No one's saying we roll the same dice at birth. That doesn't mean that people who are so desperate that they can't risk negotiating a job offer are 99.99% in that situation because of birth rather than decisions made subsequent to birth.
Especially because in America at least, over 200 million people are born middle class or above. An even lower class in America is doing much better than many other countries in the world.
At what point in your mind does personal accountability come into play? How prosperous does a nation have to be for people to have some responsibility for the consequences of their own actions? Or are people never responsible?
Regarding personal responsibility, at an individual's level it's your responsibility to improve your life, because that's the only lever you have and you don't have the time to wait for societal changes that take decades or centuries to arrive.
When we're discussing policy for our society however it's too easy to blame people for the choices they made so we don't have to think harder. The world's complexity is beyond what the humans brain can hold at any single time. Some people are dealt bad hands, born in a difficult family, born in a body that slow them down or drag them down. Some people make one bad choice (even something mild like a financially unprofitable carrer choice) at 18 because millions of parameters that played since their birth compulsed their brain to make that choice at that moment in their life. Not even mentioning meeting the wrong people. You can do everything well and cross the path of someone who breaks you.
Truly and without getting too philosophical,looking back and learning about people's stories I've come to realize that we have little agency and by the time we understand how the world works and what we should have done instead it's often too late to change the outcome drastically.
To tie it all back to the topic of this thread, the 19 year old who's been pushed by his parents all his life to get good grades, study well, get involved in the right extracurriculars, ends up at Stanford, starts a startup because that's what people do around him, is told to apply to YC, is accepted, is taken care of by YC, tell me how much is he responsible for his success?
I don't disagree with you. I think there's an even argument along these lines that we don't really have free will, since our initial biology and environmental circumstances aren't within our control, and yet every subsequent decision and choice follows inexorably from those initial conditions.
To me, this inspires empathy and care, and it's why I believe that society should have a very high floor. But discussions like these, and the current "eat the rich" zeitgeist seem to focus so much more on lowering the ceiling. Which to me is the wrong focus.
Capping the ceiling would be a tremendous mistake. It would eliminate the "if" in your scenario. The same value in wealth would not be created. You would be massively disincentivizing people to stay here and innovate, and that innovation would flow elsewhere or simply diminish.
Luckily, we've never actually capped the ceiling, and it's unlikely we ever will.
If there's no cap on a ceiling, is it fair or humanly okay when someone's wealth is Epstein-enough to own other people's lives? Wealth is a proxy for power, when someone has more power than legal systems or enough to swindle all of it, is that a better world?
There should be a ceiling or we reach the current state where accountability is nothing a million dollars can't buy.
Especially because in America at least, over 200 million people are born middle class or above. An even lower class in America is doing much better than many other countries in the world.
At what point in your mind does personal accountability come into play? How prosperous does a nation have to be for people to have some responsibility for the consequences of their own actions? Or are people never responsible?