correct, i think in lots of cases, including several i have first hand experience with, many people didn't deserve to become millionaires overnight that did. al

correct, i think in lots of cases, including several i have first hand experience with, many people didn't deserve to become millionaires overnight that did. also, people who hit the lottery buying domain names in the early 90's... same thing. do we really think those people deserved millions, in anything other than the most technical sense of the word? i understand your argument about compensating for risk, it's not dumb and not outrageous, but i'd like to challenge it to some degree. hopefully it's fair to assume that risk is simply the financial risk, i.e. how much you could lose, and at what probability? in that case, would it be fair to say that any positive expected value investment would result in undeserved profits? in other words, wouldn't there be cases where the rewards outweighed the risks? if we accept that narrow definition of "deserve", then i guess it would be my job to argue that the three categories i mentioned show an imbalance. or course, knowing true risks is impossible, but you might be able to make a pretty good case in some instances. but i really dont know enough to do that. but, i think that formulation doesn't really fully resonate with the way most people intuitively judge desert. six people ante 200k each, then roll a die. who ever had the number that is rolled takes all the money. does the winner deserve the money more than the losers? in that example, sure, i think most people would agree, its a game of chance and they all entered willingly. did he "earn" it? ehhh, i guess? now what if six people go off and build houses for a year. at the end of that year, they get paid proportion of the sum of all houses value based how many sq feet of house they personally made? someone might build a really shitty but huge house. would they deserve their pay? "but the rules were pay based on sq ft"... well, sure, but the spirit of the rules? probably the spirit is to pay people based effort, skill and product, so as to incentivize them. so maybe a flaw in the incentives then? i realize this is meandering from my original point... but i think its on us to do the right thing, not rules to force us to. ok, anyway... i think in this case most people would probably say this person doesn't deserve all the money because the house they built is so shitty, and they just found a loophole and exploited it. that is all just a very long winded way of saying that i think desert is based on more than explicit contracts.