Should society be allowed to try to give the poor but genetically gifted children a boost in life?
Nobody’s suggesting that parents shouldn’t use whatever resources they have. The question is what we should do as a society with all the potential we’re wasting. If every dollar we spent on boosting smart poor children yielded two dollars back to the economy, why shouldn’t we do that?
> if the parent is able to provide ... I think that’s actually progressive at a societal level
The argument that those with private wealth helping their children is making society better is the opposite of what is normally called “progressive”. It’s trickle-down economics. When people say “progressive” they are talking about policies that benefit everyone, not policies that say if the rich do well, then surely we’ll all benefit from the margins and leftovers.
> The problem with summary statistics like in this article is that there’s no nuance — just a brunt “unfair” reflex triggered in the reader.
Life is extremely unfair, and very biased toward the rich. It’s not a surprise, we already knew it. This article just highlights some papers that confirm scientifically one of the many ways life is unfair. There might be some nuance, and of course there usually is when the press covers scientific research, but are you suspecting some specific nuance?
But to a certain extent it is zero-sum. The way you boost smart poor children is by taking money from non-poor parents. So you really are suggesting that non-poor parents "shouldn't use whatever resources they have." I don't think anyone fundamentally opposes this, but there is a legitimate philosophical question about how much redistribution is appropriate, and what criteria go into defining "appropriate."
It is not zero-sum, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in either the US economy nor the global economy. If we educated everyone, and everyone with potential reached their potential and contributed to the economy, we can all have more wealth. It’s not a requirement that someone lose, and this is what I meant by a return of two dollars for every dollar spent.
> The way you boost smart poor children is by taking money from non-poor parents. ... how much redistribution is appropriate...
In practice, we could fund university education for all in the margins of what we willingly spend on the military or several other programs, people have been pointing this out for decades. It doesn’t have to be a change in taxation for anyone, nor does it need to come from “non-poor” disproportionately.
But, larger picture, I find it ironic that you use the word redistribution with respect to the rich, but not with respect to the poor. Where does rich people’s money come from? And if you’re going to worry about rich people funding social programs, how about also tallying the benefits they get from national infrastructure that poor people also have to pay for?
That is an interesting narrative. Direct state funding per-student for college is down in almost all states over the last 10 years and the last 30 years. Tuition has risen for several reasons: 1- to compensate for lack of state funding, 2- because colleges and universities have larger higher paid administrations than ever before. Some of the subsidies we have are nothing more than consolation prizes for state funding cuts that are larger than the subsidies, so I simply don’t buy that public funding has caused tuition to rise, when public funding is declining overall.
> Your plan would make it worse.
I didn’t share a plan, so I’m not sure what you mean.
But, I have to wonder, why does it matter if tuition goes up, if it’s a net positive to the economy? Why would it matter if tuition goes up, if it’s paid for? Why do you assume that tuition prices would look anything like they do now if all of education was publicly funded?
Government backed student loans for anybody who wants them has inflated the cost of college in the United States.
Your plan I refer to, is when you said the government could entirely pay college costs for every willing student.
With all that free money, where is the motivation for schools to improve?
> we could fund university education for all in the margins of what we willingly spend on the military or several other programs
I heard it the first time. Do you have anything new to add, any evidence, or any explanation of how your theory actually works, given that total public funding has declined?
Is it possible you’re assigning causation where there is only correllation? Tuition hikes certainly correllate with loan programs that were put in place to compensate for state budget cuts, I can see how easy it is to assign blame to loan programs, but isn’t tuition going up when state financing is cut the simpler explanation?
> With all that free money, where is the motivation for schools to improve?
Norway’s higher education system is ranked higher than the US, and is free for all citizens. So you tell me.
It’s your assumption that public funding leads to stagnation, an assumption that requires ignoring contradictory evidence in order to hang on to.
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/B...
The biggest constraint is often individual people’s time/attention; additional money is only slightly (if at all) helpful for the already rich.
But a little bit of money goes a long way to help people who are not eating well, don’t have a place to live, need to work 3 stressful part-time jobs to make ends meet, ...
Massive inheritances (dropping someone tens of millions of dollars or more) are one of the greatest problems in our society. The top marginal tax rate for inheritances should be 90%+, and we should be cracking down hard on all the sneaky ways people hide gajillions of dollars for their descendants. Maybe with an exception for small family farms, since presenting farmer sob stories is one of the biggest ways billionaires have figured out to market their intergenerational hoarding.
Inheritance tax is theft.
Also, if you are in the US, the estate tax is now $11.18 million per taxpayer (so 22 million for a couple) due to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. As a result, only approximately 2,000 people (or 0.0006% of the population) in the US are currently liable for estate tax [0] so you should be fine unless you already have fuck you money at which point it doesn't really matter because again, you have fuck you money.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_State...
I think you mean estate tax exemption.
If you really believe in individual sovereignty, a society that maximizes social mobility should be inherently attractive to you. The John Galt type that the right idealizes would have been nothing if he'd been born an untouchable in pre-British India.
That being said, I recognize that a tax would discourage some people from being as productive as they might otherwise be. At the same time, I suspect that many people will work harder under more fair conditions. It's hard to say what the net effect will be.
Of course, if you have other ideas for promoting a fair society with social mobility along with realistic methods of paying for them, I'm happy to hear them.
So its bad because it would hurt you.
This is the problem. The way you think. Estate taxes could pay for services that help the poor and inprove our society as a whole. But you're only concerned with making sure your own kids get out ok.
But thats your job as a parent. I get it. You see a dog eat dog world out there, and you wanna get your kids out alive. But just why are we so scared? Why is everyone fighting over scraps?
> But you're only concerned with making sure your own kids get out ok.
I can't speak for grandparent, but I'm concerned with all the kids getting their rightful inheritance from all their respective parents, not only my kids.
That said, I don't think there is anything wrong with providing for your kids and not others.
Some kids dont get an inheritance. Some get a huge one. None of it is "rightful"... Its not deserved. Its not based on need or on merit. Its based on who your parents are. There are few things less democratic.
"That said, I don't think there is anything wrong with providing for your kids and not others."
In the context of widening inequality, your sentence should read "at the expense of others". Im not opposed to inheritance per say but it should be highly taxed.
> There are few things less democratic.
Many of them are important to be that way: like who is permitted to enter your home; who gets to touch you and so on. Should that all be more democratic?
The modern sense of "democracy" refers to concepts like constitutional representation and controlled use of force.
If a mob decides that access to your pockets should be open to everyone, that is not democracy in the modern sense.
Inheritances that provide centuries of descendants with a work-free life and the power/influence to corrupt the government make a grotesque mockery of our society / politics.
If they taxed the estates at a high marginal rate with no gaping loopholes, auctioned off all the assets thereby recovered by the government, and then just zeroed out the bits representing the dollars in the resulting accounts, that would be just fine with me.
Ultra ultra wealthy people are not being “punished” by having their estates taxed at a steep top marginal rate. The great-great-grandchildren of industry titans do not have a preordained right to massive wealth at the whole society’s expense. Money is a social construct, and can and should be designed to work for all of us.
In a functioning society with a growing (or even stagnant) economy, each generation should inherit a greater wealth of public infrastructure, capital, services, knowledge, ... than the previous one. Instead, in our society there is an incentive for public officials to transfer collective assets to individual aristocrats in corrupt deals, to underfund/destroy public institutions, to take out loans guaranteed by the state and pocket the money, etc., impoverishing the next generation. This amounts to basically theft/fraud against the polis.
Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/inheritance-tax-sta...
Pick a number around the 80th percentile of 401k balance at age 70 and tax it at 50%, then go up to 95%.
The kickback to this modern gilded age is going to be brutal.
Table 3 is interesting.
"Almost half (50.7%) of the children with low IQ [0–79] came from families with income <Rs. 50,000/month [$675/mo]. On the other hand, 65.6% of children with high IQ [above 120] came from families with more than Rs. 50,000/month (P = 0.001)"
I think the idea is that it benefits society for the best to rise and spread their genes. Additionally, it helps to pacify society and prevent revolutions and other violence if poor people have a realistic path to wealth.
An unequal society is an unstable one. I hope we don't have to relearn that lesson in the US when we can see it around the globe.
This cuts directly to the heart of the meritocracy argument (most strongly in technology, but it exists everywhere): how can you claim that everyone is judged by their merits (directly related to how hard they work and how smart they train themselves to be) when being lucky (in genetics, in birth, in support and growth, in opportunities) plays such an overwhelming role?
The way it's used by most hackers is to say that someone's work is judged only on its own merits, rather than the author's social status or how good they are at playing political games or anything else orthogonal to the work actually being valuable.
At least, that's the ideal.
I care quite a bit that the best cancer researchers should get hired, and the best ideas get the money -- their progress is likely to directly affect people close to me. And this is true but less obvious for almost every field... an economy where everyone was focused solely on zero-sum competitions would not grow very fast.
I don't quite know what cosmic fairness means. But perhaps cosmic unfairness involves people's talents not being identical. The goal of trying to get the fastest progress against cancer does not align with the goal of trying to remedy such unfairness.
So in order to get the best doctors you can't just be all "meritocratic" by looking only at the results, i.e. grades, but have to take other factors into account.
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The relationship between school type and academic performance at medical school: a national, multi-cohort study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5589012/
What is the effect of secondary (high) schooling on subsequent medical school performance? A national, UK-based, cohort study. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29792300
We should aim to admit to medical school the people who'll make the best doctors at age 40, not just the people with the best scores at age 18.
The position that states "remedying inequity costs more than simply giving it all to the current best" is a shortsighted one.
Because we were friends for a while I said something to the effect of "I just want to make sure this doesn't look like nepotism"
His response was basically, "Who cares? I love Nepotism. that means me and my friends do better and help each other out."
Kind of shocked me to be honest, but after thinking about it it makes total sense. Why wouldn't you help your friends? I mean I help my friends all the time, but there seemed to be an artificial cutoff when it came to hiring and buying companies or otherwise giving them outward signs of "success."
Not sure I can make a rational case against Nepotism even though it feels wrong.
Suppose a friend promoted you over someone else who was vastly more qualified, and worked much harder than you for that promotion.
Etc.
Now suppose you're the one getting screwed over instead of the friend benefiting.
It's not nepotism if friends benefiting is merely a side effect of making the best business (or whatever) decision. But if that decision process is subverted in order to benefit friends, negatively impacting other stakeholders that you have a responsibility to, creating a work environment which is deeply unfair and unmeritocratic, etc., then that is absolutely a problem. This should be pretty obvious.
Maybe someone is "vastly more qualified" technically but doesn't have any business sense or some other quality that is unknown to the rest of the group. There were many times where I thought that the wrong person was promoted or hired, to find out later that they were actually a good fit. Were they the PERFECT fit? I don't know, but there is value in having history with someone to have a higher confidence they will meet the minimum standard.
There's always someone or some group that is "better" for a job or acquisition or whatever based on some metric.
It's a real problem in my mind for "market information." Generally people go for a product they know, that can fit the bill, over a product they don't know that might be better. Same goes for hiring and personnel etc...
Sure, in some situations, it may be ambiguous who is actually the better pick. For argument's sake, let's assume such choices are ALWAYS ambiguous. If you're consistently picking your friends in those situations, you're nevertheless creating a perception of nepotism (read unfairness) throughout the rest of the company, which will minimally be harmful to morale. So yeah, even if you're not being particularly nepotistic, guarding against the perception of nepotism is still important.
My bigger concern, however, is that it's very easy for someone to rationalize nepotism when they're a beneficiary.
I really don't know enough about the specifics of your situation to know if nepotism is much of a concern, but I definitely don't think your friend's "nepotism is GREAT" stance is worth taking seriously.
So that's why I was shocked.
I know of one case of using it productively involves incentives. If you have sensitive data to process that is resistant to automation but fundamentally simple and know a son of a high level partner who is receive considerable support from him with things like paying for college or apartments then that sort of nepotism makes some objective sense even if it is unfair. Betrayal on their part would also be betraying their family and harm their means of support.
In your example, your CIO friend has a responsibility to the company to make the best acquisition on the best possible terms. If he’s treating you preferentially because you’re friends, he’s not doing that.
The friend seems to be plainly stating they don't care if the max outcome is what is occuring or not, insofar as they all at least do better. Helping their friends out is more important than maxing out the quality of the outcome.
Societally, reinforcing and protecting social trust systems may be dramatically more important than maxing out business success outcomes.
The price in the first case is paid by the litigious investors. In the second one, by the unwilling tax payers.
To all "proponents" of "the luck argument": there are thousands of people far more lucky than Elon and Steve (born to wealthier families, smarter, better connected, etc) that didn't achieve what they have. So... luck obviously isn't the answer.
Having said that, even if luck were the answer, I'd still support meritocracy, because it results in the best outcome. It's not about fairness, fundamentally - it's about creating the best society. If the only people who can do that are "the wealthy" (or whichever category you choose - most likely "the intelligent" these days), then so be it - it's best for all the rest of us if they "rule", meritocratically.
I'd worry about your definition of "best society". Is the current system an existence proof in your mind?
Yes, the current system (Western-style democracy, capitalism, freedom, markets) is the most meritocratic of all systems realised so far (AFAIK), but that doesn't mean we can't do better still.
Human instincts and morals are really well calibrated to small-village life. I take things like the Dunbar number [1] to indicate that we are optimised for a small circle of close relationships.
"Fairness" has a sister in "equality" that is very powerful force on the local scale and scales horribly, to the point where equality being scaled up is usually a warning sign of an incoming economic breakdown where everyone starves. Unfortunately, people keep trying to scale equality up because they want it in their local relationships.
Talking about "permanent power disparities" touches on the same vein of thinking - we know that permanent power disparities are an inevitable feature of society. The attempts to set up societies where there are no permanent power disparities have resulted in permanent power disparities forming, and frequently going to very nasty despots. Modern western civilisation has done _extremely_ well compared to the competition by dangling systemic advantage as the reward for massively improving the industrial base and consumer access to resources. This has worked a lot better than attempts to suppress inequality under, eg, the communist systems.
Whether luck is involved or not is of little interest to me. I think we obsess too much about money and tie it too much with human worth. In part because we like to think of ourselves as meritocratic, some of us feel compelled to justify our wealth differences to ward off the envious (plenty of that to go around). I'm not sure how you tie this into creating a "best society". I think arguments can be made that intersections of money and power/power and ambition are the most dangerous. Indeed, an argument against democratic republics is that those with a lust for power will tend to seek office and once they have it, believe they are entitled to it because they merit it as a result of their own actions. Hereditary monarchs, on the other hand, know fully well that they didn't ascend to the throne through their own efforts and that they are in a position of responsibility w.r.t. their people. (Note that most monarchies were not despotic despite the folklore because they were checked to varying degrees by tradition, the lords, the Church, etc, and were guided by advisers who brought their knowledge to the table, thus divorcing expertise from that bounded and constrained power.)
This is a frequent criticism that is IMO completely off base. Nobody is saying that this world is particularly meritocratic (although I think Western-style democracy+capitalism+markets is experimentally the most meritocratic system ever realised).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump#Family_and_person...
This is too broad. Is it really so? I believe that we don't want to disadvantage ourselves relative to other groups. But that we want to gain advantage at somebody's else expense - not sure.
I would much rather help a friend or group of friends do well as opposed to randoms or people I don't like. First, I like my friends and want them to be happy (and am going to be the one who hears about it when they aren't), so I have a vested interest in helping them achieve happiness and success whereas I have a weak interest in the happiness and success of randoms as we have no relationship. Second, if I can help my friends become happy and successful, they become better able to help me become happy and successful (by pooling resources, providing advice, providing introductions, creating mutually beneficial opportunities, creating happiness by spending time with me, providing trust and facilitating vulnerability, providing capital or expertise etc). This sets up a positive feedback loop and creates strong ROI for my efforts. I get net negative ROI from helping a random (assuming no relationship will develop and I expend time or funds) so it's far less likely that I will use my scarce time and resources to do it.
The entire world runs on relationships, favors, and reputation.
We do a lot more for people we know and like and trust than for randoms; I don’t believe this is restricted to just a few cultures. It shows in nature as well, unless there’s a massive amount of anthropomorphism going on in those studies. Rather more likely, it seems there would be selection pressure in favor of helping your offspring and those close to you.
There's a line between "is it OK to start a start-up with your dorm-mate?" and "is it OK to spend 5% of the nation's budget buying submarines through your brother-in-law's banana company?"
You have information about your dorm-mate, and you aren't acting on behalf of others. But if the same norms applied to CEOs and judges, we could not have our civilisation.
Those norms don't apply to CEOs and judges?
News to me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18179583
From one of my comments: That's the weird part: “I.Q. + effort = merit” sounds pretty positive, right?
But,
"A system of class filtered by meritocracy would, in his view, still be a system of class: it would involve a hierarchy of social respect, granting dignity to those at the top, but denying respect and self-respect to those who did not inherit the talents and the capacity for effort that, combined with proper education, would give them access to the most highly remunerated occupations."
The intended result doesn't sound very appealing. Then there was this quote:
"Young’s vision was decidedly dystopian. As wealth increasingly reflects the innate distribution of natural talent, and the wealthy increasingly marry one another, society sorts into two main classes, in which everyone accepts that they have more or less what they deserve. He imagined a country in which “the eminent know that success is a just reward for their own capacity, their own efforts,” and in which the lower orders know that they have failed every chance they were given. “They are tested again and again…. If they have been labeled ‘dunce’ repeatedly they cannot any longer pretend; their image of themselves is more nearly a true, unflattering reflection.”"
That sounds familiar.
"But one immediate difficulty was that, as Young’s narrator concedes, “nearly all parents are going to try to gain unfair advantages for their offspring.” And when you have inequalities of income, one thing people can do with extra money is to pursue that goal. If the financial status of your parents helped determine your economic rewards, you would no longer be living by the formula that “I.Q. + effort = merit.”"
And so does that.
Like many things in social contract, the answer is - okay to a reasonable degree, but extremes should be discouraged / forbidden.
Some concrete examples: annual limits on gift taxes, inheritance tax beyond a certain estate size etc. Policies which will level the playing field between rich and poor kids:
- very high rate of inheritance tax beyond $1M estate (some reasonable adjustment for inflation)
- no legacy based admissions for any university benefitting from govt money
- funding schools strictly at state level; not allowing local district to fund extra school activities in any way (because that is prone to gaming)
- CA specific: disallowing inheriting tax basis for inherited homes (one of the most stupid aspects of Prop 13 and CA housing policies)
To paraphrase: "the question is not who will let them, but who will stop them?"
To understand this, consider this - if you're bill gates, would you rather live in a society where your just your kids are well educated, smart contributors to making the life of all humanity better, or a society where EVERYONE that has potential is well educated and smart contributors to society. If you have $100 bucks, you'd think - my limited resources is not able to do the latter, even though its better both for me and humanity as a whole to invest in everyone, so let me stick to the former. But a rational actor with infinite resources who cares about their own well being will realize that their society is only as good as everyone in it, and would push for the latter kind of resource distribution.
Of course, your goal doesn't have to be acting efficiently in a global market. It's not morally wrong to act inefficiently (although some would have you think it is).
Why? On one hand - I love the general idea that everyone should start on the same playing field.
On the other hand - My work ethic should infact give my children a major advantage.
I know it's not PC to say that, but most fathers would like to "give an advantage" to their children. It's baked in to our basic psychology.
Maybe the question is "who decides" and then "who enforces" fair?
These statistics should give a person pause when they talk about "bootstraps" or when they hold a Calvinist perspective that a person not being successful somehow "deserved it." It doesn't mean that we need to have some sort of totally even playing field: but it does mean that we shouldn't pretend the field is even - even if the actionable result is just to treat poor and/or unsuccessful people with more empathy and compassion than we might have previously. And perhaps a measurement more of self-examination when we decide (consciously or unconsciously) that we are "better" than others due to our success.
So yeah, people can inherit wealth but it seems obvious there is tons of opportunity to unlock a lot of potential that's being thrown away due to people being blind to the costs of income inequality.
Most of the instances I've heard of where talented but disadvantaged people are shut out of opportunities are actually because of implicit bias. Someone may be very good at a particular skill, but they don't "pattern match" as the type of person who would be successful, and so they get passed over by the folks who could give them opportunities.
The thing is - this is self-correcting by market mechanisms. It's profitable to spend a little more time overcoming your unconscious biases and learning to evaluate candidates on their own merits, because by doing so, you can get a talented employee who others are not extending offers to, likely for less money. And then once people realize this, either they'll do it or they'll be outcompeted by people who do it, and wages will go up for disadvantaged groups.
We don't need collective action or societal change, we just need more greedy bastards who want to fuck over their competition by being smarter than them. There's a market opportunity here for people willing to get over their prejudices.
Read the article. Clearly it is not.
Do we want meritocracy because it is an enlightened value or do we want to follow the instinct of having our genes spread as far and wide as possible. That's the kind of societal dialog politics is made for.
Parents who donate a lot of money to a college will expect preferential admissions treatment for their offspring. Colleges certainly know this, and they want the money.
Other systems are possible, but they have other tradeoffs. You can for instance pay for everything out of taxes, but this means putting those in control of the tax system in charge, and they have their own interests. The extreme of this was the USSR, and it did great science in some areas. But was far from paradise.
We should be optimizing for maximum utility not dubious concepts such as fairness.
What I think is far more likely the case is that parents who succeed in their lives are far better prepared to teach their children how to succeed as well. Further, that they're better at giving them a leg-up in networking and opening doors for them.
The fact that this study cites "academic success" as a measure for determining capability for business success shows that the author himself doesn't really understand how to make big money. Does he really think most entrepreneurs are genius level IQ?
I have a totally different interpretation. This study is evidence pointing towards the extreme failure of the public school system. The purpose of public schools is to provide talented, hard-working people with the tools to succeed. Schools haven't been preparing children for success, they've been largely focused on preparing them for college, and in turn for graduate school. They have not been teaching kids the values and skills which allow them to genuinely get ahead in life.
Granted there are a few cases where even money can't save someone. A severe schizophrenic for instance could have poor quality of life even if they receive top quality care and have a trust fund. Technically they are better off than if they were poor and had it but the good is greatly reduced.
I'm pretty happy to have been brought up poor. I had to figure things out for myself, and if things went wrong, it was my fault. Emerson's "Self Reliance" became my guiding star. To be "indefatigable" is not something easy to teach if you have options for exits.
As Dylan put it, "helpless, like a rich man's son"
It doesn't make me rich; but it certainly doesn't make me think of wealth as the end all, be all, in life.
If society really believed and committed in meritocracy, no. But this is always the trap of meritocracies: people lower ladders for friends and family. And that is what always corrupts meritocracy in a free society.
* Equal treatment under the law
* Equal treatment by kinda-public things like corporations and universities
* Equivalent opportunities in general
* Equivalent results
But most socialists are ok to take from other to give until it touch their family.
Should parents be allowed to try to give their children a boost in life? If the answer is yes, then it follows that parents with more resources will be more able to provide that boost.
For me, the line is drawn at “legacy” admissions or jobs, where a clearly lesser candidate is given the nod over someone who is more qualified. But if the parent is able to provide e.g. volunteer opportunities or early business exposure, tutoring, and other extracurriculars, and their child grows as a result of that, I think that’s actually progressive at a societal level (spurring more growth at earlier ages).
The problem with summary statistics like in this article is that there’s no nuance — just a brute “unfair” reflex triggered in the reader.