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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Most of life is luck, with regards to success and economic prosperity. We’ve built a system that ignores that for the benefit of a privileged few, using fairy tales around exceptionalism and faux meritocracy. We should build socioeconomic systems where luck is less a component for survival and living a good life, imho. I think we’re on our way there (support of democratic socialism and their candidates is at record highs, mostly around the young, and the old age out at a rate of 2M per year 55+ [higher support of capitalism because they were lucky under it]), but it’s going to take another decade or two to see the improvements (political cycles, electorate turnover, policy implementation lag, etc.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49357337 (citations)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027462 (citations)

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Yes and no. I can think of easily three decision or inflection points in my life where if i went left instead of right, id be a multi millionaire. I can think of even more where my life direction would have been radically different.

Luck plays a huge part on where you start and land but no one is totally unlucky. Luck strikes everyone across all starting points.

What i have seen with my loved ones that struggle is that they have had many lucky breaks and somehow keep squandering them in a sad self fulfilling prophecy. Success begets success and failure begets failure. Both cycles are reversible.

Keep in mind “success” is not rich/famous but financially stable.

Luck is just as important even with perfect economic equality. It’s just that economic luck gets replaced by luck of genetics, luck of immaterial circumstances, etc.

I have always found the assumption strange that one is somehow preferable to the other, but most people seem to believe that, so maybe one day they’ll get what they’re asking for and then find out that it’s not what they wanted after all.

You must be joking. Democratic Socialism is just Socialism with a prettier name. Socialism does not work, full stop, unless you're in the group at the top controlling the strings. Don't point at the nordic countries, they have far less progressive taxation policies that the US when you factor VAT in.

I thought it was more like, if it doesn’t work it’s socialism, if it does work it’s not socialism? This is why Norway is at the same time called not socialism (because it works) and socialism (because conservatives don’t want us to even try adopting what works in Norway).

Worked just fine when the US had a much higher tax rate. We just bring back the higher tax rates. Easy peasy.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcRRTC0ETlS/

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