In the United States, at least, poverty tends to be concentrated geographically in inner-cities and rural areas instead of being evenly spread out. This would seem to indicate fairly conclusively that location and environment affect opportunity and wealth more so than an individual willingness to work hard. In fact, being born into an environment of concentrated poverty like this molds your mental state and perception of the world, to the extent that the idea of breaking out of poverty may not always even appear as a possibility, thus discouraging you from even believing that hard work might pay off.
Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky
101–110 of 303 posts
Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky
#102Progressive consumption tax is ridiculous. It requires your tax rate at the point of sale to be dependent on all your purchases to that point in time. That's just not practical. Or it may require every purchase you make to be recorded for tax-time when you then pay the taxes. Either way it requires the government to know every purchase you make, or at least the price. This is not something anyone should want.
There are three mechanisms for implementing a progressive consumption tax outlined here[1] and none of them involve keeping track of all purchases. I would imagine that Robert Frank also has a sane proposal. 1: https://www.cato.org/publications/cato-online-forum/move-pro...
Those aren't even purely consumption based. Also, the whole thing is an attempt to remove taxes on interest. The author talks a lot about how terrible it is to "tax savings" which we don't do - we tax interest. The problem is if you remove tax on dividends and interest you will split to world in short order into those who have savings and those that don't.
Typically people opposed to this will point out that everyone spends money, but only people with assets have extra income from their assets. So someone who spends 100 percent of his income is going to be taxed on 100 percent of his income, while someone who has the same income and spends the same amount but happens to have a million dollars collecting rents will pay tax on a substantially lower portion of his "income". To that the response is always that it needs to be a progressive tax or offer a rebate for those poor people. At that point it's just a way to fuck the middle class, keep the poor working paycheck to paycheck, and let the rich increase their fortunes through rents.
These guys need to run simulations to show how a closed system works - you'll quickly see a bifurcation under those circumstances and they know it.
Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky
#103The 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 raised, where you grew up, what kind of education you got -- everything you can't control that does have a significant impact on your life's outcomes. You can work to improve your lot, or minimize its impact on your life, but it's very difficult.
Of course there's some correlation: those with a good lot often learn early how to manage luck, and those who manage luck well can negate a poor lot.
Hence I begrudge no-one with seemingly good "luck": often (possibly more than not), their fortune is simply a byproduct of how they managed their luck. Good for them!
But those born into a good lot? They're the true "lucky" ones.
Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky
#104My 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…
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?
Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
> food stamps that stop people from wasting their money on alcohol, cigarettes, lottery tickets, and casinos Are you certain they are effective at that? It isn't hard to imagine that a secondary market for food stamps could exist wherein they're traded for cash at some reduced rate.
It "stops" it within a margin of error. Of course, no system is perfect. Just because there's abuse doesn't mean that handing out cash is just as good. The same way murder is illegal but still happens, but no one wants to live somewhere where murder is legal.
Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
That still requires keeping track of all purchases.
Maybe I wasn't clear – rebate doesn't need to be connected to purchase amount. A flat, fixed-value rebate serves a similar purpose if it is appropriately set, and individuals who don't meet a particular threshold will receive more money through rebate than they pay in sales tax.
Now you're talking about UBI - universal basic income, in the form of that rebate. That model doesn't work either.
Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky
#107My 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…
This is a big point that Robert Frank makes in "Success and Luck" (the book this interview is about). Being born in a developed country is one of the luckiest things you can have happen to you. He talks about his time in Nepal for the Peace Corps and a man who worked for him, who was one of the most talented people he's ever worked with. He was also illiterate and living in a developing country, so his prospects were vastly reduced.
Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky
#108I 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…
>Welfare can be controlled via food stamps that stop people from wasting their money on alcohol, cigarettes, lottery tickets, and casinos. UBI is just a cash handout which absolutely go to those things and drugs.
Why are you so opposed to allowing people to spend money on mood altering substances?
>If the government guaranteed me $100k a year I wouldn't work. I mean I'd "work" but at being a rock musician or comic book artist or a non-practical technical pursuit.
And maybe your artistic pursuits would help make others happier and motivated and inspired to work on their projects that would qualify as real "work" to you.
For example: Lots of people listen to music to get in the groove when they are working on something that requires them to block out the distracting real world.
Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky
#109My 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 amount of success one finds in life is probably some combination of luck, effort, smarts, and appetite for risk / ability to take risks. I think most would agree that you can determine how much effort you put in and you can study hard to get at least some amount of domain expertise. It seems like your father likely ignores that people do not get to choose what family situation they are born into, what skin color they have, or what gender they are. All of these factors affect things like your economic level of support and your ability to take career risks, which in turn has a big effect on your ability to be successful (assuming we define successful as making a lot of money).
Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.