Agree with this. Adam Smith ftw.

I agree with this take. Being highly intelligent can help that though a great deal because people generally speaking have a lot of respect for those that are highly intelligent.

This thread really need to be on the Politics forum at the same time. Anybody know how to do that?

I think it's an interesting thread precisely because it's not in politics.

Very true! BFI is the last bastion of capitalism on this site. This thread and its socialistic tones have no business being here and it should be moved to politards where they salivate over this kind of crap.

I think Ed witten thinks that whether there is free will or not is unknowable. That guy practically invented string theory all by himself.

It is interesting because if you don't believe free will it affects your actions, and you might take less initiative. So a person who does belief in free will might be more successful on average.

Although a society that realizes that success doesn't get you there by 100% free will alone might have less poor people.

So probably having a mixed belief system is best.

Probably is too political. Of course, now a days everything is political.

The problem is that you assume IQ is natural. For example IQ scores a 100 years ago were much lower in the west. IQ scores in poor countries are much lower and go up significantly as development goes up.

You are assuming that low IQ is something permanent and not largely because of poor upbringing.

The brain has shown time and again to be really flexible. Often low IQ is a result of lifetime of abuse of the brain, and lack of development.

Not saying there are no naturally stupid people (there are), but the % might be much smaller with better development.

Amazing post all around Jason.

Grunching here. Regarding the above point, I'm not entirely sure public sentiment in this case would come down on the side of the government rather than Amazon. Cynicism towards the government seems to be at an all time high (I think? At least much higher than the Rockefeller era); I can easily see a scenario where Joe Sixpack thinks he's getting way more value from AMZN than from the government.

For an example of this on a very small scale, look at the case of Uber getting kicked out of Austin. A significant part of the population viewed that as the Austin government screwing them, rather than Austin protecting them from an evil corporation.

I'm not sure of the particulars of Austin and Uber. I believe in Nevada the biggest reason it was banned for awhile was the government trying to protect the taxi companies under the guise of it being for "public safety". People in Nevada were pissed because they knew Uber was a great service they were missing out on.

Amazon is offering an amazing service right now. I agree I think right now people would side with Amazon over the government. It will depend on how the public views Amazon when the government decides to step in.

They did have a valid argument with regards to vetting of drivers backgrounds, didn't they?

Sounds scummy but it was still valid as an excuse.

We know where the SJWs stand already.

I don't understand what the case against amazon is. Is it that they're destroying jobs? Seems like their distribution model just make for different jobs, not necessarily fewer.

And if the concern is monpolitstic behavior, there're plenty of other huge retailers who could step in if the margins got especially juicy. It seems like they're killing it because of scale, not because they're gouging people. Almost 2/3rds of american households have a prime account ffs.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/shephyk.../#268bb4924586

Lol, and if they lose the argument they will just try to get the thread deleted!

Debt is obviously zero sum even though The Economist feels free to publish nonsense like this:
It turned out that debt is not a zero sum game, in which any loss to creditors is matched by a gain to borrowers. If a loan is secured against a property, and the property price falls sharply, both the lender and the borrower can suffer; the borrower loses his deposit (and possibly his home) while the lender has to write down the value of the loan.

Every dollar of the lender's write down benefits the borrower. Other poor choices the borrower might make have don't change the zero sum status.

I think it's odd when people try to demonize zero sum things like debt, or derivatives.

If I have a 100 dollars, and I borrow an additional 100 dollars, and then I set fire to a 100 dollars and don't pay back the loan --- then I have 100 dollars more than I would have without the loan and the lender has 100 dollars less.

All the fool at The Economist has demonstrated is that properly values aren't zero sum. If your home goes up in price, the person who sold it to you doesn't have to pay you money. Wealth is created.

The borrower loses because they miss out on a gain and lose their equity to the lender.

Plus their chances of getting credit in the future go down.

Overall credit has a positive effect because it allows people and organizations to concentrate wealth in one place in a short amount of time to create efficiency gains.

That doesn't prove that the loan was bad. It proves that the worst case outcome sucks.

I'd still argue that borrowing 5-10x your net worth to invest in a single property is a terrible life choice that shouldn't be encouraged but that's the american dream i guess. And banks will gladly pimp out financial products that don't make sense.

The loans aren't worse than zero sum in the strictest monetary sense but in terms of the benefits realized by the involved parties I would guess that basically all credit card debt that lasts more than a couple of months is held by people who didn't really understand what they're getting into.

Generally if you don't pay the loan then that is the worst outcome? Or are we in agreement here?

If you default on real estate you lose your equity, if you default on credit card debt your rates will go up and borrowing becomes harder. And your credit score goes down.

That does not mean borrowing money is a negative sum game on average. If done right it is positive sum?

Exactly right. Typically wealth flows from lenders to borrowers. The exception would be if you're borrowing money and expect to be able to invest it getting a high return. That doesn't apply to 99.99% of credit card debt.

Good post. Our backgrounds are very similar and probably give an insight into the consequences of some edge case familial situations that others cannot imagine.

The US is such that anyone who is capable of delaying gratification, who is smarter than a dog and doesnt' have children out of wedlock, can quite easily become middle class wealthy working 40 hours/week.

That's the definition of a fair shot. The US is meritorious enough that anyone of average intelligence and a willingness to work can be averagely wealthy without doing anything special, "Fair shot" doesn't mean that someone born a tard must be able to be as wealthy as Bill Gates.

A level playing field society is not something that is possible. The Soviets tried it. The Chinese tried it. How many failures do you need before you let go of such failed ideologies?

The best we can do is ensure that merit is rewarded close to equally, which is how the US is.

Bolded the straw men that AFAIK no one here has argued in favour of.

You can look at the negative side of things or the positive. No one would say BoredSocial didn't have a tough go at it. But him making something of his life, in my opinion, is a positive thing. I'm sure he knows many people who didn't make it out. He made it out because of his direct action, not luck. No one stepped in and magically changed his life.

We can't fix everyone's problems. Bored faced more challenges than I have, and I didn't have it easy. Government can't make our childhoods full of love and trips to Disneyland. They can only try to ensure that if you're willing to put the effort in that you get a decent shot to improve your life.

I come from a long line of dirt poor people because they got screwed because of bad luck. It could have continued with me when my father died and plunged my family into immediate poverty. I refused to allow that to happen, and I am happy I live in a country that allowed me to change course. No one said it's automatic. You have to go out and do it. If you think that's unfair, I don't know what else to say.

So what are you arguing for? You said "good post" to
The mentally ill are screwed. As are those that are trapped strongly in cultures that are dysfunctional. But they're a fairly small minority and it's not anyone's business to interfere, if such was even possible.

To me, a fair shot is defined as "If someone from a lower class wants to leave their surroundings and improve their life substantially without doing anything special, can they?" and the answer in America in 2017 is that they can do it very easily. You have to get into pretty bizarre victim politics to disagree with this imo. The only people this doesn't apply to are the mentally ill and those with trauma such as child abuse.

No one is arguing that an idiot should have the same expectation of success as a Bill Gates, or that a totally level playing field between everyone is possible.

This is not binary. The mentally ill and people trapped in dysfunctional cultures are almost totally screwed, but kids with parents long-term addicted to hard drugs, or with recidivist parents, or who suffer from prolonged physical or sexual abuse are quite screwed too.

Lower down the scale, kids whose parents split when they were young are disadvantaged somewhat compared to peers with stable family structures.

That's not saying that some individuals from those backgrounds but born with the right characteristics can't become successful in life (and there are examples here of people who have - the survivor bias cases); simply that fewer of them probably will.

From his post, BoredSocial was able to leverage his strong IQ advantage over his peers by recognising that his parents weren't good role models and presumably by studying/working hard and in the right ways.

If he'd been the same kid without that advantage, it seems reasonable to say that it's much less likely he'd have been able to make a success of himself, as his post says.

What he's arguing is that due to no fault of their own some people are so disadvantaged by some background factors (and I'm deliberately not citing race because I know you don't even regard it as a limiting factor) that it's wrong to say they have a fair shot at a successful life, so to claim that

"The US is such that anyone who is capable of delaying gratification, who is smarter than a dog and doesnt' have children out of wedlock, can quite easily become middle class wealthy working 40 hours/week."

is untrue.