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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

#151

Post by Frondo »

willholloway wrote: post #53
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…

That's interesting. That view, of the essential unfairness of the system, had the opposite effect on me: it motivated me lots. Just not to buy into the American dream stuff.

It motivated me to understand my own values, and learn more about the system, and figure out what I wanted to do to try and change the system for the people who'd never luck out and get a desk job, the people in coffee shops, cleaning hotel rooms, and the like.

Guess we can take different things from the same thing.

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

#152

Post by Frondo »

awa wrote: post #144
criddell wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cory Doctorow pointed to an interest article that described the subsidies that flow to wealthy households: http://boingboing.net/2016/07/03/low-income-us-households-ge... I wonder if your father thinks of his mortgage interest deduction as an example of receiving help he doesn't deserve?

I am not sure why mortgage interest deduction gets such a bad rap. It allows a lot of people to be able to afford homes which they couldn't otherwise. It helps the housing market/industry and banking industry. Apart from that a lot of other countries has it. If I had to change something I would actually add a rental deduction to help those who can't afford to buy housing instead of removing mortgage interest deductio…

I would rather the government do more to actually balance the system, than just throw a bone to too-poor homeowners.

I would rather every middle class worker simply have a much higher paycheck, so that the mortgage interest deduction could be eliminated without anyone feeling a thing.

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

#153

Post by ChuckMcM »

If you get a chance to experience an "exit", where a number of people suddenly have much more wealth than others around them who are essentially doing the same things but joined the company at a different time, you will get to see all the different ways that people internalize that event (both positively and negatively).

Luck is very much a part of success and a big part of the way that Vikings talked of sailing with successful leaders ('they have a lot of luck'). And most importantly luck has no bearing character. But internalizing that can be hard when someone you despise gets rich, or someone you really care about fails to get the rewards that others in the same place have.

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

#154

Post by fibbery »

charles-salvia wrote: post #90
kahnpro wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that success is based on effort is fundamentally... wrong. For every famous singer, there are thousands of other people putting in years of effort who cannot even earn a salary. For every Facebook, there are thousands of other products or companies who have put in heaps of effort but just didn't have the right timing, or that special something, that let Facebook take off. For every well thought out or engine…

I wouldn't go as far as saying effort is irrelevant - just not the only, possibly not even the dominant factor that contributes to success. I view it as something like 40% effort/motivation, 60% luck

is innate skill filed under luck?

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

#155

Post by user5994461 »

Bombthecat wrote: post #147
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…

There is an old saying in FPS games: when luck becomes skill. Basically, you move the luck in your favour. Using the situation at hand for you.

I usually say for FPS: when you've got a lot of luck, that's called skill.

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

#156

Post by nisse72 »

Tangentally related, I find it interesting that we often call people lucky when something very bad happened to them, but they somehow managed to survive the situation or land on their feet. We aren't as keen to describe people as lucky who avoided danger entirely.

Lone survivor in a plane crash? Lucky. Took a cruise instead? Meh.

Personally I think it's preferable to not be in the crash, than to have survived it.

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

#157

Post by usefulcat »

awa wrote: post #144
criddell wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cory Doctorow pointed to an interest article that described the subsidies that flow to wealthy households: http://boingboing.net/2016/07/03/low-income-us-households-ge... I wonder if your father thinks of his mortgage interest deduction as an example of receiving help he doesn't deserve?

I am not sure why mortgage interest deduction gets such a bad rap. It allows a lot of people to be able to afford homes which they couldn't otherwise. It helps the housing market/industry and banking industry. Apart from that a lot of other countries has it. If I had to change something I would actually add a rental deduction to help those who can't afford to buy housing instead of removing mortgage interest deductio…

"It allows a lot of people to be able to afford homes which they couldn't otherwise."

That may be true, but if it's having that effect for a lot of people, then surely it's also contributing to higher housing prices, which of course negates (at least in part) the supposed increase in affordability..

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

#158

Post by badsock »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #113
kyleschiller wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inequ…

The problem I have with inequality is that it seems almost impossible to disentangle political influence from wealth.

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

#159

Post by ItsDeathball »

awa wrote: post #144
criddell wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cory Doctorow pointed to an interest article that described the subsidies that flow to wealthy households: http://boingboing.net/2016/07/03/low-income-us-households-ge... I wonder if your father thinks of his mortgage interest deduction as an example of receiving help he doesn't deserve?

I am not sure why mortgage interest deduction gets such a bad rap. It allows a lot of people to be able to afford homes which they couldn't otherwise. It helps the housing market/industry and banking industry. Apart from that a lot of other countries has it. If I had to change something I would actually add a rental deduction to help those who can't afford to buy housing instead of removing mortgage interest deductio…

The mortgage interest deduction distorts the market in several ways. Making credit more available does allow people to spend more on homes, but this is then priced into the market. As you hint at, the subsidy is net neutral for homeowners, as it ultimately benefits the housing and banking industries. People who owned suburban land at the implementation of the deduction also benefited hugely, but now that prices are artificially inflated, any removal of the deduction would take money away from homeowners.

Additionally, it makes paying cash for a home unrealistic, making the housing market (more) dependent on banks and their attendant federal regulations. Over time this has had numerous negative effects on land use patterns and urban health by encouraging car-oriented sprawl and devaluing urban mixed-use neighborhoods. There's also the whole race-based redlining thing. The worst of these policies have been mitigated in the recent past, but they still pose obstacles to certain kinds of development (that are highly desirable lately) and would not have existed in the first place without government intervention in home mortgages.

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

#160

Post by emodendroket »

This seems to take a sudden leap from a relatively uncontroversial (I'd think) proposition into a political program. I wonder about this bit:

> The price of the average American wedding in 1980 was $10,000. In 2014, the most recent figure I had, was $31,000.

According to a random inflation calculator I checked online $10k in 1980 would be worth almost $30k today. https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=10000&year1=19...

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