Quote:
Originally Posted by BitchiBee
I think you are working under the assumption that all humans produce relatively close to each other. Human production in pretty much all fields follow zipfs law, or the pareto distribution. A tiny % of people produce the vast majority of the yield.
someone like bill gates has produced more wealth than millions of regular human beings. his kids being able to be lazy and rich is not because of some flaw in the system.
To be clear, I don't believe that social policy should aim for a correlation coefficient of 0. I'm in favor of so-called death taxes but I don't think they should be anywhere close to 100% of the deceased's wealth. I'm simply making the point that we don't have a pure meritocracy, where each individual's social status and wealth is a function only of their own hard work. Goofy's point about intergenerational mobility was a response to wil's line about "equality of opportunity".
I *do* think that many Americans have attitudes about poverty which are excessively punitive. That is, I think they believe, without sufficient justification, that most people are poor simply because they don't work hard enough, and that therefore they don't deserve either government assistance or private sympathy. But mobility data illustrates the point that working hard is often insufficient, and that "equality of opportunity" is something of a myth.
The point, to me, is not therefore that we should create real "equality of opportunity" by using laws to entirely erase the benefit of being born wealthy. It's that we should stop framing debates about economic policy around this false premise that where people end up in life is purely a consequence of how hard they work, or don't.