Comment by underlipton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by underlipton | Hacker News Reader

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They're basically saying that social inequality is not the sum total of rich people having made good decisions and poor people having made poor decisions. As an individual, it is possible to make savvy decisions that raise your circumstances; however, as a society-level phenomenon, it's incorrect to say that poor people are only poor because they screwed up. As an extreme hypothetical, consider a system where

1) Your annual income is determined by making one specific, arbitrary decision

2) It is possible to be observant enough to make the decision intelligently, but most are not able to perceive the clue clearly and must guess; this is reflected in an outcome distribution that skews towards a preponderance of incorrect answers

3) Making the decision correctly nets you $1 mil; incorrectly, $1,000

4) There are no other opportunities to make money

The inequality present in this system is largely a function of the magnitude of the spoils/demerits for being correct/incorrect, not the distribution of correct/incorrect answers.

>They're basically saying that social inequality is not the sum total of rich people having made good decisions and poor people having made poor decisions. As an individual, it is possible to make savvy decisions that raise your circumstances; however, as a society-level phenomenon, it's incorrect to say that poor people are only poor because they screwed up.

Does anyone honestly think this? Is this a strawman? I don't think you need a study to make you conclude that individual choices don't explain 100% of differences in income/wealth. Someone born in a worse school district is obviously going to be at a disadvantage compared to someone in a better school district, all else being equal. The same exists for luck or other random factors (eg. meeting the right people).

I grew up around people with the belief poor people are poor because they are lazy or made bad decisions.

If a poor person would make good decisions and not be lazy, they wouldn’t be poor.

This is probably very different from person to person. Most of the poor people I know personally are hard-working, intelligent people, and are not poor because they screwed some important thing up. It's just circumstances/family obligations, and not any personal failing.

I'm also aware of a couple of people who appeared to have a reasonable shot at a stable life with some level of wealth, but they seemed determined to squander it, maybe due to mental/emotional trouble and addiction.

I'd like to see society change so that we afford more respect, stability, and comfort to the least fortunate among us, but where this fits into a discussion about personal choices is a contentious issue.

> This is probably very different from person to person

Yes, well, of course. The point of statistical analysis is to account for this variation at the level of the population. If anecdotes were sufficiently explanatory, we wouldn’t need to do the math.

Yes, many people think that, and I’d argue many more maybe don’t but use it as convenient kayfabe to blame the poor for their lot / undermine attempts to address inequality.

If you want numbers, just look to the numbers of people who attend prosperity gospel churches. That’s just one very specific example of attributing individuals’ circumstances to their specific decisions (in this case, the individual’s piety)

You may or may not have been paying attention to the recent SCOTUS decision on Affirmative Action, wherein the notion you are questioning the prominence of is ubiquitous amongst the discourse pro-revocation

> Does anyone honestly think this? Is this a strawman?

My aunt does. She is a conservative lobbyist. She believes that giving a penny to charity is bad because every single poor person is lazy and made bad choices.

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