Thread by @Noahpinion

1/What matters for success - hard work, natural ability, or luck?

This is a mostly meaningless question that doesn't really matter for policy. I'll explain why.

2/"Natural ability vs. luck" is meaningless since natural ability is entirely dependent on luck.

If I'm born with parents who teach me stuff and take care of me, that's luck.

If I'm born next to a factory that wrecks my brain with pollution, that's luck.

3/If I'm born with genes that give me natural advantages, that's luck.

If I'm born into a country that makes companies put iodine in salt, so I don't have a brain-injuring iodine deficiency, that's luck.

Etc. etc. etc.

4/How about "hard work vs. luck"?

This isn't a *completely* meaningless question but it's mostly meaningless.

Lots of effort is determined by luck.

5/If I get depression that stops me from working hard, that's luck.

If I am born to parents who inculcate me with a strong work ethic, that's luck.

Etc. etc.

6/The question of "hard work vs. luck" isn't ENTIRELY meaningless, because we can change society in order to incentivize people to work harder or less hard.

But I think these incentives have limited effectiveness, and a lot of effort is just pre-determined.

7/In math terms, "luck vs. other stuff" is generally a meaningless question because at some level of analysis you can define anything as a random variable.

8/Now here's why even if these questions were meaningful, aren't nearly as important as we think.

Usually, "luck vs. natural ability vs. hard work" is how we determine whether we think inequality is justified or unjustified.

ifo.de/DocDL/wp-2019-…

9/But this makes no sense.

To see this, imagine two societies.

In the first, someone with "twice" as much ability gets twice as much money.

In the second, someone with "twice" as much ability gets 1000x as much money.

Which of these societies is more just?

10/Well, most people would probably say the first one, where money is a linear function of ability. Twice as much ability, twice as much money. Sounds fair, right?

But OK, what does it mean to have "twice" as much ability? What is the scale???

11/You could use IQ or something, but even if that were a good measure of general ability (which it is not), IQ is normalized to a make it come out a bell curve. So for example, it's meaningless to say someone with a 200 IQ is "twice as smart" as someone with a 100 IQ.

12/In practice, we have no way of measuring *how much* one person's ability exceeds that of another.

In math-speak, ability is ordinal while money is cardinal.

13/So suppose I have greater generalized ability (whatever the hell that even means) than @eean. Given that it's @eean, this is a plausible assumption. 😀

Do I deserve to make $1 more per year than @eean? $100,000 more? $1,000,000,0000 more?

It really just makes no sense.

14/A similar argument applies to effort. What does it mean to work "twice as hard" as someone else? Twice as many hours? Twice as many buckets of sweat? Twice as many actions per minute in Starcraft? There's just no cardinal measure that makes sense.

15/So even if we do decide to attribute success to natural ability or hard work, there's no obvious way of determining what level of inequality that should correspond to.

16/The "correct" level of inequality is both a moral and a practical judgment. The moral part is "How much do we care about people?". The practical part is "What are the costs of achieving a certain level of equality/inequality?".

Everything else is just rationalization.

(end)