[rgifford]

Success and wealth tend to compound intergenerationally. That can be a good thing. When societies have economic mobility, wealth tends to enter and leave families over a couple generations.

I love music from Drake, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Justin Bieber and the like. Their music and the fact we live in a society where stars are bred for music -- that's incredible. Fair/unfair isn't a very interesting binary. Natural variance and inequity is an important part of healthy competition. How much inequity is too much? That's a very interesting question.

[digislave]

Instead of fretting about people who became successful, we should think about how we can help more people become successful. Which incidentally seems to be a huge part of what PG does.

Even poor people today live better than kings in the past. The things we can afford, microwave dinners, washing machines, were only available to kings with lots of servants in the past. When you consider medicine, it becomes even more obvious that we are better off now than rich people in the past.

[rgifford]

> ...we should think about how we can help more people become successful.

It's like you're purposefully missing the point.

What if most of serious wealth and success is decided at birth? What are the logical consequences of that?

Let's go extreme: A rich guy wins the lottery. He then tells everyone in town how they could've won if they bought tickets. What's your reaction?

> Even poor people today live better than kings in the past.

I generally agree with this on quantitative measures of productive or technological progress. Other quantitative measures don't look so great: education, housing and healthcare costs; health (esp. mental health) issues in developed vs developing nations; prison populations in the present vs past.

Michael Foucalt has better arguments to make here than I do [1].

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBJTeNTZtGU