[0xcde4c3db]

Principle #41 has a name in academia: the just-world hypothesis [1] (occasionally the just-world fallacy, largely from atheist and feminist sources). It has surprisingly widespread consequences and implications. Conservative politicians and pundits play on it when they tout "personal responsibility" in the face of systemic bias. Abusers use it to convince their victims that they "deserve" the abuse. Religiously devout people use it to minimize tragedies (not to mention crimes) as "part of God's plan", and so on.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

[yummyfajitas]

I often see people discussing the just world hypothesis and the awfulness of the people who believe it. But I very rarely see those same people even considering the possibility that it might be true.

In the world of work, while exceptions exist, I've always seen a strong correlation between position and competence. (I haven't worked at bridgewater so I don't know if it's true there.)

In the political/economic world, I see poor people refusing to engage in personal responsibility (i.e. having children out of wedlock, doing drugs, smoking, eating badly and not exercising, refusing to work) while the rich do the exact opposite.

So I'll ask the question that I guess makes me an awful person too: why do we think the just world hypothesis is actually false?

[GVIrish]

> In the political/economic world, I see poor people refusing to engage in personal responsibility (i.e. having children out of wedlock, doing drugs, smoking, eating badly and not exercising, refusing to work) while the rich do the exact opposite.

Yet there are plenty of poor people working two jobs and clipping coupons but never see their economic situation meaningfully improve. On the other side, someone born into wealth can be lazy, use drugs, and be a general screw up and still die wealthy.

Plenty of rich people do drugs too but the chances of them going to jail for doing drugs are negligible compared to the chances of jail time for a poor person. Law enforcement targets poor neighborhoods far more heavily, wealthy people don't buy drugs off street corners, and wealthy people can pay for far better legal representation.

Crime? White collar crime is rarely punished with jail time. Someone selling drugs on the street might get several years in jail, whereas someone who helps launder billions for drug cartels gets no jail time and their company only pays a fine.

Unethical sociopathic behavior in politics and many parts of the business world is how some people get to the top. It's not that the most qualified or deserving person got what they deserved, it was that the most ruthless, self-promoting, and deceitful person took the spoils.

The just world hypothesis is often what callous people use to justify why they have the riches and people lower on the totem pole don't. It's easy to point at poor people and say they're poor because they're lazy or irresponsible, but it's much harder to admit that someone succeeded because of either advantages they were born into, or outright immoral behavior.

[yummyfajitas]

Very few poor people work two jobs or even one. That's a marked contrast to high income individuals who work very hard.

http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publication...

Similarly, poor people are more likely to have substance abuse problems.

http://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/2013MHDetTabs...

Now, as you note, rich people get away with things more - so wouldn't responsible poor people be less likely to do drugs? As a responsible adult, I do far more drugs in India (a cop might want 500rs ~ $7) than Malaysia (off with their heads!).

You seem to believe the just world hypothesis is false, yet you clearly haven't even googled data which suggests it's a pretty solid statistical hypothesis in this case.

It's truly a flaw in our society that such rhetoric - describing people who hold true beliefs as "callous" and "immoral" - is causing people to hold utterly incorrect beliefs. It's kind of like the modern version of "only satan worshippers believe in evolution".

[GVIrish]

The point isn't that most poor people work 2 jobs or whatever, the point is that there are plenty of poor people that work very hard but don't get ahead. Someone born into wealth who even puts in half the effort of a single mother working two jobs is still going to be wealthy. Furthermore, if you are born into a family where you have to work hourly jobs to support the family at the expense of your own educational advancement, chances are you are not going to advance as much economically as someone who doesn't have to make that compromise.

As far as poor people and substance abuse, several states implemented drug testing regimes for people on welfare and what they found in all cases is that the drug use rate for welfare recipients was less than that of the general public, in most cases, about an order of magnitude less.

http://time.com/3117361/welfare-recipients-drug-testing/

The problem with the just world hypothesis is that it goes backwards from the successful outcome, then asserts that this outcome is proof that the world is fair. Person A is rich and successful because they worked hard and people who aren't rich and successful must've failed because they were lazy or irresponsible. But the truth is that circumstances are a large part of success and failure.

Sure, when you equalize circumstances someone's personal effort, ability, and choices are what determines outcomes, but circumstances are rarely equal. When you're talking about groups of people born into massively unequal circumstances, the whole 'just world' thing falls apart. Someone born into a poor area, with bad schools, poor economic opportunities, and crime problems is simply not playing with the same deck of cards. Similarly, someone in the professional world who doesn't have the same connections as others or is not willing to bend the rules like others may be, is at a disadvantage.

It doesn't mean that working hard and being skilled won't get you forward in life, most times it does. What it means is that success and achievement are not always fair and they are almost never independent of the situation someone is born and raised in.

[yummyfajitas]

Congrats - you've just disproven the just world hypothesis as a hard and fast, 100% true for every person rule. That straw man is now just a pile of hay!

The problem with the just world hypothesis is that it goes backwards from the successful outcome, then asserts that this outcome is proof that the world is fair.

Ok, so you have no problem with a statistical just world hypothesis like what Dalio and I suggested? Namely, good behavior causes good outcomes, but only probabilistically?

Someone born into a poor area, with bad schools, poor economic opportunities, and crime problems is simply not playing with the same deck of cards.

It's far from clear that this is true. Consider a statistically typical American born into such circumstances. Now consider a Gujurati, born into far worse circumstances who then shifts into American "bad circumstances" at age 12.

Do you think the Gujurati will have the same bad outcomes as the American? If not, then it's not really a defensible claim that circumstances (at least as far as variation within the US goes) matter a lot.

(We know from historical experiment that the answer is no, the Gujurati will perform quite well.)

[abawany]

There are a lot of problems with your post. How do you know that these ubermensch "Gujarati" were uniformly born info "far worse circumstances"? Were their ancestors forced into slavery in the USA, then Jim Crow, then systematic segregation and on-going police brutality? I think you have lived in India for a while. Can the strata of society that is actually able to afford/obtain a visa to move to the US be compared one on one with a person from a bad neighborhood in this country? And why "Gujaratis" for goodness sake? Are Tamils SOL? How many of these folks do you know that have had good vs. bad outcomes? What historical experiment are you referring to here? I am spluttering but the rules of this site prevent me from venting what I actually feel after reading the above.

[TheOtherHobbes]

I'm curious how you deduced that "Very few poor people work two jobs" or "High income individuals work very hard" from a census report that doesn't mention multiple job holding, and includes no information about hours worked.

>it's a pretty solid statistical hypothesis in this case.

Certainly not on the basis of that report, it's not.

[yummyfajitas]

See table 3. Very few poor people work at all. Extrapolating from this to multiple job holders follows from the fact that people who work is an upper bound on people who work multiple jobs.

[notlefthanded]

Maybe poor people don't work because there's a welfare cliff wherein people can work a lot more and still experience no gain in quality of life or economic situation.

[Grishnakh]

> On the other side, someone born into wealth can be lazy, use drugs, and be a general screw up and still die wealthy.

Exactly. Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan are poster children for this.

[kafkaesq]

The rich certainly do engage in their fair share of irresponsible behavior, also - it's just that they're generally better at managing appearances and externalizing consequences. In fact, quite often that's exactly how they got to be wealthy in the first place.

So while people in the lower economic brackets might engage in overtly self-damaging behaviors like smoking or eating poorly (in disproportionate numbers) -- or simply be too depressed to look for work in an economy that basically has no use for them, or to go to college for an advanced degree in their 40s or 50s -- folks in the bulge brackets will end up doing "responsible" things, like voting for the political class that brought us the invasion of Iraq (including 500k+ killed and the bloodshed we are seeing up to the current day), climate change denial, and the (artificially accelerated) deindustrialization that killed off the middle class jobs those (now) in the lower tiers might have had access to in the first place, a few decades back.

In the world of work, while exceptions exist, I've always seen a strong correlation between position and competence.

In a sense this is almost a truism; one simply has to ask "competent at what?" In many organizations, unfortunately, it isn't technical or domain knowledge, or even interpersonal skills that merits promotion -- but simply the art of "managing up."

[rhizome]

I see poor people refusing to engage in personal responsibility (i.e. having children out of wedlock, doing drugs, smoking, eating badly and not exercising, refusing to work) while the rich do the exact opposite.

Sorry for the snark, but it appears you simply aren't paying attention. Rich people don't have kids out of wedlock? Don't do drugs or smoke?

It's probably more likely that you have a blind spot toward shared behaviors between classes because you associate them as low-status.

[hx87]

Because there are far, far too many counterexamples for the hypothesis to be true in any useful sense.

[yummyfajitas]

Dalio's "by and large" indicates that he feels it's generally true, not universally true. I.e. a statistical trend, not a hard and fast rule. How do your uncited counterexamples show that a statistical trend is not true in any useful sense?

Moreover, why isn't it reasonable to treat it as a hypothesis that is true in many specific contexts? Should we also discuss the personal awfulness of people who believe in normal distributions as a useful principle since not all data is normally distributed? "Racists and child molesters sometimes use normal distributions to model the world!"

[Lawtonfogle]

The reason is due to the difference between necessary and suficient. Hard work is necessary to get to the stop and stay there for any significant length of time, but it is not sufficient to do so. The Just World fallacy treats it as being suficient. This is probably why it is so popular, because it is kinda close to the truth.

[lotsofcows]

Are you saying you have evidence that the actions you list (even ignoring the obvious cultural entrenchment) are more common in the poor than the rich? Can you provide a link please?

[yummyfajitas]

I've done so in various other replies.