[SvenMarquardt]

> The only way to prevent the extreme outlier men from dominating everything is to prevent winner-takes-all games

Which is why we should focus on infinite wealth creation games, rather than zero-sum status games.

Throwing away equity while chasing equality is a recipe for ushering in the next dark age.

[cbozeman]

> Throwing away equity while chasing equality is a recipe for ushering in the next dark age.

I would argue trying to enforce equity to chase equality is your actual recipe for ushering in the next Dark Age.

Look at your Scandinavian societies for a model of what happens when you allow men and women the choice to live their lives as see fit without interference from the state, in the form of 'quotas' - you get some very interesting distributions. Something like 90% of all engineers in those societies are male, and something like 90% of women are nurses. Would anyone have the gall - to border on sheer stupidity - to claim that Scandinavian nations are holding back their women and oppressing them? Or is that equity isn't a very good goal... and that when you maximum equality, you'll also get massive differences in occupation because different occupations appeal to different personality traits and men and women do not have the exact same traits in the exact same quantities?

[throwawayboise]

I would dispute that the Scandinavian system does not have "interference from the state." The Scandinavian educational system seems more active at steering kids into career paths compared to the US model. From what I understand, kids are split into various vocational/college bound tracks after middle school based on grades and aptitude. In US high schools it seems that you're either college-bound, or a non-entity. If you're lucky your high school might have a vocational program which might have instruction in automotive repair, welding, or construction.

[SvenMarquardt]

I agree with your POV. I'm arguing throwing away equal opportunities (free education and career path choice for all Scandinavians) with the aim of chasing equal outcomes (50/50 gender split of nurses and engineers) is a fool's game.

[zpeti]

For that it would be great if we could differentiate between who in society is a wealth creator and who is a zero sum player.

Grouping Jeff Bezos in with Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan CEO), as both evil because they are both rich, is an extremely simplistic view of the world, but seems common, even on HN.

Bezos has his faults, but he is still responsible in an insane reduction in prices for many items for consumers. Plus he created 400,000 jobs in the pandemic.

Jamie Dimon takes huge financial risks with all sorts of opaque financial tools, an when he fucks up gets bailouts from government.

One creates wealth, the other basically rearranges it into his own pocket.

(and don't get me started about people complaining about Elon Musk being a billionaire, that is just a sad state of jealous resentment that should not be given a voice in society)

[fastball]

Yes, my test is fairly simple: your business (whatever it is) should be creating value and then capturing a fraction of that value. If that is not what you are doing, the business is parasitic in nature and should not exist.

[throwawayboise]

Creating value for who? Every business creates value that someone is willing to pay for, otherswise it couldn't exist.

[fastball]

I see a difference between creating value and finding value.

For example, if your business is based around an ad model, you are not creating value because that value already existed (people's attention / purchasing power). You are merely redirecting value.

If you take facebook as an example, they are creating value for people by letting them communicate / etc. But they are not capturing a portion of the value they are creating, they are taking value that already existed (the value of your attention) and selling it to someone else.

Or take an investment bank that purely speculates on existing assets. Any time they win, it is not because they created value and captured a fraction of it, it is because someone else lost.

I of course like fb better than the ib in this example, because they are at least creating some value. But I think any business where you're capturing value in a different area from where you're creating it is one that is very likely to end up with lots of conflicts of interesting and exploitation to a certain extent, so best avoided entirely.

[TulliusCicero]

I don't think chasing more equality necessarily precludes more productivity. I think you can easily think of some examples where greater equality meant more total productivity.

For example, at least all developed societies have 'chased equality' by providing free, decent-quality public education for people at least until adulthood. Does anyone think dropping that and just leaving poor families to their own devices would actually increase total economic output?

[SvenMarquardt]

Equal opportunity ≠ equal outcomes

As a teenager, I tried briefly to play basketball. But I was lucky to hit the backboard, much less the basket. Yet I had just as much opportunity to play basketball as Michael Jordan had. But equal opportunity was not nearly enough to create equal outcomes.

Nevertheless, many studies today conclude that different groups do not have equal opportunity or equal "access" to credit, or admission to selective colleges, or to many other things, because some groups are not successful in achieving their goal as often as other groups are.

The very possibility that not all groups have the same skills or other qualifications is seldom even mentioned, much less examined. But when people with low credit scores are not approved for loans as often as people with high credit scores, is that a lack of opportunity or a failure to meet standards?

When twice as many Asian students as white students pass the tough tests to get into New York's three highly selective public high schools — Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech — does that mean that white students are denied equal opportunity?

[kbenson]

> Yet I had just as much opportunity to play basketball as Michael Jordan had. But equal opportunity was not nearly enough to create equal outcomes.

I don't know about you, but as someone that played a lot of basketball in my youth, I did not have equal opportunity to play basketball the same way Michael Jordan did. Could I go out to a hoop at a park and play around? Sure. But at 5'-8", my opportunity to play at any real competitive level was limited by genetics long before things like drive and skill.

I'm confused why you would think this is a good analogy at all, unless you were trying to link it to intelligence (which is its own can of worms), which doesn't seem to be where you were going. Using competitive sports, which are extremely cutthroat when viewed through the lens of careers and those that make a living doing it, is almost never a good way to equate equality and regular access for the masses.

[fanciestManimal]

There are also the the equality of opportunity issues that still exist for cultural reasons... which seem like obvious things to correct. For example, having a "black sounding" name on your resume causes you to not get called in for interviews as frequently.

[coldtea]

>Which is why we should focus on infinite wealth creation games

So, fairy tales?

[FredPret]

Fairy tales are ironically typically set hundreds of years ago, when wealth creation was tied to land and thus finite.

[coldtea]

Wealth creation is still tied to land and natural resources (and bounded by those), and is thus finite, by we conveniently ignore the issue and pile up extenalities.

[FredPret]

We’ve had economic growth that’s not tied to land since the Industrial Revolution.

Yes there are externalities.

But value is being added in continually more ethereal ways.

[coldtea]

>We’ve had economic growth that’s not tied to land since the Industrial Revolution.

Only ignoring the externalities (including a very real possibility of wiping out billions via climate change).

[FredPret]

You have to price those externalities pretty damn high to cancel out two centuries of exponential improvements and growth.

We simply aren’t all going to die from climate change.