[dcist]

Some people are indeed much better. Anyone who played sports as a kid understands this. Huge differences are immediately apparent in small children. But generally, I agree that, for most life tasks, the differences between people are not enormous. Humanity could do a much better job eliminating poverty. In the future, we may view enormous disparities in wealth as evil as we do racism today.

[lwhi]

Better at sports .. but I bet there's a fairly even distribution between people who have money and don't.

> In the future, we may view enormous disparities in wealth as evil as we do racism today.

A lot of people already do.

[WendyTheWillow]

And a lot of people would be very wrong. There’s a floor to survivability, below which you can’t keep yourself alive, but there is no ceiling. If everyone is above the floor, there’s no reason for concern about those looking for the ceiling.

In the future we’ll pull people up to the floor, but that doesn’t require attaching a ceiling. The will never be a successful society that substantially punishes achievement above a certain point.

[matthewmacleod]

I'm not really sure that "it's okay if the billionares have space palaces so long as the poor aren't literally dying" is the optimal economic philosophy.

[lwhi]

You're wrong.

Fundamentally it requires redistribution and a complete change of mindset.

[WendyTheWillow]

A shallow dismissal is less valuable than an excellent critical comment. Please share with me (and others) what's wrong with my thinking. I'm trying to be transparent about my reasoning in child comments, so hopefully, you will have enough to work with.

[yawpitch]

> a shallow dismissal is less valuable than an excellent critical comment

An excellent critical comment is wasted on a shallow argument… your thinking assumes that reaching beyond the metaphorical ceiling doesn’t require standing atop those still struggling to reach the metaphorical floor… it absolutely and necessarily does. Worse, you seem to think that reaching for means that vastly outstrip your need is somehow noble. It isn’t… it’s pathetic.

[WendyTheWillow]

If Jimmy turns a piece of wood and some graphite into a pencil, he has created value. That didn't require exploiting the lumberjack or the miner. Jimmy did not steal value from either. He created value by inventing a new way for their raw materials to be useful to other people. Jimmy didn't need to "stand atop" anyone to do this.

What's "pathetic" are the ad hominems and insults the people in this thread have to resort to when they can't argue like adults. You're not right because you're angry, and you weaken your advocacy by trying to use your frustration as leverage over people giving reasoned arguments.

[klabb3]

Depends how much the people at the top (money-wise) are playing zero-sum games. If they are, to a large extent, engaging in asset acquisitions and passive growth of eg real estate, or monopolistic protectionism, then there’s plenty of room for others to engage in activities with positive externalities instead.

There’s no question a lot of people don’t get the opportunity to pursue their niche passions and drives, based on a bad birth lottery ticket. There’s a lot of wasted potential in countries that reduce aperture of the early success funnels.

[lwhi]

The issue is, a lot of the people at the top engage in business practices that actively disenfranchise people at the bottom.

Their wealth actually comes from those people who have so little.

Stop peddling this absolute fabrication that there's unlimited wealth and the super rich should be left get richer still.

[WendyTheWillow]

You're going to need to do a lot of work to demonstrate that wealth is zero-sum, as it doesn't comport with any well-respected economic model I'm aware of.

But even granting that, a government that creates a "survival floor" would protect against wealth-seeking in a world where it was zero-sum. The floor only needs to be high enough to allow people not to be held to the floor should they desire to participate in the accumulation of wealth and its ensuing benefits.

The whole point is to incentivize value creation.

Edit: You really won't like what this paper [0] has to say:

> Globally, zero-sum thinking is associated with skepticism about the importance of hard work for success, lower income, less educational attainment, less financial security, and lower life satisfaction.

[0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.edu/files/...

[thiago_fm]

If the people who ran that study were really as smart as they pretend to be, as they are from Harvard, they would understand how even their own thoughts, the language they speak and so on, all happened because they were lucky.

Let me repeat to you, as you seem unable to read and comprehend what I have previously written, it can be reading comprehension issue, so I won't judge you negatively like Harvard, an elitist school would, here it is:

Talent is everywhere. It's abundant. There is an immense amount of hard-working people that even if they don't believe in "zero-sum", get nowhere. They still wake up every day early, work much harder than you ever will in your life, but are still in a shithole and this situation will stay as it is until they perish.

That study was done by one of the most well-known universities, full of privilege in a country that managed to have its reigns on the world for so long, an empire.

Let's think together. It would be strange if either the study or the University would conclude that people work really hard. And are as talented as the people able to attend Harvard, but because they were unlucky and that the world is unfair, they couldn't.

That would be a big counterargument to Harvard's selection process, it wouldn't feel it's a really deserving university, nor that the creator of the study is as good as he believes to be. Why would anybody want to pay for its overpriced curriculum that are literally books you could buy it at Amazon? I'm not saying it is all fake, but you can understand how much reputation is bought, not acquired.

You aren't special, nor the thought of zero-sum thinking is what creates poverty. People are drawn into those ideas, not because of stupidity, but lack of luck.

Stop pretending you have so much control of yourself and your thoughts, read more science and you'll see how all those conclusions you believe to be true are really naive.

[klabb3]

Both activities happen in the same economy. Zero-sum or negative-sum activities are plenty. Asset speculation is one such area where the first, second and third order effects are all completely useless to society as a whole, and lack meaningful externalities. Yet people invent the most far-fetched fairy tales to explain why golden handcuffing the brightest math and physics phds to work for hedgies/hfts is a critical piece of human progress.

The truth is markets work great for some things and terrible for other things. When you make a means a goal you always end up with absurdity, in any system.

[lwhi]

I'm sorry. I consider you either very sheltered from poverty, delusional or both.

[SenAnder]

> The issue is, a lot of the people at the top engage in business practices that actively disenfranchise people at the bottom.

In an ideal world, we could first ban those practices, and only resort to punitive wealth/income taxes [1] if/when those measures fail to resolve the problem. The problem is regulatory/legislative capture by the wealthy. But I have doubts wealth caps would solve that - organizations such as WIPO or the BSA don't need multi-billionaire members to lobby effectively. A wealth cap would just multiply the number of shareholders.

[1] In the sense that they are intended to prevent ultra-richness, instead of merely filling government budget shortfalls from the pockets of those who can most afford it.

[yawpitch]

> In the future we’ll pull people up to the floor, but that doesn’t require attaching a ceiling.

It absolutely does, right up until the exact future moment when EVERYONE is pulled up above (well above) the (bottom) floor. In other words no one should be at liberty to seek the ceiling until EVERYONE is out of the basement.

> The will never be a successful society that substantially punishes achievement above a certain point.

There has never been a successful society that hasn’t.

[beacon294]

> In other words no one should be at liberty to seek the ceiling until EVERYONE is out of the basement.

Can you explain your reasoning?

[mlrtime]

The reasoning is based on feelings, so changes with the wind and subjective.

[WendyTheWillow]

Again, you rely on the utterly false notion of a "zero-sum" economy, when in fact it may only be possible to pull everyone out of poverty if we allow people to be proportionately rewarded for their contributions.

[yawpitch]

That _may_ be true (though the fact that we _have long_ allowed them such rewards and they certainly have not pulled everyone out of poverty seems to auger against that hypothesis) until you prove that conclusively, however, we should continue to proportionally tax them on their earnings.

[WendyTheWillow]

"Prove conclusively" is not how any of this works.

[badpun]

The ceiling is there because without it, a minority of people eventually acquire enough wealth and political power than comes from it, that it dominates entire society, to its detriment. Just look at Mexico or Ukraine as examples of what happens when there's no reasonable ceiling.

[WendyTheWillow]

What ceiling are you talking about? AFAICT there is no earnings or wealth ceiling in the Western world, and there certainly isn't one in the United States.

[simbolit]

>The[re] will never be a successful society....

As I do hold degrees in the field studying this very question, may I kindly ask for your sources? Or, not being greedy here, reasons...?

[WendyTheWillow]

I would bet entire dollars you'll hate this source, but here's one: "The Magnificent Progress Achieved By Capitalism: Is the Evidence Incontrovertible?" [0]

Here's a less insane one: "Comparative Economic Systems: Capitalism and Socialism in the 21st Century" [1]

Another one: "Economic Systems and Economic Growth" [2]

It's not really controversial in your field to claim that rewarding effort is a superior model to spreading out value evenly. The question is more of "to what extent" or even "what is achievement."

[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41560252

[1] https://www.bu.edu/eci/files/2021/08/Comparative-Economic-Sy...

[2] https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/87244/1/MPRA_paper_87244.pdf

[simbolit]

What's un-controversial is claims like "There will never be..." are bullshit.

[WendyTheWillow]

Quality contribution; thanks for commenting.

[ajkjk]

Yeah seriously, it's pretty much standard at this point.

[georgeecollins]

I don’t think the OP was saying that most people are the same, he was saying that most people have talent. In your sports analogy think about the kid who might be good at wrestling but terrible at track. And vice versa. The worry is that more affluent people sub-consciously see themselves as “better” in a universal way. That is not too different then European aristocracies used to see themselves.

[10xDev]

I don't believe there is a special part of your brain that allows you to be good at say chess, but leaves you with no potential in football (soccer). Of course some people are naturally faster than others or have a higher endurance peak but anything that involves working with your mind comes down to working memory (incredibly important), long term memory and spatial reasoning. That's why you will often see people talented at one thing change careers and still be successful. A good example is a Norwegian grandmaster who was also a national team football player: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simen_Agdestein

[threatofrain]

Also having good grades in math predicts having good grades across the board, including English.

[cogman10]

> Some people are indeed much better. Anyone who played sports as a kid understands this.

Anyone with a little bit of nutritional knowledge knows that having a nutritious diet is a major part of athletic competitiveness. Poverty limits or eliminates the ability of a parent to provide nutritious meals.

There's certainly going to be a level of natural talent that exists, but everyone who comes from poverty are playing with major handicaps.

Poverty makes small children.

[DanHulton]

And the time of the year you're born, too! Holy shiiit this fucked me up as a kid.

I always thought I was just "bad at sports," but I was born in August, so I was playing against a lot of kids who had up to like 11 months of development on me. That's _huge_ when you're a little kid.

A lot of those kids were "indeed much better." Because they were nearly a full year older!

[jack2312]

Yeah, there are studies that have been done on this. It's called the 'relative age effect'. It can have an effect into adulthood as well, when a one-year age difference may be less significant. This is because in their earlier years, the children who are a half-year older and more developed will generally see more success, thus getting more opportunities to play, thus getting more practice and coaching, thus leading to more success, etc...

(For more info, see this article [0]. Interestingly from that article, and I didn't know this before today, younger athletes in their cohort who make it to the later stages of their sport are more likely to be "super elite" athletes, probably because they were able to overcome the challenges of playing with bigger athletes in their childhood years.)

[0]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-athletes-birthdays-...

[sneed_chucker]

Lots of top athletes come from either poor countries or from poverty within non-poor countries.

NFL teams are full of players who grew up in poverty and ate fast food and processed junk during the formative years of their lives.

[cogman10]

There are a bunch of studies around the impact of poverty on athletics. Take this article with a bunch of them [1].

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. Just because you can show that "hey, some poor people are awesome athletes" doesn't negate the fact that by and large you can predict who is even participating in sports based on their household income.

I'd also like to challenge you to provide numbers. What percentage of top athletes came from poverty? Not poverty nations, or cities, but actual poverty.

[1] https://journals.lww.com/acsm-csmr/fulltext/2021/09000/dispa...

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

I can also tell you I was homeless as a child and went to college on an athletic scholarship.

there's some truth here but it's being overblown.

[bluedino]

Genetics probably play the biggest role when it comes to natural abilities. Height, strength, explosiveness, body proportions, endurance.

[AlexandrB]

This is inconsistent with the fact that average height has increased significantly over the last two centuries[1]. Our genes have not had time to change in that span, but our environment, including access to nutrients, has changed radically.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/human-height

[bluedino]

Taller than average people are most successful in certain sport. Basketball, volleyball, etc

Shorter than average are very rare in most sports except for some niche positions.

[achenet]

gymnastics and olympic weightlifting actually both favor shorter statures.

[gosub100]

the parents bear responsibility too, they are the ones responsible for feeding their kids. Poverty gets in the way, but poor parental choices and neglect share the blame. (I know personal responsibility is too passé these days, so sorry to bring up the topic).

[iamthepieman]

My limited anecdata does not support this. The kids who are the best on my children's sport teams are the ones who play club sports in addition to the regular season, who go to sport camps and are on multiple teams. It's clear why they are better. They spend all their time not in class, playing or practicing.

Financially, we are at least peers to all these families that spend so much time on sports but we don't prioritize it the same way so my kids are mid level players.

Obviously genetic differences do account for some variability especially at the extremes. A 190cm sophomore is going to have an easier time on the basketball court than a 165cm kid.

[bee_rider]

I don’t think it is obvious how much is talent, and how much is sort of… path dependent or something. We enjoy doing things we’re good at in general, so we do them more, and get more practice as a result.

Huge differences among small children could be something as arbitrary as “this kid is just under a year older, and as a result 10% more mature,” or “this kid has played a similar sport.”

[aurareturn]

>Some people are indeed much better.

At what? I consider myself a quick thinker and generally high IQ. But my sister has a way of connecting with children that I will never be able to replicate.

So who is "much better"? And at what?

[mewpmewp2]

You just said it yourself, you are much better at abstract thinking, while your sister is much better at connecting with children.

[bbor]

High IQ. I don’t believe in IQ but the commenters above are discussing inherent talents that our society chooses to reward.

Ps, I personally don’t find “I’m smarter than you but at least you can do X” to be a super comforting thing. I’m sure that comment makes sense in your context with your sister, but I definitely bristle whenever I read it. Smacks of prideful engineers & scientists trying to appear nice while still affirming their base insecurities about being superior to others.

But maybe all that’s just pedantic

[aurareturn]

  but I definitely bristle whenever I read it. Smacks of prideful engineers & scientists trying to appear nice while still affirming their base insecurities about being superior to others.

Growing up, my sister had better grades than me and was tutoring me in math.

  inherent talents that our society chooses to reward

Society doesn't work if we can't raise children.

[collingreen]

I think the comment you're replying to has the same sentiment, ie who is to say what "talent" is better than any other