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Comment by lenitabinol | Hacker News Reader

I read Arthashastra last year and had mixed feelings about the book at the end. It has a Machiavellian-type determination for success but also holds fast to the belief that the circumstances of one's birth determines their potential.

Certainly some wisdom in ancient writings but need to be taken with a grain of salt.

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Life expectancy of a child born in [1][2]:

Baltimore, MD: 72

Greenwich, CT: 89

Djamena, Chad: 53

I cannot argue that the children born in those three places have the same potential, everything else being equal.

Even children born in the same place, the biggest predictor of "success" in the USA is not ability but wealth of parents [3].

Can we escape the geography and parental endowments of our birth to maximize our potential? Yes, that is the exception not the norm. On a good day, I would argue that escaping the constraints of our birth and maximizing our potential is the goal of civilization. But not today ;)

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

[2] https://qz.com/1462111/map-what-story-does-your-neighborhood...

[3] https://www.wnpr.org/post/georgetown-study-wealth-not-abilit...

The same people who call the five[1] greek-letter castes of Brave New World a dystopia[2] voluntarily sort themselves by five-digit postal codes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269640

[1] already an increase over the traditional trinity of upper, middle, and working classes. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24222905

[2] in part due to its solution for escaping geography and parental endowments?

Things change but they still remain the same.

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