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Some people are indeed much better. Anyone who played sports as a kid understands this. Huge differences are immediately apparent in small children. But general
by dcist 3y ago
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.
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- lwhi 3y agoBetter 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.
- ajkjk 3y agoYeah seriously, it's pretty much standard at this point.
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoAnd 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.
- lwhi 3y agoYou're wrong. Fundamentally it requires redistribution and a complete change of mindset.
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoA 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 3y ago> 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 3y agoIf 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.
- yawpitch 3y agoIf Jimmy only ever prototyped the pencil by collecting and working the wood and graphite himself then, sure, he didn’t exploit anyone… as soon as he went into business employing others to manufacture those pencils he started to. The moment he concentrated the means of pencil production in his own hands he started to exploit both his raw suppliers — that graphite miner’s health woes are the fruit of Jimmy’s demand — and his employees. In the end it was the people actually turning the raw materials into pencils that made the value; the invention added nothing until someone’s labour was exploited.
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- simbolit 3y ago>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 3y agoI 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 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41560252 [1] https://www.bu.edu/eci/files/2021/08/Comparative-Economic-Systems.pdf https://www.bu.edu/eci/files/2021/08/Comparative-Economic-Sy... [2] https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/87244/1/MPRA_paper_87244.pdf https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/87244/1/MPRA_paper_87244.pdf
- simbolit 3y agoWhat's un-controversial is claims like "There will never be..." are bullshit.
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoQuality contribution; thanks for commenting.
- simbolit 3y agoSame vibe here.
- matthewmacleod 3y agoI'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.
- klabb3 3y agoDepends 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 3y agoThe 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 3y agoYou'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/nunn/files/zero_sum_draft23.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.edu/files/...
- lwhi 3y agoI'm sorry. I consider you either very sheltered from poverty, delusional or both.
- yawpitch 3y ago> 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.
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoAgain, 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 3y agoThat _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 3y ago"Prove conclusively" is not how any of this works.
- beacon294 3y ago> 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 3y agoThe reasoning is based on feelings, so changes with the wind and subjective.
- badpun 3y agoThe 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.
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- WendyTheWillow 3y agoWhat 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.
- georgeecollins 3y agoI 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 3y agoI 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simen_Agdestein
- threatofrain 3y agoAlso having good grades in math predicts having good grades across the board, including English.
- black_13 3y ago[dead]
- aurareturn 3y ago>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?
- bbor 3y agoHigh 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
- collingreen 3y agoI think the comment you're replying to has the same sentiment, ie who is to say what "talent" is better than any other
- aurareturn 3y agobut 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.
- mewpmewp2 3y agoYou just said it yourself, you are much better at abstract thinking, while your sister is much better at connecting with children.
- cogman10 3y ago> 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.
- sneed_chucker 3y agoLots 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.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y agoI 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.
- cogman10 3y agoThere 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/disparities_and_inequities_in_youth_sports.13.aspx https://journals.lww.com/acsm-csmr/fulltext/2021/09000/dispa...
- DanHulton 3y agoAnd 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!
- bee_rider 3y agoI 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.”
- iamthepieman 3y agoMy 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.