Is a Hard Life Inherited?
nytimes.com
Is a Hard Life Inherited?
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Re: Is a Hard Life Inherited?
#2[deleted]
Re: Is a Hard Life Inherited?
#3Isn't success in the United States better explained by hard work and intelligence?
You can lower the cost of being unsuccessful by expanding the availability of health care for the poor, increasing long-term unemployment benefits or raising the minimum wage, but the middle class doesn't rely on these programs for its success.
Re: Is a Hard Life Inherited?
#4I hate the argument that boils down success to just being lucky. A person's success in life is due to many things like environment, opportunity, intelligence, and work ethic. Positive increases in those things are going to increase the odds of success, so I do agree with the rest of the author's arguments that the poor are at a disadvantage usually coming from a bad environment and an area that lacks much opportunity. Unfortunately the US government seems to be geared to taking care of the old rather than enriching the lives of the young.
Re: Is a Hard Life Inherited?
#5Isn't success in the United States better explained by hard work and intelligence? You can lower the cost of being unsuccessful by expanding the availability of health care for the poor, increasing long-term unemployment benefits or raising the minimum wage, but the middle class doesn't rely on these programs for its success.
Many times people whose family were poor don't have access to the opportunities when they are young to make a better a better life for themselves when they are older.
Re: Is a Hard Life Inherited?
#6Isn't success in the United States better explained by hard work and intelligence? You can lower the cost of being unsuccessful by expanding the availability of health care for the poor, increasing long-term unemployment benefits or raising the minimum wage, but the middle class doesn't rely on these programs for its success.
Difficult to mobilize intelligence when you are struggling daily to survive and otherwise overwhelmed with emotional turmoil.
Re: Is a Hard Life Inherited?
#7I hate the argument that boils down success to just being lucky. A person's success in life is due to many things like environment, opportunity, intelligence, and work ethic. Positive increases in those things are going to increase the odds of success, so I do agree with the rest of the author's arguments that the poor are at a disadvantage usually coming from a bad environment and an area that lacks much opportunity…
I agree. There are hundreds of millions of people born into the American middle class. There are tens of millions of people born into the "global 1%". On average, the richer are going to better, because you average out all other factors, like work ethic. So if I'm "floating" through life, putting in the average work into everything I do, I think it's pretty obvious that I'm going to benefit from having rich parents to save me from the random pitfalls that I may fall into.
However, the huge problem that I have with these arguments is that so many successful people are statistical outliers, in terms of hard work, natural talent, ect. They aren't going to follow the average behavior. Lionel Messi is not a good soccer player just because he got lucky. There were millions of people brought up with the same means, but through whatever personal work ethic he has, he's become one of the biggest statistical outliers in soccer. Sure, you could make the case that for "soft skill jobs" like CEO, luck comes into play quite a bit, but for someone like Mark Zuckerberg, he simply would not have gotten lucky if he didn't lock himself in his room and code for 6 hours a day at Phillips Exeter (which is something he actually did, he was very asocial, at least at Exeter). In the end, I think for the same reason OKCupid's match percentage is nearly useless in terms of finding a "soulmate", I think you can't really attribute average statistics to explain why someone was successful, they are both going to be outliers, "black swan events" to borrow from Nassim Taleb.
Re: Is a Hard Life Inherited?
#8Isn't success in the United States better explained by hard work and intelligence? You can lower the cost of being unsuccessful by expanding the availability of health care for the poor, increasing long-term unemployment benefits or raising the minimum wage, but the middle class doesn't rely on these programs for its success.
How is intelligence not luck?
There is a lot of legitimate controversy about how much is genetic vs. environmental, but I think it's well-established that your intelligence is pretty much fixed by the time you are old enough to really be held responsible for your own actions.
Re: Is a Hard Life Inherited?
#9Isn't success in the United States better explained by hard work and intelligence? You can lower the cost of being unsuccessful by expanding the availability of health care for the poor, increasing long-term unemployment benefits or raising the minimum wage, but the middle class doesn't rely on these programs for its success.
Do a search on "toxic stress effects on cognition" sometime.
Re: Is a Hard Life Inherited?
#10I am reminded of PG's essay on income inequality. Worth reading if you haven't: http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html