Aside from the political discussion bound to happen here, I was surprised and happy to see the story of Hilltop highlighted. I used to buy filet mignon there for $7 a pound back in 2009 when I was living in Chelsea, as a recent migrant from California. I was very sad when it closed, and never knew the story.
It highlights a more general point: we, as humans, have a profound attribution bias. It's psychological. We tend to attribute success to our own individual characteristics, actions, and free will. Americans significantly more so.[http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2786780?uid=2&uid=4&si...]
This would be fine, if it were true; however this attribution bias causes a significant departure from reality. When people succeed, we tend to focus on their personal attributes and actions, instead of looking at the situation surrounding them. When we do that, we tend to think of them as "rising above their situation," or "using their advantages well." We like to think we can do the same, but it is truly a kind of collective delusion.
We have to recognize that this is simply fantasy. It's not backed up by truth. Statistics says much the opposite: that most people who try will fail, and that people will be significantly burdened by failure, and that people who have failed or succeeded are extremely affected by external effects; that most successes are the result of both individual and significant historical and contextual factors. Externalities are more important than we want to believe. They're not everything, but they deserve much, much more attention than they get, which is often nil.
We would be a different kind of society were we to match our perception of success and failure with the reality of that success or failure. We don't have to give up our sense of individualism and the respect for personal growth and contribution; we just need to back it up with a recognition of the surrounding factors that are extremely real and highly influential on all our lives. I know we would be a better society if we did.
I think you're right, but it's equal parts being prepared to when the opportunity arise and purposefully putting yourself in situations that increase your odds.
E.g., nobody ever got laid staying at home, no matter how pretty, nice, rich or lucky.
I'll repeat this again even though I posted it below, because the analogy is so applicable, and I like having thought of it so well:
A wire is connected to the electricity, which powers the bulb. The bulb cannot light without the electricity, and it cannot light without the wire. Is the success of the bulb attributable to the wire, or the outlet?
The success of the bulb is the result of (and to the extend of) its internal design. Change the bulb to a cork and you'll never see the light, whatever wires and outlets you have for it.
What of a perfectly designed bulb without a fixture that holds it correctly for electrical contact?
What if no cord is attached to that fixture?
What if the cord is not plugged in?
What if the cord doesn't have a plug that fits the outlet?
What if the internal wiring of the building doesn't support the bulb's voltage?
What if the electrical grid is not attached to the building?
What if the transformer that turns the grid voltage to one the bulb can use has blown or doesn't do its job?
What if the grid is overloaded, or not correctly handling the appropriate load for the time of day and electrical demand?
What if the power plants themselves are not producing the planned and coordinated output?
What if the supply of coal or oil to power the plants is disrupted?
And on and on.
The bulb absolutely depends on the stability and function of systems surrounding it; systems that are hundreds of millions of times larger and more complex than the bulb itself. The bulb's success is due to both its intrinsic properties and quite literally hundreds of external factors that you cannot take for granted.
The pervasive ignorance of this seemingly obvious facet of our daily lives is astounding.
More astounding is that people fail to apply it to individual people—or to themselves—equally. It applies equally—without question.w
> We would be a different kind of society were we to match our perception of success and failure with the reality of that success or failure. We don't have to give up our sense of individualism and the respect for personal growth and contribution; we just need to back it up with a recognition of the surrounding factors that are extremely real and highly influential on all our lives. I know we would be a better society if we did.
This is a really good point, and it's something I've been thinking about lately too. Fortunately, I've seen a growing appreciation for the role luck and circumstance has in people's success, particularly with regard to educational opportunities and social class, so hopefully this is starting to change.
I agree, I too have seen signs of respect for externalities more and more. I think it's getting very difficult to ignore in light of the increasingly obvious wealth and opportunity gap in this country.
The opportunity gap is a myth. The real problem is cultural. Too many people believe themselves victims and act accordingly. There is certainly a very low probability of a poor person becoming a millionaire, but there are plenty of people who could go from poor to middle class if they made better decisions. For example, the poor too often gets caught up in the bread and circuses aspects to their own detriment. Do a survey of public housing projects and find out how many people have cable TV. It isn't about the monetary cost of that cable TV but it's a question of the opportunity cost. If someone were to spend two hours watching TV each day (actually a very low number) or if that person were to spend two hours at the public library learning something (for example learning basic coding) then in perhaps a year they might be able to find an entry level tech job. And, with the $30-60 per month they're saving from giving up TV, they could buy a cheap Linux box to start doing some coding on ODesk or eLancr, etc. in fact, most TVs cost as much as a low cost computer. Yet, time and time again you have poor people who can tell you everything about the Kardashians and nothing about HTML. I am not suggesting everyone should be a coder, but as an example it demonstrates a problem of priorities. Barely 8 years ago, I was dead broke, even living in my car for several months. My parents didn't go to college -- we weren't in poverty, however if would have been easy to just follow the path of the lower middle class. Instead, I'm now a software engineer and sometimes entrepreneur making over $200k per year. I make more in a year than my dad made in almost 6 years! I am not special -- anyone who is motivated can do it. The problem is that there is a culture of dependency among much of the poor. Effectively, our society has turned the poor into a bunch of children. Contrast that to the poor in China where entrepreneurism rather than dependency is the norm. American society enables the poor. Our War on Poverty has resulted in no change to poverty rates. Perhaps it's time to stop blaming the rich and start blaming leftist politicians who gain their power from a dependent underclass.
This discussion always makes the libertarian cream of the crop rise to the top of the vat.
You are wrong in nearly every sentence; I don't have the time or patience to convince you, I wasted 5 years of my life arguing with a libertarian already. Please consider the wider systems surrounding each person's condition. They are not fake.
Would you say this is true for most cases of success, or primarily for extreme cases of success? I can imagine that winning the "startup lottery" has much to do with fortunate market timing and circumstances, but can the same be said of a small business owner, CPA partner, doctor, etc.?
I'd say it is true for most success in this complex market.
It's not a matter of whether success is attributed to the individual or to the situation; it's both.
A wire is connected to the electricity, which powers the bulb. The bulb cannot light without the electricity, and it cannot light without the wire. Is the success of the bulb attributable to the wire, or the outlet?
Humans have a problem with complexity and compound causality in general; any person who succeeds does so by some combination of both individual grit, and support from society and loved ones (even if indirectly), regardless of what the proportions happen to be (if one could even measure such a thing). Thinking that success must derive exclusively from either society or the individual is sheer absurdity, driven by a need to impose an idealized narrative upon messy reality.
any person who succeeds does so by some combination of both individual grit, and support from society and loved ones
And genetics, and the general culture, and luck, which is just a word we use for many factors we can't even name yet mixed with true randomness. And then there's a fair bit of interplay between all the factors.
Why do some people work 60 hours a week when others barely crack 10? That "grit" doesn't come from nowhere.
And surely there are more fundamental reasons for why some societies at some times are more supportive, or more successful, or richer, or saner, than others.
I work 60 hours a week because I was fortunate enough to be born with aptitudes that cause employers to want to pay me a lot of money for those hours. If my employers were fighting to keep me under 30 hours so they wouldn't have to pay benefits, and to pay $7.50 for each incremental hour, with zero upward mobility, my incentive to work those hours would vanish.
Moreover, you shouldn't get credit for genetics. That's not a product of your exercise of free will.
Why not? Seems like a completely arbitrary standard. And pretty hard on everyone else. Are you not viscerally impressed by beautiful women, high IQ speakers, and so on?
Even if you somehow get people to agree, and at least partially implement it, how can you credit anything then? Is there a human quality we care about not heavily influenced by genetics?
How do you disentangle von Neumann's ability from his achievements? How do you discount Brigitte Bardot's beauty or Michael Jordan's height?
You may not agree with it, but its not arbitrary to say that the economy should strive to give people credit for what they choose to do, rather than what you luck into. Its a distinction based on a well-defined criterion.
I'm not really interested in discussing outliers like Michael Jordan, or tiny segments of the economy like sports or entertainment. I'm talking about how we distribute the proceeds of our industrial economy, or at the very least, how we assign moral culpability to people based on things they have little control over.
That is to say, it might be inevitable that pretty people or smart people will have advantages. But the only difference between attractiveness and intellect is that on places like HN, its socially acceptable to be smug about the latter.
> the economy should strive to give people credit for what they choose to do
The economy is an inanimate abstract. It does not strive for anything. It is not interested in anyone's perception of what is fair any more than my phone is interested in vulgar language.
The economy consists of billions of individuals getting together and saying "I have x to offer, I want y". To try to force some idea of justice, morality, fairness, equality, etc. into this equation is to say individuals do not have the right of free association; that they, the simpletons they surely are, are not smart enough to choose for themselves and judgement must be deferred to some all-knowing third-party.
> The economy consists of billions of individuals getting together and saying "I have x to offer, I want y".
No. It consists of that against the background understanding that parties cannot say " well I don't want to pay y, so I will kill you and take x." And in every extant example of a sophisticated economy, that understanding is enforced by a government that has guns. One can imagine scenarios in which that "all-knowing third party" does not exist, but I imagine if it were such a good idea it'd exist somewhere.
Once the people come together to create that third party that has the guns that creates the background understandings that allow economies to exist, then they are entitled to say: "well what else do we want?"
That understanding doesn't come from the people with guns. Else the US would not need to spend $billions on guns to fight the drug trade.
I don't say the folks with guns can't do constructive things to improve trade. They can. But they don't create that understanding you're talking about.
It absolutely does. Just look anywhere in the world where there isn't a government (or "dominant gang" if you want to call it that). Trade totally breaks down. In a world where there is no entity with guns to punish use of violence, its the game theoretic advantageous behavior. Not everyone will engage in it, and most won't, but enough will to cause the framework of trade to break down.
I've traded with people who I barely shared a language with. I could probably go buy weed today if I wanted to. I've watched thousands of dollars of business transacted in situations where enforcement of the deal was in practice impossible (offshore developers). Primitive societies without governments still understand and desire trade.
Again, the understanding you're talking about doesn't come from the sovereign.
You mean that network where the operator tried to call in an hit on people? Look at how many Bitcoin networks have been hacked (the digital equivalent of using violence). And in real world black markets, (think mafia), violence is rife (even in areas where the underlying transactions aren't illegal).
That's beside the point. You stated without government the "framework of trade [will] break down". On the contrary, even after scandals and shutdown markets, new markets pop up and, incredibly, people continue to use them.
As for Bitcoin networks being hacked that is a red herring as we often hear of non-black market sites being hacked--even with the all mighty government protection.
Even with the black market, government provides a backdrop of expectations. Murderers are still prosecuted even if the murder happened in a black market trade. I'm talking about a situation where there is no disincentive to use force, e.g. a place like Somalia or rural Pakistan.
If I could upvote twice, I would. The idea that the economy is a "being" is communist rot. The idea that we can (or should) control the economy is nonsense. Attempting to control the economy is like trying to control the weather. Certainly we can work harder to mitigate the effects of the weather, but a bunch of smart people thinking hard enough can't stop a hurricane, no matter how socially desirable that might be.
What would you think if I said there were indications that most conscious decision making isn't fully conscious at all? That, to a degree, free will is an illusory shadow of subconscious processes and that by the time you choose something, you've really already chosen it? And that genetics, prenatal development, and cultural influences all have a great say in those subconscious processes?
For example, if a child becoming a very aggressive person were totally predictable based on behavioral characteristics of the biological parents, would that matter in this discussion?
I know this is a departure from the way we typically like to think about ourselves, but there is actually some good evidence to indicate that we may not have as much control as we think.
Not necessarily fixing those who are caught, but pour encourager les autres. There are no morals here, since we are all just machines, and we're just trying to get the machines to do what we want.
Okay, sure. We have evidence that certain behaviors are predictable, but that doesn't eliminate free will entirely, it just limits it.
It's also worth making a distinction between our subconscious and conscious choices, even if they are both more or less deterministic. At least we are aware of our conscious choices, and probably identify more strongly with them.
The original discussion was about when someone deserves credit for their actions. And if there are two poles of always and never, can we land somewhere in between? And where?
> You may not agree with it, but its not arbitrary to say that the economy should strive to give people credit for what they choose to do, rather than what you luck into. Its a distinction based on a well-defined criterion.
It's not well-defined at all. If person A is "smarter" than person B, how can you tell whether that's the result of A working harder than B or A having lucked into greater intelligence? Measure how much time each spent studying in college? If person C "chooses" to be an alcoholic and is therefore unproductive, how much of that is "free will" (what does that even mean?) and how much is bad luck?
the economy should strive to give people credit for what they choose to do, rather than what you luck into
The choices you make are heavily influenced by factors you lucked into, like intelligence, family, culture. And the choices you are presented with are even more influenced by your country of origin.
It's not just outliers. What do you do at 90th or 50th percentile of intelligence? Those two people can make the same choices, say majoring in CS, with very different outcomes.
How do you reward choices under those conditions? You could pay only for the results you like. But we pretty much already do that. What else is there?
This is like a just world fallacy episode 2: the world may not be fair but surely we can make it so.
The invisible forces at work here are in the nature of your “choices” and your agency to participate within that value system.
Few here may be able to participate in the distribution of wealth within the high end of the luxury car market via their purchases, and fewer still via their purchasing or selling of energy market entities.
Along this path, we can also be critical of the options available and the hegemonic / power forces at work that birthed them.
All in all, it is a questionable suggestion that buys into (no pun intended) a cascading wall of myth.
If you were stranded in the wilderness and needed to survive from scratch, would you rather be with a group of attractive people or a group of smart people?
I'd rather be with a group of backwoods rednecks to be perfectly honest.
But I digress. The economy isn't about heros fighting nature to save the day. Its about everyone working together to make an environment where creation is possible. You take Zuckerberg and leave him in the middle of the woods, and what happens? Does he still create wealth? No, he's useless without being plugged into the larger economy. That larger economy is made up of ordinary people. They are poorly compensated not because their contribution doesn't matter, collectively, but because they are fungible. Is fungsbility a fair criterion for structuring an economy?
>You take Zuckerberg and leave him in the middle of the woods, and what happens? Does he still create wealth?
If I were to bet on it, I'd bet very heavily on him creating wealth under those circumstances. As measured by creating a system for survival. Obviously not as well as someone trained in such things (as implied by your dodge), but better than someone who lacked his intelligence, and more importantly, his drive.
Ordinary people are compensated ordinarily because their contributions to the economy are ordinary. That actually does seem quite fair to me. I appreciate the work cleaners do, but their jobs simply don't contribute to the economy as much as building a large company like Facebook does.
That's not to say everyone who is highly compensated contributes highly to society, we all know that isn't true. But that's also not really what we're discussing.
Maybe it only seems ordinary to you, because it doesn't interest you. Its upper-middle-class arrogance showing, that nobody's job is as important as jobs like mine. What makes cleaning 'ordinary'? Try firing your cleaner/garbage man/street sweeper for a month and see how that impacts you.
And what on earth does it mean, to contribute to an economy wherein only 'non-ordinary' folks benefit? That's pretty circular reasoning. I'd argue that the esoteric jobs of building web gadgets are the fluff and foam of our economy, unimportant to real health and welfare, and way, way overcompensated.
>And what on earth does it mean, to contribute to an economy wherein only 'non-ordinary' folks benefit?
I have no idea where that came from or what it means, so I can't respond to it.
I made a point of saying that I respect the importance of ordinary workers. I've spent most my life in ordinary jobs, your assumptions about me aside.
However, the fact remains that individually their contribution to the economy is much, much less than the individual contribution of someone who founds and directs the construction and growth of a large company.
Glad to hear about respecting 'ordinary' workers. Still, I suspect there's a difference between respect and understanding the importance of these workers.
If the pay of 'ordinary' jobs is to be set to some low minimum level, then the 'job making' or 'economy building' of the non-ordinary people will have no benefit for most folks. Its fine to brag about building wealth; but if its the highly-educated building wealth for themselves then who cares? But them of course.
The economy is not the plaything of those that have figured out the system. Its not there to make them wealthy, though I have no problem when that happens. As long as we remember the whole system is supposed to be for everybody.
There is a long chain of responsibility in an organization to allow anyone to function effectively at their job. Repeating what I wrote above, take away 'ordinary' tasks and the company grinds to a halt exactly as dead as if the CEO were removed. Maybe not; a company can go on for a year or so without a CEO on momentum; it stops dead if payroll stops processing, or heck if the lock on the front door breaks and nobody can get into the building.
I agree with you in general, but you are not winning any loyalties to your idea with this attitude. Shaming a person and accusing of snobbery is a bad way to drive your point across.
When I debate the social good aspect of entrepreneurship and tech entrepreneurs priorities, I try to appeal to the rationality of the self-interested agents. We, as a humanity, have two unambigous pathes in future. Either everything is really good or everything is equally bad. We are heading to near-utopia or to full-blown dystopia.
Tech entrepreneurs and investors hold the power to change the world faster than anyone else. More wealth inequality --> closer to the dystopia. It rational for anyone with power to influence the world and possible future to contribute to the decrease of wealth inequality.
I guess such approach to discussion would be more beneficial to your cause.
>> Tech entrepreneurs and investors hold the power to change the world faster than anyone else. More wealth inequality --> closer to the dystopia. It rational for anyone with power to influence the world and possible future to contribute to the decrease of wealth inequality.
Unless they think that their lives will be better by increasing inequality, particularly in their individual case (cf. Tragedy of the Commons). And that may well be true, as they would disproportionately hold power and capital. Is it better to be a rich man in a society slowly going to hell or a poor one in a society slowly on the rise?
It's a non-empathic viewpoint, but I can understand why some would consider it rational and self-interested.
IMHO, it has nothing to do with importance or impact of the work one does. It has to do with the supply and demand: Even if we assume the irrational that e.g. a cleaner's work is 100x more important than Zuckerberg's work, the fact that for every Zuckerberg we can find much more than 100 cleaners means that a Zuckerberg is much more important than a cleaner, not that cleaning is more important or less important that Zuckerberg's work. In fact, personally, the impact from absence of cleaning would be much bigger than the impact from absence of Facebook. But if I take the importance of cleaning and multiply it by the scarcity of cleaners I get a smaller product than multiplying the importance of Facebooks with the scarcity of Zuckerbergs.
I don't think there is a true scarcity of Zuckerberg's as every day I walk down the street and am amazed at the overwhelming mass of self important d-bags walking around....
All trolling and snark aside your comment is the antithesis of the point that many factors outside of the individual contribute to their success. If you believe that then the number of those individuals capable of similar success rises dramatically. Also those who clean and do "ordinary" jobs are people who are similarly shaped by many factors they don't control.
Also I am very certain that people would get by better without Facebook then they would with the lowly legions of those toiling away to keep the world merely "clean".
> Also I am very certain that people would get by better without Facebook then they would with the lowly legions of those toiling away to keep the world merely "clean".
I totally agree with that. That's why I weight it with the scarcity. Of course you disagree with the scarcity of Zuckerberg, but in my comment I assume that what defines a "Zuckerberg" includes the outside factors that the individual doesnt control.
"You take Zuckerberg and leave him in the middle of the woods, and what happens? Does he still create wealth?"
I doubt that ability grow the company and be the CEO correlates much with the ability to hunt and kill an animal. Especially if we are talking about hunting in isolation, CEO skill is mainly in dealing with people and making strategy. If you drop someone alone in the middle of woods, he needs to be strong, fast and know a lot about nature. Otherwise said, Zuckenberg would do as good as any other random man.
> If you were stranded in the wilderness and needed to survive from scratch, would you rather be with a group of attractive people or a group of smart people?
The naively obvious answer is "smart", but given that what people have evolved to find attractive in general (before distortions from makeup, etc., designed to fool natural attraction) is somewhat tied to health and physical fitness,
and ability to contribute in a survival situation is very much affected by that as well as smarts, then if those are the only two measures available, there's reason to at least seek some balance between then rather than purely favoring smarts.
Fitness is related to, but not the same as, attractiveness.
Of course it's possible to imagine a scenario of puny or fat nerds vs gorgeous athletes, but that's adding in things that don't necessarily relate and it's pretty clearly avoiding the intent of the scenario.
> Fitness is related to, but not the same as, attractiveness.
Sure, and if you have free reign to choose on any traits you want, you'd probably not consider attractiveness directly, but instead consider a balance of general health, physical fitness, survival experience (and specific context if the expected survival situation was known in more detail), and general intelligence (though the latter wouldn't necessarily be very high on the list of priorities.)
If all you have is intelligence and attractiveness, though, given that attractiveness has a correlation with (even though it isn't identical to) important things other than general intelligence that the hypothetical has prevented you from considering directly, you'd be ill advised to neglect it in favor of intelligence alone.
In fact, the whole reason attractiveness evolved is is exactly about choosing who to be stuck in a long-term survival situation with (which is why it is linked to both general health and physical fitness.)
There are studies that claim attractiveness is also correlated with intelligence. (And others claim that it is not).
It is one of this science "just-so-stories", but the idea being that other attributes being equal more intelligence would allow you to more successfully mate with attractive people.
I'm not sure what you are asking, but I directly observe that, when presented with the choice between doing something hard that pays off a lot, or doing something easy that pays off little or not at all, that there are a bunch of people in the first camp and a bunch in the second camp.
This doesn't strictly break down by SES, either, although there are certainly trends.
You can come up with all sorts of reasons for the second camp's behavior, and many of those reasons are likely true for some subset of that camp. But at some point you have to recognize people's agency in their own behavior, or else they are just children in your eyes.
when presented with the choice between .... bunch of people in the first camp and a bunch in the second camp.
This is a VERY narrowed perspective.
Unless these behaviors are constant across all areas of one's life, they only tell you what one's priorities are.
Because someone may sacrifice short term for long term gain in their career, while at the same time sacrificing long term gain for short term satiation when it comes to food or health.
So truly what can be said about this marvelous developer, and about his ability to hold on for long term outcomes, when she refused a Google buyout offer and took her company public, when at the same time she pushed back starting a family, eating healthy, and working out.
My point is NO-ONE belongs to one camp and one camp only. You and I, and all others belong to both camps.
“Thinking that success must derive exclusively from either society or the individual is sheer absurdity, driven by a need to impose an idealized narrative upon messy reality.”
Very astute postmodern summation.
The only thing missing in this is the possibility that the myths of narrative (male hero), constancy (see genetics and scientism), etc. are all driven by ideology. In particular, capitalist ideology; the value of capital is predicated on foundational ideology. “Made man” for example, reinforces individual capital ownership as opposed to cultural byproduct.
A counterpoint might be other cultures with an Eastern religion based view chance / fortune as having a greater and more culturally secured role in the lives of an individual.
It's pretty easy to see the effects of this if we compare the number of successful people from rich countries to the number of successful people from the other several billion people in the world. Where one is born and in which family is hugely (if not primarily) important.
I'm from the US, and I've seen quite a few highly intelligent and hard-working (but poor) people end up as heroin dealers or working odd jobs, with no steady employment. Conversely, I've seen relatively mediocre people, born to wealthy families, succeed wildly. And, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's seen this.
It's something to think about in a world where around 2400 billionaires (~0.000033% of the population) own ~7% of the world's wealth.
However, the public discourse and political narrative is decidedly in the individualistic camp, aligning more on the side of what people want to believe, rather than what is true.
This allows those with power to take advantage of the situation to a large degree.
It is there that the wishy-washy reductionist argument of 'the world is complex' ceases to be useful (not saying you're making that argument, but it often comes up). We need to push the world a little more to one side; a little more toward the balance point of this messy reality, with full recognition and respect for that complexity.
Yet there are some people that work 60 hours per week and some that choose to not work at all. The people in the first camp are typically more successful than people in the second camp. Articles like the OP discount their efforts and accomplishments completely.
I certainly does not work as hard as the cleaning lady getting up at 5 am to clean my desk. I just sit there typing lightly on my ergonomic keyboard, in my air-conditioned office and in the end, I will probably end better off, even though she might have crossed a deadly desert to come here and won't see her relatives for a long time. I just have the chance of being born around.
Hard work == success, is probably a variation of the just world bias [0]. It provides a reassuring and motivating narrative, but in the end, it is quite simplistic. I am not saying that hard work is not a necessary condition, but it is far from being sufficient.
Another example : with all the discussions about European debt, it has been reported multiple times that on average Greeks were working much longer that Germans. It does not do them much good.
> I certainly does not work as hard as the cleaning lady getting up at 5 am to clean my desk
No kidding. I was in the office at 10 pm the other night, and the cleaning guy came around to empty the trash cans. He's like "man, still here at 10?" And I'm thinking "well so are you."
I think part of the reason this conversation is valuable, though, is that the inverse omission is far more dominant in the cultural conversation right now. It's certainly mostly true that hard work plays an important part in fantastic success. But it's equally true that even in those cases, the majority enjoyed advantages that are often invisible even to them.
So to be sure, the opposite extreme is just as ridiculous as suggesting that every person exists in a bubble where their effort correlates exactly with outcome. But when the awareness of systemic advantage is absent (as it certainly is), I see staking out a far extreme opinion like this as a challenge to find a more reasonable center.
The work ethic narrative is immensely useful to employers, but in too many situations it's almost totally disconnected from real opportunity and reward.
Ultimately it's a political problem - but not necessarily in the obvious sense.
The most successful and fun cultures reward inventiveness and positive social contributions, and include some element of challenge and competition.
But using money and markets to make decisions about the kinds of activities that are rewarded turns out to be an inefficient, short-sighted and often surreal way to manage what does and doesn't get valued.
And I'd appreciate it if downvoters justified their downvotes.
I'm quite happy with the idea that an economy where it's possible to raise $1 million in funding for an app like Yo! while the many apps that do something with longer term benefits struggle for commercial support has some issues with rational resource allocation.
Not to mention the outrageous bubbles and the epic acquisition disasters that litter the Internet ruins.
If you believe otherwise I'd like to see you argue why.
I'm pretty skeptical of the study on which this essay bases its premise that economic mobility in the U.S. is limited compared to, say, France. The most detailed information I can find online is the executive summary[1], which has to handwave that it found Italy with a strongly negative correlation between parents' and children's economic outcomes! That suggests to me that their methodology is not particularly robust.
I've found similar attempts to establish parent/child economic correlation equally suspicious when, for example, they measure income correlation with percentiles rather than in adjusted dollars (it's much easier to be "mobile" if there's only $10K in income separating the 40th and 60th percentiles!)
The same results have been reported by many other studies. The facts are clear - for the poor the US is a land of economic handicap, not a land of opportunity.
There will always be individual exceptions to this, but they'll be single data points. Put crudely, for every heart-warming success you see interviewed in Forbes, there will be millions of failures no one hears about.
The most useful picture is broad-based and statistical, and studies like this one:
show that mobility depends as much on where you were born as to whom you were born.
Broadly, inequality has exploded since the 1980s and in areas with limited social capital - including good free education - it's now more difficult than ever to work your way up from the bottom.
But this is balanced by increased opportunities in other areas - mostly affluent, mostly urban - which have created a halo effect for the poorer communities around them.
So average mobility has remained approximately constant, but only because bad areas have been balanced by good areas.
Meanwhile average mobility in the US continues to be worse than mobility in other countries.
Meanwhile average mobility in the US continues to be worse than mobility in other countries.
What's the best study you can find that demonstrates this? I haven't seen any that don't appear to succumb to the flaws I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, such as measuring relative mobility instead of absolute mobility.
I would define absolute income mobility in terms of some globally comparable good. Dollars, PPP adjusted or not, for example.
Relative mobility to me means mobility within some particular income distribution: Moving from, say, an average household income in the first quintile to an average household income in the fifth quintile.
I prefer absolute mobility as a measure of economic mobility for the same reason that any rational actor would prefer to win a lottery for the difference between the income of an average bottom 20% household and an average top 20% household in the U.S.[1] vs. Sweden[2]. According to OECD, that's $75K vs. $37K.
No, that's not the point. A society with almost no income inequality, where everyone makes almost exactly the same amount, would have nearly perfect "mobility" as measured by the correlation between the percentile of parent and child earnings (a few random dollars would move you a lot!). But it wouldn't be a "mobile" society in the sense we usually mean, where the poor can become rich (and vice versa) because there would be no poor and no rich!
It depends on what you're trying to measure by "economic mobility" though. I can think of valid reasons to want to know the percentile change between a person and their parents, irrespective of the absolute value difference, and reasons to be interested in the different-but-related measure of absolute change in income/quality of life.
It's generally better to start with the question "what do I want to know?" and then looking for a suitable statistical framework that will answer that question, rather than starting with a ready-made statistical analysis and then trying to use it to answer arbitrary questions.
I can think of valid reasons to want to know the percentile change between a person and their parents, irrespective of the absolute value difference, and reasons to be interested in the different-but-related measure of absolute change in income/quality of life.
Sure, but when comparing nation A to nation B, it's generally more interesting to look at either the absolute dollar difference or some relative quality-of-life measure (you could call the latter "class", I guess). Folks moving around within a tightly distributed income distribution don't really gain or lose much of either, relative to someone in a society with larger disparities.
Mobility is about moving between classes of society. So, the society you just described would be rightfully described as having high social mobility. What it probably does not have is high average wealth.
So, the society you just described would be rightfully described as having high social mobility.
But it would just be economic Brownian motion. Social mobility isn't (I hope!) valued because it shows that a society produces random outcomes, but rather that it enables people to achieve to the limit of their talents.
Social mobility is defined somehow and that somehow is not "the absolute total measure of fairness of any society". And speaking about virtually any country in the world, including North Korea, they all have lower class and upper class. Your worry about totally classless society is purely theoretical.
If we would live in classless society, social mobility would be less important measure.
Plus, you define achieving the limit of the talent in purely financial form. If I am genius mathematician, achieving limits of the talent mean doing great (potentially useful) math somewhere at the university. That does not translate to neither "high class" nor "rich".
> "Or is it more like a mass delusion keeping us from confronting the fact that poor Americans tend to remain poor Americans, regardless of how hard they work?"
The language used here is interesting. Wasn't the labor theory of value thrown out a while ago?
yeah but I'm always struck by how many successful people started out through some criminal act. Andrew Carnegie apparently committed fraud to get his start. That was a new one to me.
It highlights a more general point: we, as humans, have a profound attribution bias. It's psychological. We tend to attribute success to our own individual characteristics, actions, and free will. Americans significantly more so.[http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2786780?uid=2&uid=4&si...]
This would be fine, if it were true; however this attribution bias causes a significant departure from reality. When people succeed, we tend to focus on their personal attributes and actions, instead of looking at the situation surrounding them. When we do that, we tend to think of them as "rising above their situation," or "using their advantages well." We like to think we can do the same, but it is truly a kind of collective delusion.
We have to recognize that this is simply fantasy. It's not backed up by truth. Statistics says much the opposite: that most people who try will fail, and that people will be significantly burdened by failure, and that people who have failed or succeeded are extremely affected by external effects; that most successes are the result of both individual and significant historical and contextual factors. Externalities are more important than we want to believe. They're not everything, but they deserve much, much more attention than they get, which is often nil.
We would be a different kind of society were we to match our perception of success and failure with the reality of that success or failure. We don't have to give up our sense of individualism and the respect for personal growth and contribution; we just need to back it up with a recognition of the surrounding factors that are extremely real and highly influential on all our lives. I know we would be a better society if we did.