Yes.

Billions of people that were without shelter & adequate food (not to mention health care or any sort of shot at a good education) now have access to such things. That is progress.

I firmly believe that we in the past did not have a responsibility to "educate" the various indigenous peoples of the planet, however due to past measures existing cultural structures were completely decimated, people are totally reliant on the West. We have interjected ourselves to every facet of the globe, continually introducing technologies and economic patterns that many cultures cannot afford or scale, that is these countries end up in massive poverty (measured by Western standards), because they are trying to adapt a complete economic and technological system that they had no part in developing.

Children routinely die due to easily preventable diseases or starvation. Simple infections are life threatening for adults. Hunger is constant. Exposure to extreme elements is common. Life expectancies are short. Individuals lack meaningful control over their own lives and have little or no ability to improve their situation in the world.

Of course, colonialism did not bring any advantages to the West or cause bad things in Asia or Africa.

In a democracy, the guiding policy should be "this policy will make the majority of Americans better off in the long term"

It's the same thing in dictatorships. Many dictators could use their highly concentrated authority to undertake large projects that would benefit their population significantly and leave a great legacy. But most of them don't because it's easier and more predictable to just maintain an iron grip on power and enjoy a life of luxury while suppressing any opposition.

Strategically, many people prefer to be a big fish in a small pond than the reverse.

Don't get me wrong - I agree with the moral obligation to help those less lucky than you. I don't always agree with the looseness in which the word "luck" is applied these days. The problem is if you look at basically anyone's life, there's always SOMETHING you can point to that was "lucky" compared to their peer(s). Yes, some more than others. But perhaps we can begin to give people the benefit of the doubt when they say they learned a difficult craft, and a new language, to lift themselves out of a shitty situation. It discounts his hard work to say it all came down to lucky brain genetics.

How many people work hard their entire life only to not be rewarded? It's not like everyone who doesn't see success is lazy or doesn't work hard. Labourers work hard, tradesmen work hard, and yes, programmers work hard too.

I live in Alberta right now, which is in the midst of an economic recession/depression. In my city unemployment is at 10%, despite being probably the youngest, most educated city in the country. All of my peers have degrees (or better), and most don't have jobs in their fields. All have worked hard, all still work hard, most are underemployed.

> At what point do we reward human accomplishment instead of throwing it all away to "luck"? I hear this all too often nowadays that any kind of success can always be attributed to luck and therefor you have a moral obligation to those less "lucky" than you.

I personally hate the idea of a moral obligation to do anything. Shaming people into certain behaviours is shitty.

But we do live in a society amongst other people. Poverty begets crime and social unrest, and it's not in anyone's interest for this to happen. So we attempt to construct the best society we can for all our benefit. Having a highly-stratified society, even if we feel it's 'fair', isn't a good thing.

We can play that game.

In my country youth unemployment rate (those under 30) is 13.7%. That ignores everyone who is studying until 27 because "they're not in the labor force".

Overall unemployment rate is 9.8%. Again, discounting everyone who is "not in the labor force".

As far as I know, we've been in an economic recession for the past 10 years or so. Before that we were in a "Yeah we're growing but socialism fucked us" stage for some 15 years.

> Poverty begets crime and social unrest

We're one of the safest countries in Europe. I don't know why Americans love to lump crime together with poverty, but that's not how it works in Europe from what I can tell. Or at least in my part of Europe.

Social unrest, yes there's some of that. Demonstrations happen once in a while. Just like they do in the US all the time. That's just part of democracy.

The point isn't that where I live is awful (it's really not), but that education and hard work doesn't guarantee success when there are macroeconomic forces working against you.

> We're one of the safest countries in Europe. I don't know why Americans love to lump crime together with poverty, but that's not how it works in Europe from what I can tell. Or at least in my part of Europe.

I'm willing to bet your country has a decent safety net, and that there's less 'poverty' than the US, even if your unemployment is higher.

Overall the Roma population probably has it worst. Followed closely by the immigrants.

I'm not a good judge of Why because I don't have good insight. The Roma seem to have your usual problems of being below the poverty line, a culture that heavily discourages improving your lot in life, and a strong culture of expecting govenment handouts. If you asked a Roma I'm sure their explanation would be different, this is what it looks like from the outside.

The immigrants, well, they're immigrants. New culture new life new jobs low prospects due to social standing and so on. Immigrants always seem to struggle.

Basically what inhibits a person from Atlanta is not their legal or technical disadvantages, but those perceptual ones - large parts of society, and often police in particular, holding prior assumptions of criminal disposition and unwillingness to better themselves.

I'm Irish and we have very few Roma people but we have a similar and related ethnosocial subgroup. Imagine how difficult it would be for a 'gypsy' person to attain significant political power in our home countries, and how even if elected/appointed to a position of responsibility everything they did would be undermined by attacks on their heritage, regardless of their legal or intellectual eligibility for the role.

I noticed very soon after arrival in the US that I was assumed to have much greater potential than members of disfavored ethnosocial minorities. I say ethnosocial because I'm thinking of a former roommate from Mauritius who felt that his French accent and foreign origin gave him substantial social advantages vs American blacks whose negative qualifiers were already assumed.

Well, I never said that did I? In fact that's kind of the point of my original post. Don't discount everyone who's had success as having had it due to luck. And don't discount everyone who's had failure as having had it due to lack of luck.

> I personally hate the idea of a moral obligation to do anything. Shaming people into certain behaviours is shitty.

I agree. I should clarify that when I say "moral obligation" what I mean to say is "my own, personal, moral obligation". What you do with your life, and what conclusions you draw based on your experiences, are your own. Just don't hurt people.

> Having a highly-stratified society, even if we feel it's 'fair', isn't a good thing.

Fair point to which I don't disagree. Life is inherently not fair, nor is it kind and forgiving. To your point, that doesn't mean we should give up our ideals of peace and happiness for everyone. My only concern is that we don't write off our fellow man as having achieved all of their success because they were born in the right place, time, skin color, gender, genetics, etc. In my opinion that's a way of looking at life that is detrimental. Instead, accept that luck plays a significant role in all aspects of life, but with hard work you can change your life.

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

How are you arguing that people who are beautiful don't have more options for mate selection, or that intelligent people aren't more likely to accumulate wealth?

I understand the difference between r vs K selection, but that seems like a non sequitur in response to my previous post.

That'd be like saying antelope are more adapted to their environment than lions.

In human terms, I'd argue that K-selected children are much more likely to make the types of breakthroughs that will advance the human species e.g. curing disease, scientific discovery, space travel, etc.

At the point where you start finding lots of nice houses and comfortable-looking cars. Lot so fo people already enjoy substantial rewards for accomplishment. That's great. The problem is that sometimes all the benefits are ascribed to accomplishment and luck is completely discounted.

Look, you've played Monopoly, right? You take a bunch of players of about equal skill level, put them into a game, and who is doing well after 10 rounds of the board is a matter of both skill and luck. Eventually one player will end up with all the money and the others will go bankrupt, because that's the outcome the game is structured to produce.

Now, Monopoly is just a game and so players could in a tournament play multiple games to minimize the luck factor and figure out which players have the greatest skill. But in the real world you don't get to try out a different life strategy every year and then reset on January 1 for a fresh round. If you start out with poor luck, then your disadvantages can accumulate just as your advantages can.

Further, people don't all start out with the same beginning conditions as they do in a game of Monopoly. Nobody wants to come in and join a game of Monopoly already in progress because many of the strategic options have already become unavailable. Likewise it would be a less fun game to play if initial cash allocations were random and some players started out with much more or less than others.

Sure didn't feel lucky when I was a troubled youth who failed most of his classes in high school and floundered around in college, ultimately not graduating.

I guess one thing I did have that my American peers do not, is access to high quality free education and a cultural expectation that it's okay to be a student into your late 20s. I really lucked out on that one. That is true.

I was only stating that it's impossible for all 7 billion people in the world to do what you did. The 'system' has its limits.

There's a reason why in statistics you throw away outliers...

That's the thing. I'm not an outlier. It could be an effect of my social circle back home, but basically everyone has either moved out of the country, freelances for foreign companies, or works for foreign markets by proxy through a faux local startup/company whose investors and customers are abroad.

It's very much a "The whole generation is doing it because it's the only thing you can do"

I really think the moderators should add "Downvoting are not meant for expressing disagreement." in the HN guidelines.

First of all, nationalism is not national sovereignty.

The former is a social construct which an individual embraces while the latter is a principal of law which a group embraces.

The former is hardly useful, but the latter is vital to all existing nations. No nation is going to willingly give up its right to self governance.

> I'm in favor of putting limits on concentrations of sovereignty.

So, essentially, you wish to live in a world without borders where one or more unions govern many places regardless of geographical separation?

Because that worked out so well in the past...