4 ms·

You said it is "mostly not luck". I said and believe I did at least prove to a first approximation that it is indeed mostly luck. Yes, hard work matters at the

by tfourb 4y ago

You said it is "mostly not luck". I said and believe I did at least prove to a first approximation that it is indeed mostly luck. Yes, hard work matters at the margin. Among the people I studied with, those with a good work ethic are mostly in a better place today than those who slacked during college. But we were all able to attend college in the first place because we were very lucky, not because of any particular great achievements on our part. And in terms of standard of living and luxury, we are more or less all in the top 5% globally, I estimate. Meanwhile I have worked and travelled across quite a few African countries and I can positively confirm that almost everyone I met there has worked quite a bit harder than I have throughout their lives and despite that, practically all are financially worse off than I am today. I don't loose sleep over that, there is no cosmic balance I am upsetting with my privileged existence. But the least I and everyone else profiting from this privilege can do is to acknowledge it and stand in solidarity with efforts to redistribute some of that extreme profits that the most lucky people in our societies reap through no real sacrifice of their own. Rich people should simply accept that they are rich mostly not because of their genius and/or hard work, but because of the privileges afforded to them by birth and chance, as well as the services provided to them by greater society. Consequently, I am all for enjoying the fruits of your labour but all this talk about systems like the U.S. "rewarding innovation" or "risk taking" etc. is simply propaganda by people who would rather see other people literally starve than lower their bank account balance from 10 to 8 figures.

robertlagrant 4y ago
I more meant that I don't split things up into "luck" and "hard work" - I think that's too broad. However, sticking to your framing, I would say a lot of that thing you call luck is the hard work of your parents, or their parents. Eventually you can trace that back to more significant events - being invaded by the right people can jump-start your civilisation (e.g. Britain being invaded by the Romans). Equally, being invaded by the wrong civilisation can be devastating. Or, say, sticking with Britain: the amount of thought and intellectual and cultural superstructure that had to go into the events that led up, say, to the signing of the Magna Carta, is enormous. The whole raft of arduous work that up to that point is just crazy. Or the building of Oxford University. Having a culture that is able and willing to instute massive, long-term investments is the result of a lot of hard work and intelligent thought. And some luck - being close to Europe and the Middle East and being relatively to the world back then was definitely lucky. But luck isn't most of it. Even all the effort of translation and diplomacy and inventing ships and bearing the risk of travel was all hard work, translating that location into something useful. Which, in an anthropic principle sort of way, does lead us to be something you could call "lucky" today. But it's not unearned luck. It's luck other people made for us. And for me, working hard to build things that are good and will (or their future iterations) survive me is the best way to make tomorrow's "luck".
- tfourb 4y ago
  Yeah sure, but my point was that the current capitalist-maximalist ideology is that rich people have "earned" their wealth by "hard work" and thus should not be required to share with the rest of society. And that is just dump. Personal wealth is to a first approximation just an expression of the hard work of other people (which is just another way of saying what you explained) and the luck of being in the right place at the right time (and more often than not having the right skin color, gender and social capital, also acquired by the work of other people). It should just be tolerated to the extend that it motivates people to take some risk to start businesses. But society does not have a moral duty to enable obscene personal wealth, quite on the contrary. On a side note, your last comment is broadly correct but does skip over a lot of exploitation and repression that enabled the economic dominance of European nations in recent history. And again, this exploitation and dominance wasn't enabled by a particular genius or hard work on the Europeans' part. European societies were not more complex or sophisticated at any given time than i.e. many in Africa or East Asia.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    > Yeah sure, but my point was that the current capitalist-maximalist ideology is that rich people have "earned" their wealth by "hard work" and thus should not be required to share with the rest of society. And that is just dump You'd have to cite this. The only people I see who are under the impression that labour is all it takes to make a business succeed are far left-wing, labour theory of value people. > But society does not have a moral duty to enable obscene personal wealth, quite on the contrary. You're half right. The criminal vagueness of "society" aside, no one has a moral duty to enable it. But there is no morality in disabling it, through theft or other means. > European societies were not more complex or sophisticated at any given time than i.e. many in Africa or East Asia. You seem to have misread. I wasn't saying or implying anything special about the complexity of European societies.

by tfourb 4y ago

robertlagrant 4y ago

I more meant that I don't split things up into "luck" and "hard work" - I think that's too broad. However, sticking to your framing, I would say a lot of that thing you call luck is the hard work of your parents, or their parents. Eventually you can trace that back to more significant events - being invaded by the right people can jump-start your civilisation (e.g. Britain being invaded by the Romans). Equally, being invaded by the wrong civilisation can be devastating. Or, say, sticking with Britain: the amount of thought and intellectual and cultural superstructure that had to go into the events that led up, say, to the signing of the Magna Carta, is enormous. The whole raft of arduous work that up to that point is just crazy. Or the building of Oxford University. Having a culture that is able and willing to instute massive, long-term investments is the result of a lot of hard work and intelligent thought. And some luck - being close to Europe and the Middle East and being relatively to the world back then was definitely lucky. But luck isn't most of it. Even all the effort of translation and diplomacy and inventing ships and bearing the risk of travel was all hard work, translating that location into something useful. Which, in an anthropic principle sort of way, does lead us to be something you could call "lucky" today. But it's not unearned luck. It's luck other people made for us. And for me, working hard to build things that are good and will (or their future iterations) survive me is the best way to make tomorrow's "luck".

tfourb 4y ago
Yeah sure, but my point was that the current capitalist-maximalist ideology is that rich people have "earned" their wealth by "hard work" and thus should not be required to share with the rest of society. And that is just dump. Personal wealth is to a first approximation just an expression of the hard work of other people (which is just another way of saying what you explained) and the luck of being in the right place at the right time (and more often than not having the right skin color, gender and social capital, also acquired by the work of other people). It should just be tolerated to the extend that it motivates people to take some risk to start businesses. But society does not have a moral duty to enable obscene personal wealth, quite on the contrary. On a side note, your last comment is broadly correct but does skip over a lot of exploitation and repression that enabled the economic dominance of European nations in recent history. And again, this exploitation and dominance wasn't enabled by a particular genius or hard work on the Europeans' part. European societies were not more complex or sophisticated at any given time than i.e. many in Africa or East Asia.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  > Yeah sure, but my point was that the current capitalist-maximalist ideology is that rich people have "earned" their wealth by "hard work" and thus should not be required to share with the rest of society. And that is just dump You'd have to cite this. The only people I see who are under the impression that labour is all it takes to make a business succeed are far left-wing, labour theory of value people. > But society does not have a moral duty to enable obscene personal wealth, quite on the contrary. You're half right. The criminal vagueness of "society" aside, no one has a moral duty to enable it. But there is no morality in disabling it, through theft or other means. > European societies were not more complex or sophisticated at any given time than i.e. many in Africa or East Asia. You seem to have misread. I wasn't saying or implying anything special about the complexity of European societies.