Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We’re Missing | Hacker News Reader

Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We’re Missing

nytimes.com

84 pointsarikr73 comments

I didn’t even begin to understand the patent system or even the business side of innovation until I was in my late 30s. Yet, I have noticed that the most financially successful innovators that I know have had many family advisors and connections throughout their life.

But, inequality is just a small piece.

First, you need real education reform - educating kids on how the system operates. The current education system is broken and harmful. It teaches 99% of kids to become cogs in a system. And, after many years, they grow up to believe that being a cog is all there is. Instead, they need to learn how the system works and how to pull its levers and press its buttons to make it work for them. But, who is going to fund that?

But, even that’s not enough. Smart kids also need access to capital (‘other people’s money’ as my very rich friends call it) and connections. Having those things makes a huge difference.

> It teaches 99% of kids to become cogs in a system.

working as intended then ?

>working as intended then ?

Yes... the whole of education is to make society ignorant of reality.

See here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYFxtNgOeiI

Then below...

Our brains are much worse at reality and thinking than thought. Science on reasoning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

Manufacturing consent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwU56Rv0OXM

https://vimeo.com/39566117

"Intended as an internal document. Good reading to understand the nature of rich democracies and the fact that the common people are not allowed to play a role."

Crisis of democracy

http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf

Education as ignorance

https://chomsky.info/warfare02/

Testing theories of representative government

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

1. We need "cogs" in the system. In a developed nation in the 21st century being a "cog" is a really great existence.

2. Profoundly gifted people generally do rise to the top as our system is already structured, assuming they want to, given the average amount of support.

"The System" as it stands is doing a great job of the dual goals of helping the average live their lives to the fullest and also giving the gifted a chance to rise above the rest.

I do agree that ‘cogs’ are necessary. However, shouldn’t the individual be able to decide that, not the educational system? The current system doesn’t enrich children in ways that allow kids to explore other options. Look up successful technology company founders - you’ll see that many went to alternative schools like Montessori. But, the vast majority of kids don’t have access to that type of exploratory education.

I disagree about your second point based on my experiences. I grew up ‘gifted’ in a working class, rust belt city. Many of my schoolmates ended up with decent middle class jobs. And, a surprising number even went on to get PhDs. An even more surprising number didn’t make it to graduation.

The majority of the PhDs ended up switching fields (with tremendous debt) after working for a few years. The few that went on to become professors, successful researchers, and innovatvators came from rich families with well-educated and successful parents.

My main criticism of our system is that it doesn’t veer far from basic primate behavior. I would even bet that a general model of primate hierarchical system would do well in predicting human success. And, that’s an absurd model, especially today. Humans have given up or suppressed many primate behaviors in order to live in the modern world. But, we still hold on to familial hierarchical behavior - maybe because the dopamine rush of being at the top just feels so damn good.

I am very curious to know your background and why you hold those opinions.

Interesting comment. I grew up in a blue-ish collar rust-belt city, was "gifted" (whatever that means) and ended up getting a PhD (no debts, though) that I now arguably don't make money from. Everything you mentioned is very common, but I'm not sure that observation points to some kind of change we can make versus the underlying day to day realities of the US circa 2017.

My big takeaway from years inside higher education both as a student and as staff and adjunct faculty is that the most successful people are those aligned with wealthy, connected families and despite my aptitude, I was always on the outside looking in. It's as though there are two colleges, two universities, which is the same in the "real world" also--a few get brought along because they're connected and the rest of us are encouraged to believe in the illusion, the lie, really, that we can have true upward mobility. I have been upwardly mobile, but only because where I came from was so low. In comparison to the insiders I am talking about, many of whom I would characterize as drooling idiots who would never make it on their own merits, my own arc is far less profound.

The children of the wealthy and connected will always have the upper hand and there's nothing you can do about it other than take big risks to start your own business and build up wealth faster than working for someone else can accomplish. If you succeed, you will be "new money" and remain an outsider. You may improve the lot of your heirs, however.

The biggest slap for me in my whole life of hard work and continuous improvement is the realization that I prospered more via marrying well than I have in my actual career and that even my relatively modest wealth does not compare to the most successful people because the bar has moved so incredibly far up.

What did you get your PhD in, from what quality school, and did you pursue a faculty position with the expectation of wealth?

Your last paragraph is particularly funny to me because it’s exactly my experience, too. For all my hard work and successes, my marriage had the most impact. It opened doors to me that weren’t previously available. And, that access was most important.

To your first point, business is largely a zero sum game at any given time for business owners. I believe the number of entrepreneurs who can be supported by the economic ecosystem is already at its current carrying capacity, so giving more opportunity to the poor will not increase the total sum but rather just change the social background of those who go on to become entrepreneurs. This is not a bad thing, but it still leaves us with the same number of people succeeding and failing as we have now.

To the anecdotes you mention, there is only a finite amount of basic research which can be done at any given time. A finite number of avenues which can be pursued. At a certain point the work being done by scientists becomes redundant. From this perspective, throwing more researchers at a problem doesn't necessarily increase our productivity. Those whose work is valued enough by someone willing to pay - either Universities or businesses - will be the ones who get to pursue that work. Again, I believe that the active research being done now is sufficiently pursuing those promising lines of research which exist.

To your third point, humanity has advanced very much from our primitive existence in the distant past, in terms of the well being of the masses as well as our collective capabilities.

If you feel the existence of hierarchies is antithetical to progress, I would challenge you to find any complex system in which hierarchy of some sort does not exist. I believe that hierarchy is a fundamental characteristic of productive, complex systems.

To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with hierarchies. I implied that when I said that ‘cogs’ are necessary. Hierarchies are a good way of organizing work.

But, I do think there is a problem with social and economic systems that encourage animal hierarchies - ones where a person’s birth status directly affects their future social status. That is very inefficient.

>Profoundly gifted people generally do rise to the top as our system is already structured, assuming they want to, given the average amount of support.

In the US? What makes you think that?

Well the public and private school system which the vast majority of youth in the US take part in has mechanisms for identifying the gifted. Those who excel in school generally go on in life to better themselves.

Most people are not profoundly gifted, so the majority simply do as well as their parents, give or take.

I don't know, wouldn't be so sure without actual supporting data.

Anecdotally I know many talented people who got "broken" at high school level (due to any number of issues, from poverty to physical and emotional trauma). Having connections, mentors, initial capital, educated family, it all helps a lot.

This is not US-specific either, I made it to the US from a war-torn country across the globe with no money or connections, but I am extremely stubborn. There were definitely people who didn't make it this far who arguably had the pure IQ advantage.

How could we possibly know this? We would at least need to know how many potentially profoundly gifted people there are before we can know if we’ve done a good job supporting them.

I think the problem is deeper than the author suggests. Not only are certain groups of people not getting the resources they need, there is also the matter of a cultural disconnect between the people in power who control the resources, and the underserved who may deserve them.

> "We do a pretty good job at identifying the kids who are good at throwing a football or playing a trumpet,"

We do a good job of this now, but if you look back, there was a time not long ago when a black person playing the trumpet, no matter how well, was not seen as valuable. It took time for jazz and other cultural things to enter the mainstream and become valued by the group of people who are in power.

There are already plenty of "Einsteins" out there, who got access to at least enough resources to explore their passions and express their creativity. However, they still fail to be recognised when they are invisible to people in positions of power, who may be too stuck inside their cultural framework to acknowledge them.

> We do a good job of this now

Actually, we don't. The fact that the best hockey players are bunched around certain birth months shows that we create these kinds of differentials.

> I think the problem is deeper than the author suggests. Not only are certain groups of people not getting the resources they need, there is also the matter of a cultural disconnect between the people in power who control the resources, and the underserved who may deserve them.

Beyond the cultural disconnect and more importantly, there is a disconnect in self-interest. It isn't in the interest of those in power to level the playing field. Humans are selfish creatures. We all want our family, friends, etc to have the advantage. We want ours to always have an advantage over others.

This isn't a conservative or liberal issue. It isn't bigots vs non-bigots. It's an innate human concern. Liberal parents/people want to advantage their children, families, etc over the others just as much as conservatives.

My main problem with this article and associate research is using patents as an indicator of invention. Patents are only an indicator of money, sometimes innovation, but certainly not invention.

For reference, innovation is taking existing ideas and implementing or combining them well, invention is creating wholly new works.

Invention is still mostly the domain of academia. Some of the big corporations can afford to fund research into true invention, but generally the risks don't make good business sense because the rate of return is so low.

Innovation happens frequently in startups, but patents are still a poor measure of it. Patents mainly measure whether someone can afford the lawyers to write the applications. In my experience in software, the patents themselves are only a loose approximation of any real technology. Perhaps in mechanical sciences they are more concrete.

Patents are obviously a poor proxy, even inventions are a poor proxy for social impact. But there's no reason to believe that the data would look significantly different if we were able to measure it directly.

What's interesting is that the great innovations of the early 20th century, weren't by a diverse group of people. Eastern European Jews (of which Einstein was a member) produced a disproportionate amount of those discoveries. This was despite the fact that they were among the most persecuted groups in history. Because of this, I don't think that US government policy is the major reason for the differences in the article.

"Eastern European Jews" should be more like "motivated, liberal, hardworking and a terrific high school identifying talent early". There is a related thread on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15684785

They were among the most repressed human being on Earth. The entire Jewish population is still recovering from the Holocaust (based on global population level).

I often fear when researchers like the NYT author start conditioning on unchangeable characteristics like ethnicity and gender. It invariably implies a villain based on unchangeable characteristics like ethnicity and gender.

The classification of "Jews" has been the most innovative. Should we start making laws conditioned on someone being a Jew so that's non jews can become more innovative ? Does this not sound like a bad idea? (I am trying to dodge godwins law)

Einstein was born in Southern Germany, with ancestors that had been there for centuries. German Wikipedia describes his family as "assimilated, non-orthodox, Jewish-German middleclass" and quotes him as being grateful to his town of birth, Ulm, for part of his character. English WP says "The Einsteins were non-observant Ashkenazi Jews", and he got the arguable most important part of his education in Switzerland where he moved to early on.

He was already traveling the world and giving lectures well before the rise of the Nazis, and he "simply" didn't return to Germany when they were in power. I can't speak for him, but I would assume he would consider himself as having had a good life with ample opportunities. The Nazis simply didn't even have a chance to persecute him, if anything the FBI made a huge dossier on him for his socialist views, though even that wasn't really persecution of the kind you ascribe to him by mere association. He had plenty opportunities, he wasn't born poor and certainly not Eastern European. I can't even begin to guess where you have any of that from, but it's not from the actual life of the actual person. And if that's the only reason you think the article is mistaken, then you don't have a (valid) reason.

That does not mean that Jews didn't face sharp and harsh discrimination by the very widespread and strong antisemitism at the time. Arguably they were one of the most prosecuted people in European history. And despite all that they still fared very well in comparison to the majority population.

Which makes the narrative that the lack of success in other groups is entirely grounded in lack of opportunity due to discrimination, rather shaky.

What about some actual data? The article does offer data, not a "narrative".

Eastern European Jews had limited occupation opportunities and subject to special restrictions. Their disproportional amount in occupations that allowed them in might as well be consequence of government policies - which prevents them to do other occupations.

Also, educated richer Eastern European Jews tended to leave Eastern Europe way more then poor Jews who were numerous.

> We do a pretty good job at identifying the kids who are good at throwing a football or playing a trumpet

The number of kids who are trained in sports yet never reach the professional level is absolutely enormous, and it has far-reaching consequences for them.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/oct/06/football-bi...

Those boys are all good, really. It is mostly that the number of top positions is very limited, not that they would be bad at football or lazy.

Good God this is infuriating. The single most anomalous figure in the whole article and not one word about it.

Surely, the over representation of people of Asian descent in this, and similar findings, is worthy of some analysis?

I appreciate it spoils the narrative but, if people actually cared, it must make sense to look at the systemic cases that buck the trend.

At the very least acknowledge it. Completely ignoring whole racial groups strikes me as somewhere between blatantly rude and racist.

It's social science, where theories don't need to be falsifiable and data is only used to support you ideology and adapted to fit your narrative but never used to challenge some sacred a priori believes.

Well, given that most people in the world by far live outside the U.S.A, and that people that do not have opportunities are outside the US, in my opinion the low hanging fruit for innovation is in Africa, South America and China,and India not the USA.

In Africa you have kids that are not well fed and after 2 hours of intellectual work they can't continue because of the low nutrition of food!!

In equatorial Africa I can't even think clearly myself because of the intense heat all year long. In India and South Asia it is worse half a year because of humidity.

I seriously believe that climate has a lot to do with intellectual output, specially math is very sensitive to outside temperature.

China probably has the brightest near future, but for this it has to change their culture. Innovating is breaking and changing the rules, something China is very bad at.

I’m a bit bothered by how society == USA, and that’s it. There’s a world outside of USA, with people inventing things and helping society. Maybe it’s time we start thinking more globally, instead we’re just at globalized thinking.

I can understand that feeling, when I clicked I thought it was going to be about somewhere else, the Sudan, or Congo maybe, those places where genius is snuffed out hour by hour.

There is certainly a place for a discussion of issues at a national level. While the Times certainly covers issues of international import, it is most likely to affect policy (or influence individuals) at the US level.

In addition, while the statistics and research reflect the situation in the US, the principles are still relevant to other countries and the world as a whole. There is work to be done in strengthening social networks and role models for people everywhere. Might as well start at home (wherever that may be.)

I think we are losing innovations from people for other reasons besides this as well. Smart people, even geniuses, can have difficulty deciding what they should be working on and what is worth their time in this modern world with all sorts of crap, and most of the sciences having had a lot of the more obvious or low hanging fruit and what's left is a lot of the smaller, much harder and more expensive to prove, and potentially less interesting aspects of it (Particle Theory, String Theory, etc).

Meanwhile some of the best minds of this generation are probably getting sucked into Silicon Valley or the financial industry, a lot of them to work on "yet another social network app" or a better way to trick people into giving you pennies (ads or microtransactions), or in making a slightly better trading algorithm, because that's what pays and academia doesn't come anywhere close to that (plus has all sorts of issues itself besides that).

Granted we don't have nearly as much war as we've had in the past, which I'm sure did a great job of killing off all sorts of brilliant minds, so maybe it's balanced out by that a bit.

I am not a genius, but I am pretty smart. I consistently scored extremely well growing up, and got put into a lot of accelerated or "gifted" programs, but once I hit the real world I stumbled and spent a lot of my career working for companies or on software that ultimately didn't go anywhere (I did a pretty good job and got paid for them, but the impact they made ended up being minimal). I've got all sorts of ideas of things I could be working on in my spare time, but nothing really stands out as being really worthwhile for society.

And anyways the thing that I enjoy doing most right now is designing board and card games, something that the world probably doesn't need more of, honestly (Over a thousand games get released every single year right now, and there are a ton of really great games that come out every year, it's crazy).

> I encourage you to take a moment to absorb the size of these gaps. Women, African-Americans, Latinos, Southerners, and low- and middle-income children are far less likely to grow up to become patent holders and inventors.

I know the author uses patents as a proxy for innovation. But is it really a valid proxy?

Do we want to maximize innovation or do we want to maximize patent holdings?

Why not remove patents and construct a modern understandig of "innovation". Did Einstein even patent anything in his own name? What about his contemporaries: Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger?

While this is a great suggestion, it doesn't defeat the idea of the article.

Einstein did patent inventions, around 50 are known. He also worked at a patent office for 7 years. I think you still have a point, I also don't think patents necessarily equal innovation, but Einstein simply is not the best example for it.

One tangential point is that earning a scholarship seems to increase your chances of winning another. I recently heard on the local news that X student had earned a prestigious scholarship, and that he had previously won multiple others. What's the use of giving away a lot of money and recognition to someone? When is is "too much"?

Scholarship resources being limited, you should maybe get less chances to win another scholarship after winning one. Then you'd get more people with scholarships, and maybe some of them would get the confidence boost they need to actually perform instead of work stupid jobs.

One particular case I always thought was especially unethical is for some people to win scholarships and then change branches entirely. I.e. to use the scholarship for an application to med school, or law school, or whatever other program they didn't get into.

Here's the link for original research and presentation:

http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/inve...

To use Occam's razor - this is an income inequality issue.

How does this jive with the Silicon Valley trope that ideas aren't worth very much in and of themselves, but the people and teams who can execute on them are?

That trope is sort of bullshit. Both matter.

It does apply when the idea is some kitschy social media thing but not so much when it's a real key innovation.

The problem is we don't have much of a theory of innovation.

Google beat AltaVista etc because of execution, not because page ranking was the most amazing invention in history.

But to get to Google you need a trail of gamechanger innovations in science, physics, and math. All those innovations were created by individual geniuses armed with a pen, some paper, a brain, and maybe some discussion with other geniuses.

At that level, ideas don't need to be executed with a commercial strategy and a website, because they're more abstract and far more powerful than a startup. In fact they create an envelope in which new kinds of execution become possible.

I'm skeptical of whether there can be a theory of innovation. Innovation means a novel movement in state space toward some new maximum in the fitness landscape. Each movement is going to be different. Each innovation is a unique thing.

A theory of innovation would be like a theory of adaptation. You can say vague general things like "adaptations occur because of natural selection" but you could never formulate a theory specifying the exact sequence of concrete changes or events leading to an adaptation.

I think it’s quite dangerous to rely on such simple logic. Great ideas are not worthless and it’s not only execution that matters.

The value of some "life-changing for all" ideas is not always based in building a sellable product, as Alfred Wegener could tell us.

On the other hand, there is not point in being granted a patent unless you have a lot of money and can afford to hold it.

It's "jibe" not "jive" although some people are trying to normalize jive because it sounds better, I guess. Jibe is a nautical term, jive is an inner-city dialect circa 1970s.

This is unsurprising. Simply look at what it takes to win the Regeneron (nee Intel nee Westinghouse) Science Talent Search. If you don't have a lot of adult support, you aren't getting anywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneron_Science_Talent_Searc...

Intellectual Property needs to be abolished. Google: "Against Intellectual Monopoly"

Equality of opportunity is a terrible concept. Even if we somehow solve it, it would just be shuffling people up and down the ladder of an unfair system.

Instead, we should be dismantling the ladder. Real equality means equality of outcomes.

Most people who talk about "equal opportunity" do so because they want to avoid talking about real equality and its implications.

Can you expand on what you mean but real equality?

>Equality of opportunity is a terrible concept.

What? So you are in favor of other people (read: rich white people with parents that have money) having more opportunities than people that were born poor due to mere chance?

>Real equality means equality of outcomes.

I completely disagree. Real equality does NOT mean equality of outcomes. People have opportunities. People have choices. People make choices and these choices have real consequences. I personally do not think it's fair to force the same outcome on some college kid that binge drinks and smokes weed all day versus some college kid that studies his bum off. Imagine what this does to incentives!?

>Most people who talk about "equal opportunity" do so because they want to avoid talking about real equality and its implications.

Would you elaborate on this? I'll be honest here that I'm not too well-versed in this topic but I think it's interesting to talk about nonetheless.

Full disclosure: I'm from the Netherlands where I feel there is quite some equal opportunity. Nearly every kid can go to a good primary school, high school, and any university if they try hard enough. There are little financial barriers as tuition is only 2.000/year. Contrast this to US universities if you do not have a scholarship, etc.

However, the fact that everyone can go to the same university doesnt mean that everyone will end up exactly at the same place. People make choices and these choices have consequences.

> So you are in favor of other people (read: rich white people with parents that have money) having more opportunities than people that were born poor due to mere chance?

He explicitly wrote that no, he favors equality of outcomes.

This educational system you describe is great, no doubt, but are you sure it offers __equal opportunity__ to every kid?

In my opinion, according to family history, background etc (roughly boiling down to the income history in past 1-2-3 generations), kids won't be able to extract the same possibilities from the same conditions offered to each one: studies will be harder for some more than for others, simply because of the background, logistics etc, which will require not only working harder from someone who already does, but doing something they might not even know about: aiming higher, not compromising where others would be allowed to, having more confidence than an average kid their age, etc.

I don't really know how to solve this (I think this part incumbs to family, but is that equal opportunity still?). The best thing about the system you describe that they carefully detect and extract the "nuggets" we sometimes get here. But I should thinks all educational systems nowadays do that more or less well.

How do you propose to measure whether two outcomes are equal? Not everyone wants the same things. How many soccer games are equivalent to a guitar?

When people talk about the equality of outcomes, I am always reminded of Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. [0]:

"THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal..."

[0] https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge...

Equality of outcome's implication is a culture engaging in an authoritarian and quixotic pursuit of perfect human misery. It is hard enough to ensure a specific outcome for yourself, let alone another, and even less so to make two people come out exactly the same. Equality of opportunity at least acknowledges that culture produces winners and losers.

Dying in the gutter because you can't afford health insurance seems pretty miserable to me. Working at Walmart for minimum wage to make Sam Walton's useless children richer seems pretty miserable to me.

There are many well proven ways to make people more equal, strong government welfare programs being one. They are very straightforward.

Culture doesn't make people winners and losers, a brutally enforced system of authoritarian capitalism does.

You are saying one thing, but describing another.

We want people to always have good opportunities to bootstrap themselves out of a terrible situation (your gutter and wallmart situations). But we don't want to remove all the rewards from turning time into value.

"brutally enforced system of authoritarian capitalism" think you have a few opinions there that are deeply rooted in feelings ...

When you are alone on an island, the world rewards you when you spend time changing things for the better (eg hunt for food). If in that situation you have the opportunity to trade you will be even better off.

Things only go south when free markets also create a free labor market. Then the power of markets pushes strongly on those wages. Even if there is no evil intent by anyone, companies not ignoring this push will not be around for long ...

You're pretty clueless as to the history of capitalism.

From war is a racket:

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil intersts in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."[p. 10]

"War is a racket. ...It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." [p. 23]

"The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." [p. 24]

General Butler is especially trenchant when he looks at post-war casualties. He writes with great emotion about the thousands of traumatised soldiers, many of who lose their minds and are penned like animals until they die, and he notes that in his time, returning veterans are three times more likely to die prematurely than those who stayed home.

http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/...

Blum:

http://williamblum.org/aer/read/137

US distribution of wealth

https://imgur.com/a/FShfb

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

The Centre for Investigative Journalism

http://www.tcij.org/

Some history on US imperialism by us corporations.

https://kurukshetra1.wordpress.com/2015/09/27/a-brief-histor...

Why am I "pretty clueless" when your comment does not even address anything I said, let alone counter it?

You add a whole different perspective, but one that is fully compatible on top of what I said, nobody is denying that part of capitalism. Powerful people, no matter what system, can do horrible things without regard for the victims ... and under capitalism companies can become powerful too.

You don't understand what is happening, the elites are at war with all citizens of their respective states because they fear the free flow of information through their society. That is why are collecting everything. Go view the privacy video and skip to 1:02:30 and watch.

So hear it from national security advisor of the united states. If you are the non fraction of the 1% you are the enemy, aka spying is aimed at politically controlling your perception because they know your brain doesn't see the world as it is. See the science:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

Every citizen called a "global menace" here by Zbig:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7ZyJw_cHJY

Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

Government does not work for you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYFxtNgOeiI

Book:

http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf

Privacy video

https://theintercept.com/a-conversation-about-privacy/

Again, since I didn't talk about those issues, you cannot conclude what I do or do not know.

I don't see a contradiction between Equality of Opportunity and welfare programs. Indeed, they seem to be proposed hand-in-hand by most people, so I'll set aside for a moment the emotional content of your argument.

I do not see how invoking 'authoritarian capitalism' serves as a refutation that cultures of human beings creates winners and losers.

The distinction to make here is that Equality of Outcome requires everyone to have the same outcome. Feeling as you must do, surely you would prefer a reduction in inequality, not mandatory equality?

People aren’t equal. When we invest our resources in the wrong people out society suffers because of it.

We’re extremely good at investing in the wrong people.

Neither way is fair, but maybe we’d be better at being unfair if we invested in the right people to lead us.

We culturally have a problem with the inability to accurately judge, much less even tell parents what their children are capable of, or not capable of.

In the end even with the best education, some people will grow up to be tow truck drivers, low skill factory workers, or service industry personal - its just how the split works out - not everyone is going to be super smart, some will be average, some will be below average, and some will give a wet bucket of sand a run for its money.

How do you ensure equal outcomes?

Keeping everyone equally poor and miserable is an easy way to achieve this

Only way?

Communists have been consistently achieving this in the past 100 years, so at least we know it’s possible!

Why is equality of outcomes desirable? And how is it measurable? Or sustainable?

I agree with you. Equality of opportunity is equality in probability. But people have only one life, and if you have only one shot, then probability of it is somewhat a useless concept.

The best goal is to have a steadily increasing minimum outcome.

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