| I generally agree with this, but I think there's also a real issue of what to do about people that just can't do this. This requires some threshold level of intelligence. It requires knowing that it's possible and not making stupid decisions along the way that inhibit it. You're less likely to be exposed to knowledge of how or where to start when no one inside your network is successful. There are some issues with learned behavior (children from poverty that eat one marshmallow in the test because they've learned adults are unreliable and one now is better than the promise of two later). People from poverty tend to spend money quickly when they get it because having it is scarce/rare and there's learned behavior to use it right away. I think a lot of the arguments from the left that "it can't be done", "social mobility doesn't exist", etc. are both wrong and really harmful because it confuses people into thinking they can't improve their situation when they can. It takes away agency. I think the truth is messier though and not everyone has the capacity to do this and our society is definitely skewed for intelligence, but arguably so is any society with living things that need to adapt to their environment. The solution is probably some sort of complex policy and iterating on it to try and make things better and protect the lower bound of society, but that's boring pragmatic neoliberalism and doesn't really rally the troops. People prefer to argue the extremes. I think the key is you can protect the lower bound of society without taking from the rich or disincentivizing wealth creation and growth, but I also think wealth inequality in a society when it comes from wealth creation and growth is not that big of a deal and we want to reward this kind of thing (less true when it comes from other places like inheritance). Basically protect the lower bound, don't worry about capping the upper bound. Worry about inheritance and leveraging wealth into political power. Tyler Cowen's book makes a pretty good case for growth in this kind of way being the best way to help the most people the fastest: https://press.stripe.com/#stubborn-attachments I think that gets less attention though because it's easier to 'hate the rich' than it is to focus on policy issues that affect the lower bound. |