Also, might we perhaps run into self-fulfilling prophecies? If the lawyer was “lucky” enough as a child to have parents that instilled in him a great respect for education, and the furniture mover was “unlucky” enough to have parents that believed all success was due to luck, then perhaps the lawyer would have believed in the power of his agency, thus creating his good fortune, and the furniture mover would have doubted the power of his, thus abstaining from creating a similar fortune.

Surely if I ever have kids, I will aim to instill the concept that we live the lives that we create for ourselves. What a poverty it would be to rely upon the whims and agency of others’ charity, either voluntary (private) or involuntary (government).

Sure, we start with a genetic deck of cards and environmental one, but the value of agency is part of the elemental equation. A memory that has always stood out in my mind: my room mate and I were once in the same college class. I recall that on one evening, we were to leave home for class together. The setting: it was raining, and the Simpsons was just starting. I chose rain and class. He chose the Simpsons. The product of hundreds of similar choices was that I graduated in 7 semesters, whereas he is actually finishing up his final semester presently, 10 years after he started. He’s not been poor in the interim, but that’s solely due to the assistance of his wealthy parents – I don’t believe that he’s held a job more than a month or two in the past decade.

What, if anything, made me choose rain and class over the Simpsons, and what made him choose otherwise? I believed then (as I do now) that I could punch my meal ticket if I put in the effort. For what it’s worth, my parents were of much more modest means than his.

Whatever it is that encouraged me to choose rain and class is the thing that society must produce. Compassion dictates that we ought to grant my room mate a satisfactory existence should his willpower continue to fail him and his parents discontinue supporting him, but surely we have to acknowledge the moral hazard in doing so.

Social capital is luck

Thanks for this. I’ve been banging my spoon on the highchair for some years trying to make the point that remarkably successful people (like me) owe much or most of their success to luck. I wrote it up here:

http://trueconservative.typepad.com/trueconservative/2005/12/you_deserve_it.html

I was born smart (50% heritable), reasonably well-to-do, in the U.S. in the last half of the twentieth century, and–as just one more example of dozens or hundreds–lacking the “I love alcohol” gene.

I often think back to a phrase from Abe Lincoln’s speech to a temperance society in the 1840s (which phrase was not received with unalloyed enthusiasm by that quite Puritan crowd):

“In my judgment such of us who have never fallen victims [to alcoholism] have been spared more by the absence of appetite than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have.”

IOW, the lucky-sperm competition.

The moral implications are important not so much to claim benefits for the lazy, but to counter the moral underpinnings of mutually destructive supply-side, trickle-down rhetoric: “I earned it, so I deserve to keep it. And by the way you’ll all be better off if I do.”

“Luck” counters both of these statements. I worked hard to achieve my success, but so what? Many people work much harder and don’t achieve that success. So even if my hard work was “my own doing” (questionable), it doesn’t give me an inalienable right to whatever comes my way.

More important, though, is undercutting the second statement. In an increasingly high-productivity economy that delivers our essential needs with ever-decreasing labor input, labor is inevitably devalued. So laborers–especially unskilled laborers–have less “claim” to output. (Let’s not forget that *by definition,* 50% of people are unlucky enough to have been born with an IQ below 100; how much claim do they have?)

If productivity increases a thousandfold, so one producer replaces 1,000, the choice of that one person looks increasingly like pure luck. Yes, the other 999 can produce other things, but we know that the human utility curve flattens out at $15 or $20K a year, so if one person produces all of those high-utility goods, the other 999 are trying to stake a claim on goods by producing what are, ever-increasingly, relatively low-utility goods. Damn hard to make a claim based on that.

The problem is that–putting aside all moral claims–we need those people to have good incomes to maintain consumer (hence, indirectly, aggregage) demand. Otherwise the hot producers don’t have anyone to sell to. The log stops rolling and you have one guy standing on a stationary log, with the rest drowning around him.

Obviously we need to maintain incentive for high achievement or the log will also stop rolling, or get bloody sluggish. But guaranteeing a nice standard of living for everyone–even those with an IQ of 80–will actually allow that incentive to be greater, because there’s a strong, stable, steadily rolling economy like the one I was lucky enough to be born into.

We need to increase taxes and redistribution so lucky people can succeed.

Another bizarre circumlocution. Who is this “you” who could have been born in Dark Age Russia? A certain combination of genes? A disembodied soul plucked out of the Bardo and planted in a body? A zero-differentiated game theory player? Whatever passes for a thought experiment in the more thoughtless science fiction?

Sheesh.

As you know I am not a very academic person…but an old mentor of mine instilled two brief thoughts on this subject.

(1) “I would rather be lucky than good”

(2) “The harder I work the luckier I get”

I miss you buddy………….chip

Yes, self discipline is partly genetic and partly due to environment, but the fact is, for whatever reason, those who worked hard, or did things that weren’t their first choice, made a sacrifice, so it’s reasonable to think they should get greater rewards.

With regard to Yglesias’ comment, “separating the hard-working partner at the corporate law firm from the hard-working guy who moved the furniture into the law firm’s office.”. That guy who’s moving the furniture didn’t make an effort in the classroom, where it really counted, and the guy in the lawfirm did. There we’re likely many many days in highschool when that law partner would have preferred to be outside playing baseball instead of in the library studying, but he studied, while the furniture mover played baseball.

True, the furniture mover probably went to much worse schools, but if he had made the same effort as the law partner, he would still have earned a degree, and would have been making much more money.

It’s very important that we not decrease peoples incentive to work on their educations, where work counts the most. I’m all for greatly increasing education spending and college aid and support, but people have to make an effort in the classroom, not just the shoproom.