"People are jealous" seems to me like the uncharitable formulation. I'd phrase it more along the lines of: "we evolved in small tribes and are more acutely aware of relative status than absolute welfare." Most people's assessment of how well off they are comes from comparison with their neighbors rather than absolute knowledge of weather they have enough.
I agree though that eliminating severe poverty is a more worthy humanitarian goal than trying to produce equity.
In their model the only benefit of talent is it makes you more likely to double your wealth given luck. This means that they assume luck is needed for advancement while talent is not. Hence they assume that luck is more important than talent, and it's unsurprising that they see the result.
Likewise the power distribution is built in. Power distributions are created by multiplicative laws and the only ways wealth changes in this model are multiplication and division. This means they also assume the power distribution they claim to discover.
It's definitely very hard to build models that match reality, but this one doesn't really seem to try and it's outcomes are so predictable they don't offer meaningful insight. Luck surely plays a huge role in success, but something like longitudinal studies where we measure the abilities of children and then follow their outcomes are likely far more insightful.
> This means that they assume luck is needed for advancement while talent is not.
Which is clearly true. You can be as talented as you like, but talent without a corresponding opportunity to use that talent for monetary gain obviously yields no wealth. There's nothing objectionable here.
It's also widely believed that greater talent makes one more successful at exploiting opportunities, and the paper accepts this premise in order to test it.
Now you can quibble that perhaps the random variable governing opportunities is not independent of talent, in that, those with more talent are simply presented with more opportunities. Perhaps that's true.
But the paper actually shows that our world is also consistent with the hypothesis that opportunities are completely random.
> Power distributions are created by multiplicative laws and the only ways wealth changes in this model are multiplication and division. This means they also assume the power distribution they claim to discover.
I think you're looking at this wrong. The power distribution is not the discovery, the discovery is that what we see in real life is consistent with such a simple formulation based on a small number of factors where wealth disparity is largely dominated by luck.
Perhaps that's not actually the case in reality, but we now know that it's absolutely not impossible, which some previously believed.
> Luck surely plays a huge role in success, but something like longitudinal studies where we measure the abilities of children and then follow their outcomes are likely far more insightful.
These aren't mutually exclusive. Modelling and empirical studies both yield insights.
Their model is if you have a lucky event you have P(talent) chance of doubling your capital and if you hit an unlucky event your capital is halved. Any step in time where you neither experience luck or unluck you are left unchanged. It seems wrong on face for several reasons:
- You need to be "lucky" in order to ever increase your wealth, which makes the "finding" that luck is more important than talent completely obvious from the way the model was designed
- Capital only changes by multiplication and division, so the fact that this model "recreated" the power distribution we see in wealth in the world is obvious from the setup. It was designed to be a power distribution and couldn't be anything else
- Talent has no effect on your life during unlucky or neutral periods in their model. This obviously fails to conform to the real world.
tldr; they designed a power-distributed model where luck was clearly more important than talent, and "discovered" that it showed a power distribution where luck is more important than talent.
Can't speak for many professions, but a long series of interviews where you do a bunch of modules and meet a large proportion of your team is pretty typical in consulting.
Maybe the distinction lies in the filtering. Stackoverflow and Wikipedia have high quality because only people that really care about a subject (and thus usually know a lot) will invest time for free.
Once you start paying people, the much larger audience of 'people that want money' starts posting and the good people get drowned out.
Your friends who are employed were filtered by the hiring process. I imagine Google would be much worse if they hired everyone who applied.
> Once you start paying people, the much larger audience of 'people that want money' starts posting and the good people get drowned out.
Yep. Seen this on a forum called Digitalpoint, back when they had revenue sharing for posts. In theory, that should have made people post higher quality content given the financial reward for doing so. In practice? It inspired thousands of people from third world countries to join and post uninspired gibberish for the chance to get their Adsense ID used in every thread they posted in. A site that already had problems with spammers registering and posting meaningless content for signature backlinks ended up getting flooded by people who saw it as a convenient get rich quick scheme.
With larger audience you will have a greater variety, more bad and good content. Good content tends to float to the top, bad one is ignored, on average. Everyone benefits.
This is missing the last point of my argument though. Paid professionals like those that build Photoshop or Google are filtered by the hiring process.
Steemit (and I assume Woyano in the parent) is lacking both the GIMP/Wikipedia filter of people who are willing to work for free and the Photoshop/Google filter of screening people for ability before paying them to do something. This can land it in an unhappy valley where people are encouraged to churn out whatever and sheer volume makes it harder for good content to rise to the top.
I’m not saying it’s impossible for a model like this to work, just that it’s easy to fall into a trap where the best strategy to make money is to churn out low-quality content and so that’s what you get flooded with. Think of it as similar to the clickbait problem in online journalism.
I think the key distinction here is between “intolerance” and refusal of services. No one should be going out of their way to hear or publish the Nazi point of view, and people ought to call them disgusting and monstrous when they appear in the news.
That said we shouldn’t deny them services like hosting, because maintaing a neutral hosting stance is what allows for a firm argument that protects imprortant discourse like legitimate political dissent. Once you allow for a line to be drawn, suddenly bickering over that line becomes a an endless problem that might stifle any idea.
I find the BBC and the Economist good for this reason. They are/seem a lot less biased than U.S. stuff through some combination of higher standards and that they'd rather manipulate the emotions of Europeans than Americans (and I am an American).
To a certain extent, yes. But they have plenty of articles where they argue that governments need to step in and regulate this and that. It's markedly different from true libertarian sources like the Mises institute, etc.
That sounds like an awesome goal! Why the negative tone?
(by the way, "anti-Left" isn't a complete description of classical liberalism, since the Right is tainted by authoritarianisms such as cronyism, drug prohibition, social conservatism, etc.)
It's not a negative tone, the poster is just observing that the Economist has bias. I have no problem with its bias considering that it's clearly stated on a regular basis; I've read it for years and greatly respect it even though I don't agree with its editorial stance.
> The Economist is not, therefore, an honest examiner of the facts. It is constantly at pains not to risk conclusions that may hurt the case for unregulated markets. This tendency reached its absurd apotheosis in the magazine’s infamous 2014 review of Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. The magazine objected to Baptist’s brutal depiction of the slave trade, saying the book did not qualify as “an objective history of slavery” because “almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.” When outraged readers pointed out that this is because, well, the victims of slavery tended to be black, The Economist retracted the review. But as Baptist observed in response, there was a reason why the magazine felt the need to mitigate the evils of slavery. Baptist’s book portrayed slavery as an integral part of the history of capitalism. As he wrote: “If slavery was profitable—and it was—then it creates an unforgiving paradox for the moral authority of markets—and market fundamentalists. What else, today, might be immoral and yet profitable?” The implications of Baptist’s work would have unsettling implications for The Economist. They would damn the foundations of the very Western free enterprise system that the magazine is devoted to championing. Thus The Economist needed to find a way to soften its verdict on slavery. (It was not the first time they had done so, either. In a tepid review of Greg Grandin’s The Empire of Necessity with the hilariously offensive title of “Slavery: Not Black or White,” the magazine lamented that “the horrors in Mr Grandin’s history are unrelenting.” And the magazine’ long tradition of defending misery stretches back to the 19th century, when it blamed the Irish potato famine on irresponsible decisions made by destitute peasants.)
This is why I said "seem." Everything has some bias, but I think foreign publications usually have a less-relevant-to-me bias, which is about as close to unbiased as I can get.
The last two places I worked as a software engineer (both big American corps) had some 30 hour a week employees. I'd say less than 15%. Neither employer really advertised it though both had well defined and written corporate structure/policies/benefits in place for it.
I feel like disappointing research is going to be a given when you have such an obvious conflict. The author has a strong motivation to make Zestimates seem bad (the less reliable the resources you have to buy/sell a home on your own are the more you'll need to contact them) and a million degrees of freedom (which neighborhoods in which cities, price floor for consideration, how many examples to pull ...) to get the answer they want.
"Research" of this type should probably never be trusted.
I agree though that eliminating severe poverty is a more worthy humanitarian goal than trying to produce equity.