umeu wrote:How was Steve Jobs' success based on anything funded by the state?
You seem to misunderstand, who is talking about the state?
I rephrase. Was Jobs' or any self-made man/woman's success based on any degree of privilege? It's not just Jobs, most of the super-rich came from either poor or middle class at best backgrounds. If riches beget riches, how did the likes of Jobs, Buffet, Bezos, Gates, Dell get there?
He dropped out of college, he lived in squalid conditions for a few years. He was adopted by a blue-collar family. Despite his rather poor background, he managed to build a multibillion empire through entrepreneurial spirit alone.
I very much doubt it. I know how you like to buy in to this "no one ever handed me anything on a platter" narrative, but it's one which just doesn't correspond with reality. Ever. Personal drive matter, sure, but they're only part of the picture. If that's the single story you tell, over and over again, people might mistake it for the truth. But it's like any stereotype, not necessarily untrue, but necessarily incomplete.
Dell was washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant at age 12 to save money for his stamp collection. Hardly a privileged background. At age 19, after one year with his first business, he made $6 million in sales.
DeJoria used to be a janitor and door-to-door salesman. He started his first cosmetics firm with a $700 loan and grew that business into a $1 billion revenue firm.
Jim Ratcliffe used to live in a council home in the UK, those houses in which the poorest people in the UK live, since they cannot afford anything else. Now he has an estimated worth of $32 billion.
Outliers? Sure, just like in any category of performance, those at the top might always be mere statistical outliers. But they're just the tip of a normal distribution, which extends into tens of thousands of self-made millionaires that weren't born to privilege. Again, this doesn't mean that those who were born to riches are not likely to continue to do very well financially, by coasting on their parents' performance. Though, it's not unusual for them to completely waste their parents' inheritance and end up in a much worse position than their parents used to be.
I'm not sure this even matters. There are plenty of people who managed to rise above their condition without benefiting from any special education or help. Sure, that's not the case for most people who account for statistical averages. In most cases, people just tend to just reinforce the financial standing of their background/parents, by the sheer power of social inertia. Is this fair? I don't know, it's just part of life, different people are born to different backgrounds and that is likely to lead to similarly different backgrounds. However, as long as the opportunity to rise above your background is there, it's all fine. And it is there.
Now we have come to the crux of the matter. Yes, it's a fact of life, but it's never just a fact. These facts have come to be in some way. Sure, it's easy to be fine with it if you're in a position where more of the same isn't all that bad. But what if you're not? That's what this is about. How can we help those, for whom more of the same isn't just fine.
Nobody is owed anything just because he's alive. There's no institution that owes you anything in terms of wealth. Depending on where on this planet you are born, it's likely that you will get some basic rights, but even those are quite variable, depending on cultural background. So where does this mentality of self-entitlement come from? Why should everyone have more similar levels of wealth? Levels of wealth should reflect someone's professional performance or social worth, the degree to which their contributions to society are valued or the magnitude of impact that their contributions provide. Not some utopian concept of self-entitlement.
Firms are not going to deny you a chance at a better job if you show aptitude for it. They'd be crazy to do that.
They'd indeed be crazy to do that, from a purely rational economical perspective. But guess what, people aren't robots. And people hold irrational beliefs, and make irrational decisions. It's also a fact of life that people are denied a chance at a better job, despite, or sometimes even because, of showing an aptitude and desire for it. There are countless examples of this, both in the past and the present, and there will undoubtedly be many more to come in the future. And I'm sure you can understand, that if you're the one denied opportunity for whatever reason, which has nothing to do with your aptitude, then you will not just be ok with it.
Absolutely, but then private firms have the right to make suboptimal choices. They end up becoming less competitive if they do so. And public institutions may also occasionally do that, to their detriment. When you have a suboptimal allocation of human resources, as a society, you end up paying a price eventually.
I have a theory that such failures to identify and harness people's optimal potential can eventually lead to war.
I think this concept of "class" is really dubious. It makes it seem like there's some kind of a common spirit or solidarity between individuals who just happen to have similar income levels. Which is not really or always the case.
Yet, the concept of race isn't dubious to you? Any common spirit or solidarity between individuals who just happen to have the same color of skin? Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Yet, it's what some people believe.
The concept of race is something much broader than that of class. It's so broad that you can rarely see such spirit of solidarity as you mention. For example, Uralic populations would be classified as Caucasian, but they actually represent a transitional population between proper Eastern Asians (like Mongols, Chinese, Japanese) and European Caucasians. Throughout history most ethnic groups have developed some way of defining strangers based on whether they belonged to their group or not. The Japanese still use "gaijin" to define foreigners, even when those foreigners belong to the same Asian population. I'm not aware of any such race solidarity among Asians, even though they definitely use the race category even in their scientific studies. Chinese anthropology, for example, uses the race concept quite often in their studies. Westerners are not used to this, because Western culture is infused with certain ideas on multiculturalism, but a great deal of non-Western cultural areas still use some sort of race concept, that is used to differentiate between themselves and outsiders. It's a native form of cultural mutual identification that has been used since times immemorial to preserve the social cohesion of their ethnic groups. And it's probably also based on mutual identification of physical similarity, which is likely to be learned during the first years of life. That doesn't mean that there is a hard causation of race or that there is no biological basis whatsoever for perceived physical differences. Each culture has processed these perceived differences in its own way and has different ways of dealing with this concept.
The fundamental difference between class and race, though, is that, in the case of race, you have no choice over how you are perceived by a certain cultural/ethnic group. It doesn't matter how much Japanese I would learn and how many years I would live in Japan, they would always perceive me as a "gaijin". The concept of class, by contrast, allows for a lot more social mobility. So, if people from a similar ethnic background are removed from their native location and thrown into another cultural-ethnic space, it's very likely they will show a lot more solidarity with those they recognise to be of their own background than with other strangers. Whereas people who belong to similar levels of income/wealth may not necessarily identify anything in common, since having a shared cultural background trumps similar levels of wealth.
They often perceive each other as competitors. I can't think of any particular "class" that acts as a class. Sure there are interest groups which tend to gravitate around common interests and you're likely to see some common socio-economic characteristics there too, but it's a far cry from calling that a self-aware, self-organised class. It's an obsolete, old Marxist concept that doesn't have much relevance today, I think.
You probably have a point, the old definition of class is definitely outdated. Nonetheless, I don't think it can be completely discarded. But it should be used carefully. In any case, the exact definition here was not particularly relevant for what I said. You have already admitted my point earlier, which is that people are often trapped in the background they came from, not due to any particular failure or success of their own.
Oh, but that's not what I said. I described multiple paths that wealth can take. Some might rise to wealth through sheer willpower and entrepreneurial spirit. Others may simply coast on their parents' inherited position for a while, by virtue of pure social inertia. They might lack their parents' strong determination and motivation to achieve, but they might not be wasteful enough to completely spoil their inheritance yet. Their children, though, might deal that deadly blow to their family inheritance. And yet others, might continue to wallow in poverty, again, by virtue of pure social inertia, until one of them develops that feisty spirit which leads them to escape poverty (a Jim Ratcliffe case, if you will). There's no single type of trajectory, there are multiple types, animated by a great deal of factors (personal, environmental).
People who are "trapped" in their inherited social milieu are very often those who lack that inner motivation to transcend their condition.
If wealthy parents are trying to fraudulently secure access to schools for their offspring, it's just an ordinary crime that should be routinely punished. As we've just recently seen with the Hollywood clowns who tried to pad their offspring's CVs with reputable credentials.
It should be, but the point is that they aren't. Whereas when a poor, black woman did something similar, yet far less fraudulent, she was sent to jail. The order of the adjectives and nouns, most likely the order of her crimes. In America, the biggest crime is still being poor.
I'm not aware of the particular case you are quoting. The law should be the same for all, regardless of background. Yeah, I know, that's not really the case, because quality legal advice is expensive and it can make a world of a difference in the outcome of a trial. It's not a completely hopeless situation, though. There are talented lawyers who work on a pro bono basis too.
However, there are also examples of people from a very poor background who made it big, through their own efforts. Jay-Z grew up in a public housing project, brought up by a single mother of four, amidst the violence from Brooklyn's neighbourhoods. Now he's almost worth 1 billion US shekels.
Yes, I am familiar with De Waal's work as well as with the work of tens of other researchers on theory-of-mind abilities. Not sure what to make of this argument. The leap from other primates' rudimentary ToM abilities to those of humans is so large, that we're basically talking of something like the difference between a kite and an Airbus 380. Or between a stone cleaver and stereotactic surgery tools. Humans have a unique capacity for feeling and expressing very subtle gradations of emotional states, which no other species on this planet can. We really don't have any term of comparison. Ours is a very mind-boggling species.
Sure, I doubt any of them, or I, denies that. Yet, you can surely trace back how the Airbus 380 originates in designs of earlier planes, and how these earlier planes again have their designs originated in earlier planes, until at some point, you arrive at the kite. Perhaps if there never had been a kite, we never wouldve had an airbus. I think that seems like quite a reasonable statement. Of course it's ridiculous to compare an airbus to a kite, yet you can't just ignore the relation.
By the same token, we can trace philogenetic similarities with rodents and further down the evolutionary road, with amphibians. *shrug*
That doesn't mean it would justify arbitrary efforts at equalising outcomes either, like it happens right now in some countries where priority is given to particular classes of individuals, regardless of their merits.
You will have to be more specific.
How is this meritocratic?
https://www.wired.com/story/new-lawsuit ... diversity/
