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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I don't know how any definition of "fair opportunity" encompasses getting a better outcome than someone else despite putting in the same amount of effort,[1] just because your parents had money.

[1] I had "effort and intelligence" here, but I don't think "intelligence" belongs. Our human capital is the hours of life that we are given here on this earth. Free will is what we choose to do with those hours. Getting a better outcome from the same hours of labor, just because of the composition of your parents' DNA, isn't fair. It might be natural and inevitable, but that doesn't mean it's fair.

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The simple answer is you're using a definition of "fair opportunity" that is different from what the people who disagree with you are using. Opportunities can simultaneously be 'fair' and 'unfair' depending on which definition you use.

Personally, I don't find the Harrison Bergeron definition of 'fair' to be particularly useful. It seems to be questioning things for the mere sake of questioning things. Yes, in the cosmic sense, everything is unfair, but what's your point? Society wasn't made to give everyone equal "cosmic fairness". This is how you create a society where the gifts of peoples' talents and circumstance go unused. By contrast, the people who are disagreeing with you are interested in maximizing the usefulness of these gifts. Improving peoples' circumstances is part of this, but only one part.

Not all effort is equal, though. Learning to discern which sorts of effort are more worthwhile is an important life skill.

Toiling away for 16 hour days in a factory with no AC isn't necessarily as valuable to others as working from home on computer problems that have huge impact.

And I say this as someone who has done both of those things personally.

The issue is how much of that inequality derives from things inside versus outside our control. Many (most?) people who labor in a factory for 16 hours a day don't choose to do it rather writing code for an equal length of time for much higher pay. To the extent that the lack of choice derives from circumstances that a person didn't choose as an adult, that is unfair. It might be inevitable, but its unfair.

It's not as if I chose to do one when I had opportunity to do the other. The reverse would be far more accurate, that I chose to do what I did for lack of other opportunities at the time.

And yet, oddly enough, doing the one helped me get the other job. Not many come out of a factory job with a letter of commendation from the company president, after all.

I think it is true that we don't all have equal access to opportunity, and that extent I do think it unfair. My solution to that is to use my advantages to create more opportunities for those who lack the same and I have done this where I was able.

>>To the extent that the lack of choice derives from circumstances that a person didn't choose as an adult, that is unfair. It might be inevitable, but its unfair.

Again, its not. Unless you are stuck in a war zone or in some remote corner of Africa.

Most people in developed and developing nations today have the freedom to make decisions that decide how they are going live their lives. For centuries we've fought and asked for these rights, Now we have them. The fact is most people have fewer reasons to blame for their failures these days. Sooner or later you have to face the fact, you are what you are because of your decisions.

Even the person who works 16 hours at a factory has a choice. It might be a difficult choice, but the person still has some remote chance. The question is do you want to the same work another 15 years from now, or can you do something in your spare time and change that.

There are always going to be some people in that factory who won't be doing the same job 15 years from now, and there are always going to be people who will the same job 15 years from now.

> Even the person who works 16 hours at a factory has a choice. It might be a difficult choice, but the person still has some remote chance. The question is do you want to the same work another 15 years from now, or can you do something in your spare time and change that.

What spare time? Have you tried laboring for long periods of time in very unpleasant conditions? The majority of humanity is engaged in a daily struggle for survival (in fact, for most of them our original state as hunter-gatherers would probably be an improvement). For the majority this condition is not a choice, but mostly a circumstance of the birth lottery.

Eh, even at that work load, you do end up with some spare time and, in developed countries at least, vacation time.

I actually ended up using all of my vacation time to take a class that helped me churn out some projects that really impressed them on my interview for a much better job.

> It might be inevitable, but its unfair.

If it is inevitable but unfair then fairness is not a relevant consideration. Nothing can be done to make a situation more fair if it is inevitable.

>>just because your parents had money.

They don't 'just' have money. Its not like some fairy shows up on one particular night drops a suitcase full of money outside their doorstep.

Life is full of choices and actions we take.

If a parent slogs all their life to ensure their kids have a good future and another parent doesn't. Then I'm very sorry that's exactly the future these people chose for themselves.

Ironically these are the same people who keep talking of work life balance, quitting jobs and taking care of kids and all that. While somebody else builds a financial empire. In the real life a parent who is always busy but can provide financially is vastly more preferable to kids than some who isn't but stays at home just to take care of them.

Learn to live with your choices and decisions.

I don't disagree. My wife and I work very hard to give our daughter an advantage. Its clearly not unfair to us to get the reward of that hard work. But absolutely none of that is chargeable to my daughter. As far as she is concerned, some magic fairy did drop a bunch of money on her lap. Her own choices, ambition, work ethic didn't factor in to getting that advantage.

Some parents literally just won a lottery rendering that justification moot. But let's lot forget the children of thieves, pimps, and drug dealers etc. In the end money has no moral weight.

>>Some parents literally just won a lottery rendering that justification moot.

How many billionaires exist in the world? Say X000? How does this compare with the world population? You seem to arguing that Y is a failure in life, because X was born to a rich guy.

I wouldn't go to an extent to argue that your initial conditions in life don't have a effect on your future. But at some point of time as you age, that argument just dies.

>> In the end money has no moral weight.

You can either say that and not make money, or go out and earn money. At the end having money would have solved most of your problems and may be even your kids's problem.

Wow, I guess everyone that's not a billionaire are all just poor. No wait, that's nothing like what I said, the difference between your parents making 1,000$ a year and 10,000$ a year is huge. Often people discount the idea that having a collage degree and making 50+k/year is anywhere close to the world's average lifestyle.

> Our human capital is the hours of life that we are given here on this earth. Free will is what we choose to do with those hours.

The more I see in life, the more I question how valid a concept "free will" really is, and to what extent we really "choose what to do with those hours." I'm not prepared to say there's no such thing as free will, but just the way people's behavior changes under the influence of chemicals, or in response to brain damage, suggests that we don't have a satisfying theory of why people make the choices they do.

I keep meaning to re-read John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. What he said about making social policy from behind "the veil of ignorance" makes so much more sense to me now than it did when I read it in law school. (Back then I was much more conservative, and a fan of Robert Nozick's response, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.)

I wrestle with having an increasingly narrow view of the extent to which people exercise free will, and having an increasingly cynical view of the social structures we have in place to help the poor. I agree with 'bane: the marshmallow impulse control experiment says a lot. So what gets to me is the sanctimony. If I were born as one of those kids who couldn't resist the marshmallow for 10 seconds: 1) how much if my outcome is the result of my own choices? 2) how is spending more money on education going to help?

You are in luck: followup research shows that kids with impulse control (er, patience) came from stable families with safe predictable behavior, and less patient kids came from families with unstable environments and adults who weren't reliable. In fact, the kids were roughly equally rational with respect to the environments they grew up in.

If you still have a copy of A Theory of Justice, definitely pick it back up. If you'd like to work through his later-life work, then you'll want to grab Political Liberalism and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, in which he revisits his original ideas, and brings together a full account of justice as fairness as he later understood it. Definitely recommend digging back into him.

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