Reason’s blog has a post up on a poll taken of Americans’ beliefs about what it takes to be successful. The typical divisions between conservatives and liberals come up, with the latter thinking luck has more to do with success than conservatives, who predictably take the boot-strap side. What is dubbed “Pure Independents” leans toward the luck side of the debate. This is all to show how these underlying beliefs inform views on the role of the state in intervening and helping the less lucky (or lazy) get on in life.
I guess I’m in the minority, because my laissez faire orientation notwithstanding, I think luck indeed has more to do with success than hard work (especially if what you’re aiming for is an elite socioeconomic status). Structural forces reign, but include genetic predisposition in addition to global economic shifts. The statistical likelihood of having X life outcome given a certain Y background, or the ability to conclude Y background given X life outcome, is often so overwhelming that it seems laughable to think one can will oneself into success on matters of great consequence. Of course, someone reading such a study about the likely life outcome of a background that fits the reader’s own can take conscious action to alter their future, but the likelihood even here of such a reader being college educated and of above average intelligence is probably, well, far greater than .00.
Those against state intervention should cease with the hard-work talk, and instead tout the ability of markets to experiment and correct for error relative to state supported initiatives, and how this benefits both the lucky and unlucky. This won’t satisfy radical levelers most concerned about economic rather than political equality, but I wonder how many of those types actually exist. This is a less romantic (read: folk economic) narrative, however, and will probably only work within a certain milieu, e.g. the community of political philosophers that inform the policy wonk elite. At the layperson level – the level the Reason poll was working on – the perpetuation of myths may be necessary, in which case Horatio Alger isn’t such a putz after all, and Virginia Postrel is super insightful.
September 13, 2011 at 10:17 am
There’s a problem here with framing – “success in life” isn’t necessarily conceptualizable as if everyone’s life was in running some kind of sole proprietorship.
I tend to look at this from a chooser’s perspective. If I were an employer and had to select someone to hire or promote (in other words, were I to have a say as regards someone else’s success in life), all else being equal among various candidates, would distinguishable aspects of character and habitualized virtue be relevant to my selection?
The answer is that it certainly would. Furthermore, If I had a subordinate manager who was oblivious to that factors of personality and character when making his recommendations, I would attempt to counsel and develop his skills at competent discrimination or, that failing, remove from him this particular responsibility. Dedication, perseverance, diligence, determination, motivation, integrity, etc. are all observable attributes and relevant to my choices.
I would go further and add that I would consider these factors important in all of my interpersonal relations. Who do I prefer for friends, to be my doctor, lawyer, or accountant, to invest with, to lend to, etc. When don’t I prefer Horatio Alger / Bourgeois virtues in others when their behavior impacts my welfare?
Now, of course, it’s possible to ask from where those aspects of character originate, and it’s possible to answer that question in a way that attributes even these traits to “luck”. One can go further and adopt a metaphysics without “free will” and attribute everything that happens to “luck” or “chance”. I wouldn’t be surprised if deep political-ideological splits were also accompanied by basic and profound philosophical differences.
September 23, 2011 at 12:48 am
Who do I prefer for friends, to be my doctor, lawyer, or accountant, to invest with, to lend to, etc. When don’t I prefer Horatio Alger / Bourgeois virtues in others when their behavior impacts my welfare?
I guess the question is, which Horatio Alger character are you looking for? The one who has already pulled himself up by his bootstraps etc, or the one who is still in the process of doing so?
September 16, 2011 at 10:55 am
What is deemed the result of effort and what is deemed the result of luck seem to be greatly dependent on the observer. For example, one might justifiably claim that it takes a great deal of effort to become a successful physician – four years of undergraduate education, three years of medical school, followed by residency, and perhaps post-doctoral education to learn a specialty – all of this before even beginning to build a practice!
On the other hand, just to absorb that much education requires perhaps a minimum IQ of 120. IQ is largely innate – the product of one’s genetic background. One can only count himself lucky to be born with a high IQ. It is not the product of his own effort.
However, genetic predisposition does not guarantee outcome. A high level of innate intelligence many be a necessary condition for success as a physician (or whatever other highly-skilled, highly-rewarding line of economic activity one might choose), but it is not a sufficient condition. Luck is rarely as simple as winning a lottery. More often, what luck provides are opportunities; effort is still required to seize them. Fortuna cedat peritis.
September 16, 2011 at 2:41 pm
The problem is that as the level of competition for any particular high-status social role increases, an increasing percentage of those who obtain the elite spots will be characterized by high talent, effort, and fortuitous and serendipitous life circumstances. You have to be “running on all cylinders” to make it past the many weed-out hoops to get to the top levels of any profession, so it’s increasingly difficult to dis-aggregate effort from luck – more successful people will tend to be both, and less successful people will tend to have neither.
At any rate, I think the real problem is the potential backwards-engineering of these almost metaphysical claims from people’s political preferences. If you want high redistribution and economic egalitarianism through the government, it helps to signal and be exhibitionist about possession a coherent moral framework in which your policy is merely pursuing an objective-ish “social justice”, and not just one’s personal utopian dream. The converse goes similarly for private property and the “deserving” or “rights” framework of the contrary set of minimal redistribution preferences.
This is basically how I view Rawls’ “A Theory of Justice” project – as surreptitiously reversing the historical relationship of ethics and politics – deriving arbitrary axioms from desired end-state conclusions, but cleverly pretending otherwise.
September 17, 2011 at 3:34 am
I find Rawls work to be not that clever, just venerated.
September 30, 2011 at 8:06 am
“On the other hand, just to absorb that much education requires perhaps a minimum IQ of 120. IQ is largely innate – the product of one’s genetic background. One can only count himself lucky to be born with a high IQ. It is not the product of his own effort.”
But actually absorbing the education requires effort – as does putting the education into practice.
There is no form of intelligence that doesn’t involve acts of will at some point in the process.
September 17, 2011 at 3:33 am
Interesting post. I can find nothing to niggle about (although I’m not laissez faire oriented).
September 20, 2011 at 8:23 am
My problem with this kind of analysis is that it is wrong.
But it does sound good!
A luck / boot-strap poll really means should we topple the inheritance incentive?
it is pure Darwinsim – it has NOTHING to do with luck / boot strap – people with stuff, WANT to be able to leave it to their kids.
If you thin about it from the child’s view – the luck sperm club is a fact.
But we don’t. So POLLING that assumes we do, ASSUMES that what the public thinks matters.
It doesn’t.
In reality, our laws are written according to a dynasty view – that is people who have power make decisions KNOWINGLY giving their children advantages.
We aren’t going to make it illegal for one set of kids (those whose parents have money) to go to super expensive high priced schools.
We aren’t going to increase the death tax.
And Reason Magazine ought not to even be endorsing the presumption that what the public thinks matters.
it leads to poor thinking, like maybe we should DO SOMETHING.
What we want to do is create laws that make it easier for new born poor sharks to chew up the protected rich ppodles.
That is make things more laissez faire, so that price compression can occur in things like education, and so the poor get better signals earlier in life about how normal people act.
September 29, 2011 at 1:15 pm
What we need to understand people is a poll that breaks down what is meant by luck and what is meant by work.
September 30, 2011 at 8:04 am
Well, the simple and easy answer is that you need both to rise to the status of ‘wealthy and powerful’, which is often what people mean when they talk about ‘success’.
If you’re born into status and wealth, it’s a matter of luck. In a healthy society, hard work is more important for the vast majority of individuals to become able to support themselves comfortably. Are those people successful? I’d argue so.
September 30, 2011 at 4:26 pm
Let’s also consider what allows some people to be born into status and wealth. At some point, that person’s ancestors acquired it. How did they acquire it? Ordinarily, by intelligent effort.
Many people work hard to no great effect. The peasant of yore worked hard with a scythe, but accomplished little in comparison to today’s farmer with his combine. Neither has worked as productively as the man who invented the combine. It is the admixture of effort with intelligence and vision, imagination, inspiration, or whatever it may be called, that leads a person to attain status and wealth with which he was not born, and the power that is their concomitant. We know that intelligence is one component of this combination in which people are quite unequal, and that a large part of it is innate.
We are assured by the chattering classes that society has become more “meritocratic” – presumably meaning that social background, ancestry, ethnic origins, and such matters related to the status of one’s progenitors, are less and less significant, while such things as academic achievement and ability to climb the greasy pole to success in one’s career are more so, with respect to the attainment of wealth and power.
Yet this carries with it a paradox. People tend to meet and to marry those with whom they are grouped towards the end of adolescence and in early adulthood. Whereas, in the past, a high-status young man might marry a high-status young woman that he had encountered at a debutante ball, today, it is much more likely that a young man and woman destined for high status (if not enjoying it already) might meet at Harvard or Stanford.
Since these institutions select applicants based on measures of their intelligence, and since intelligence is largely innate, the offspring of such unions are predictably going to be more intelligent on average than the children of persons of lower status. “Meritocracy” will thereby eventually be transformed into a sort of hereditary aristocracy. Indeed, this process is already well under way, and is scarcely obscured by the smokescreen of politically-correct egalitarian platitudes uttered by many of today’s elite.
Egalitarianism always tries to bury inherited status, and it is always resurrected – transformed, perhaps, in some small aspect, but no less powerful. I suspect this is the case because egalitarianism is never really about making all people socially or economically equal; it is rather the stratagem of a rising class, frustrated in its ambitions by an existing elite, to cast down the ones it envies and despises, then to take their place.
Societies throughout history have demonstrated a tendency towards oligarchic governance, and it always arises from the same innate human inequalities. The claim that modern society is more meritocratic than past societies does not really hold water. The “carrière ouvert aux talents” has always been available to those with sufficient talent. It is hard to imagine a university curriculum today that is as difficult to master as the skills of a successful courtier, as outlined by Baldassare Castiglione in the sixteenth century, nor an environment as unrewarding to the socially and intellectually maladroit as the typical mediæval or Renaissance court.
Where past elites suffered and failed to retain their dominance was in their tendency to transform the natural and somewhat fluidly hereditary social classes based upon differences in inherited talents, into rigidly hereditary castes. Time will tell if the currently ongoing process of social stratification that has yielded the currently ascendant elite will end in a similar result. Where past elites shone was in their adherence to aristocratic ideals. This is in sharp contrast to the present elite, which mouths the slogan “all men are created equal” while demonstrating, by its actions, an utter disbelief in that article of secular piety. No genuine aristocrat would stoop to such hypocrisy. Time, too, will tell whether the present elite can become virtuous and embrace the aristocratic ideal, or will continue to wallow in its philosophical contradictions, and succumb in its turn to a new kind of elite as yet unforeseen.
October 1, 2011 at 12:40 am
Then there’s the concept that in the “now” of any point in time, having resources managed by the most talented managers is what’s best for the public welfare.
October 1, 2011 at 9:31 pm
But what are the principles of “the most talented managers”? The most talented are not necessarily the most virtuous. The problem that exists today is that the elite is not virtuous. In the past, rulers were restrained from the worst possible excesses either by the regard in which they held the Aristotelian virtues of aretê and philotimia, or at least by their fear of God. The twentieth century was the century of totalitarian dictatorship, the doctrine that rulers can exert their will without any such restraint. The results speak for themselves.
October 2, 2011 at 10:03 am
Michael, that doesn’t match what little I know of history. Leaders were previously held in check by the need to avoid angering too many of their followers – or at least, those who could exert power. Cooperation can be extorted, but rulers need to be able to exert force in order to extort at all, and that means getting someone to work with you by free choice.
As far as I can tell, Christian values were never given much more than lip service until Christianity was finally abandoned as a faith in modern times. Then, entire nations started taking the ethical principles transmitted as part of the faith seriously – which has been generally disastrous, as they tend to be extremely foolish and self-destructive precepts.
October 4, 2011 at 1:06 pm
Christian values and Aristotelian virtues are not the same thing. Indeed, the Latin virtus is derived from “vir,” i.e., man in his civic sense, and not merely in the sense of his membership in the human race. Virtus was manly virtue, meaning the characteristics of a citizen, paterfamilias, and soldier. Christianity put its own rather thin veneer on these antique virtues, and out of the combination came the character of a gentleman, as understood until sometime after World War I. The “fear of God” represents mostly the fear of damnation, and this, together with the desire to conduct oneself in a manner befitting a gentleman, was what restrained rulers from the worst possible excesses at this period.
What you refer to as “taking the ethical principles transmitted as a part of the faith seriously” – presumably, socialism – is a misrepresentation of Christianity. It is true that socialism is a sort of secularized religion – but it is a fallacy to argue the converse, namely that Christianity is a sort of divinized socialism.
Socialism never prevailed in any place or time when Christianity was taken seriously by the ruling class. Christianity is not, and was never understood as, a prescription for the political re-ordering of society. It is a prescription for the proper ordering of the individual believer’s life, in preparation for the life to come; and that proper ordering, for most of its history, was understood as partaking in the sacraments of the church.
October 2, 2011 at 6:17 pm
The optimizing society should be meritocratic, but regression to the mean makes ancestry an imperfect proxy. So we’ll continue to have tests.
October 4, 2011 at 2:15 pm
There may be regression to the mean, but selective breeding is a continual process. A couple in which both parents have IQs of 125 may produce a child with a lesser IQ, but it doesn’t revert to 100 in one generation. It might revert to 120 or 115. Yet that child, on reaching marriageable age, will be associated with a cohort of others in the same or higher IQ range. It is quite unlikely he or she will marry someone of IQ 85. The chances are greatest that the child’s offspring will be conceived with someone from his or her IQ cohort, at least a standard deviation above the norm, and over time this will lead to a new norm for the cohort and its progeny. This is, indeed, how families – and races, which are just large, somewhat inbred families – come to resemble each other in numerous characteristics, of which intelligence is only one.
Ancestry may be an imperfect proxy, but the trends in modern society make it less so – perhaps less so than at any other time in the past. The irony is that this development has come about at a time when egalitarianism is the reigning orthodoxy. At least, it reigns in the sphere of abstractions – but not at all in the personal lives of the elites, however much lip service they may pay it.
La Rochefoucauld, who lived in an aristocratic age, observed that hypocrisy was the tribute vice paid to virtue. By “vice” and “virtue,” he of course meant what those words were understood to mean in his day. Today, hypocrisy about “equality” is the tribute paid by secular-progressive idealism to genetic reality.
October 7, 2011 at 7:36 pm
It seems to me the best successor to a resource manager is rarely, RARELY, one of their kids. Regression to the mean from an optimal resource manager is of course more than just IQ -something I think you of all people would appreciate, Michael.
October 8, 2011 at 8:38 pm
There is a self-regulating aspect to an economy based on private property, which is that a fool and his money are soon parted. That seems to me to address the issue you raise rather well. No more in Castiglione’s day than in ours were the dull and lazy able to hang onto the social and economic prominence attained by their talented sires. A family retains them only by producing multiple generations of superior people, and this happens with more than random frequency. IQ isn’t everything, but it’s an important part of the explanation why hereditary elites have historically prevailed in so many parts of the world.
October 9, 2011 at 5:54 pm
I’m all for good breeding when it comes to people, but really I’m for bringing concepts from mass production and quality control over to the production of people -but it seems too repugnant to almost everybody. We should be rolling climate scientists, SENS optimizers, other valuable types of technical minds of our times off of conveyer belts. And 99.9% of people, to be cautious about my orders of magnitude, shouldn’t be reproducing at all, it seems to me.
October 9, 2011 at 9:38 pm
Good luck to you on that. I won’t hold my breath waiting for it to happen. Selective breeding on the level you advocate requires ruthless culling, and the gelding or spaying of those specimens deemed useful but not of breeding quality. How do you expect to make it happen?
Reverting to a natural aristocratic/hierarchical order, on the other hand, would involve only removing those egalitarian social engineering measures that have been imposed on civil society for the past three or four generations – abolishing the estate tax, the graduated income tax, “affirmative action” and other “civil rights” laws that impede traditional rights of free association and create “rights” for the lumpen element at the expense of the productive classes, the servant at the expense of the master, the debtor at the expense of the creditor, etc. Given an absence of egalitarian interference in civil society by government, the superior would quickly re-assert themselves. The effect would be passively eugenic. This seems more easily possible than the thoroughgoing implementation of active eugenic steps you seem to advocate.
We have seen how quickly the entrepreneurial spirit rebounded in many former satellites of the Soviet Union after the demise of Marxism-Leninism there, and in China after the death of Mao Tse-tung. Imagine how quickly the natural aristocracy in the West could also do if the debris of the egalitarian welfare state were swept away. What would be harder to restore would be the old philosophical values that made the elite culturally, as well as naturally, aristocratic.
October 12, 2011 at 2:03 am
“How do you expect to make it happen?”
heehee. I expect to die within 100 years and be forgotten within 200 except as part of aggregrate social science statistics.
October 9, 2011 at 9:41 pm
Michael,
That’s essentially the EXACT opposite of what left-libertarians believe would happen in the absence of the state.
October 11, 2011 at 5:29 pm
Maybe so, but if the state were to disappear, civil society would continue to exist, and would sooner or later re-create the state. Man is naturally a social animal, and his societies have always displayed hierarchy. We are hard-wired for society, and for differentiation within it by social and economic class.
The egalitarianism of the day is an historical aberration. It enjoys its current strength because the present elite used it as a tool in the early days of its ascendancy to displace the previous elite, and is still attached to it in the way that a small child is fond of an old blanket or a tattered but favorite toy. Sooner or later (perhaps when it is challenged by an aggressively rising class below it) today’s elite will realize that it has been speaking as a child, understanding as a child, and thinking as a child. At this point it will have matured, and put away childish things.
I cannot help but think that this has already begun to happen. The governmental-academic-media complex may still mouth its left-wing slogans – may indeed indulge in a bit of retro play-acting like “Occupy Wall Street” (which seems to be mainly a project of the SEIU, the labor union closest to Obama, and every bit as artificial as the pro-Khadaffy and pro-Mubarak demonstrators fronted by those former rulers’ regimes). Yet a truer representation of its innermost sensibility is the patronizing disgust with which it regards manifestations of the populist right such as the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, and those that “cling to their guns and religion.” The tone of mixed horror and contempt with which the punditocracy discusses these people approximates that of a Victorian dowager upon discovering a tramp that has invaded her parlour. This snobbish revulsion signals that the elite is becoming aware of a challenge to its elite status, and doesn’t like it.
October 22, 2011 at 3:08 pm
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