Comment by ChaitanyaSai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChaitanyaSai | Hacker News Reader

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The author bemoans the fact that he was handicapped in his early life by his unlucky (un-wealthy) circumstances. Being born into money, or with a good intellect, sporting ability, or looks (to name a few other valued traits), that isn't luck?

Being born into money is somehow different from the others?

Wealth is a proxy for one of the other talents. Wealth has always played a role in our selection process. Smarts, at some point, lead to an accumulation of wealth. Wealth signals, a lot more often than not, good genetic material that was awarded in previous iterations. Wealth offers the carriers of this material a better chance at survival, even if the current generation has regressed to the no-good-frat-boy mean. And if the chances are not availed, wealth is squandered in a few generations.

The idea that the wealthy, but dumb get a free ride, ultimately jeopardizing the entire system is foolish. There will always be smart people around to either guide them and their finances for a percentage, or fleece them and penalize them for their ignorance.

Enron filtered aggressively for morons. A fat lot of good it did them. A society is only a larger collection of vested interests.

Money hasn't existed long enough for it to have any hand in human evolution. Social and economic Darwinism don't describe the real world, they describe how some people feel the real world should operate.

Furthermore, the fact that inherited wealth is a longstanding tradition isn't a qualitative judgment one way or another, post facto rationalizations notwithstanding. Not everything that's existed for a long time is necessarily some happy equilibrium that benefits all sides.

Money is a proxy for other evolutionary factors. Is there are a good reason to disagree with this? Money by itself does not promote the well being of its holders, the underlying factors do. Lottery winners squander theirs within a few years, let alone a generation.

Observing that money is a proxy for many desirable traits, and helps, and has helped, in bettering survival chances is not social Darwinism. To assume that the unintelligent wealthy are somehow more lucky, and that morons must be filtered out is.

Inherited wealth is much a tradition in the same way gestating your young (outside of the womb) is. Happy equilibrium or not, that is the way culture and nature have co-transformed, and determining the causative reasons is not necessarily blind Darwinism.

Here's a statement: On average, the wealthy are smarter, prettier, and taller, than the not-wealthy. Do you disagree with that? Or do you agree, but attribute the correlation to happenstance?

>Observing that money is a proxy for many desirable traits, and helps, and has helped, in bettering survival chances is not social Darwinism. To assume that the unintelligent wealthy are somehow more lucky, and that morons must be filtered out is.

The unintelligent wealthy are more lucky, because they don't have to struggle. The letter writer struggled his whole life doing things he appears not to enjoy very much to get into the right school, make the right deals, etc, so that he could retire and go live on a diamond-studded houseboat and smoke weed or whatever he's going to do with his life now. If he had been born extremely rich, he could have done what he's doing now from the start. If he had been born moderately rich or an Ivy League legacy, he could have done it with less difficulty.

>Here's a statement: On average, the wealthy are smarter, prettier, and taller, than the not-wealthy.

If you want to select for smarts, looks, or height, then select for smarts, looks, or height, not some proxy which will never be as good as direct measurement.

Money is a proxy for other evolutionary factors. Is there are a good reason to disagree with this?

Yes, there is: wealth doesn't imply a greater number of offspring. Survival is a relatively low economic hurdle, as is raising and nurturing children. By asserting any real similarity, you're conflating survival with some modern concept of success.

Here's a statement: On average, the wealthy are smarter, prettier, and taller, than the not-wealthy. Do you disagree with that?

I agree that wealth is a social signal. It might even imply things that aren't immediately apparent (though you'll know someone is tall and attractive before you'll know they're rich, most of the time). But even the facile comparison of a peacock's feathers and a rich person's designer clothing doesn't really hold water in my mind. I think a lot of our evolutionary urges might be sublimated in our struggles for success, but that doesn't make them the same things.

wealth doesn't imply a greater number of offspring

It did in preindustrial times, which is to say for practically all of human history. I recently read a quite impressive study of birth records in a scandinavian country (forget which) that showed a significant difference in the number of surviving children of rich and poor women.

I would argue that in preindustrial times the rich and the poor were on different sides of a subsistence level income. This was a huge distinction until recently, but in the present day Warren Buffet doesn't have a harem, nor does he have several hundred children. Wealth and progeny don't scale.

I agree, but the correlation also applies to adopted children of the wealthy. Would you attribute that to happenstance, or dispute it?

The children of the wealthy are also richer than the rest of the population. Would you dispute that?

On average the wealthy attend better schools, receive tons preparatory courses, are providing with learning assistance, receive better health care and endure more plastic surgery than the not-wealthy. Do you disagree with that?

Most "white male Americans" have inherited "wealth". They were born white male Americans. You start at the top of the global order even if you are penniless relative to a few others.

The author may bemoan it and may secretly (or openly) want all the unfair advantages he can get but that has nothing to do with the point he is making regarding meritocracy.

It may be completely unfair that you are born super-capable but society does better when you get ahead in life because of it.

"It may be completely unfair that you are born super-capable but society does better when you get ahead in life because of it."

I agree, and say the same about being rich and providing capital to the smart, or passing it on to your own progeny who stand a relatively better chance of ending up with the "good, success determining, bouquet of traits.

Ah - but the argument is that society would be better off with a real meritocracy rather than the current wealth-distorted one. Not to speak of a society where everyone was given the opportunity to succeed as thoroughly as possible. "No Child Left Behind" - really.

Most social organizations filter for other criteria, and tell successful applicants they are screening for intelligence. No different than looking for "rock stars" and telling them they're genuises.

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