The self-made man
slate.com
slate.com
It highlights a more general point: we, as humans, have a profound attribution bias. It's psychological. We tend to attribute success to our own individual characteristics, actions, and free will. Americans significantly more so.[http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2786780?uid=2&uid=4&si...]
This would be fine, if it were true; however this attribution bias causes a significant departure from reality. When people succeed, we tend to focus on their personal attributes and actions, instead of looking at the situation surrounding them. When we do that, we tend to think of them as "rising above their situation," or "using their advantages well." We like to think we can do the same, but it is truly a kind of collective delusion.
We have to recognize that this is simply fantasy. It's not backed up by truth. Statistics says much the opposite: that most people who try will fail, and that people will be significantly burdened by failure, and that people who have failed or succeeded are extremely affected by external effects; that most successes are the result of both individual and significant historical and contextual factors. Externalities are more important than we want to believe. They're not everything, but they deserve much, much more attention than they get, which is often nil.
We would be a different kind of society were we to match our perception of success and failure with the reality of that success or failure. We don't have to give up our sense of individualism and the respect for personal growth and contribution; we just need to back it up with a recognition of the surrounding factors that are extremely real and highly influential on all our lives. I know we would be a better society if we did.
E.g., nobody ever got laid staying at home, no matter how pretty, nice, rich or lucky.
A wire is connected to the electricity, which powers the bulb. The bulb cannot light without the electricity, and it cannot light without the wire. Is the success of the bulb attributable to the wire, or the outlet?
What of a perfectly designed bulb without a fixture that holds it correctly for electrical contact?
What if no cord is attached to that fixture?
What if the cord is not plugged in?
What if the cord doesn't have a plug that fits the outlet?
What if the internal wiring of the building doesn't support the bulb's voltage?
What if the electrical grid is not attached to the building?
What if the transformer that turns the grid voltage to one the bulb can use has blown or doesn't do its job?
What if the grid is overloaded, or not correctly handling the appropriate load for the time of day and electrical demand?
What if the power plants themselves are not producing the planned and coordinated output?
What if the supply of coal or oil to power the plants is disrupted?
And on and on.
The bulb absolutely depends on the stability and function of systems surrounding it; systems that are hundreds of millions of times larger and more complex than the bulb itself. The bulb's success is due to both its intrinsic properties and quite literally hundreds of external factors that you cannot take for granted.
The pervasive ignorance of this seemingly obvious facet of our daily lives is astounding.
More astounding is that people fail to apply it to individual people—or to themselves—equally. It applies equally—without question.w
Framed ideology.
This is a really good point, and it's something I've been thinking about lately too. Fortunately, I've seen a growing appreciation for the role luck and circumstance has in people's success, particularly with regard to educational opportunities and social class, so hopefully this is starting to change.
You are wrong in nearly every sentence; I don't have the time or patience to convince you, I wasted 5 years of my life arguing with a libertarian already. Please consider the wider systems surrounding each person's condition. They are not fake.
It's not a matter of whether success is attributed to the individual or to the situation; it's both.
A wire is connected to the electricity, which powers the bulb. The bulb cannot light without the electricity, and it cannot light without the wire. Is the success of the bulb attributable to the wire, or the outlet?
And genetics, and the general culture, and luck, which is just a word we use for many factors we can't even name yet mixed with true randomness. And then there's a fair bit of interplay between all the factors.
Why do some people work 60 hours a week when others barely crack 10? That "grit" doesn't come from nowhere.
And surely there are more fundamental reasons for why some societies at some times are more supportive, or more successful, or richer, or saner, than others.
Moreover, you shouldn't get credit for genetics. That's not a product of your exercise of free will.
Why not? Seems like a completely arbitrary standard. And pretty hard on everyone else. Are you not viscerally impressed by beautiful women, high IQ speakers, and so on?
Even if you somehow get people to agree, and at least partially implement it, how can you credit anything then? Is there a human quality we care about not heavily influenced by genetics?
How do you disentangle von Neumann's ability from his achievements? How do you discount Brigitte Bardot's beauty or Michael Jordan's height?
I'm not really interested in discussing outliers like Michael Jordan, or tiny segments of the economy like sports or entertainment. I'm talking about how we distribute the proceeds of our industrial economy, or at the very least, how we assign moral culpability to people based on things they have little control over.
That is to say, it might be inevitable that pretty people or smart people will have advantages. But the only difference between attractiveness and intellect is that on places like HN, its socially acceptable to be smug about the latter.
The economy is an inanimate abstract. It does not strive for anything. It is not interested in anyone's perception of what is fair any more than my phone is interested in vulgar language.
The economy consists of billions of individuals getting together and saying "I have x to offer, I want y". To try to force some idea of justice, morality, fairness, equality, etc. into this equation is to say individuals do not have the right of free association; that they, the simpletons they surely are, are not smart enough to choose for themselves and judgement must be deferred to some all-knowing third-party.
Please, just don't.
No. It consists of that against the background understanding that parties cannot say " well I don't want to pay y, so I will kill you and take x." And in every extant example of a sophisticated economy, that understanding is enforced by a government that has guns. One can imagine scenarios in which that "all-knowing third party" does not exist, but I imagine if it were such a good idea it'd exist somewhere.
Once the people come together to create that third party that has the guns that creates the background understandings that allow economies to exist, then they are entitled to say: "well what else do we want?"
I don't say the folks with guns can't do constructive things to improve trade. They can. But they don't create that understanding you're talking about.
Again, the understanding you're talking about doesn't come from the sovereign.
As for Bitcoin networks being hacked that is a red herring as we often hear of non-black market sites being hacked--even with the all mighty government protection.
Can you cite me one example of this happening?
For example, if a child becoming a very aggressive person were totally predictable based on behavioral characteristics of the biological parents, would that matter in this discussion?
I know this is a departure from the way we typically like to think about ourselves, but there is actually some good evidence to indicate that we may not have as much control as we think.
If people have free will, then we punish those who harm others.
If people are finite state automatons, then we punish those who harm others, because that's how you change inputs into the finite state automatons.
It's also worth making a distinction between our subconscious and conscious choices, even if they are both more or less deterministic. At least we are aware of our conscious choices, and probably identify more strongly with them.
The original discussion was about when someone deserves credit for their actions. And if there are two poles of always and never, can we land somewhere in between? And where?
It's not well-defined at all. If person A is "smarter" than person B, how can you tell whether that's the result of A working harder than B or A having lucked into greater intelligence? Measure how much time each spent studying in college? If person C "chooses" to be an alcoholic and is therefore unproductive, how much of that is "free will" (what does that even mean?) and how much is bad luck?
The choices you make are heavily influenced by factors you lucked into, like intelligence, family, culture. And the choices you are presented with are even more influenced by your country of origin.
It's not just outliers. What do you do at 90th or 50th percentile of intelligence? Those two people can make the same choices, say majoring in CS, with very different outcomes.
How do you reward choices under those conditions? You could pay only for the results you like. But we pretty much already do that. What else is there?
This is like a just world fallacy episode 2: the world may not be fair but surely we can make it so.
The invisible forces at work here are in the nature of your “choices” and your agency to participate within that value system.
Few here may be able to participate in the distribution of wealth within the high end of the luxury car market via their purchases, and fewer still via their purchasing or selling of energy market entities.
Along this path, we can also be critical of the options available and the hegemonic / power forces at work that birthed them.
All in all, it is a questionable suggestion that buys into (no pun intended) a cascading wall of myth.
If you were stranded in the wilderness and needed to survive from scratch, would you rather be with a group of attractive people or a group of smart people?
But I digress. The economy isn't about heros fighting nature to save the day. Its about everyone working together to make an environment where creation is possible. You take Zuckerberg and leave him in the middle of the woods, and what happens? Does he still create wealth? No, he's useless without being plugged into the larger economy. That larger economy is made up of ordinary people. They are poorly compensated not because their contribution doesn't matter, collectively, but because they are fungible. Is fungsbility a fair criterion for structuring an economy?
If I were to bet on it, I'd bet very heavily on him creating wealth under those circumstances. As measured by creating a system for survival. Obviously not as well as someone trained in such things (as implied by your dodge), but better than someone who lacked his intelligence, and more importantly, his drive.
Ordinary people are compensated ordinarily because their contributions to the economy are ordinary. That actually does seem quite fair to me. I appreciate the work cleaners do, but their jobs simply don't contribute to the economy as much as building a large company like Facebook does.
That's not to say everyone who is highly compensated contributes highly to society, we all know that isn't true. But that's also not really what we're discussing.
And what on earth does it mean, to contribute to an economy wherein only 'non-ordinary' folks benefit? That's pretty circular reasoning. I'd argue that the esoteric jobs of building web gadgets are the fluff and foam of our economy, unimportant to real health and welfare, and way, way overcompensated.
I have no idea where that came from or what it means, so I can't respond to it.
I made a point of saying that I respect the importance of ordinary workers. I've spent most my life in ordinary jobs, your assumptions about me aside.
However, the fact remains that individually their contribution to the economy is much, much less than the individual contribution of someone who founds and directs the construction and growth of a large company.
If the pay of 'ordinary' jobs is to be set to some low minimum level, then the 'job making' or 'economy building' of the non-ordinary people will have no benefit for most folks. Its fine to brag about building wealth; but if its the highly-educated building wealth for themselves then who cares? But them of course.
The economy is not the plaything of those that have figured out the system. Its not there to make them wealthy, though I have no problem when that happens. As long as we remember the whole system is supposed to be for everybody.
There is a long chain of responsibility in an organization to allow anyone to function effectively at their job. Repeating what I wrote above, take away 'ordinary' tasks and the company grinds to a halt exactly as dead as if the CEO were removed. Maybe not; a company can go on for a year or so without a CEO on momentum; it stops dead if payroll stops processing, or heck if the lock on the front door breaks and nobody can get into the building.
When I debate the social good aspect of entrepreneurship and tech entrepreneurs priorities, I try to appeal to the rationality of the self-interested agents. We, as a humanity, have two unambigous pathes in future. Either everything is really good or everything is equally bad. We are heading to near-utopia or to full-blown dystopia.
Tech entrepreneurs and investors hold the power to change the world faster than anyone else. More wealth inequality --> closer to the dystopia. It rational for anyone with power to influence the world and possible future to contribute to the decrease of wealth inequality.
I guess such approach to discussion would be more beneficial to your cause.
Unless they think that their lives will be better by increasing inequality, particularly in their individual case (cf. Tragedy of the Commons). And that may well be true, as they would disproportionately hold power and capital. Is it better to be a rich man in a society slowly going to hell or a poor one in a society slowly on the rise?
It's a non-empathic viewpoint, but I can understand why some would consider it rational and self-interested.
Also helping other is a significant factor in emotional wellbeing.
I mostly blame the current snapshot of evolving social system, not the actors, even psychopathic ones.
All trolling and snark aside your comment is the antithesis of the point that many factors outside of the individual contribute to their success. If you believe that then the number of those individuals capable of similar success rises dramatically. Also those who clean and do "ordinary" jobs are people who are similarly shaped by many factors they don't control.
Also I am very certain that people would get by better without Facebook then they would with the lowly legions of those toiling away to keep the world merely "clean".
I totally agree with that. That's why I weight it with the scarcity. Of course you disagree with the scarcity of Zuckerberg, but in my comment I assume that what defines a "Zuckerberg" includes the outside factors that the individual doesnt control.
I doubt that ability grow the company and be the CEO correlates much with the ability to hunt and kill an animal. Especially if we are talking about hunting in isolation, CEO skill is mainly in dealing with people and making strategy. If you drop someone alone in the middle of woods, he needs to be strong, fast and know a lot about nature. Otherwise said, Zuckenberg would do as good as any other random man.
The naively obvious answer is "smart", but given that what people have evolved to find attractive in general (before distortions from makeup, etc., designed to fool natural attraction) is somewhat tied to health and physical fitness, and ability to contribute in a survival situation is very much affected by that as well as smarts, then if those are the only two measures available, there's reason to at least seek some balance between then rather than purely favoring smarts.
Fitness is related to, but not the same as, attractiveness.
Of course it's possible to imagine a scenario of puny or fat nerds vs gorgeous athletes, but that's adding in things that don't necessarily relate and it's pretty clearly avoiding the intent of the scenario.
Sure, and if you have free reign to choose on any traits you want, you'd probably not consider attractiveness directly, but instead consider a balance of general health, physical fitness, survival experience (and specific context if the expected survival situation was known in more detail), and general intelligence (though the latter wouldn't necessarily be very high on the list of priorities.)
If all you have is intelligence and attractiveness, though, given that attractiveness has a correlation with (even though it isn't identical to) important things other than general intelligence that the hypothetical has prevented you from considering directly, you'd be ill advised to neglect it in favor of intelligence alone.
In fact, the whole reason attractiveness evolved is is exactly about choosing who to be stuck in a long-term survival situation with (which is why it is linked to both general health and physical fitness.)
It is one of this science "just-so-stories", but the idea being that other attributes being equal more intelligence would allow you to more successfully mate with attractive people.
Are you suggesting the people "cracking" only 10 lack the ability to work 60 hours weekly?
This doesn't strictly break down by SES, either, although there are certainly trends.
You can come up with all sorts of reasons for the second camp's behavior, and many of those reasons are likely true for some subset of that camp. But at some point you have to recognize people's agency in their own behavior, or else they are just children in your eyes.
This is a VERY narrowed perspective.
Unless these behaviors are constant across all areas of one's life, they only tell you what one's priorities are.
Because someone may sacrifice short term for long term gain in their career, while at the same time sacrificing long term gain for short term satiation when it comes to food or health.
So truly what can be said about this marvelous developer, and about his ability to hold on for long term outcomes, when she refused a Google buyout offer and took her company public, when at the same time she pushed back starting a family, eating healthy, and working out.
My point is NO-ONE belongs to one camp and one camp only. You and I, and all others belong to both camps.
Very astute postmodern summation.
The only thing missing in this is the possibility that the myths of narrative (male hero), constancy (see genetics and scientism), etc. are all driven by ideology. In particular, capitalist ideology; the value of capital is predicated on foundational ideology. “Made man” for example, reinforces individual capital ownership as opposed to cultural byproduct.
A counterpoint might be other cultures with an Eastern religion based view chance / fortune as having a greater and more culturally secured role in the lives of an individual.
I'm from the US, and I've seen quite a few highly intelligent and hard-working (but poor) people end up as heroin dealers or working odd jobs, with no steady employment. Conversely, I've seen relatively mediocre people, born to wealthy families, succeed wildly. And, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's seen this.
It's something to think about in a world where around 2400 billionaires (~0.000033% of the population) own ~7% of the world's wealth.
This allows those with power to take advantage of the situation to a large degree.
It is there that the wishy-washy reductionist argument of 'the world is complex' ceases to be useful (not saying you're making that argument, but it often comes up). We need to push the world a little more to one side; a little more toward the balance point of this messy reality, with full recognition and respect for that complexity.
Hard work == success, is probably a variation of the just world bias [0]. It provides a reassuring and motivating narrative, but in the end, it is quite simplistic. I am not saying that hard work is not a necessary condition, but it is far from being sufficient.
Another example : with all the discussions about European debt, it has been reported multiple times that on average Greeks were working much longer that Germans. It does not do them much good.
No kidding. I was in the office at 10 pm the other night, and the cleaning guy came around to empty the trash cans. He's like "man, still here at 10?" And I'm thinking "well so are you."
So to be sure, the opposite extreme is just as ridiculous as suggesting that every person exists in a bubble where their effort correlates exactly with outcome. But when the awareness of systemic advantage is absent (as it certainly is), I see staking out a far extreme opinion like this as a challenge to find a more reasonable center.
Ultimately it's a political problem - but not necessarily in the obvious sense.
The most successful and fun cultures reward inventiveness and positive social contributions, and include some element of challenge and competition.
But using money and markets to make decisions about the kinds of activities that are rewarded turns out to be an inefficient, short-sighted and often surreal way to manage what does and doesn't get valued.
I'm quite happy with the idea that an economy where it's possible to raise $1 million in funding for an app like Yo! while the many apps that do something with longer term benefits struggle for commercial support has some issues with rational resource allocation.
Not to mention the outrageous bubbles and the epic acquisition disasters that litter the Internet ruins.
If you believe otherwise I'd like to see you argue why.
I've found similar attempts to establish parent/child economic correlation equally suspicious when, for example, they measure income correlation with percentiles rather than in adjusted dollars (it's much easier to be "mobile" if there's only $10K in income separating the 40th and 60th percentiles!)
[1] http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_as...
There will always be individual exceptions to this, but they'll be single data points. Put crudely, for every heart-warming success you see interviewed in Forbes, there will be millions of failures no one hears about.
The most useful picture is broad-based and statistical, and studies like this one:
http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/
show that mobility depends as much on where you were born as to whom you were born.
Broadly, inequality has exploded since the 1980s and in areas with limited social capital - including good free education - it's now more difficult than ever to work your way up from the bottom.
But this is balanced by increased opportunities in other areas - mostly affluent, mostly urban - which have created a halo effect for the poorer communities around them.
So average mobility has remained approximately constant, but only because bad areas have been balanced by good areas.
Meanwhile average mobility in the US continues to be worse than mobility in other countries.
What's the best study you can find that demonstrates this? I haven't seen any that don't appear to succumb to the flaws I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, such as measuring relative mobility instead of absolute mobility.
Which definitions of absolute and relative are you using? (There are a few, and they're not identical.)
Relative mobility to me means mobility within some particular income distribution: Moving from, say, an average household income in the first quintile to an average household income in the fifth quintile.
I prefer absolute mobility as a measure of economic mobility for the same reason that any rational actor would prefer to win a lottery for the difference between the income of an average bottom 20% household and an average top 20% household in the U.S.[1] vs. Sweden[2]. According to OECD, that's $75K vs. $37K.
[1] http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/
It's generally better to start with the question "what do I want to know?" and then looking for a suitable statistical framework that will answer that question, rather than starting with a ready-made statistical analysis and then trying to use it to answer arbitrary questions.
Sure, but when comparing nation A to nation B, it's generally more interesting to look at either the absolute dollar difference or some relative quality-of-life measure (you could call the latter "class", I guess). Folks moving around within a tightly distributed income distribution don't really gain or lose much of either, relative to someone in a society with larger disparities.
But it would just be economic Brownian motion. Social mobility isn't (I hope!) valued because it shows that a society produces random outcomes, but rather that it enables people to achieve to the limit of their talents.
If we would live in classless society, social mobility would be less important measure.
Plus, you define achieving the limit of the talent in purely financial form. If I am genius mathematician, achieving limits of the talent mean doing great (potentially useful) math somewhere at the university. That does not translate to neither "high class" nor "rich".
The language used here is interesting. Wasn't the labor theory of value thrown out a while ago?