141–150 of 196 posts
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For the purpose of this discussion, the precise definition of luck doesn't matter, and can be taken to be anything that isn't talent.
So where would you put what we call "determination?" When someone has 9 businesses/jobs/experiments/etc fail and gets "lucky" with the 10th one, it seems like there is another aspect other than luck and talent.
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I agree with you completely. I got downvoted on a thread several weeks ago for finding issue in the US placing below Mexico on a "(relative) child poverty" measure. Regardless of whether their methodology or even results are correct - I think it's guaranteed that many readers will distort that information and propagate that distortion onward. But, pardon my cynicism and condescension, but, try arguing that with a gro…
> people, who frankly, are jealous of others and want more. That's always what it boils down to, isn't it? The one argument the hardcore libertarians and FYGM people always fall back to is "well, you're just jealous. If you just worked harder , you could afford it too", which has been shown again and again to be blatantly false and a clear example of a just world fallacy. Luck plays an enormous part in how successful…
I have some personal biases here.
There are very different shades of privilege here. The bank director may have been the son of an immigrant, had straight A's in school, got perfect math scores and found an interest in finance, gotten into a top school, and generally worked hard his entire life. Their child also has natural ability in school, his father tells him to shut up, don't complain about anything, teaches them to work hard and pursue their talents but pays for their school. The kid works 80 hours a week, perhaps develops a talent and launches a business around it, and becomes successful as well.
The alcoholic single mother may not had an ounce of ability in school, partied her way through life and mooched off of her boyfriends until around 30 when she has to get a job and then keeps one to survive. Then she has a daughter, her daughter is very beautiful, fails out of school, is used to getting things for free as well, is jealous of her friends who have more, and does not end up going to college or doing anything of great significance.
And then of course you have successful father, child drinks and parties their way through life, abuses others, then inherits everything and preaches to others about how they had to sacrifice everything, and, against all odds, made it. I would not complain if this unfortunately substantial portion of our population got dropped off in Siberia.
I think it is very rare, but perhaps the next Von Neumann is working two jobs and failing out of school to pay the rent for his younger sister and alcoholic mother somewhere. That is a human tragedy and I hope it is rectified and I believe we've steadily been changing in that regard for centuries. We certainly have a lot of issues regarding educational opportunity that needs to be rectified. I think the wealthy are highly under taxed in this nation and that needs to be fixed, but anybody who thinks success is purely luck does not deserve success.
America's aversion to the role of luck is based on the Protestant work ethic. There is no chance and everything is predetermined by God's grace. God's grace is demonstrated by hard work, frugality, and discipline. There is a concept of double predetermination where you already need to be saved to be saved. Which means the poor is poor not because of chance, but because they lack God's grace.
It's funny how old religious ideas are simple observations in a way. By doing something everyday you just accumulate lots of subtle knowledge and roots in any domain. So mathematically you have lots of chances to get it right at one point. More than "luck" to me the main factor is a blend of inner desire and context that allows you just enough time to think and do.
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I agree with your comments, but I want to add to it. I agree that wealth inequality leads to power inequality. And I agree that curtails freedom. But I think it also tends to societal instability. Closing the loop, we care about wealth inequality because we don't want society to collapse.
Are there historical examples of societal collapse due to wealth inequality? (Honest question)
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This is a distortion. Young men see rich men with beautiful women flying to anywhere they want on the planet. Only a few of them will get that when they're older, and it oftens boils down to intelligence, work ethic, cleverness, other abilities like athletics and looks, and a few lucky breaks that they take advantage of. Exceptions being inherited wealth. Law of averages, those who do make it are hard working and int…
However, everyone still wants the hot girl and the jet. I'd settle for decent healthcare and enough stable income to raise a family. Should the group, who by and large, has contributed more to the society not have proportionally more say? 1) They haven't and 2) no. You appear to be advocating plutocracy.
I'm a bit confused by this statement. In the vast majority of cases where an individual purchases something, they do it because they want it (food is purchased because the body desires food, phones are purchased because the brain likes communication and connectedness, medical care is purchased because people realize it helps them, etc). Therefore, for someone to have accumulated a large amount of profit, enough people must have decided that whatever they are offering is beneficial.
Simply put, if a person has a large amount of money earned through a truly free market, then they must have provided a benefit to society.
Now, this can be confused by things like regulation. Regulatory capture, corruption, and many other things can all force people to purchase things they do not desire or do not provide as much benefit as a different product, but this is not an issue that can be solved by more regulation or taxation. Instead, it is an issue with interference in the market which causes the inequalities that I would agree, very much do exist.
Absolute junk science. A negative contribution to net human insight. >The simulations show that although talent has a Gaussian distribution among agents, the resulting distribution of success/capital after a working life of 40 years, follows a power law which respects the ”80-20” Pareto law for the distribution of wealth found in the real world. As opposed to what? What kind of distribution might you expect? Based on…
> As opposed to what? What kind of distribution might you expect?
For one thing, they might have expected the result not to be dominated by luck.
> It bears literally no relationship to reality, where random massive doublings of wealth are the exception, not the rule.
I don't think this will help to control the luck as opposed to talent. I suspect the problem is in the "leverage". Having more wealth makes it easier to accrue more wealth in the future, however, the same is not true for talent. Having more talent doesn't help you get much more talent.
So eventually, regardless how big your talent can be, the accrued wealth will dominate the end of the distribution. The rate at which the wealth is accrued doesn't matter, it will only reduce social mobility.
Addendum: Interestingly, the model actually shows what we would expect for low to middle end of income distribution, that talent there is more important than wealth. Which is in line with my explanation.
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Great inequality of wealth is virtually always an inequality of power, and so it is "problematized". You're right that all social dynamics are complex (even economics, or "the dynmaics of wealth", isn't known to the way it can be effectively controlled), but at the end of the day, policies are made based on values. A society that values the maximization of freedom would fight against growing wealth inequality beyond…
Yes, yes. I agree with all of this (well, "grows sub-linearly" is grossly speculative, but matches the marginal utility of consumption, etc.) But you misunderstand my question. To counteract the power of wealth, some other sort of power is needed. Doesn't this lead to power inequality again? Do we know anything about power inequality dynamics that lets us choose this or that structure of coercion?
Even if we did have a good model of power dynamics, controlling it would still be hard, as it's an intractable system. Instead, what we have is politics, where different groups fight for their power (and freedom). That's exactly what politics is. When power inequality grows too much, we have revolutions.
What scares me is that we may be seeing an increase in soft, non-authoritarian power (like the power in the hands of companies like Google and Facebook), that is almost as bad as authoritarian power but harder to fight against because it doesn't feel coercive.
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The reason we care so much about inequality has nothing to do with jealousy and everything to do with power[1]. As resources are a major source of power (and often vice-versa), and because power is relative, inequality of resources means inequality of power. And as power means influence (and so the ability to reduce another's freedom), inequality reduces overall freedom. As freedom can never be total[2], the question…
This is a distortion. Young men see rich men with beautiful women flying to anywhere they want on the planet. Only a few of them will get that when they're older, and it oftens boils down to intelligence, work ethic, cleverness, other abilities like athletics and looks, and a few lucky breaks that they take advantage of. Exceptions being inherited wealth. Law of averages, those who do make it are hard working and int…
I don't know how you came up with this "law of averages" but I do know that you haven't seen the paper's results.
> Take "power" from [Hard working and intelligent]U[Scott Disick, Donald JR] to normalize influence across everyone?
Limiting the creation of powerful feudal lords that are close to matching in power a democratic society's government is not the same as normalizing influence across everyone. Our choices aren't limited to feudalism and communism.
> Should the group, who by and large, has contributed more to the society not have proportionally more say?
That is a question of values, and you may have different ones, but the values on which democracies are founded say no (whether or not those values are actually realized is a different question). Less democratic societies say yes. I am not saying that a democracy is absolutely superior to an oligarchy, but you must understand where your values lie. All things considered, I value democracy more.
Absolute junk science. A negative contribution to net human insight. >The simulations show that although talent has a Gaussian distribution among agents, the resulting distribution of success/capital after a working life of 40 years, follows a power law which respects the ”80-20” Pareto law for the distribution of wealth found in the real world. As opposed to what? What kind of distribution might you expect? Based on…
News articles about science, even good science are often terrible. The most common problems I see are oversimplifying, overgeneralizing and overstating conclusions. Many readers then further generalize and simplify what they read in the article.
I just saw this recently with an article about a study that concluded (and I'm oversimplifying here) that NSAIDs are a better first-line treatment for arthritis pain than opioids. By the time a layperson was referencing it in conversation, they had concluded that it's never a good idea to use opioids to treat any pain.
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This is an interesting answer. But I'm not sure if inequality-of-power-driven-by-inequality-of-wealth can be problematized (put into the discussion and on the agenda) and fought in such a way that equalizes power. We're shuffling power around and the dynamics of power inequality aren't clear at all.
It has to do with universal commodification. Check out Michael Walzer and 'Spheres of Justice.' He makes the case for a kind of 'complex equality' where power in one sphere doesn't bleed into another. Thus having a lot of money would allow you to buy fancy paintings and a nice car and typical commodities but when it comes to something like healthcare, we'd be better off if money couldn't be used to buy a better versi…