the bounds our own social system because it really is the most arbitrary set of rules that we've laid upon ourselves.

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

#120

Post by Karunamon »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #79
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…

>but it's a somewhat limited solution to capping how far down someone can fall in society That's welfare's job. UBI is to provide a living wage when its not possible or difficult to do so (depressed areas, automation taking jobs, etc). As a social safety net UBI does nothing welfare doesn't, and in most cases does worse. Welfare can be controlled via food stamps that stop people from wasting their money on alcohol, c…

There will naturally be tradeoffs; where we differ is whether those tradeoffs will be worth it.

There already is a secondary market for welfare benefits, to the point where someone who wants to squander it is able to do so, and worth mentioning that the end result to someone who burns their benefits irresponsibly is the same either way, crime or starvation.

Administering the bureaucracy necessary to enforce these controls (of varying effectiveness) carries a very real cost outlay.

With that in mind, UBI carries the promise of significantly less overhead with the idea of identical societal goals.

The alternative is a great ramp-up in the scope and size of welfare systems, like what you might see in the Nordic countries. This idea also has its proponents, but I don't think it would fly in the USA.

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