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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

#201

Post by jartelt »

mindcrime wrote: post #195
jartelt wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off, congrats on getting to where you are today. It sounds like your hard work is really paying off. I would just note that one of the points of the article is that it is difficult for a successful person to recognize the lucky events in their life. Perhaps in one of your job interviews you hit it off with the interviewer because you went to the same college or were both from "redneck-ville." Another person wit…

I don't see anybody really saying that "every outcome is fair and logical" though. My issue is just all this luck talk is counter-productive. I mean, if you convince a group of people that life is nothing but luck, how have you helped them? Why bother working hard at all, if you don't believe it can possibly pay off?

The talk about luck is meant to encourage empathy and understanding. If your world view says that success is based only on your work ethic, then you will assume that all people who are not successful did not work hard. With that logic it is pretty easy to conclude that we should not help people out or support unsuccessful people because it's solely their own fault that they were not successful. Some would argue this is the wrong world view and that we should acknowledge that many unsuccessful people work really hard and just got dealt a bad deck of cards. These different world views lead to different priorities in public policy among other things.

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

#202

Post by jartelt »

mindcrime wrote: post #199
bradyo wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people working hard in aggregate can improve the situation of _all_ people in the system if the system equally distributes rewards. The problem is we don't live in such a system. So I (and others in this thread) will continue to try to convince people to have more empathy until we do have such a system.

"the system" doesn't have to distribute rewards equally for people to work to improve the situation of all (or most) people. So I (and others in this thread) will continue to try to convince people to have more empathy until we do have such a system. I see those as orthogonal concerns. You can have empathy even if you don't have a "everything is luck" mentality.

Sure, you can have empathy with that mentality. But, when you assume everyone less successful than you is less smart and/or doesn't work as hard as you, it's not as likely that you will.

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

#203

Post by bradyo »

mindcrime wrote: post #199
bradyo wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people working hard in aggregate can improve the situation of _all_ people in the system if the system equally distributes rewards. The problem is we don't live in such a system. So I (and others in this thread) will continue to try to convince people to have more empathy until we do have such a system.

"the system" doesn't have to distribute rewards equally for people to work to improve the situation of all (or most) people. So I (and others in this thread) will continue to try to convince people to have more empathy until we do have such a system. I see those as orthogonal concerns. You can have empathy even if you don't have a "everything is luck" mentality.

Sure, the system doesn't _have_ to be that way for people to work together. But sooner or later they'll come to the same conclusion you have - what's the point if they're not seeing equal returns? Who knows what will happen at that point - I'd rather fix the system before we get to that point.

And sure, you can have some empathy even if you don't have all of the empathy. But those are definitely not orthogonal concerns. Being able to empathize fully with someone's situation IMO includes recognizing that everything truly is luck. Like down to your genetic makeup. Hell, being alive is lucky.

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

#204

Post by kartan »

> The whole process of constructing life narratives is biased in ways that almost guarantee that people won’t recognize the role of chance events adequately.

This is also a cultural thing. Here in Sweden it is easier that people dismisses their achievements to not look like they are bragging and to accept that chance is part of life. I do that myself. And I feel better and less stressed recognizing that luck is part of why I have what I have.

So I work not too hard - that can be bad for my health and a bad long term investment - not too little - work is needed to achieve anything and you have to do your part to not let other down. So you work lagom.

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

#205

Post by lostsock »

snarf21 wrote: post #95
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…

There is also the biggest luck factor of all, that being how/when/where you were born. Most of us were born in the US into a family. We did nothing to deserve that but it already makes us in the top 1% richest people globally. What would our path look like if we had been born in rural Nicaragua instead? I'm not "woe is me" but I was raised in a super conservative family, taught to avoid risk and that a steady paychec…

I've often heard that it's lucky to be born in a certain place to certain parents, but I think this is a really narrow view of luck.

It may be individually lucky to the person born somewhere (i.e. they had no involvement or choice in where they were born and to whom) but I'm not sure why you would isolate luck to the individual level.

That persons parents made decisions about when, where and how their child would be born. Some parents move countries in search of better opportunities, some were themselves "lucky" to be born where they were. When you zoom out a little it becomes a lot less "lucky" and more of the result of intergenerational decisions and priorities.

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

#206

Post by kelnos »

crusso wrote: post #143
hx87 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government can certainly mitigate the effects of luck while simultaneously rewarding effort.

Examples?

A single-payer healthcare system is your government mitigating the effects of your bad luck. Giving you a tax break for gains on certain kinds of investments is your government rewarding your work. (That's not traditional "hard work" in the sense of expending physical energy, but deciding what investments to make is certainly work.)

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

#207

Post by quadrangle »

bufordsharkley wrote: post #188
quadrangle wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that renters pay property tax, just indirectly, right? Property taxes aren't paid only by owner-occupied homes. Mortgage tax deductions are only on a primary home, so they don't apply to owners of rental units. Put simply: property taxes are NOT a penalty for homeownership, they are paid by everyone. Mortgage tax credit is only given to homeowners.

And importantly, only enjoyed by homeowners who got the mortgage before the benefit of the tax deduction started getting capitalized into the value of the house.

wait, what? There's a $250k capital gains exemption for sale of primary home lived in 2 of past 5 years, so isn't capital gain basically irrelevant to anyone but very wealthy? Do you know something I don't? (reasonably likely)

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

#208

Post by mindcrime »

jartelt wrote: post #201
mindcrime wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see anybody really saying that "every outcome is fair and logical" though. My issue is just all this luck talk is counter-productive. I mean, if you convince a group of people that life is nothing but luck, how have you helped them? Why bother working hard at all, if you don't believe it can possibly pay off?

The talk about luck is meant to encourage empathy and understanding. If your world view says that success is based only on your work ethic, then you will assume that all people who are not successful did not work hard. With that logic it is pretty easy to conclude that we should not help people out or support unsuccessful people because it's solely their own fault that they were not successful. Some would argue this…

If your world view says that success is based only on your work ethic, then you will assume that all people who are not successful did not work hard. With that logic it is pretty easy to conclude that we should not help people out or support unsuccessful people because it's solely their own fault that they were not successful.

I'm not saying anything about you specifically, but that sounds a lot like a kind of "anti-libertarian" straw-man argument I hear a lot. Certain people like to claim exactly that libertarians believe "that all people who are not successful did not work hard", which is far from true.

I think everybody understands that some people work very hard and still fail to achieve "success" (depending on how you define success). But what I think should be taken into account is that:

Some people who fail to achieve "success" do so because they didn't work hard enough.

Hard work, good decisions, etc., do play an important role in the amount of success you attain.

Obviously reality falls somewhere in between "luck is everything" and "hard work is everything", but I get the sense that some people promoting the "it's all luck" mindset have an agenda in terms of denigrating the fundamental idea that effort and initiative count at all. Again, not saying that's you, and I'm probably just over-sensitive on this subject.

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

#209

Post by many_bells_down »

wazoox wrote: post #166
mindcrime wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being religious or not has nothing to do with believing that effort is the dominant factor affecting success. I'm an atheist who also believes that effort reigns supreme. That doesn't mean that I don't believe that what we call "bad luck" can't come along and derail you, but I firmly believe - based on my own experience - that you "make your own luck" through effort and the decisions you make. I grew in dirt-poor in…

You're an atheist, but you somehow believe that the good guys mostly win in the end. I call this religious, no insult intended, I'm speaking of a turn of spirit, not of actual religion. I think that the fundamental philosophical and political dissent lies there, that the irreconcilable point is that: either you think that the world is totally unjust, may crush you even if you're hard working, nice, polite, and let Po…

Define "world". Define "good guy".

Is it inconsistent to believe that the world is totally unjust and, yet, also believe that individuals who put forth more effort are generally more successful? I think not.

The world itself may be totally unjust; physics shows no partiality for individuals who possess a greater "morality" or work ethic. However, we do not only live within the world. We also live within various frameworks, such as a culture, society, company, etc. These frameworks are not governed merely by physics, but by other humans. And these other humans do, almost by definition, show partiality. Therefore, I argue, that you can increase your chances for success through your own actions. This is not inconsistent with claiming Pol Pot and torturous jihadists "won"; they could have simply assessed their situation and, by their own effort, maximized their chances for success.

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

#210

Post by bzbarsky »

quadrangle wrote: post #184
hueving wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're willing to criticize the mortgage interest deduction, are you also willing to criticize property taxes? Both are unfair advantages/disadvantages given to homeowners.

You do realize that renters pay property tax, just indirectly, right? Property taxes aren't paid only by owner-occupied homes. Mortgage tax deductions are only on a primary home, so they don't apply to owners of rental units. Put simply: property taxes are NOT a penalty for homeownership, they are paid by everyone. Mortgage tax credit is only given to homeowners.

> Mortgage tax deductions are only on a primary home, so they don't apply to owners of rental units.

Mortgage interest on a rental unit is deductible against the rental income on that unit for obvious reasons: it's a business expense for the rental business and hence taken out of gross revenue for that business to figure out the (taxable) profits.

Specifically, for US individual federal taxes in 2016, see Form 1040, Schedule E, line 12. This is the form you use if you haven't actually formally incorporated your rental activity as a business.

Note that you can also deduct your spending on repairs to the rental property, insurance on it, property taxes (line 16 on that form), and so forth, for the exact same reasons: income taxes on business-like activity are levied on net income, not gross income.

The only people who can't take a mortgage interest deduction are people who have a second home that they are _not_ renting out.

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