[lukifer]

Humans have a problem with complexity and compound causality in general; any person who succeeds does so by some combination of both individual grit, and support from society and loved ones (even if indirectly), regardless of what the proportions happen to be (if one could even measure such a thing). Thinking that success must derive exclusively from either society or the individual is sheer absurdity, driven by a need to impose an idealized narrative upon messy reality.

[spindritf]

any person who succeeds does so by some combination of both individual grit, and support from society and loved ones

And genetics, and the general culture, and luck, which is just a word we use for many factors we can't even name yet mixed with true randomness. And then there's a fair bit of interplay between all the factors.

Why do some people work 60 hours a week when others barely crack 10? That "grit" doesn't come from nowhere.

And surely there are more fundamental reasons for why some societies at some times are more supportive, or more successful, or richer, or saner, than others.

[rayiner]

I work 60 hours a week because I was fortunate enough to be born with aptitudes that cause employers to want to pay me a lot of money for those hours. If my employers were fighting to keep me under 30 hours so they wouldn't have to pay benefits, and to pay $7.50 for each incremental hour, with zero upward mobility, my incentive to work those hours would vanish.

Moreover, you shouldn't get credit for genetics. That's not a product of your exercise of free will.

[spindritf]

you shouldn't get credit for genetics

Why not? Seems like a completely arbitrary standard. And pretty hard on everyone else. Are you not viscerally impressed by beautiful women, high IQ speakers, and so on?

Even if you somehow get people to agree, and at least partially implement it, how can you credit anything then? Is there a human quality we care about not heavily influenced by genetics?

How do you disentangle von Neumann's ability from his achievements? How do you discount Brigitte Bardot's beauty or Michael Jordan's height?

[rayiner]

You may not agree with it, but its not arbitrary to say that the economy should strive to give people credit for what they choose to do, rather than what you luck into. Its a distinction based on a well-defined criterion.

I'm not really interested in discussing outliers like Michael Jordan, or tiny segments of the economy like sports or entertainment. I'm talking about how we distribute the proceeds of our industrial economy, or at the very least, how we assign moral culpability to people based on things they have little control over.

That is to say, it might be inevitable that pretty people or smart people will have advantages. But the only difference between attractiveness and intellect is that on places like HN, its socially acceptable to be smug about the latter.

[ancap]

> the economy should strive to give people credit for what they choose to do

The economy is an inanimate abstract. It does not strive for anything. It is not interested in anyone's perception of what is fair any more than my phone is interested in vulgar language.

The economy consists of billions of individuals getting together and saying "I have x to offer, I want y". To try to force some idea of justice, morality, fairness, equality, etc. into this equation is to say individuals do not have the right of free association; that they, the simpletons they surely are, are not smart enough to choose for themselves and judgement must be deferred to some all-knowing third-party.

Please, just don't.

[rayiner]

> The economy consists of billions of individuals getting together and saying "I have x to offer, I want y".

No. It consists of that against the background understanding that parties cannot say " well I don't want to pay y, so I will kill you and take x." And in every extant example of a sophisticated economy, that understanding is enforced by a government that has guns. One can imagine scenarios in which that "all-knowing third party" does not exist, but I imagine if it were such a good idea it'd exist somewhere.

Once the people come together to create that third party that has the guns that creates the background understandings that allow economies to exist, then they are entitled to say: "well what else do we want?"

[briandear]

If I could upvote twice, I would. The idea that the economy is a "being" is communist rot. The idea that we can (or should) control the economy is nonsense. Attempting to control the economy is like trying to control the weather. Certainly we can work harder to mitigate the effects of the weather, but a bunch of smart people thinking hard enough can't stop a hurricane, no matter how socially desirable that might be.

[orwhat]

What would you think if I said there were indications that most conscious decision making isn't fully conscious at all? That, to a degree, free will is an illusory shadow of subconscious processes and that by the time you choose something, you've really already chosen it? And that genetics, prenatal development, and cultural influences all have a great say in those subconscious processes?

For example, if a child becoming a very aggressive person were totally predictable based on behavioral characteristics of the biological parents, would that matter in this discussion?

I know this is a departure from the way we typically like to think about ourselves, but there is actually some good evidence to indicate that we may not have as much control as we think.

[danielweber]

It often leads to the same conclusions.

If people have free will, then we punish those who harm others.

If people are finite state automatons, then we punish those who harm others, because that's how you change inputs into the finite state automatons.

[lmm]

> You may not agree with it, but its not arbitrary to say that the economy should strive to give people credit for what they choose to do, rather than what you luck into. Its a distinction based on a well-defined criterion.

It's not well-defined at all. If person A is "smarter" than person B, how can you tell whether that's the result of A working harder than B or A having lucked into greater intelligence? Measure how much time each spent studying in college? If person C "chooses" to be an alcoholic and is therefore unproductive, how much of that is "free will" (what does that even mean?) and how much is bad luck?

[spindritf]

the economy should strive to give people credit for what they choose to do, rather than what you luck into

The choices you make are heavily influenced by factors you lucked into, like intelligence, family, culture. And the choices you are presented with are even more influenced by your country of origin.

It's not just outliers. What do you do at 90th or 50th percentile of intelligence? Those two people can make the same choices, say majoring in CS, with very different outcomes.

How do you reward choices under those conditions? You could pay only for the results you like. But we pretty much already do that. What else is there?

This is like a just world fallacy episode 2: the world may not be fair but surely we can make it so.

[mcelroyian]

I choose how wealth is distributed every time I make a purchase. As do you.

[foolrush]

Except not quite.

The invisible forces at work here are in the nature of your “choices” and your agency to participate within that value system.

Few here may be able to participate in the distribution of wealth within the high end of the luxury car market via their purchases, and fewer still via their purchasing or selling of energy market entities.

Along this path, we can also be critical of the options available and the hegemonic / power forces at work that birthed them.

All in all, it is a questionable suggestion that buys into (no pun intended) a cascading wall of myth.

[waterlesscloud]

The only difference?

If you were stranded in the wilderness and needed to survive from scratch, would you rather be with a group of attractive people or a group of smart people?

[rayiner]

I'd rather be with a group of backwoods rednecks to be perfectly honest.

But I digress. The economy isn't about heros fighting nature to save the day. Its about everyone working together to make an environment where creation is possible. You take Zuckerberg and leave him in the middle of the woods, and what happens? Does he still create wealth? No, he's useless without being plugged into the larger economy. That larger economy is made up of ordinary people. They are poorly compensated not because their contribution doesn't matter, collectively, but because they are fungible. Is fungsbility a fair criterion for structuring an economy?

[dragonwriter]

> If you were stranded in the wilderness and needed to survive from scratch, would you rather be with a group of attractive people or a group of smart people?

The naively obvious answer is "smart", but given that what people have evolved to find attractive in general (before distortions from makeup, etc., designed to fool natural attraction) is somewhat tied to health and physical fitness, and ability to contribute in a survival situation is very much affected by that as well as smarts, then if those are the only two measures available, there's reason to at least seek some balance between then rather than purely favoring smarts.

[rokhayakebe]

Why do some people work 60 hours a week when others barely crack 10? That "grit" doesn't come from nowhere.

Are you suggesting the people "cracking" only 10 lack the ability to work 60 hours weekly?

[danielweber]

I'm not sure what you are asking, but I directly observe that, when presented with the choice between doing something hard that pays off a lot, or doing something easy that pays off little or not at all, that there are a bunch of people in the first camp and a bunch in the second camp.

This doesn't strictly break down by SES, either, although there are certainly trends.

You can come up with all sorts of reasons for the second camp's behavior, and many of those reasons are likely true for some subset of that camp. But at some point you have to recognize people's agency in their own behavior, or else they are just children in your eyes.

[rokhayakebe]

when presented with the choice between .... bunch of people in the first camp and a bunch in the second camp.

This is a VERY narrowed perspective.

Unless these behaviors are constant across all areas of one's life, they only tell you what one's priorities are.

Because someone may sacrifice short term for long term gain in their career, while at the same time sacrificing long term gain for short term satiation when it comes to food or health.

So truly what can be said about this marvelous developer, and about his ability to hold on for long term outcomes, when she refused a Google buyout offer and took her company public, when at the same time she pushed back starting a family, eating healthy, and working out.

My point is NO-ONE belongs to one camp and one camp only. You and I, and all others belong to both camps.

[foolrush]

“Thinking that success must derive exclusively from either society or the individual is sheer absurdity, driven by a need to impose an idealized narrative upon messy reality.”

Very astute postmodern summation.

The only thing missing in this is the possibility that the myths of narrative (male hero), constancy (see genetics and scientism), etc. are all driven by ideology. In particular, capitalist ideology; the value of capital is predicated on foundational ideology. “Made man” for example, reinforces individual capital ownership as opposed to cultural byproduct.

A counterpoint might be other cultures with an Eastern religion based view chance / fortune as having a greater and more culturally secured role in the lives of an individual.

[imjk]

Just out of curiosity, are you a student or recent graduate?

[foolrush]

Old. Very old.

[ap22213]

It's pretty easy to see the effects of this if we compare the number of successful people from rich countries to the number of successful people from the other several billion people in the world. Where one is born and in which family is hugely (if not primarily) important.

I'm from the US, and I've seen quite a few highly intelligent and hard-working (but poor) people end up as heroin dealers or working odd jobs, with no steady employment. Conversely, I've seen relatively mediocre people, born to wealthy families, succeed wildly. And, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's seen this.

It's something to think about in a world where around 2400 billionaires (~0.000033% of the population) own ~7% of the world's wealth.

[calinet6]

However, the public discourse and political narrative is decidedly in the individualistic camp, aligning more on the side of what people want to believe, rather than what is true.

This allows those with power to take advantage of the situation to a large degree.

It is there that the wishy-washy reductionist argument of 'the world is complex' ceases to be useful (not saying you're making that argument, but it often comes up). We need to push the world a little more to one side; a little more toward the balance point of this messy reality, with full recognition and respect for that complexity.

[300bps]

Yet there are some people that work 60 hours per week and some that choose to not work at all. The people in the first camp are typically more successful than people in the second camp. Articles like the OP discount their efforts and accomplishments completely.

[seren]

I certainly does not work as hard as the cleaning lady getting up at 5 am to clean my desk. I just sit there typing lightly on my ergonomic keyboard, in my air-conditioned office and in the end, I will probably end better off, even though she might have crossed a deadly desert to come here and won't see her relatives for a long time. I just have the chance of being born around.

Hard work == success, is probably a variation of the just world bias [0]. It provides a reassuring and motivating narrative, but in the end, it is quite simplistic. I am not saying that hard work is not a necessary condition, but it is far from being sufficient.

Another example : with all the discussions about European debt, it has been reported multiple times that on average Greeks were working much longer that Germans. It does not do them much good.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

[rayiner]

> I certainly does not work as hard as the cleaning lady getting up at 5 am to clean my desk

No kidding. I was in the office at 10 pm the other night, and the cleaning guy came around to empty the trash cans. He's like "man, still here at 10?" And I'm thinking "well so are you."

[newppc]

Hopefully he didn't start till 6pm though :)

[jmclean]

I think part of the reason this conversation is valuable, though, is that the inverse omission is far more dominant in the cultural conversation right now. It's certainly mostly true that hard work plays an important part in fantastic success. But it's equally true that even in those cases, the majority enjoyed advantages that are often invisible even to them.

So to be sure, the opposite extreme is just as ridiculous as suggesting that every person exists in a bubble where their effort correlates exactly with outcome. But when the awareness of systemic advantage is absent (as it certainly is), I see staking out a far extreme opinion like this as a challenge to find a more reasonable center.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The work ethic narrative is immensely useful to employers, but in too many situations it's almost totally disconnected from real opportunity and reward.

Ultimately it's a political problem - but not necessarily in the obvious sense.

The most successful and fun cultures reward inventiveness and positive social contributions, and include some element of challenge and competition.

But using money and markets to make decisions about the kinds of activities that are rewarded turns out to be an inefficient, short-sighted and often surreal way to manage what does and doesn't get valued.

[TheOtherHobbes]

And I'd appreciate it if downvoters justified their downvotes.

I'm quite happy with the idea that an economy where it's possible to raise $1 million in funding for an app like Yo! while the many apps that do something with longer term benefits struggle for commercial support has some issues with rational resource allocation.

Not to mention the outrageous bubbles and the epic acquisition disasters that litter the Internet ruins.

If you believe otherwise I'd like to see you argue why.