If people can't keep their luck-based gains, no one has any real reason to try anything unusual. Everyone would be chasing the puck instead of skating to the open ice hoping to catch a break. Society would stagnate.
You won't get any luck if you don't try.
Working to put yourself into a situation where luck can find you will greatly increase your luck.
If we all accepted that luck is the driving force, decided that we would rather live in a world where hard work and intelligence pays off - then it's possible to imagine a world in which you're rewarded for hard work (on areas of importance) and gains are socialized instead of losses. The socialized gains could pay people who worked hard and their ideas didn't pan out.
I'm not saying this is a world that would work and is better.
But it's pretty unimaginative to think it's just flat out impossible to have progress in any society that isn't structured around luck.
If you are going to propose banging our head into that wall again you can’t just naively point out how great it sounds from first principles. Been there, done that. Instead you need to seriously grapple with those failures and convincingly explain why this time will be different.
Or about the 25th largest economy in the world, if looking at it that way.
And it's a better corporate analogy than most, considering it essentially does everything from retail to services.
It seems like a possible option.
Also getting everyone to accept one worldview. Maybe the most important area of importance would be educating people to see things the way you see...
Can you name one country in the world where it is not true?
But I would not be so hostile to luck. We need it. The Lord of the Rings would never exist if Tolkien wasn't lucky enough to come down with a trench foot and thus survive the Great War. mRNA vaccines might not exist if Katalin Karikó did not beat that cancer in the late 1990s. Etc.
Cut the welfare, stop punishing success with higher taxes and you'll see just how much better people can be.
Failure is not being rewarded, being a member of sociery is, it's not about performance.
Dollar for dollar poor people pay 1 sixth of the income taxes that high income earners pay. If that's not rewarding failure, what is?
But it's not uncommon, we do it with our kids all the time. "If you don't perform good grades, you are not good enough". My point being that changing that view to, "look at what opportunities you (will) have now". Someone being a failure according to you may be quite demotivated at reaching a high income due to the fact that it seems impossible, why do the effort? For what is more important than playing a role in society, and be a good human? Is really income a value of how human you are?
You're also assuming high incomes are completely independent of Central Banks subsidizing asset prices.
If we had a more meritocratic society, I doubt people would pride themselves in their ignorance.
But as it stands, our society rewards both luck and misfortune - and we privatize gains and socialize losses.
Combine that with the fact that access corruption is rampant in Western societies - and the way to succeed is to take excessive risk, woo gatekeepers, execute, and get lucky.
Only one of those requires the type of intelligence you get in school (execution). And if you have enough luck or corruption, you don't even need to execute.
Why do the hard work on trying to find cures for common forms of cancer, make breakthroughs toward fusion energy, or increase crop yields on staple crops - when you can take on excessive risk in property speculation and your odds of financial success are many times higher?
I'm a strong believer that the world is getting better every day - even in recent times. But I'm not sure how much longer that trend will last in a world that gives smart people very few incentives to do things that actually benefit society.
Maybe with enough people we're destined to get lucky and progress no matter what.