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> Suppose any rich man wakes up in the Amazon jungle with nothing to his name, no clothes and no money. He may in fact be the richest man on earth, but in the jungle it doesn't matter.

Suppose a aboriginal guy from the Amazon wakes up naked on a snowy Manhattan street... He could be the best Tapir hunter in the five valleys, but that doesn't count for much if he inevitably either freezes or gets locked in a cell for indecent exposure.

But that aside, I think Arnold was saying something misleading: When people call him a self-made man, they're not saying he's not the benefactor of the efforts of the people who came before him. Even the aborigine is on the receiving end of 15,000 years of tribal knowledge about how to survive in the American wilderness. What they're saying is that he's not one of the people who was handed success by default, and it's fine to say "thanks" to the people who helped you in your efforts to better yourself, but there's still an important distinction there.

> Suppose a aboriginal guy from the Amazon wakes up naked on a snowy Manhattan street... He could be the best Tapir hunter in the five valleys, but that doesn't count for much if he inevitably either freezes or gets locked in a cell for indecent exposure

You seem to be making OP's point for them.

I don't think they are. I think "Aboriginal helpless in Manhattan" means that any skill you may have is dependant on environment, is an specialization, and you shouldn't judge a fish by its cycle-riding skills.

Definitely not.

The OP's point is that wealth is created and bestowed by society. The rebuttal is that it is an interaction between skills and environment, which may or may not involve other humans.

The Amazonian hunter has a form of wealth with no dependence on other humans. And yet it is as fragile as the rich person's wealth once you change the environment. To that rebuttal I would add that merely bestowing riches on people does not generally result in wealth. The classic case in point being that lottery winners generally wind up no better off than they were previously, and this reversion is surprisingly quick.

What human society and industry has done is create the possibility of great wealth. Untold wealth. Wealth undreamt of in the past. Aristocracy in Elizabethan times would envy the average US citizen today. And not for the technological marvels that we would normally list - topping the list of things they would wish that they had is that our medical care lets us expect to see our children grow up, and our dental care means that we do not regularly go through a level of pain that they took for granted.

But wealth remains an interaction of skills and environment. It is not merely granted by society.

It is when society defines the environment though, to a certain extent. When wealth can be used to change the environment to tailor it to your skills, then you do get an advantage.

I'd like you to elaborate more your idea in terms of the relation between skill, society and environment. Assuming all three influence each other.

> The rebuttal is that it is an interaction between skills and environment

That's the main point. It is not. You need society: > Suppose any rich man wakes up in the Amazon jungle with nothing to his name, no clothes and no money. He may in fact be the richest man on earth, but in the jungle it doesn't matter.

He has his skills, and a rich environment full of resources. But he lacks what society provides: law and order, education, skilled workers, media that spread ideas, etc...

> Suppose a aboriginal guy from the Amazon wakes up naked on a snowy Manhattan street... He could be the best Tapir hunter in the five valleys, but that doesn't count for much if he inevitably either freezes or gets locked in a cell for indecent exposure.

That is true, but it's a different point. The point of the rich man is that, in society, he can use his wealth to get other people to just give him stuff and do things for him. But that power evaporates in contexts where there aren't other people around, or they don't care about money.

The analogy to what you said about the aboriginal guy would also apply to the rich man: the rich man's skills (eg. business) that he might use to actively work at making a living might not apply in a different context.

It seems to be essentially the same point. In the Amazon the best Tapir hunter is a rich man indeed.

I think Arnold realizes this. I think he's just using this shift or reframing to highlight his point that while people can succeed with sticktoitedness, vigor and ambition, etc. despite not inheriting success directly from someone, that despite this, they do owe something to the system and people which and who allowed them to succeed.

I think that above all, what Arnold is saying is that the blueprint for success is "standing on the shoulder of giants", or listening to successful people advice, which, though it's probably good advice, happens to lead right to the book his article is advertising.

That is all fine and good, but who gets to decide what is "good" for Athens? It could be argued that the tyranny of the majority is just as dangerous as the tyranny of the wealthy, perhaps more so.

Who gets decide what is "good" for us? Us. It's our society, and we would have to give the keys away to have it be any other way. Democracy is the default, the resting state, although looking at history, you wouldn't guess that.

Since time began, people in power (read: wealthy), and their apologists, have tried to argue against it. But slowly, since the Enlightenment up to modern times, these kinds of arguments have fallen more and more on deaf ears. The more it was tried, the more the results spoke for themselves.

The last time I heard "tyranny of the majority" said with any seriousness, it was in the context of why South Africa should not end Apartheid. Democracy is something we've figured out now, finally, thankfully. There's no going back.

"Democracy is something we've figured out now"

Really? I would love to learn more about this ideal society that has a perfect, working democracy?

Regarding tyranny of the majority: I think there are a lot of HN users that could tell you about CA Proposition 8 how tyranny of the majority might be used in all seriousness in that context.

Edited to correct Proposition 13 to Prop 8.

In the long run, Democratic Republics favor loosely associated blocs of power, mainly in the form of corporations. The wealthy in Europe probably didn't like it very much when fascists and communists came to power.

Any type of centrally planned economy is an anethema to those who have saved massive sums of capital.

I think there are two main arguments here. The first is about credit assignment, and the second is about property rights.

For the first, you're saying (if I understand correctly) that, without a stable society, without good government, without healthy civic norms, etc., nobody who's rich now would have much of anything. That's clearly true, at least in absolute terms. But as with most things, there are multiple points of dependence.

Eg., consider a new Silicon Valley web startup. The founder incorporates it, the investor puts in some capital, the backend engineer builds a great server, the frontend engineer makes the page slick and responsive, the designer creates an awesome UI, and the salesperson brings in customers. If any one of those people disappeared, the web application wouldn't exist, so in some sense they can all claim 100% credit. But going deeper, Web applications wouldn't exist at all without Kahn and Cerf's work on the Internet, Noyce's work on semiconductors, Edison's and Tesla's work to create an ubiquitous, reliable electrical grid, and so on. So they can all claim 100% credit too. But of course, everyone can't get 100% of the stock, so we divide things up based on who contributed what, using heuristics about replaceability and so on.

Because, without "society as a whole", wealth wouldn't exist, you seem to be saying that society should in some sense get 100% of the credit. But this feels like the same fallacy as the backend engineer saying, hey, without me this app wouldn't exist, I should have 100% of the equity. When there are multiple contributors, each one of which was absolutely essential, you can't give 100% to everyone, and giving 100% to any particular person or group (when others were equally essential) is unfair.

For the second argument, you seem to be saying that (eg.) if a very rich person raises the rent on a poor apartment building, and many of the tenants (being unable to pay) get evicted, this is a wrong, because you make many people worse off to make one person slightly better off. In the short run, again that's true. But in the long run, it's very clear that societies which enforce strong property rights are much wealthier as a whole. The correlation between, say, Heritage's Index of Economic Freedom or the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business index, and median income per person, is like the correlation between smoking and lung cancer. Philosophically, this is like the difference between act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism: rather than judging each action individually, you can judge what overall rules, followed consistently, make everyone better off in the long run.

Athens was built by slavery, so not the best example of full equality for all.

You judge something from 2k+ years in the past with our current set of values.

Our current set of values: wearing a five dollar T shirt and cheap sneakers ... made by slaves in a sweatshop somewhere.

This is not a case of someone casting contemporary normative values on an ancient culture in judgement. The parent made a correct positive claim; ancient cultures, including Athens, typically had vastly more inequality than is present today.

It doesn't matter whether or not inequality had a different flavor of cultural sophistication or acceptance attached to it at the time. It remains that the culture is not a good example of equality.

> It remains that the culture is not a good example of equality.

If you take context into account, inequalities in Athens were actually pretty decent compared to other places.

For one citizens were equals (~10% of the population, males only). Women, again for that time, could enjoy a relative freedom and had a place in society. Slaves were quite notoriously well treated in Athenian households, more like mandatory work than inhumane treatment, and a comparatively high proportion would eventually 'earn' their own freedom in Athens. In the wider picture, don't forget that slavery was that age's "industrial" drive, you could not end slavery and have the means to defend the city.

If you look at Athens within its own space and time, it really was a prime example of philosophical and societal enlightenment. It would, as you know, go on as a political model to influence the Roman Republic institutions (sadly a pale copy in practice) and later on the Empire's culture, down to our modern days quest for democracy passing by Revolutions. Judging "humanity" is relative, it can only be done relevantly to a context —that of the deed, and the idea.

> In the wider picture, don't forget that slavery was that age's "industrial" drive, you could not end slavery and have the means to defend the city.

I have a suspicion that much of our moral advancement as a species is essentially a function of our technological advancement. We're not more humane because we have better and more strongly held ideals, but because we're allowed by technology the space to practice them.

I think slavery has always been wrong, even when it was accepted by society.

There's many things that are widely accepted today, that will be considered wrong in the future. Two examples would be eating meat and circumcision.

As I said above, don't forget that slavery was that age's "industrial" drive, you could not end slavery and have the means to defend the city. It was a life or death situation, and no society at the time found a way to sustain military might without slavery as an economical asset. I take that as a sign that it was no easy change of paradigm.

Later on, machines allowed one man to put out the work effort of several, and things progressively changed, but it took centuries, for hard reasons that I observe are, historically, more economic than philosophical. You could argue that domination or independence should not have been the end goal in civilizations history and I could agree, but then we're not talking about human beings anymore and it all becomes an abstract thought experiment rather irrelevant to our world.

This is an interesting point- but I wonder, do you know of any significant civilizations that tried to end slavery around the same time period?

So was England and the rest of Europe, they just called them serfs.

There's a technical distinction in that serfs are bound to the land, not an individual, but that's nitpicking.

By whom are they bound by, though?

That distinction is slightly more theoretical than actual. They effectively become owned by a position not a specific person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom#Becoming_a_serf

Serfdom does starts with a specific owner at the start. What separates serfs from indentured servants was: "By taking on the duties of serfdom, serfs bound not only themselves but all of their future progeny."

And of course people where at times forced into serfdom making the slavery connection even more obvious.

That distinguishes serfdom from chattel slavery, not from slavery in general.

To answer questions here and in responses, as to what serfs were and how distinct they were or weren't from slaves:

"Serf" is servus in Latin: literally the word "slave". Serfs began as chattel slaves on late-Roman latifundia, but were tied to the land, not to individual owners, by late Roman laws trying to fight depopulation and keep agriculture running.

In the Dark Age, the Carolingian period, and the Viking Age, slaves'/serfs' rights increased due to pressure from the Church, while free commoners' rights decreased, often also due to pressure from the Church. By the end of the Viking Age and the beginning of the Middle Ages proper, official documents spoke of "slaves free and unfree"; by the High Middle Ages, land as well as people was servile or free, so that a serf could own free land (which required a cash rent) or a freeman could own servile land (which required labor service). "Own" here meant "lease", but you could literally buy or sell the lease, or borrow money against it.

A History of Private Life, especially its second and third volumes, and Marriage and Family in the Middle Ages are excellent sources on this.

Neither was it presented as the best example. One idea was taken from Athenian beliefs and op then says "It's through this lens that we should consider a wholistic approach ..."

Of course it's easier to throw out a random fact like 'oh slavery' so your argument is moot, but what are you really adding here?

Good point... but I think the OP was just trying to say that it is easy to talk the talk, but no so easy to walk the walk.

It's not a random fact, it's the counterpoint to invalidate the OP's argument. It's easy to espouse individualism and not have to worry about anything when you have a whole class of people who you can order to do your bidding (to grow food, build buildings, even defend the city).