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My 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

My 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 an amount of "unfairness" in people getting help they "don't deserve", while he finds this very offensive. I honestly feel that if considered luck to be a larger factor and effort to be a lesser factor, his political stances would change pretty dramatically. (same applies to me in reverse). I wonder how much the social willingness to accept luck as a factor impacts popular political positions. (Perhaps not much, as the author in the article promotes a consumption tax, which is generally seen as more regressive)

Shivetya 10y ago
I would tend to favor your father's position; I'm a libertarian. I put in the context of some are our industries brightest and best have had some remarkable ideas and luck but how many times did it take them to get there? Like an old Ted Turner story about his smart quotes and the remarks of just how many bad ones it took to get there. the issue with this in society is the ability of people to have enough bad outcomes to arrive at the good one. can we level that playing field or do we first need to find out why so many don't have the drive to try? Do we discourage people too early in life, do we give some the excuse they need to not try?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- pmyteh 10y ago
  Your ability to handle the consequences of either making bad choices or being unlucky is dependent in large measure on factors like financial resilience (can you afford to take a risky project without running the chance of being homeless?) and social support (will your partner be prepared to support a change of direction, do your parents recognise the value of trying and failing at difficult things, will your country help you retrain if things go wrong?). These things are not evenly distributed. I'm now in some senses on my third career (I'm 35). Each of those decisions to change direction, take risks and grow as a person were made a lot easier because I had a good enough salary to put money aside to cover the risks, and a wife who happens to be both adventure-loving and locationally-flexible. Not to mention that the most recent career change (moving into academic research) basically required a self-funded MSc as a preparatory to funded PhD study (I was moving into quite a different field, and there's basically no funding for taught Masters courses in the UK). That's more than half the people who could benefit from it priced out from the start.
- sbov 10y ago
  I didn't downvote, but: there are plenty of entrepreneurial people you could bring up with regards to this, but Ted Turner went to prep school & collage in an age when most people didn't go to college. His parents were well off business owners who presumably not only set him up as a good position in life, but more importantly - and this is to your point - was a safety net so he even COULD fail over and over again. The vast majority of the population are not put in a position to be able to fail over and over again like Ted Turner was, so since you used him as your example the answer to your question should be obvious.
kyleschiller 10y ago
I think the disagreement is even more fundamental than that. Even if you consider luck to be a major factor in determining success, there's still the question of what the government should reward. I'm socially and fiscally liberal, but I don't think it's absurd to think that the government should reward hard work even though luck is more important. It just so happens that you can motivate people to work harder, and can't motive people to be luckier.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  But should you reward a hard working mediocre achiever the same as a not as hard working but gifted high achiever? Then rewarding achievement is sort of pointless, giving help to those who need the least of it. Maybe instead progress should be rewarded?
- hx87 10y ago
  Government can certainly mitigate the effects of luck while simultaneously rewarding effort.
  - crusso 10y ago
    Examples?
    - kelnos 10y ago
      A single-payer healthcare system is your government mitigating the effects of your bad luck. Giving you a tax break for gains on certain kinds of investments is your government rewarding your work. (That's not traditional "hard work" in the sense of expending physical energy, but deciding what investments to make is certainly work.)
      - crusso 10y ago
        Well, I guess if "simultaneous" means that different parts of the government with different programs can have opposite effects, okay. But I'm talking about a program that mitigates the effects of luck while (in the same program, with the same methods) rewarding effort. They're mostly opposite effects and there's no way to reliably distinguish hard work from luck. That's why there's so much debate on the subject.
willholloway 10y ago
The liberal view of this issue may have the virtue of being correct, but it's very counterproductive from the individual's standpoint. I know that the ideology espoused on sites such as dailykos.com were very detrimental to personal drive and success in my college years of 18-22. That ideology kept pounding home the idea of the unfairness of the economy, of the lower share of the pie allocated to labor vs capital and the increasing inequality of American society. All of those things were true no doubt, but they were not useful for someone who had been hacking since 4th grade. I file it under bad luck that the same people that had a correct analysis and opposition to the great mistake of that time, the Iraq invasion and occupation, also had such a neurotic and self-limiting and destructive view towards work, productivity and the modern economy, and that I was too inexperienced in the ways of the world at the time to understand this very important concept.
- hx87 10y ago
  You're right if you assume that people don't work as hard when they're pessimistic. People (like me) who work harder when they are pessimistic, however, certainly benefitted from the liberal view.
- jpfed 10y ago
  I tend to look at it this way: hard work improves the probability of financial success, but it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition. So yes, people benefit on average from hard work, but because of the uncertainty of the situation you can't take the contrapositive and say that poor people are lazy.
- Frondo 10y ago
  That's interesting. That view, of the essential unfairness of the system, had the opposite effect on me: it motivated me lots. Just not to buy into the American dream stuff. It motivated me to understand my own values, and learn more about the system, and figure out what I wanted to do to try and change the system for the people who'd never luck out and get a desk job, the people in coffee shops, cleaning hotel rooms, and the like. Guess we can take different things from the same thing.
- emodendroket 10y ago
mediaman 10y ago
I agree. I talk with a number of business owners in a more traditionally conservative industry (agriculture). Many of them feel that America's problem is that we let people "get off the hook" for not "putting the work and smarts into something" like "we do." Many of these people are quite smart and run their business extremely well, and put in long hours, though many of them inherited businesses, or at least knowledge and support about a particular line of business. Their view appears to be heavily reliant on meritocratic outcomes, which of course assigns a low weight to luck. I would think that this world view would not be supported by a higher weighting to luck, but I do not know if the low assignment to luck is a result of cognitive dissonance with respect to their own hard work and long hours to sustain their success.
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
We systematically waste the human capability of millions of people because the system essentially randomly gives much better opportunity to some over others. Why can't you both be right? In my experience I've seen a lot of lucky failures because they had no work ethic. I've also seen a lot of hard working amazing people fail because they weren't lucky. "Luck favors the prepared [mind]" is the perfect middle ground on your positions. I'm willing to tolerate an amount of "unfairness" in people getting help they "don't deserve", while he finds this very offensive. To be fair, you both are willing to tolerate unfairness, the difference is likely from where that unfairness originates.
kahnpro 10y ago
The idea that success is based on effort is fundamentally... wrong. For every famous singer, there are thousands of other people putting in years of effort who cannot even earn a salary. For every Facebook, there are thousands of other products or companies who have put in heaps of effort but just didn't have the right timing, or that special something, that let Facebook take off. For every well thought out or engineered piece of software, there's a more successful one that did the minimal work necessary to get their barely working code to market. And we can easily find counterexamples on the other side, wealthy or successful people who needed very little effort and simply chose the right product, the right timing, were born to the right family. I might even go so far as to say that in the Real World, and not some libertarian utopia, that effort is irrelevant (or orthogonal) to success.
- charles-salvia 10y ago
  I wouldn't go as far as saying effort is irrelevant - just not the only, possibly not even the dominant factor that contributes to success. I view it as something like 40% effort/motivation, 60% luck
  - fibbery 10y ago
    is innate skill filed under luck?
  - aomurphy 10y ago
    I think, usually, hard work is necessary, but not sufficient. You won't succeed without it, but if you're not lucky, you won't succeed either.
- jogjayr 10y ago
  Thank you! Hard work is necessary, but not sufficient for success. (Almost) everyone successful is a hard worker. Not every hard worker is successful.
  - ergothus 10y ago
    I don't even feel that it is necessary for success - whenever discussions like this come along, people will say things like "you make your own luck" or "luck provides opportunities, hard work takes advantage of them", and I agree - to a point. That point is usually far less than others would say. Using myself as an example, I don't feel right saying that I'm a hard worker. Sure, I wasn't at the lowest end of possible effort, but I'm far from the high end as well. Figuring out if I'm above/below the 50% mark requires a lot more understanding of what is actually normal than I have, but I believe I'm close to average, probably a bit below. Despite this, I've had a ton of luck and success. And when I look at people that are more successful (wealthy, at least), some of them have worked harder...and others have had just more luck. I had a great high school which let me coast through college. Because I didn't have the GPA to get the degree I wanted (restricted admissions), I ended up with a "make-your-own" degree. (Which was good because I had accrued so many electives out of general curiosity that I'd have been in college for years extra to qualify for any other degree). I had a 75% tuition discount, which meant that even though I could afford student loans, I didn't need any. I fell into a profession just as it was becoming hugely in demand. I don't program because it makes big bucks, I program because I've always wanted to. It just happened that as I entered college the Web went mainstream. My first job out of college was working on coldfusion (which I didn't know) on an NT environment (which I hated), all because I had fired off an email telling them I could show them how to use Perl on Linux, and they had just switched to Oracle on Linux (unbeknowst to me) and wanted someone with some Linux experience. You could argue that that email was "work" on my part, but really it was just a punch-drunk sarcastic email sent after a couple of hours of putting out legitimate applications. Total luck. 3 months later I got a contracting job for the state at double the salary (3 months post-college experience apparently counts for a lot). It was a 6 week contract that I stayed at for 7 years (at that point I got hired full time and stayed for another 5 years). The job was easy and I learned a ton because they had no real work for me, so I just did what I wanted. Work? Some, but mostly just luck. Certainly a ton more luck than other people that were working harder. It goes on and on like this. And I'm not as lucky as some: I could have been born into a rich family, where I'd have to work hard NOT to make money. (Heck, we've seen that someone can have multiple failing multi-million dollar enterprises and still roughly match the market). I'm not saying I didn't do ANY work...I'm saying that my success (and the success of many others) owes far MORE to luck than effort. In fact, I'd go so far as to say the majority of people I know that are successful are so because of luck. Many of them work harder than I do...but not harder than other people that are less successful. I don't think that's because the less successful people have had BAD luck (though some have), I think it's because the successful people have had more luck than the less successful people, by and large. Yet in discussions like this people always want to emphasize the effort. I don't know if that's because my judgement is wrong, or because people are really uncomfortable facing the prospect that their effort counts for so little in the wider scheme of things.
snarf21 10y ago
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 paycheck was the ultimate success. It has taken many many years to break out of that mindset and be willing to take calculated risks. The really hard questions arise when you start talking about what people deserve. Who is to say? We all have a unique frame of reference and experiences that have shaped us. In the end, the only middle ground we're likely to reach is the mindset of helping people help themselves. To me, the fairness question is more about the opportunity to improve you and yours. Having no opportunities is unfair and must be fixed. The question is always going to be who decides how much is fair?
- 100k 10y ago
  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.
  - akvadrako 10y ago
    This is kinda a weird thing to call "luck" though. "You" could also have been born a duck, a 1000 years ago, in the future or in another universe (maybe). But then "you" would have been somebody else and hence, not "you" at all. In other words, "you" had 100% chance of being you. No luck involved.
    - allemagne 10y ago
      I definitely agree. The universe being almost certainly deterministic, there is also a 100% chance of everything that has ever happened happening. It's still useful to think as if different people could have been born in different circumstances. You could think of it as a mental shorthand for the idea that differences between human beings are arbitrary, and it makes no sense to argue that a human inherently deserves an impoverished life over another human.
wazoox 10y ago
In other words, he believes in a just world, in providence, and you don't (in other words, he's religious and you're not). I think this is the crux of most of these arguments.
- mindcrime 10y ago
  Being religious or not has nothing to do with believing that effort is the dominant factor affecting success. I'm an atheist who also believes that effort reigns supreme. That doesn't mean that I don't believe that what we call "bad luck" can't come along and derail you, but I firmly believe - based on my own experience - that you "make your own luck" through effort and the decisions you make. I grew in dirt-poor in white-trash / redneck-ville rural NC, but I've managed to work my way into a pretty good career in software development, living in a nice neighborhood in Chapel Hill. A lot of my high-school peers are still living in bumfuck, doing drugs, working fast-food, whatever. Was I just "luckier" then them? I don't think so. I think the primary factor is that I was more ambitious, harder working, and made better decisions. And I've had much "luck" along the way... man, it was minor and hard to notice. Because from my subjective perspective, I've busted my balls for everything I managed to achieve. I still remember working midnight shift waxing floors for a grocery store, leaving work at 6:30am, heading to an 8:00am class (Discrete Math of all things!), suffering through 3 hours of classes, then going and crashing on a couch in the library for an hour or so, then grabbing lunch, hitting my 1:00pm class, then driving the hour home from school, to fall alseep, wake up, and go back to work at 10:00. Lather, rinse, repeat. Some people will suffer through that shit, some won't. I don't see a whole lot of luck in the equation.
  - wazoox 10y ago
    You're an atheist, but you somehow believe that the good guys mostly win in the end. I call this religious, no insult intended, I'm speaking of a turn of spirit, not of actual religion. I think that the fundamental philosophical and political dissent lies there, that the irreconcilable point is that: either you think that the world is totally unjust, may crush you even if you're hard working, nice, polite, and let Pol Pot die peacefully in his bed, or you don't. You want to believe, I dare say, maybe because of all the hard shit you had to go through. But there is somewhere in Aleppo or elsewhere someone who went through all the same hardship as you, and worked hard, and was nice and all, but who died miserably after having being tortured by jihadists or whatever and having seen his whole family beheaded. In fact, there are millions upon millions of people that did everything right but were unlucky to be born in Uganda or Syria or Libya or Bangladesh, and got fucked in the end, like most of the thousands who were drowned in the Mediterranean last year. Luck trumps merit. That's the whole point of the original article.
criddell 10y ago
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-get.html 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?
- awa 10y ago
  I am not sure why mortgage interest deduction gets such a bad rap. It allows a lot of people to be able to afford homes which they couldn't otherwise. It helps the housing market/industry and banking industry. Apart from that a lot of other countries has it. If I had to change something I would actually add a rental deduction to help those who can't afford to buy housing instead of removing mortgage interest deduction.
  - Frondo 10y ago
    I would rather the government do more to actually balance the system, than just throw a bone to too-poor homeowners. I would rather every middle class worker simply have a much higher paycheck, so that the mortgage interest deduction could be eliminated without anyone feeling a thing.
  - usefulcat 10y ago
    "It allows a lot of people to be able to afford homes which they couldn't otherwise." That may be true, but if it's having that effect for a lot of people, then surely it's also contributing to higher housing prices, which of course negates (at least in part) the supposed increase in affordability..
  - ItsDeathball 10y ago
    The mortgage interest deduction distorts the market in several ways. Making credit more available does allow people to spend more on homes, but this is then priced into the market. As you hint at, the subsidy is net neutral for homeowners, as it ultimately benefits the housing and banking industries. People who owned suburban land at the implementation of the deduction also benefited hugely, but now that prices are artificially inflated, any removal of the deduction would take money away from homeowners. Additionally, it makes paying cash for a home unrealistic, making the housing market (more) dependent on banks and their attendant federal regulations. Over time this has had numerous negative effects on land use patterns and urban health by encouraging car-oriented sprawl and devaluing urban mixed-use neighborhoods. There's also the whole race-based redlining thing. The worst of these policies have been mitigated in the recent past, but they still pose obstacles to certain kinds of development (that are highly desirable lately) and would not have existed in the first place without government intervention in home mortgages.
jartelt 10y ago
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).
- ergothus 10y ago
  I see luck even within those fundamentals. I'm pretty successful, and I'm aware of how generally lazy and procrastinating I am. Perhaps it's Imposter Syndrome, but while I can point to some areas where my work ethic or effort is greater than some, I definitely don't think these are better than some other friends and peers that I'm clearly more successful than. I just got lucky, more than once.
dv_dt 10y ago
There is a saying about seniority type systems that goes: The longer you live with the seniority system, the more you grow to like it. I think it applies somewhat here in that you are more likely to believe that effort always yields rewards if you were were always rewarded for your efforts. I think by demographics, your father was likely in a generation that was much more often in a position to be consistently rewarded for their efforts. The generation that was at certain ages in the Great depression, or the dotcom crash, and more recently the Great Recession has a different formative experience than experiences in the Baby boom generation.
WalterSear 10y ago
This also suggestsa subtle long term strategy for shifting people's political persuasions. Convince them that luck or effort has more or less to with outcome, and perhaps their political convictions will soften or harden to match.
FruityCode 10y ago
Probably, the difference of opinions from the 1st point is due to different experience. I suppose your father started his career in those great times after the II World War, when the world was developing so much that there was space for almost everyone. So it's that generation of people, who did work hard, but as the circumstances were so favorable, their efforts automatically translated into success. Now, we have to slow down due to increased competition - not only related to the reason indicated in the article, but also to the growth of Asian economies. And this makes people notice that with bad luck your efforts mean so little...
Waterluvian 10y ago
Have you ever tried to frame "help people don't deserve" as being a selfish act? Ie. I like social programs not because I want to give out free help but because I want to increase the demographic of who can buy my products, reduce who may try to hurt me, etc.
- marknutter 10y ago
  That would require faith in the assertion that giving free help to those people will actually result in those things happening. A lot of people's skepticism about free help is the lack of hard evidence that it actually improves people's lives. For instance, if someone is the type of person who is willing to physically harm other human beings, it's unlikely that more money is going to change their mind about that.
crusso 10y ago
While I agree that luck vs work is a key distinction between people that seems to drive political differences. I think that desires regarding the future are even more fundamental. Looking to the future, I would like to see cancer cured in my lifetime. I'd like to see aging cured or at least I'd like to get a lot more quality years out of my life. I'd like to see a real cure for my failing knees, eyes, and memory. None of that is going to happen if we throw up our hands and rely upon luck. Because no matter what "reasonable" ratio you put on the luck to work formula for success, work is non-zero.
FabHK 10y ago
BTW, might want to get your dad that book the interview was about (Robert Frank: "Success and Luck"). It's a good read, and you'll have something more to discuss :-)
- ergothus 10y ago
  I got a Kindle copy for myself...if I like it I will definitely order him a copy.

Shivetya 10y ago

I would tend to favor your father's position; I'm a libertarian. I put in the context of some are our industries brightest and best have had some remarkable ideas and luck but how many times did it take them to get there? Like an old Ted Turner story about his smart quotes and the remarks of just how many bad ones it took to get there. the issue with this in society is the ability of people to have enough bad outcomes to arrive at the good one. can we level that playing field or do we first need to find out why so many don't have the drive to try? Do we discourage people too early in life, do we give some the excuse they need to not try?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
pmyteh 10y ago
Your ability to handle the consequences of either making bad choices or being unlucky is dependent in large measure on factors like financial resilience (can you afford to take a risky project without running the chance of being homeless?) and social support (will your partner be prepared to support a change of direction, do your parents recognise the value of trying and failing at difficult things, will your country help you retrain if things go wrong?). These things are not evenly distributed. I'm now in some senses on my third career (I'm 35). Each of those decisions to change direction, take risks and grow as a person were made a lot easier because I had a good enough salary to put money aside to cover the risks, and a wife who happens to be both adventure-loving and locationally-flexible. Not to mention that the most recent career change (moving into academic research) basically required a self-funded MSc as a preparatory to funded PhD study (I was moving into quite a different field, and there's basically no funding for taught Masters courses in the UK). That's more than half the people who could benefit from it priced out from the start.
sbov 10y ago
I didn't downvote, but: there are plenty of entrepreneurial people you could bring up with regards to this, but Ted Turner went to prep school & collage in an age when most people didn't go to college. His parents were well off business owners who presumably not only set him up as a good position in life, but more importantly - and this is to your point - was a safety net so he even COULD fail over and over again. The vast majority of the population are not put in a position to be able to fail over and over again like Ted Turner was, so since you used him as your example the answer to your question should be obvious.

kyleschiller 10y ago

I think the disagreement is even more fundamental than that. Even if you consider luck to be a major factor in determining success, there's still the question of what the government should reward. I'm socially and fiscally liberal, but I don't think it's absurd to think that the government should reward hard work even though luck is more important. It just so happens that you can motivate people to work harder, and can't motive people to be luckier.

AstralStorm 10y ago
But should you reward a hard working mediocre achiever the same as a not as hard working but gifted high achiever? Then rewarding achievement is sort of pointless, giving help to those who need the least of it. Maybe instead progress should be rewarded?
hx87 10y ago
Government can certainly mitigate the effects of luck while simultaneously rewarding effort.
- crusso 10y ago
  Examples?
  - kelnos 10y ago
    A single-payer healthcare system is your government mitigating the effects of your bad luck. Giving you a tax break for gains on certain kinds of investments is your government rewarding your work. (That's not traditional "hard work" in the sense of expending physical energy, but deciding what investments to make is certainly work.)
    - crusso 10y ago
      Well, I guess if "simultaneous" means that different parts of the government with different programs can have opposite effects, okay. But I'm talking about a program that mitigates the effects of luck while (in the same program, with the same methods) rewarding effort. They're mostly opposite effects and there's no way to reliably distinguish hard work from luck. That's why there's so much debate on the subject.

willholloway 10y ago

The liberal view of this issue may have the virtue of being correct, but it's very counterproductive from the individual's standpoint. I know that the ideology espoused on sites such as dailykos.com were very detrimental to personal drive and success in my college years of 18-22. That ideology kept pounding home the idea of the unfairness of the economy, of the lower share of the pie allocated to labor vs capital and the increasing inequality of American society. All of those things were true no doubt, but they were not useful for someone who had been hacking since 4th grade. I file it under bad luck that the same people that had a correct analysis and opposition to the great mistake of that time, the Iraq invasion and occupation, also had such a neurotic and self-limiting and destructive view towards work, productivity and the modern economy, and that I was too inexperienced in the ways of the world at the time to understand this very important concept.

hx87 10y ago
You're right if you assume that people don't work as hard when they're pessimistic. People (like me) who work harder when they are pessimistic, however, certainly benefitted from the liberal view.
jpfed 10y ago
I tend to look at it this way: hard work improves the probability of financial success, but it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition. So yes, people benefit on average from hard work, but because of the uncertainty of the situation you can't take the contrapositive and say that poor people are lazy.
Frondo 10y ago
That's interesting. That view, of the essential unfairness of the system, had the opposite effect on me: it motivated me lots. Just not to buy into the American dream stuff. It motivated me to understand my own values, and learn more about the system, and figure out what I wanted to do to try and change the system for the people who'd never luck out and get a desk job, the people in coffee shops, cleaning hotel rooms, and the like. Guess we can take different things from the same thing.
emodendroket 10y ago

mediaman 10y ago

I agree. I talk with a number of business owners in a more traditionally conservative industry (agriculture). Many of them feel that America's problem is that we let people "get off the hook" for not "putting the work and smarts into something" like "we do." Many of these people are quite smart and run their business extremely well, and put in long hours, though many of them inherited businesses, or at least knowledge and support about a particular line of business. Their view appears to be heavily reliant on meritocratic outcomes, which of course assigns a low weight to luck. I would think that this world view would not be supported by a higher weighting to luck, but I do not know if the low assignment to luck is a result of cognitive dissonance with respect to their own hard work and long hours to sustain their success.

AndrewKemendo 10y ago

We systematically waste the human capability of millions of people because the system essentially randomly gives much better opportunity to some over others. Why can't you both be right? In my experience I've seen a lot of lucky failures because they had no work ethic. I've also seen a lot of hard working amazing people fail because they weren't lucky. "Luck favors the prepared [mind]" is the perfect middle ground on your positions. I'm willing to tolerate an amount of "unfairness" in people getting help they "don't deserve", while he finds this very offensive. To be fair, you both are willing to tolerate unfairness, the difference is likely from where that unfairness originates.

kahnpro 10y ago

The idea that success is based on effort is fundamentally... wrong. For every famous singer, there are thousands of other people putting in years of effort who cannot even earn a salary. For every Facebook, there are thousands of other products or companies who have put in heaps of effort but just didn't have the right timing, or that special something, that let Facebook take off. For every well thought out or engineered piece of software, there's a more successful one that did the minimal work necessary to get their barely working code to market. And we can easily find counterexamples on the other side, wealthy or successful people who needed very little effort and simply chose the right product, the right timing, were born to the right family. I might even go so far as to say that in the Real World, and not some libertarian utopia, that effort is irrelevant (or orthogonal) to success.

charles-salvia 10y ago
I wouldn't go as far as saying effort is irrelevant - just not the only, possibly not even the dominant factor that contributes to success. I view it as something like 40% effort/motivation, 60% luck
- fibbery 10y ago
  is innate skill filed under luck?
- aomurphy 10y ago
  I think, usually, hard work is necessary, but not sufficient. You won't succeed without it, but if you're not lucky, you won't succeed either.
jogjayr 10y ago
Thank you! Hard work is necessary, but not sufficient for success. (Almost) everyone successful is a hard worker. Not every hard worker is successful.
- ergothus 10y ago
  I don't even feel that it is necessary for success - whenever discussions like this come along, people will say things like "you make your own luck" or "luck provides opportunities, hard work takes advantage of them", and I agree - to a point. That point is usually far less than others would say. Using myself as an example, I don't feel right saying that I'm a hard worker. Sure, I wasn't at the lowest end of possible effort, but I'm far from the high end as well. Figuring out if I'm above/below the 50% mark requires a lot more understanding of what is actually normal than I have, but I believe I'm close to average, probably a bit below. Despite this, I've had a ton of luck and success. And when I look at people that are more successful (wealthy, at least), some of them have worked harder...and others have had just more luck. I had a great high school which let me coast through college. Because I didn't have the GPA to get the degree I wanted (restricted admissions), I ended up with a "make-your-own" degree. (Which was good because I had accrued so many electives out of general curiosity that I'd have been in college for years extra to qualify for any other degree). I had a 75% tuition discount, which meant that even though I could afford student loans, I didn't need any. I fell into a profession just as it was becoming hugely in demand. I don't program because it makes big bucks, I program because I've always wanted to. It just happened that as I entered college the Web went mainstream. My first job out of college was working on coldfusion (which I didn't know) on an NT environment (which I hated), all because I had fired off an email telling them I could show them how to use Perl on Linux, and they had just switched to Oracle on Linux (unbeknowst to me) and wanted someone with some Linux experience. You could argue that that email was "work" on my part, but really it was just a punch-drunk sarcastic email sent after a couple of hours of putting out legitimate applications. Total luck. 3 months later I got a contracting job for the state at double the salary (3 months post-college experience apparently counts for a lot). It was a 6 week contract that I stayed at for 7 years (at that point I got hired full time and stayed for another 5 years). The job was easy and I learned a ton because they had no real work for me, so I just did what I wanted. Work? Some, but mostly just luck. Certainly a ton more luck than other people that were working harder. It goes on and on like this. And I'm not as lucky as some: I could have been born into a rich family, where I'd have to work hard NOT to make money. (Heck, we've seen that someone can have multiple failing multi-million dollar enterprises and still roughly match the market). I'm not saying I didn't do ANY work...I'm saying that my success (and the success of many others) owes far MORE to luck than effort. In fact, I'd go so far as to say the majority of people I know that are successful are so because of luck. Many of them work harder than I do...but not harder than other people that are less successful. I don't think that's because the less successful people have had BAD luck (though some have), I think it's because the successful people have had more luck than the less successful people, by and large. Yet in discussions like this people always want to emphasize the effort. I don't know if that's because my judgement is wrong, or because people are really uncomfortable facing the prospect that their effort counts for so little in the wider scheme of things.

snarf21 10y ago

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 paycheck was the ultimate success. It has taken many many years to break out of that mindset and be willing to take calculated risks. The really hard questions arise when you start talking about what people deserve. Who is to say? We all have a unique frame of reference and experiences that have shaped us. In the end, the only middle ground we're likely to reach is the mindset of helping people help themselves. To me, the fairness question is more about the opportunity to improve you and yours. Having no opportunities is unfair and must be fixed. The question is always going to be who decides how much is fair?

100k 10y ago
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.
- akvadrako 10y ago
  This is kinda a weird thing to call "luck" though. "You" could also have been born a duck, a 1000 years ago, in the future or in another universe (maybe). But then "you" would have been somebody else and hence, not "you" at all. In other words, "you" had 100% chance of being you. No luck involved.
  - allemagne 10y ago
    I definitely agree. The universe being almost certainly deterministic, there is also a 100% chance of everything that has ever happened happening. It's still useful to think as if different people could have been born in different circumstances. You could think of it as a mental shorthand for the idea that differences between human beings are arbitrary, and it makes no sense to argue that a human inherently deserves an impoverished life over another human.

wazoox 10y ago

In other words, he believes in a just world, in providence, and you don't (in other words, he's religious and you're not). I think this is the crux of most of these arguments.

mindcrime 10y ago
Being religious or not has nothing to do with believing that effort is the dominant factor affecting success. I'm an atheist who also believes that effort reigns supreme. That doesn't mean that I don't believe that what we call "bad luck" can't come along and derail you, but I firmly believe - based on my own experience - that you "make your own luck" through effort and the decisions you make. I grew in dirt-poor in white-trash / redneck-ville rural NC, but I've managed to work my way into a pretty good career in software development, living in a nice neighborhood in Chapel Hill. A lot of my high-school peers are still living in bumfuck, doing drugs, working fast-food, whatever. Was I just "luckier" then them? I don't think so. I think the primary factor is that I was more ambitious, harder working, and made better decisions. And I've had much "luck" along the way... man, it was minor and hard to notice. Because from my subjective perspective, I've busted my balls for everything I managed to achieve. I still remember working midnight shift waxing floors for a grocery store, leaving work at 6:30am, heading to an 8:00am class (Discrete Math of all things!), suffering through 3 hours of classes, then going and crashing on a couch in the library for an hour or so, then grabbing lunch, hitting my 1:00pm class, then driving the hour home from school, to fall alseep, wake up, and go back to work at 10:00. Lather, rinse, repeat. Some people will suffer through that shit, some won't. I don't see a whole lot of luck in the equation.
- wazoox 10y ago
  You're an atheist, but you somehow believe that the good guys mostly win in the end. I call this religious, no insult intended, I'm speaking of a turn of spirit, not of actual religion. I think that the fundamental philosophical and political dissent lies there, that the irreconcilable point is that: either you think that the world is totally unjust, may crush you even if you're hard working, nice, polite, and let Pol Pot die peacefully in his bed, or you don't. You want to believe, I dare say, maybe because of all the hard shit you had to go through. But there is somewhere in Aleppo or elsewhere someone who went through all the same hardship as you, and worked hard, and was nice and all, but who died miserably after having being tortured by jihadists or whatever and having seen his whole family beheaded. In fact, there are millions upon millions of people that did everything right but were unlucky to be born in Uganda or Syria or Libya or Bangladesh, and got fucked in the end, like most of the thousands who were drowned in the Mediterranean last year. Luck trumps merit. That's the whole point of the original article.

criddell 10y ago

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-get.html 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?

awa 10y ago
I am not sure why mortgage interest deduction gets such a bad rap. It allows a lot of people to be able to afford homes which they couldn't otherwise. It helps the housing market/industry and banking industry. Apart from that a lot of other countries has it. If I had to change something I would actually add a rental deduction to help those who can't afford to buy housing instead of removing mortgage interest deduction.
- Frondo 10y ago
  I would rather the government do more to actually balance the system, than just throw a bone to too-poor homeowners. I would rather every middle class worker simply have a much higher paycheck, so that the mortgage interest deduction could be eliminated without anyone feeling a thing.
- usefulcat 10y ago
  "It allows a lot of people to be able to afford homes which they couldn't otherwise." That may be true, but if it's having that effect for a lot of people, then surely it's also contributing to higher housing prices, which of course negates (at least in part) the supposed increase in affordability..
- ItsDeathball 10y ago
  The mortgage interest deduction distorts the market in several ways. Making credit more available does allow people to spend more on homes, but this is then priced into the market. As you hint at, the subsidy is net neutral for homeowners, as it ultimately benefits the housing and banking industries. People who owned suburban land at the implementation of the deduction also benefited hugely, but now that prices are artificially inflated, any removal of the deduction would take money away from homeowners. Additionally, it makes paying cash for a home unrealistic, making the housing market (more) dependent on banks and their attendant federal regulations. Over time this has had numerous negative effects on land use patterns and urban health by encouraging car-oriented sprawl and devaluing urban mixed-use neighborhoods. There's also the whole race-based redlining thing. The worst of these policies have been mitigated in the recent past, but they still pose obstacles to certain kinds of development (that are highly desirable lately) and would not have existed in the first place without government intervention in home mortgages.

jartelt 10y ago

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).

ergothus 10y ago
I see luck even within those fundamentals. I'm pretty successful, and I'm aware of how generally lazy and procrastinating I am. Perhaps it's Imposter Syndrome, but while I can point to some areas where my work ethic or effort is greater than some, I definitely don't think these are better than some other friends and peers that I'm clearly more successful than. I just got lucky, more than once.

dv_dt 10y ago

There is a saying about seniority type systems that goes: The longer you live with the seniority system, the more you grow to like it. I think it applies somewhat here in that you are more likely to believe that effort always yields rewards if you were were always rewarded for your efforts. I think by demographics, your father was likely in a generation that was much more often in a position to be consistently rewarded for their efforts. The generation that was at certain ages in the Great depression, or the dotcom crash, and more recently the Great Recession has a different formative experience than experiences in the Baby boom generation.

WalterSear 10y ago

This also suggestsa subtle long term strategy for shifting people's political persuasions. Convince them that luck or effort has more or less to with outcome, and perhaps their political convictions will soften or harden to match.

FruityCode 10y ago

Probably, the difference of opinions from the 1st point is due to different experience. I suppose your father started his career in those great times after the II World War, when the world was developing so much that there was space for almost everyone. So it's that generation of people, who did work hard, but as the circumstances were so favorable, their efforts automatically translated into success. Now, we have to slow down due to increased competition - not only related to the reason indicated in the article, but also to the growth of Asian economies. And this makes people notice that with bad luck your efforts mean so little...

Waterluvian 10y ago

Have you ever tried to frame "help people don't deserve" as being a selfish act? Ie. I like social programs not because I want to give out free help but because I want to increase the demographic of who can buy my products, reduce who may try to hurt me, etc.

marknutter 10y ago
That would require faith in the assertion that giving free help to those people will actually result in those things happening. A lot of people's skepticism about free help is the lack of hard evidence that it actually improves people's lives. For instance, if someone is the type of person who is willing to physically harm other human beings, it's unlikely that more money is going to change their mind about that.

crusso 10y ago

While I agree that luck vs work is a key distinction between people that seems to drive political differences. I think that desires regarding the future are even more fundamental. Looking to the future, I would like to see cancer cured in my lifetime. I'd like to see aging cured or at least I'd like to get a lot more quality years out of my life. I'd like to see a real cure for my failing knees, eyes, and memory. None of that is going to happen if we throw up our hands and rely upon luck. Because no matter what "reasonable" ratio you put on the luck to work formula for success, work is non-zero.

FabHK 10y ago

BTW, might want to get your dad that book the interview was about (Robert Frank: "Success and Luck"). It's a good read, and you'll have something more to discuss :-)

ergothus 10y ago
I got a Kindle copy for myself...if I like it I will definitely order him a copy.