I agree with you that emphasizing grit is a good recipe for optimizing perfect success. However fetishizing grit is a terrible guiding principal for public policy.

Having grown up in the US, I think this is one of the biggest reasons for the deep dysfunction we have seen there in the past few decades. The value for "the pursuit of happiness", and almost religious belief in meritocracy places the blame for failure on the shoulders of the individual in the eyes of society, and helps to create an environment where courts and legislators can dismantle safety nets, and fail to support the population in times of collective crisis.

In times like we are living through, where there are a great many forces beyond the control of the average citizen which have the power to utterly wipe them out financially, it can be actively harmful to tell people that each individual is the master of their own destiny. We can and should expect and contribute to a collective good as well.

The almost-religious and in fact religious belief in meritocracy is what made the US wealthy. Not just at the beginning; it’s a culture that keeps being replenished through waves of immigration.

I tend to agree that from the perspective of public policy we should take a more systematic view. But as I said, I think how we want politicians to view to world for public policy purposes is different than how we want people (individually and collectively) to view the world.

> religious belief in meritocracy is what made the US wealthy

Is it really though? For instance, in the post-war period of the 1950's which is often taken as the period where the American Dream was in full force, organized labor was much stronger in the US than it is today, and a huge chunk of the population was essentially inserted into the middle class through the GI bill, which was really a social welfare program when it comes down to it.

I think the degree to which individual grit gave rise to American prosperity is often over-stated, and the degree to which it was a result of collective action is often overlooked.

The US was, per capita, the richest country in the world by 1820-30.

The US is also the most geographically blessed nation on the planet.

And? The 1950's were just one example. There are also a lot of factors besides "grit" which contributed to the success of the US. Practically unlimited natural resources would be an example.

What if you subtracted the wealth created by slavery?

You usually compare countries in terms of GDP or GDP per capita, which is a measure of production and not “wealth.” By 1820, the US was producing more per person than Western Europe: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/seminars/seminars/co...

That measure inherently excludes the “wealth” represented by ownership of enslaved people. It includes what those people produce, but the “per capita” measure also includes enslaved people in the denominator.

The production of enslaved people represented a small fraction of the economy—about 5% of GDP during the peak of the cotton boom: https://fee.org/articles/no-slavery-did-not-make-america-ric... see also https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/how-slavery-shaped-american-c...

More importantly, you can’t increase a country’s overall level of production by enslaving people. Its basic economics—unfree labor misallocates labor resources to industries controlled by slave owners. Slavery obviously redistributes wealth from enslaved people to a slaveholding aristocracy, but that comes at the expense of economic growth for the country overall. This is true both theoretically and empirically. As shown in the GDP chart linked above, the end of slavery didn’t produce an economic collapse, as you would expect of it really was responsible for America’s productivity. There was not even a dip. In fact, ending slavery made America richer, exactly as economic theory would predict: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/09/ending_slavery.html

It does not inherently exclude wealth from slavery. Historical sources I had seen has slavery to be wastly profitable, that is why they did it.

It was not just reallocation of wealth like tax, it completely changed his money were made.

Slavery is very profitable for slave owners, it’s just not very productive. Think about it this way: imagine you run a business, and suddenly one day you no longer have to pay wages to your employees. This obviously makes your profit margin shoot through the roof. However, it doesn’t make your company produce more stuff. That’s the point: slavery was indeed profitable for slave owners, but it did not produce any more wealth than in an alternative scenario, where the slaves were free wage labor instead. Thus, while slavery surely made some slave owners wealthy, it did not make America wealthy, and in fact, it did quite the opposite.

> Think about it this way: imagine you run a business, and suddenly one day you no longer have to pay wages to your employees... it doesn’t make your company produce more stuff

I don't really understand this argument. Surely reducing one of the operating costs of doing business to zero leads to economic growth right? In your hypothetical scenario, wouldn't the business owner just invest some of that profit into growing the business, thereby increasing productivity?

Alternatively, they can lower their prices in order to beat competitors. If they're producing a commodity, this can have the knock-on effect of lowering the price of finished goods using that commodity.

Another point of comparison is, in places where they discover "free resources" like petrochemicals, like Norway, that does lead to prosperity, doesn't it?

You’re not reducing operating costs to zero. Enslaved people are still people, they must be fed, housed, etc. And while reducing the operating cost of say cotton production can make that business bigger, taking those enslaved people out of the market for consumption makes those other businesses smaller.

> In your hypothetical scenario, wouldn't the business owner just invest some of that profit into growing the business, thereby increasing productivity?

Sure, but imagine the alternative where the slaves are paid workers instead: then the same money that you use to invest into your business in slave scenario is instead spent by your workers on other businesses, which then use it to produce other things or invest in their businesses. Again, slavery, instead of increasing total wealth, just redistributes it in favor of slaveholders.

When people say richest country per capita, they dont mean "including native Americans and slaves". Those were not citizens. It is profit and wealth of whites that count.

You are however averaging production to slaves too. So in countries where blacks outnumber whites you get much smaller wealth then what contemporaries commented on.

The alternative scenario is north in any case. The kind of society and production south was is plain impossible without slavery. It just did not exist.

The GDP per capita statistics include everybody.

> The almost-religious and in fact religious belief in meritocracy is what made the US wealthy

I thought it was the abundant resources, rule of law, respect for property rights, free slave labor (for the first ~200 years, including before independence), and wave upon wave of immigrants who through self-selection were highly motivated and risk-taking. The post-WW2 prosperity was largely due to a lack of competition from other developed nations.

> free slave labor (for the first ~200 years, including before independence)

Do you think a free person or an enslaved one produces more economic value? If we decided to enslave everyone with green eyes tomorrow do you think GDP would grow or shrink?

Just because a certain practices makes certain individuals wealthy does not mean it makes the society wealthier.

> self-selection were highly motivated and risk-taking

This is beliefs seems to be very entangled with belief in a meritocracy. If you believe hard work and risk taking doesn't pay off why work hard and take risks. If you believe hard work and risk taking does pay off, well than that sounds a lot like belief in meritocracy to me.

Which areas do you think suffered economically compared to the US due to not using slave labor in the 1700s and 1800s?

And if slave labor were an important component driving the relative wealth of the US, wouldn't you expect the abolition of slavery to decrease the relative wealth of the US?

But that isn't what we see in the decades after the abolition of slavery in the US: "In the last third of the 19th century the United States entered a phase of rapid economic growth which doubled per capita income over the period. By 1895, the United States leaped ahead of Britain for first place in manufacturing output." See also, "Gilded Age".

Any argument about emphasising grit hinges on the extent to which grit is actually teachable. As the original article states, the measurable effects of grit seem to be a near-equivalent of conscientiousness from the well studied 'big five' personality metrics, and (as far as I understand) the evidence shows that these traits are very stable over the years (conscientiousness slowly increases over age, but roughly equally even for people who have lead very different lives) and there are no known interventions that would reliably change them.

So an argument against an educational policy to emphasize grit is that, as far as we know, this will not actually increase grit in the students. Socializing children to view the world a certain way will have many effects, but not that.

I don't know about cultural emphasis, but you can certainly go too far with grit and perseverance themselves, if you stick with a perceived opportunity too far past the point where its returns have fallen below those of other available opportunities.