Perhaps your assertion that we worry about this too much is true, but I do take issue with your hidden assumption that merit is directly proportional to effort. That is, the org chart you present presupposes that only lazy, ill-motivated people stay at the bottom.

But the truth is that some people are not very good at anything, and many people will never be the best at anything, no matter how hard they try. Some people are born mentally slower, more socially inept, physically weaker than others. Some people are born into bad circumstances (and a bad childhood can screw your whole life up at worst), others are dealt a shit hand by fate. (Your insurance company can pay for your back surgery if you're rear-ended, but they can't guarantee it's fixed, or even bearable...)

None of the people in these categories are less motivated or more responsible for these problems than others...although, indeed, we tend to despise laziness more if the person is already bad at their job, and it is easy to mistake incompetence for a moral issue. (After all, why the cliché about malice and stupidity if not?)

So yes, all of the talented, motivated people with prolonged bouts of stable home lives, good backgrounds, good health, etc., will rise to the top and get paid accordingly.

Some of those talented and motivated people will be left behind by the system. Personally, I do think it matters what the system does in moderate case.

Most systems that work at all correctly reward and punish best cases and worst cases. But what about the middle? People who are not especially talented or especially qualified or especially stable or especially healthy? When these people enter the system, what happens to them?

> The person driving your Uber likely chose that to make money, rather than all the other ways they could have made money, because they prefer it.

or didn't perceive the other ways, or didn't have resources for other ways, or wasn't approved for the subset of other ways that they both perceived and had resources for

You assume that uber drivers are ignorant. I assume that people know how to live their own lives. They had the resources to acquire a car and a driver's license. There are many, many worse jobs out there than driving a car.

Something I learned very, very rapidly when I started building things that other people actually used: one of the absolute worst things you can do is assume that the people using what you make either 1) know what they are doing 2) skimmed the manual/docs 3) are capable of doing anything that isn't explicitly stated in their list of things to do.

There are of course underlying reasons for these issues - lack of sleep, the marathon of raising children, the struggle of staying on top of bills, too many things to do in too few hours - but that does NOT invalidate them and you cannot design a system that ignores those issues and depends in part on human interaction and expect it to actually work consistently and properly.

A couple things I have read this past year suggest that mainstream economists are finally waking up to what people in tech support have known for decades. Never assume someone is acting rationally/has all the information/doesn't have extenuating circumstance, because you will probably be wrong.

I would assume there are things you also haven't been exposed to that would help you reach your goals faster and be more fulfilling than what you currently do.

I wouldn't use the word ignorant for that, but I also wouldn't argue about whether the definition would apply.

Most ridesharing drivers are ignorant of the expenses they're incurring, and therefore the effective wage they're receiving. Just because you know how to survive doesn't mean you know how to calculate the return on your time and vehicle investment (clearly, as American personal finance education is woefully inadequate).

I find arguments such as that put forth as deeply disingenuous, that most people are rational, exceptionally educated economic actors (if you can convince someone to give you an auto loan and a drivers license, which are extremely low bars, than you can clearly determine if gig economy work is in your best interests), when overwhelming evidence proves otherwise. To me, it comes off as justifying exploitation (ie "the gig economy"), which clearly has no place in first world countries or this century. But, with the number of tech workers who are employed at highly compensated at exploitative entities, I am not surprised in the least.

In my experience this kind of argument is usually given by people who don’t understand what does it mean to be poor. Poverty incapacitates the rational mind; economic reason is replaced by survival instinct. There was a paper not that long ago that said that people are only rational when they’re concentrating on the decision at hand. If you live paycheck to paycheck and have to make decisions like food or medicine daily, your mental reserves are depleted.

Whether Uber drivers are this poor is an open question; I’d wager some are.