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Talent, luck and success: simulating meritocracy and inequality

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Re: Talent, luck and success: simulating meritocracy and inequality

#11

Post by tdb7893 »

chongli wrote: post #4

Is talent not just a form of luck? It doesn't matter how hard you work at your low post game, you'll never learn to be seven feet tall. Those who are of that height are extremely lucky, giving them a huge advantage over other contenders for that NBA center position. Other forms of athletic talent are less visible than height but I see no reason not to attribute them to luck (genetics, access to nutrition, coaching et…

If you go deep enough everything is luck. Your intelligence, height, and even your work ethic are just a product of your genetics and your environment.

It seems to me that if someone who was literally identical to me was put into an identical situation they would act the exact same way which means our actions are deterministic and only depend on the boundary conditions. Anyway, this is all a little off topic but it's interesting that even if you got where you are by working hard you are still lucky to be a person who was in the right conditions (genetically and environmentally) to be someone who works hard.

Re: Talent, luck and success: simulating meritocracy and inequality

#12

Post by 0xFACEFEED »

mapcars wrote: post #7
newyankee wrote: post #2

One of the biggest lie sold in the West is that if you work hard, give everything you should succeed. This has grave implications on policy and really blinds people born with a silver spoon to the real problems in society as they have a 'i deserve it and they don't syndrome'. Contrast this with a poor society that is growing rapidly where you see islands of wealths with certain individuals, at least people over there…

>what are the basic needs of a human that a society should provide Earning a living should not be a problem in the modern world with basically any kind of job. One of the big problems is people want the latest iphone, the best car, the most luxurious home, holidays, etc. The expectation of life had been set too high to make it happen even for a small part of the population. What is actually needed is way, way differe…

That is just not true. While there may be people out there with a pathological obsession with having the "best", it isn't the norm. Unless your sample consists entirely of urban teenagers :P

Most people I meet (across all classes mind you) are scrappy and pretty selective about what they buy.

Re: Talent, luck and success: simulating meritocracy and inequality

#13

Post by Thiez »

> The new term, wT is the amount of one’s paycheck. w represents the importance of the paycheck. The higher it is, the more pay you get. w is multiplied by the talent parameter T to implement a meritocratic idea: the more talented you are, the fatter the paycheck you get.

Perhaps I misunderstand the situation, but it seems like the author is baking meritocracy directly into the model: if you have high talent then you automatically get a higher paycheck. By increasing the paycheck importance or simply reducing the event probability towards 0, this model will always produce a perfect meritocracy.

So on the one hand we have random events that have a chance to double or halve capital, but somehow a persons paycheck is a constant over their life, nobody is ever between jobs, and paycheck is entirely deterministic. I think the author really missed the opportunity to link paychecks to the random events (but paychecks would otherwise persist between events).

Re: Talent, luck and success: simulating meritocracy and inequality

#14

Post by rb808 »

rb808 wrote: post #5
newyankee wrote: post #2

One of the biggest lie sold in the West is that if you work hard, give everything you should succeed. This has grave implications on policy and really blinds people born with a silver spoon to the real problems in society as they have a 'i deserve it and they don't syndrome'. Contrast this with a poor society that is growing rapidly where you see islands of wealths with certain individuals, at least people over there…

Chris Dillow is my favorite economics blogger. http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com One of his quotes from memory is "Meritocracy is the myth that justifies inequality", which explains a lot of the current world.

To add to this - yes he's not the only one who talks about it, the idea is even on the wikipedia page for meritocracy.

Its worth following Chris, much of what he talks about is outside the world of regular media ideas, and usually has lots of interesting references.

On this topic - he often says that social mobility is not a great goal to aim for, helping working & middle classes achieve interesting & rewarding work with security is better goal.

http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli... http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...

Re: Talent, luck and success: simulating meritocracy and inequality

#16

Post by kaolti »

newyankee wrote: post #2

One of the biggest lie sold in the West is that if you work hard, give everything you should succeed. This has grave implications on policy and really blinds people born with a silver spoon to the real problems in society as they have a 'i deserve it and they don't syndrome'. Contrast this with a poor society that is growing rapidly where you see islands of wealths with certain individuals, at least people over there…

Why is it a lie? Do you disagree that hard work leads to success, within limits?

Re: Talent, luck and success: simulating meritocracy and inequality

#17

Post by denzil_correa »

mapcars wrote: post #7
newyankee wrote: post #2

One of the biggest lie sold in the West is that if you work hard, give everything you should succeed. This has grave implications on policy and really blinds people born with a silver spoon to the real problems in society as they have a 'i deserve it and they don't syndrome'. Contrast this with a poor society that is growing rapidly where you see islands of wealths with certain individuals, at least people over there…

>what are the basic needs of a human that a society should provide Earning a living should not be a problem in the modern world with basically any kind of job. One of the big problems is people want the latest iphone, the best car, the most luxurious home, holidays, etc. The expectation of life had been set too high to make it happen even for a small part of the population. What is actually needed is way, way differe…

> Earning a living should not be a problem in the modern world with basically any kind of job.

It would be interesting to see the thought process and methodology that brought you to this conclusion.

Re: Talent, luck and success: simulating meritocracy and inequality

#18

Post by commandlinefan »

chongli wrote: post #4

Is talent not just a form of luck? It doesn't matter how hard you work at your low post game, you'll never learn to be seven feet tall. Those who are of that height are extremely lucky, giving them a huge advantage over other contenders for that NBA center position. Other forms of athletic talent are less visible than height but I see no reason not to attribute them to luck (genetics, access to nutrition, coaching et…

His conculsion also rests on the premise that talent is something you can measure and put a number on. In professional sports, for the most part, you can do that: your "talent" is (indirectly) measured by the number of goals you score. The more goals you score, the more talented you are. I suspect that's one of the reasons that professional athletes are a) so rare and b) so highly compensated: it's near-trivial to compare one to another; you just assign each one a number and sort the numbers. In most fields, it's a lot harder to measure talent (actually it's probably harder in professional sports, too, but the "workers" agree to it, so it stands). While it would be unreasonable, and a logical fallacy, to lay claim to the principal and state the talent drives success and therefore if you're not successful you're not talented, the author here is doing pretty much the opposite by saying that luck drives success and if you're not successful you're not lucky (therefore we need wealth redistribution). He backs it up with a lot of equations, but unless we can all agree that talent is something you can measure objectively (which we can't even do with intelligence), the equations are fairly meaningless.

Re: Talent, luck and success: simulating meritocracy and inequality

#19

Post by k__ »

mapcars wrote: post #7
newyankee wrote: post #2

One of the biggest lie sold in the West is that if you work hard, give everything you should succeed. This has grave implications on policy and really blinds people born with a silver spoon to the real problems in society as they have a 'i deserve it and they don't syndrome'. Contrast this with a poor society that is growing rapidly where you see islands of wealths with certain individuals, at least people over there…

>what are the basic needs of a human that a society should provide Earning a living should not be a problem in the modern world with basically any kind of job. One of the big problems is people want the latest iphone, the best car, the most luxurious home, holidays, etc. The expectation of life had been set too high to make it happen even for a small part of the population. What is actually needed is way, way differe…

"Earning a living should not be a problem in the modern world"

But it is.

15% of the population have an IQ of less than 85, that's about 48 million people in the US alone.

Not even the military thinks they can do anything reasonable with them (if you under 83 they don't want you so it's probably 1 in 10 people, I guess) and they try to get as many people as they can.

Re: Talent, luck and success: simulating meritocracy and inequality

#20

Post by decebalus1 »

mapcars wrote: post #7
newyankee wrote: post #2

One of the biggest lie sold in the West is that if you work hard, give everything you should succeed. This has grave implications on policy and really blinds people born with a silver spoon to the real problems in society as they have a 'i deserve it and they don't syndrome'. Contrast this with a poor society that is growing rapidly where you see islands of wealths with certain individuals, at least people over there…

>what are the basic needs of a human that a society should provide Earning a living should not be a problem in the modern world with basically any kind of job. One of the big problems is people want the latest iphone, the best car, the most luxurious home, holidays, etc. The expectation of life had been set too high to make it happen even for a small part of the population. What is actually needed is way, way differe…

> Earning a living should not be a problem in the modern world with basically any kind of job. One of the big problems is people want the latest iphone, the best car, the most luxurious home, holidays, etc.

Hmm.. I don't believe that the countless Walmart and Amazon warehouse employees on food stamps are at the edge of poverty because they bought the latest iphone, best car and most luxurious home.

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