[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.