[K0balt]

Wealth is a huge enabler for risk taking. If you are on the verge of homelessness, you can’t gamble the rent on a 100:1 bet with 1000:1 payout, even though that is obviously a bet you should always take, every time, no matter how often you lose.

In reality, those bets are all around us. They are the very basis of life itself. Resource scarcity makes us behave as scavengers or hunter-gatherers, depending on the generosity of the environment instead of planting seeds and waiting for the harvest.

[1penny42cents]

Perhaps I should have clarified that “success” is relative. Success for someone born into poverty is different than someone born into royalty.

I’m focused on the qualities we should focus on in our adulthood to maximize our personally determinable chances of success. I believe all adults should do that for our own lives.

With that view, the question is whether homeless people benefit from being clever, brave, and persistent more than any other mix of traits, for example towards the pursuit of getting off the streets. I would say yes!

What do you think?

[K0balt]

I would agree that the paradigm of persistent application of strategic action is effective across the vast majority of problem spaces.

The issue is that as resource availability plots towards the corner of the graph, the potential actions become more and more constrained, and inherently, the benefits of being clever and brave are constrained with those limitations. Eventually you get down to the point of eating cockroaches because the option is death from starvation.

It’s certainly a matter of scale, but I think the point is that the scale isn’t linear, and that the benefits of strategic risk tolerance scale exponentially with resource abundance.

As with most things in life, the playing field isn’t level. I guess the real question here is should it be? To what extent does it benefit society at large to make it more level, and how much more level is optimal?