1. The same moral leanings that are identified with right-leaning parties are moral leanings, that when applied to your own life, can help make you more wealthy.
2. Having these moral leanings have no impact on your future success.
Considering that in absolute numbers the rich are more charitable and pay more taxes than the poor, and if you believe that the majority of the rich are strong value-creators (implying that they are generative, and are contributing positively to the economy rather than playing a zero-sum game), then for any portion of factor #1 above that is true, there is a moral argument to be made that adopting right-leaning values leads to a better world for both yourself, and for society as a whole.
All of this is speculative and stated in broad generalizations, but it's an argument that I've worked into my mind as a Pascal's wager of sorts and that I've found very convincing.
However, I think there are some other considerations that should be factored in:
- The good that left wing policies would have done if they had been implemented.
- Situations where the economy is a zero sum game (e.g. desirable housing).
- The possibility that the good that comes from the rich is not evenly distributed. (In this case I mean distribution different between different segments of the non-rich. I don't mean distribution between the rich and everyone else.)
It seems to me that the logic that you present could act as a sort of social contract that basically say "in exchange for implementing right wing policies that make conservatives rich, you will benefit from their charity, taxes, and economic growth". In that case, I could see the increasing unrest and polarization in America being due to a growing segment of the population feeling that the contract has been broken.
But if you are not rich, it will do the opposite.
And luck. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610395/if-youre-so-smart-... (If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.)
Chance is a substantial (but not the only) component to success.
I give you a machine, once per year say, and put it at the entrance to your home. It's broken. If you fix it, it will, with 5% probability, give you a ton of money. In the other 95% of cases you get nothing, it disappears, wait for next year.
Is chance a major component? Of course. But not tinkering with that machine is lower EV than tinkering with it.
If you stay in bed all day, ignore the machine and do something else instead, you're not going to get anything, ever. It will never spontaneously open by chance.
You post below that "you can do everything wrong and still succeed". No, you actually can't. If you're picturing a startup founder that makes a lot of seemingly silly decisions - well, they still made the (high risk) decision to start that company.
If you lay in bed all day, or work your corner shop job forever, then you are not increasing your EV.
I work in a field that is very heavily based on probability; I literally bet for a living. Luck is a considerable component, but if you want to tell me skill is irrelevant, then I'd like to show you what happens if I just tweak this parameter here...
This is not saying that there is no effect of skill/talent/intelligence/effort, but that the effect size is smaller than commonly thought and smaller than the variance due to luck.
I wasn't born to an upper middle class family and I didn't get a ten million dollar trust fund. I don't have the correct muscle fibers to be an Olympian, etc. That's happened, it's done. That comparison is completely pointless and irrelevant for me.
From the perspective of decision making, what matters is the difference in expected value of different decisions that I make now, from T=0, not some time in the past that I can't affect.
(FWIW, 'skill/talent/intelligence/effort' are also part of that initial distribution).
The idea that success is primarily random makes no sense at all, because there are certainly paths that an individual can take that will not under any circumstances result in outsized success.
There are paths that an individual can take that will by definition result in failure, like if I went out and drove my car into a wall at 100mph.
That still depends on the type of decision and context.
If you are talking about "should I play video game or should I study" that is a type of decision where valuing individual effort is absolutely beneficial.
If you are talking about making a decision based on evaluating other people/companies based on their life outcomes, then awareness of the role of luck is absolutely beneficial. You need to look beyond the results and also evaluate the decision making and luck that went into obtaining those results.
It's not an either or sort of thing. When we over-estimate the role of decision making in producing outcomes, we end up with a worse model of the world that will lead to worse decision making.
Thanks for making my point better than I.