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The talk about luck is meant to encourage empathy and understanding. If your world view says that success is based only on your work ethic, then you will assum

by jartelt 10y ago

The talk about luck is meant to encourage empathy and understanding. If your world view says that success is based only on your work ethic, then you will assume that all people who are not successful did not work hard. With that logic it is pretty easy to conclude that we should not help people out or support unsuccessful people because it's solely their own fault that they were not successful. Some would argue this is the wrong world view and that we should acknowledge that many unsuccessful people work really hard and just got dealt a bad deck of cards. These different world views lead to different priorities in public policy among other things.

mindcrime 10y ago
If your world view says that success is based only on your work ethic, then you will assume that all people who are not successful did not work hard. With that logic it is pretty easy to conclude that we should not help people out or support unsuccessful people because it's solely their own fault that they were not successful. I'm not saying anything about you specifically, but that sounds a lot like a kind of "anti-libertarian" straw-man argument I hear a lot. Certain people like to claim exactly that libertarians believe "that all people who are not successful did not work hard", which is far from true. I think everybody understands that some people work very hard and still fail to achieve "success" (depending on how you define success). But what I think should be taken into account is that: Some people who fail to achieve "success" do so because they didn't work hard enough. Hard work, good decisions, etc., do play an important role in the amount of success you attain. Obviously reality falls somewhere in between "luck is everything" and "hard work is everything", but I get the sense that some people promoting the "it's all luck" mindset have an agenda in terms of denigrating the fundamental idea that effort and initiative count at all. Again, not saying that's you, and I'm probably just over-sensitive on this subject.
- fnl 10y ago
  This thread is very important to the discussion, because it highlights an apparent opposite mindset of the article. As I posted elsewhere in this thread already, I think the real issue is that the ideas of Robert Frank are not about these "regular" cases in the middle income range at all. (At most, I'd conclude that the interviewer asked questions that would touch persons in that range, too, and who likely form the majority of the site's readers.) If you are doing OK-ish on the upper end or OK-ish on the lower end of the middle income strata of a Western (!) society, your "lot" should be quite tolerable. And nobody would deny that with extremely hard work and discipline you can move from the lower end of middle income to the upper end of middle income. However, if you are doing really bad and are below the poverty line or really well and are in the top 1% range, that certainly requires a good portion of (possibly: bad) luck. It already starts at conception, with your "birth rights". And the aim of the article (or rather, of Mr. Frank's theories), as I interpret it (them), is pointing that out that we need to find measures how to smooth those extremes, not about figuring out if some middle income person had a bit more or less luck, or if it even mattered.

by jartelt 10y ago

mindcrime 10y ago

If your world view says that success is based only on your work ethic, then you will assume that all people who are not successful did not work hard. With that logic it is pretty easy to conclude that we should not help people out or support unsuccessful people because it's solely their own fault that they were not successful. I'm not saying anything about you specifically, but that sounds a lot like a kind of "anti-libertarian" straw-man argument I hear a lot. Certain people like to claim exactly that libertarians believe "that all people who are not successful did not work hard", which is far from true. I think everybody understands that some people work very hard and still fail to achieve "success" (depending on how you define success). But what I think should be taken into account is that: Some people who fail to achieve "success" do so because they didn't work hard enough. Hard work, good decisions, etc., do play an important role in the amount of success you attain. Obviously reality falls somewhere in between "luck is everything" and "hard work is everything", but I get the sense that some people promoting the "it's all luck" mindset have an agenda in terms of denigrating the fundamental idea that effort and initiative count at all. Again, not saying that's you, and I'm probably just over-sensitive on this subject.

fnl 10y ago
This thread is very important to the discussion, because it highlights an apparent opposite mindset of the article. As I posted elsewhere in this thread already, I think the real issue is that the ideas of Robert Frank are not about these "regular" cases in the middle income range at all. (At most, I'd conclude that the interviewer asked questions that would touch persons in that range, too, and who likely form the majority of the site's readers.) If you are doing OK-ish on the upper end or OK-ish on the lower end of the middle income strata of a Western (!) society, your "lot" should be quite tolerable. And nobody would deny that with extremely hard work and discipline you can move from the lower end of middle income to the upper end of middle income. However, if you are doing really bad and are below the poverty line or really well and are in the top 1% range, that certainly requires a good portion of (possibly: bad) luck. It already starts at conception, with your "birth rights". And the aim of the article (or rather, of Mr. Frank's theories), as I interpret it (them), is pointing that out that we need to find measures how to smooth those extremes, not about figuring out if some middle income person had a bit more or less luck, or if it even mattered.