I'm not "woe is me" but I was raised in a super conservative family, taught to avoid risk and that a steady paycheck was the ultimate success. It has taken many many years to break out of that mindset and be willing to take calculated risks.

The really hard questions arise when you start talking about what people deserve. Who is to say? We all have a unique frame of reference and experiences that have shaped us.

In the end, the only middle ground we're likely to reach is the mindset of helping people help themselves. To me, the fairness question is more about the opportunity to improve you and yours. Having no opportunities is unfair and must be fixed. The question is always going to be who decides how much is fair?

In other words, "you" had 100% chance of being you. No luck involved.

It's still useful to think as if different people could have been born in different circumstances. You could think of it as a mental shorthand for the idea that differences between human beings are arbitrary, and it makes no sense to argue that a human inherently deserves an impoverished life over another human.

It also seems a bit homo-centric coming from a human.

BTW, I think we do have genuine subjective probability, even though the universe is deterministic.

This isn't like flipping a coin: it could come up heads or tails.

You must be thinking of some kind of immortal soul.

It may be individually lucky to the person born somewhere (i.e. they had no involvement or choice in where they were born and to whom) but I'm not sure why you would isolate luck to the individual level.

That persons parents made decisions about when, where and how their child would be born. Some parents move countries in search of better opportunities, some were themselves "lucky" to be born where they were. When you zoom out a little it becomes a lot less "lucky" and more of the result of intergenerational decisions and priorities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance

I'm socially and fiscally liberal, but I don't think it's absurd to think that the government should reward hard work even though luck is more important. It just so happens that you can motivate people to work harder, and can't motive people to be luckier.

Some poor people I know, they work harder than most of us desk monkeys, because they're doing back-breaking labor day after day. Holding down two, three jobs, shuffling around town on the bus to work 60, 80 hours a week for very little money.

This is not even an uncommon story. People working damn hard for not a lot of money.

Is that the hard work we want the government to reward? If not that, then what?

It's just too open-ended, and too easy to overlook a lot of people who work really hard, without really talking about it more.

So one should define how you measure value, and what cost (social, externalities etc.) we should be ready to accept for each type of value.

What value is a grade school teacher creating?

Hotel rooms need to be cleaned, and your coffee needs to be made. What value is that hotel room cleaner bringing into things? Or the dude framing drywall in your house?

To me, to be honest, "value creation" sounds more like "the stuff I like to think I'm doing" than a real thing.

Reward for value creation is something that the free market does every day in trillions of transactions.

Labor's value is exactly what someone is willing to pay for it.

Then rewarding achievement is sort of pointless, giving help to those who need the least of it.

Maybe instead progress should be rewarded?

But I'm talking about a program that mitigates the effects of luck while (in the same program, with the same methods) rewarding effort.

They're mostly opposite effects and there's no way to reliably distinguish hard work from luck. That's why there's so much debate on the subject.

In any case though, any government program that gives equal resources to everyone and isn't means-tested to hell can do both. For example, an UBI both mitigates luck (by giving everyone a set amount of resources) and rewards hard work (because better workers will get far better returns with the income they've been given).

I think by demographics, your father was likely in a generation that was much more often in a position to be consistently rewarded for their efforts. The generation that was at certain ages in the Great depression, or the dotcom crash, and more recently the Great Recession has a different formative experience than experiences in the Baby boom generation.

For every well thought out or engineered piece of software, there's a more successful one that did the minimal work necessary to get their barely working code to market.

And we can easily find counterexamples on the other side, wealthy or successful people who needed very little effort and simply chose the right product, the right timing, were born to the right family.

I might even go so far as to say that in the Real World, and not some libertarian utopia, that effort is irrelevant (or orthogonal) to success.

Using myself as an example, I don't feel right saying that I'm a hard worker. Sure, I wasn't at the lowest end of possible effort, but I'm far from the high end as well. Figuring out if I'm above/below the 50% mark requires a lot more understanding of what is actually normal than I have, but I believe I'm close to average, probably a bit below.

Despite this, I've had a ton of luck and success. And when I look at people that are more successful (wealthy, at least), some of them have worked harder...and others have had just more luck.

I had a great high school which let me coast through college. Because I didn't have the GPA to get the degree I wanted (restricted admissions), I ended up with a "make-your-own" degree. (Which was good because I had accrued so many electives out of general curiosity that I'd have been in college for years extra to qualify for any other degree). I had a 75% tuition discount, which meant that even though I could afford student loans, I didn't need any.

I fell into a profession just as it was becoming hugely in demand. I don't program because it makes big bucks, I program because I've always wanted to. It just happened that as I entered college the Web went mainstream.

My first job out of college was working on coldfusion (which I didn't know) on an NT environment (which I hated), all because I had fired off an email telling them I could show them how to use Perl on Linux, and they had just switched to Oracle on Linux (unbeknowst to me) and wanted someone with some Linux experience. You could argue that that email was "work" on my part, but really it was just a punch-drunk sarcastic email sent after a couple of hours of putting out legitimate applications. Total luck.

3 months later I got a contracting job for the state at double the salary (3 months post-college experience apparently counts for a lot). It was a 6 week contract that I stayed at for 7 years (at that point I got hired full time and stayed for another 5 years). The job was easy and I learned a ton because they had no real work for me, so I just did what I wanted. Work? Some, but mostly just luck. Certainly a ton more luck than other people that were working harder.

It goes on and on like this. And I'm not as lucky as some: I could have been born into a rich family, where I'd have to work hard NOT to make money. (Heck, we've seen that someone can have multiple failing multi-million dollar enterprises and still roughly match the market).

I'm not saying I didn't do ANY work...I'm saying that my success (and the success of many others) owes far MORE to luck than effort. In fact, I'd go so far as to say the majority of people I know that are successful are so because of luck. Many of them work harder than I do...but not harder than other people that are less successful. I don't think that's because the less successful people have had BAD luck (though some have), I think it's because the successful people have had more luck than the less successful people, by and large.

Yet in discussions like this people always want to emphasize the effort. I don't know if that's because my judgement is wrong, or because people are really uncomfortable facing the prospect that their effort counts for so little in the wider scheme of things.

Their view appears to be heavily reliant on meritocratic outcomes, which of course assigns a low weight to luck. I would think that this world view would not be supported by a higher weighting to luck, but I do not know if the low assignment to luck is a result of cognitive dissonance with respect to their own hard work and long hours to sustain their success.

http://boingboing.net/2016/07/03/low-income-us-households-ge...

I wonder if your father thinks of his mortgage interest deduction as an example of receiving help he doesn't deserve?

Apart from that a lot of other countries has it. If I had to change something I would actually add a rental deduction to help those who can't afford to buy housing instead of removing mortgage interest deduction.

No, it doesn't. The prospect of getting the deduction drives up demand for home purchases and therefore the price (relative to income). If we got rid of it, the same mortgage would take more money out of your income, but you would need a smaller mortgage to get any home.

(The effects don't exactly cancel, of course, but it's not some big dealbreaker like you suggest.)

In addition, it's not unreasonable to make this kind of distinction, between:

1) Free money for failing/misfortune/doing nothing (welfare policies)

vs

2) "Free" money that you have to earn through positive work somehow. (production subsidies, government jobs, innovation awards)

Food stamps and the interest deduction are the same, in being intended as subsidies, but for the the second you at least have to be productive, earning an income, approved for a house, make all the necessary commitments, etc, and then you get some of it defrayed.

That's not to say the distinction is justified, but it shouldn't be hard to at least understand why people would put them in a different bucket.

People owning rental properties get to deduct interest on financing used for the property. If we eliminated the mortgage interest deduction for home owners, we would be strongly favouring rent seeking behaviour - literally.

If capital gains were taxed away, that would counteract the situation where mortgage tax breaks feed directly into increased prices.

What I suggest above will be very very unattractive to many people, as real estate speculation represents one of the best 'money for nothing' speculations most people can engage in, but speculation is by definition unproductive, and it would seem to be a good idea, if unpopular to engineer a system that discourages real estate bubbles.

Additionally, it makes paying cash for a home unrealistic, making the housing market (more) dependent on banks and their attendant federal regulations. Over time this has had numerous negative effects on land use patterns and urban health by encouraging car-oriented sprawl and devaluing urban mixed-use neighborhoods. There's also the whole race-based redlining thing. The worst of these policies have been mitigated in the recent past, but they still pose obstacles to certain kinds of development (that are highly desirable lately) and would not have existed in the first place without government intervention in home mortgages.

So if there were no mortgage interest deduction for individuals that would simply be incentive for people to form a corporation they are sole shareholders for, for the specific purpose of buying the home. This would be especially true for people who are contracting or otherwise self-employed anyway and hence can have totally legitimate income for this corporation...

Now having the mortgage interest deduction but no imputed rent income due to the owner-occupancy, that part is arguably weird.

That may be true, but if it's having that effect for a lot of people, then surely it's also contributing to higher housing prices, which of course negates (at least in part) the supposed increase in affordability..

There's no reason to favor home ownership -- look at home ownership rates in Germany vs S. Europe. Then look at the health of their economies and living conditions.

I would rather every middle class worker simply have a much higher paycheck, so that the mortgage interest deduction could be eliminated without anyone feeling a thing.

When homeowners claim valuable land and hold onto it for decades, without paying the correct market rate for that land (which, of course, they didn't create the value for), they get the benefits of owning this resource without the responsibility.

In short, property taxes are much too high for the actual structures we build, but should be much higher on the underlying land. It's a sane revenue source that would unburden the load placed upon income tax, etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...

Mortgage tax deductions are only on a primary home, so they don't apply to owners of rental units.

Put simply: property taxes are NOT a penalty for homeownership, they are paid by everyone. Mortgage tax credit is only given to homeowners.

Mortgage interest on a rental unit is deductible against the rental income on that unit for obvious reasons: it's a business expense for the rental business and hence taken out of gross revenue for that business to figure out the (taxable) profits.

Specifically, for US individual federal taxes in 2016, see Form 1040, Schedule E, line 12. This is the form you use if you haven't actually formally incorporated your rental activity as a business.

Note that you can also deduct your spending on repairs to the rental property, insurance on it, property taxes (line 16 on that form), and so forth, for the exact same reasons: income taxes on business-like activity are levied on net income, not gross income.

The only people who can't take a mortgage interest deduction are people who have a second home that they are _not_ renting out.

Yeah, mortgage tax deduction, like all incentives that encourage borrowing more money, ends up being a transfer of wealth from new homebuyers to whoever had owned property outright (whether older long-term homeowners or developers or real estate investors).

Very important point.

I know that the ideology espoused on sites such as dailykos.com were very detrimental to personal drive and success in my college years of 18-22.

That ideology kept pounding home the idea of the unfairness of the economy, of the lower share of the pie allocated to labor vs capital and the increasing inequality of American society.

All of those things were true no doubt, but they were not useful for someone who had been hacking since 4th grade.

I file it under bad luck that the same people that had a correct analysis and opposition to the great mistake of that time, the Iraq invasion and occupation, also had such a neurotic and self-limiting and destructive view towards work, productivity and the modern economy, and that I was too inexperienced in the ways of the world at the time to understand this very important concept.

It motivated me to understand my own values, and learn more about the system, and figure out what I wanted to do to try and change the system for the people who'd never luck out and get a desk job, the people in coffee shops, cleaning hotel rooms, and the like.

Guess we can take different things from the same thing.

Why can't you both be right? In my experience I've seen a lot of lucky failures because they had no work ethic. I've also seen a lot of hard working amazing people fail because they weren't lucky.

"Luck favors the prepared [mind]" is the perfect middle ground on your positions.

I'm willing to tolerate an amount of "unfairness" in people getting help they "don't deserve", while he finds this very offensive.

To be fair, you both are willing to tolerate unfairness, the difference is likely from where that unfairness originates.

I grew in dirt-poor in white-trash / redneck-ville rural NC, but I've managed to work my way into a pretty good career in software development, living in a nice neighborhood in Chapel Hill. A lot of my high-school peers are still living in bumfuck, doing drugs, working fast-food, whatever. Was I just "luckier" then them? I don't think so. I think the primary factor is that I was more ambitious, harder working, and made better decisions. And I've had much "luck" along the way... man, it was minor and hard to notice. Because from my subjective perspective, I've busted my balls for everything I managed to achieve.

I still remember working midnight shift waxing floors for a grocery store, leaving work at 6:30am, heading to an 8:00am class (Discrete Math of all things!), suffering through 3 hours of classes, then going and crashing on a couch in the library for an hour or so, then grabbing lunch, hitting my 1:00pm class, then driving the hour home from school, to fall alseep, wake up, and go back to work at 10:00. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Some people will suffer through that shit, some won't. I don't see a whole lot of luck in the equation.

You want to believe, I dare say, maybe because of all the hard shit you had to go through. But there is somewhere in Aleppo or elsewhere someone who went through all the same hardship as you, and worked hard, and was nice and all, but who died miserably after having being tortured by jihadists or whatever and having seen his whole family beheaded. In fact, there are millions upon millions of people that did everything right but were unlucky to be born in Uganda or Syria or Libya or Bangladesh, and got fucked in the end, like most of the thousands who were drowned in the Mediterranean last year. Luck trumps merit. That's the whole point of the original article.

Is it inconsistent to believe that the world is totally unjust and, yet, also believe that individuals who put forth more effort are generally more successful? I think not.

The world itself may be totally unjust; physics shows no partiality for individuals who possess a greater "morality" or work ethic. However, we do not only live within the world. We also live within various frameworks, such as a culture, society, company, etc. These frameworks are not governed merely by physics, but by other humans. And these other humans do, almost by definition, show partiality. Therefore, I argue, that you can increase your chances for success through your own actions. This is not inconsistent with claiming Pol Pot and torturous jihadists "won"; they could have simply assessed their situation and, by their own effort, maximized their chances for success.

You worked hard, bettered your situation.

I still want to live in an America where no one needs to work that hard to have a comfortable life. Not luxurious, but comfortable. Anyone willing to put in 40 hours of work a week, they should be able to afford shelter in their region, have nice things every once in a while, have meat on the table regularly, etc.

Looking to the future, I would like to see cancer cured in my lifetime. I'd like to see aging cured or at least I'd like to get a lot more quality years out of my life. I'd like to see a real cure for my failing knees, eyes, and memory.

None of that is going to happen if we throw up our hands and rely upon luck. Because no matter what "reasonable" ratio you put on the luck to work formula for success, work is non-zero.

the issue with this in society is the ability of people to have enough bad outcomes to arrive at the good one. can we level that playing field or do we first need to find out why so many don't have the drive to try? Do we discourage people too early in life, do we give some the excuse they need to not try?

I'm now in some senses on my third career (I'm 35). Each of those decisions to change direction, take risks and grow as a person were made a lot easier because I had a good enough salary to put money aside to cover the risks, and a wife who happens to be both adventure-loving and locationally-flexible. Not to mention that the most recent career change (moving into academic research) basically required a self-funded MSc as a preparatory to funded PhD study (I was moving into quite a different field, and there's basically no funding for taught Masters courses in the UK). That's more than half the people who could benefit from it priced out from the start.

The vast majority of the population are not put in a position to be able to fail over and over again like Ted Turner was, so since you used him as your example the answer to your question should be obvious.