[chongli]

Is talent not just a form of luck? It doesn't matter how hard you work at your low post game, you'll never learn to be seven feet tall. Those who are of that height are extremely lucky, giving them a huge advantage over other contenders for that NBA center position.

Other forms of athletic talent are less visible than height but I see no reason not to attribute them to luck (genetics, access to nutrition, coaching etc.)

We can apply this reasoning to anything where success can be measured. A great deal of business success comes down to connections which provide access to capital and access to markets. All of these things accrue to the well-connected.

[SheepSlapper]

All the things you mention are forms of luck, yes. And there's no way to control for them outside of some nightmarish eugenics scenario. It's a fact of life that people are different, and will excel in different facets of their lives to different degrees.

In a free market system there will always be winners, losers, and a lot of us in the middle. That's a result of the system BEING an equal playing field, talent and money are correlated. It'll never be the case that we all go into the workforce on equal footing, because we all start out in different places, with different genetics, and different upbringings. That doesn't mean someone from a poor upbringing can't work hard and raise their market value (thus making more), but it means that not everyone is going to be a millionaire.

[s73v3r_]

I think you're going to have to make an argument that there actually is a level playing field. I think most of us here would hotly dispute that.

[SheepSlapper]

Free markets are as close to egalitarian as is possible with markets. Supply and demand set prices while skill set and productivity set wages. It's not perfect, but it's better than anything else we've tried.

Interested in why you think the playing field isn't level, outside of the "luck" aspects I mentioned earlier (since there's nothing to be done about that, life doesn't care about fairness unfortunately). I'm open to new info :)

[s73v3r_]

I think you're going to have to prove that, for one, Free Markets actually do lead to those things, and for two, that our current situation is one that could reasonably be called a Free Market.

"Interested in why you think the playing field isn't level"

I think all one has to do is look at places like the inner city, where poverty is common, and where the opportunities are simply not there. And I feel it is extremely defeatist to say "We can't do anything about unfairness". I believe we absolutely can. We just don't seem to want to.

[amelius]

> In a free market system there will always be winners, losers, and a lot of us in the middle.

Yeah, well I'm seeing a lot of "winner takes all" lately.

[tdb7893]

If you go deep enough everything is luck. Your intelligence, height, and even your work ethic are just a product of your genetics and your environment.

It seems to me that if someone who was literally identical to me was put into an identical situation they would act the exact same way which means our actions are deterministic and only depend on the boundary conditions. Anyway, this is all a little off topic but it's interesting that even if you got where you are by working hard you are still lucky to be a person who was in the right conditions (genetically and environmentally) to be someone who works hard.

[commandlinefan]

His conculsion also rests on the premise that talent is something you can measure and put a number on. In professional sports, for the most part, you can do that: your "talent" is (indirectly) measured by the number of goals you score. The more goals you score, the more talented you are. I suspect that's one of the reasons that professional athletes are a) so rare and b) so highly compensated: it's near-trivial to compare one to another; you just assign each one a number and sort the numbers. In most fields, it's a lot harder to measure talent (actually it's probably harder in professional sports, too, but the "workers" agree to it, so it stands). While it would be unreasonable, and a logical fallacy, to lay claim to the principal and state the talent drives success and therefore if you're not successful you're not talented, the author here is doing pretty much the opposite by saying that luck drives success and if you're not successful you're not lucky (therefore we need wealth redistribution). He backs it up with a lot of equations, but unless we can all agree that talent is something you can measure objectively (which we can't even do with intelligence), the equations are fairly meaningless.

[kolbe]

Agreed.

I don't love the misappropriation of randomness in some social sciences (in this case "luck"). Outside of maybe quantum effects, there is probably no randomness in the world. Maybe those quantum effects can compound in some way to make it truly unknowable to figure out if I'll get hit by a bus today or not, but I doubt it. There're just properties of a system that are unknowable at this point because of our lack access to resources/technology to observe the system.

[jsweojtj]

Nothing about the conclusions relies on talent being measurable. It's basically going, "say talent was distributed like X, and it had effects Y on the world, what would things look like?" This doesn't imply or suggest or require that talent is measurable or knowable by anyone.