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From experience, this rings very, very true. For many, this is a hard pill to swallow. Here's one way to judge it more objectively. Replace "billionaire", with
by stopachka 6y ago
From experience, this rings very, very true.
For many, this is a hard pill to swallow. Here's one way to judge it more objectively. Replace "billionaire", with something more neutral: "pro basketball player", "amazing musician", "prolific writer".
The arguments tend to make a lot of sense in other categories, but our natural inclination rebels on Billionaire. This is a great sign that something is off
- travisjungroth 6y agoAll three are of your examples are wildly different in that they’re top-tier individual contributors. Of course you can become a prolific writer without exploiting anyone. A more fair comparison would be something like politician.
- stopachka 6y agoI think billionaires are much closer to what I mentioned than to politicians. You can tell this by the fact that most billionaires have engineering degrees or were tinkerers. One defining quality is that billionaires need to scale work that often involves management. In this case consider prolific basketball coaches, or generals in war. The reason I shy away from including politicians, is because their m.o is starkly different: it’s all about status.
- travisjungroth 6y agoSure, coaches and generals are also much better comparison. Either way, I think your argument is weak. “Sure you feel this away about billionaires. But change ‘billionaire’ to something different and your feelings change.” Well, duh. That’s not even an analogy. You’re just literally changing the subject of the sentence. Billionaires are super different than writers in ways that are relevant to this discussion.
- stopachka 6y agoMy argument is more like this: Most people have a natural bias towards billionaires. To remove the particulars of the essay, to look at it with fresh eyes. Yes, indeed it changes things, and no one change will map completely. Do this a few times though and a clearer sight comes through
- travisjungroth 6y agoWhat if I do that and I come to the same conclusions I did before?
- stopachka 6y agoThen, you can be more confident in your conclusions. You may still be off, but heck, you would have subjected yourself to much more critical thinking than average, and can be much more confident in your opinions.
- jariel 6y ago"All three are of your examples are wildly different in that they’re top-tier individual contributors" And founders are not? Some founders are at that level, and frankly, more important to society than most athletes or musicians. MLB pitchers make $10's of millions of dollars a year, far more than most of our top talent.
- travisjungroth 6y agoMy challenge is on the individual contributor part, not the top-tier part. A founder is not an IC, at least not past a certain point.
- ojnabieoot 6y agoA big problem here is that the children of a musical prodigy aren’t necessarily musically talented, and the children of amazing athletes aren’t necessarily amazing athletes. But the children of billionaires are (almost) all obscenely wealthy.
- stopachka 6y agoI think these are all more similar than you think: Consider - the children of musical prodigies are likely to be more musical then average. The children of billionaires are likely to be more entrepreneurial than average - both are likely to be wealthy - neither are likely to be as prolific — I.e a child making an even more successful business, or being a better musician - over a few generations, both are likely to revert to the mean. In some countries this is not true of the wealthy, but in America this is particularly true
- NathanWilliams 6y ago> Consider - the children of musical prodigies are likely to be more musical then average Is that true though? You made a big claim, without backing, to support your other claim.
- stopachka 6y agoI didn’t support the claim, as it seems very apparent to me. Do you think it’s not the case?
- NathanWilliams 6y agoI don’t think we should make claims based only on what seems apparent to us. That isn’t a good path to finding the truth. It only exposes hidden biases and assumptions.
- yellowapple 6y agoI mean, just because someone squanders an advantage doesn't mean that one didn't have an advantage to begin with. And that's the fundamental difference between the child of a musician v. the child of a billionaire. In order for the musicians' child to be a prodigy like one's parent, there's still considerable training and practice required. In order for the billionaire's child to be a billionaire like one's parent, the child simply needs to wait for one's parent to die. That is: the passing down of musical aptitude through multiple generations requires each generation to put in approximately the same labor as the previous. The passing down of material wealth through multiple generations does not. The descendants of American billionaires might suck at sustaining their advantageous positions right now, but that's only because America's upper class is relatively fresh, still full of bourgeois "new wealth" instead of aristocratic "old wealth", and lacking practice with migrating from the former to the latter. In a century or two (barring intervention to return wealth to the proletariat) I'd expect the American upper class to get into that groove of wealth consolidation, like how things evolved in Europe (and hell, if the US follows the same trajectory as the Roman Empire we might even end up with the same sort of feudal society in some places).