Comment by trappist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trappist | Hacker News Reader

The model assigns opportunities every 6 months for 40 years and decides whether the talents of the potential beneficiary are adequate to exploit the opportunity.

It doesn't work this way. People waiting for opportunities don't encounter them with the same frequency as people actively looking for and/or trying to manufacture them. An opportunity for me to double my assets or income might exist, but will I even be aware of it? If I am, and my talent is adequate to exploit it, what kind of risk does it come with and what is my tolerance for such risk?

The last event in my life roughly conforming to the opportunities generated by this model was something I actively sought, carefully selected among hundreds of similar opportunities, and took enormous (stupid, I'd be saying now if it hadn't worked out) risk to exploit.

I think the whole point of the paper which the writers at PBS might have glossed over is simply "we can reproduce this outcome with an extremely simple set of hypotheses". That's how I read it, at least, and that's something that's bound to cross the mind of someone familiar with agent based modelling. And if all they want is produce a power law distribution over income, that's all they need. Further model complications only become relevant if they lead off to new conclusions, or different outcomes from the generally expected outcome under particular circumstances. What you're suggesting would be, on the simple basis of some academic pragmatism -- and the fact that they still have to start from somewhere -- left to further studies, adding stuff to this model while citing the original paper.

But all that you're suggest would indeed bring back at least some degree of agency to the whole thing, even if just as being able to find, sort and act upon opportunities.

Opportunity comes for those who can seek it out, which predisposes a certain level of security (for most, though not all). Risk taking is done on a scale close to risk tolerance, and risk tolerance is higher when the downsides are slimmer.

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