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Comment by throwdecro | Hacker News Reader

Real-world success is generally a matter of luck no matter what the incentives are. You can't make your cancer research pan out, you can only do it diligently and find out later if it was the right direction. You can definitely screw it up. But you can't make it work without a bit of luck.

If people can't keep their luck-based gains, no one has any real reason to try anything unusual. Everyone would be chasing the puck instead of skating to the open ice hoping to catch a break. Society would stagnate.

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Things look much more predictable and fair if you adjust your definition of success a little bit. A modest life with reasonable stability and time for some recreation and vacations is within reach for a large fraction of people (in Norcal - don't know about elsewhere) with some hard work and financial restraint. This feels like success to me.

> you can't make it work without a bit of luck.

You won't get any luck if you don't try.

Working to put yourself into a situation where luck can find you will greatly increase your luck.

Re: luck, from my father, "It's amazing how lucky well-prepared people are."

I guess if you can only imagine a society structured like it is today.

If we all accepted that luck is the driving force, decided that we would rather live in a world where hard work and intelligence pays off - then it's possible to imagine a world in which you're rewarded for hard work (on areas of importance) and gains are socialized instead of losses. The socialized gains could pay people who worked hard and their ideas didn't pan out.

I'm not saying this is a world that would work and is better.

But it's pretty unimaginative to think it's just flat out impossible to have progress in any society that isn't structured around luck.

Intelligent people tried central planning and it didn’t work. Repeatedly.

If you are going to propose banging our head into that wall again you can’t just naively point out how great it sounds from first principles. Been there, done that. Instead you need to seriously grapple with those failures and convincingly explain why this time will be different.

Seems to be working well for Walmart. A major problem with central planning is timely flow of accurate information. Although this is still a problem, it has become much easier to do so than in the past.

Do not confuse forms of governance intended for whole societies with those that work for smaller, more controlled and more selective organizations.

Walmart cannot be compared to the USA or China for sure, but your criticism is a little pedantic and presumptuous. There are national economies that are in the same order of magnitude as, or smaller than, that of Walmart's.

As context, if my numbers are right, then at ~$550B annual revenue Walmart would be around the GDP of Belgium and Thailand.

Or about the 25th largest economy in the world, if looking at it that way.

And it's a better corporate analogy than most, considering it essentially does everything from retail to services.

And it’s failing again! Interest rate interventionism has been slowly eroding social and economic mobility in the west for 30 years!

Why is decentralized planning impossible? Why can't areas of importance be picked by democratic vote?

It seems like a possible option.

I think the hard part of that is socializing the definition of "areas of importance"

Also getting everyone to accept one worldview. Maybe the most important area of importance would be educating people to see things the way you see...

I am all for it as long as I can decide what is important!

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