"He earned it..."

[_subgenius]

I believe you have a far narrower definition of what it means to "earn" in the context of your discussion.
You seem to negate the fact that there are several people who earn or otherwise acquire large amounts of money and are unable to sustain that money.

That being said, the rest of your position seems to be cliché', bad cliché', intent on being some sort of mini-rally speech at a socialist Obama fund raiser.
All the talk about Bull-Moose and Marathon runners made little sense about a person "earning" money. Trying to draw some sort of simile with physical attributes seems rather reckless.
Again, i believe your entire argument falls apart due to your following statement because it is completely unsupported by reason, logic, or common sense:
"It's not even hypothetically possible under equality of opportunity assumptions."
History seems to contradict this very statement.

However, it is clear that you have made the following arguable and unresolved points:
1. that equality of opportunity is an assumption not a given
2. what the definition of "earn" is.

now as for #2 if you mean doing "something with their lives instead of sitting back and crying about it" - i believe you abandon that position later in your posting. Otherwise i am not sure what you mean.

[_Analytics]

I’d be interested in whether or not you think your position here contradicts a broad application of the Efficient Market Hypothesis? Or, would you say a broad application of the EMH actually proves that what you say here is correct?

I’d suggest the latter. Looking at the EMH in technical terms, there are three possible sources for your market earnings: better-than-average returns being intrinsic to the stock (alpha), the riskiness of the stock (beta), and sheer luck (epsilon).

According to the EMH, alpha is zero. But you can still beat the market by being lucky—simply roll the dice and get a portfolio with positive epsilons. So if somebody is a professional stock trader and happens to beat the market due to luck, saying he “earned” his money is like saying that somebody who won Powerball “earned” the winnings.

[_Gadianton]

All the talk about Bull-Moose and Marathon runners made little sense about a person "earning" money. Trying to draw some sort of simile with physical attributes seems rather reckless.

No simile here, you are the sum of your physical attributes, including your brain, as is a Bull Moose and a marathon runner. Physical attributes are normally distributed. Do you understand the point this far? Taking smaller slices of the economy might show compatibility with the belief that people earn their money by skill. A solid grocery checkout clerk might make, on average, 12$ an hour, I don't know how much it really is. That average should take into account cost of living. Maybe a great clerk will earn 20$ an hour or more. But if you met a clerk who made a couple hundred an hour, I'm pretty sure you'd be thinking of an arrangement to explain the pay where the clerk's skill is negligable when compared to other factors. You wouldn't believe it.

If you're not with me this far, there is no point in saying more. Does the above make sense?

[_Gadianton]

Lol, Analytics, yeah, EMH is always in the back of my mind here, though I'm not trying to smuggle in anything about it for this post.

But yeah, the dismal science says "there's no loose change on the floor", so among the most greedy, self-serving, and brilliant executives, if one clears a million a year and another a hundred million, it's tough to say one is a hundred times smarter or harder working than the other.

[_Analytics]

I find it extremely distasteful when wealthy people believe they are that way because they simply outworked their less fortunate counterparts.

Don't look at me then....

What I mean by, "He earned it..," is that those were the rules I was faced with. They've always been the rules, and now because life is working out a little better for me people want to talk about changing the rules. If the socialists have their way, I'll have my optometrists salary cut to that of a teacher, but don't think for one second they'll consider paying any of the debt I acquired to do this job, not to mention what it cost my health to put my body through whatever it took to pass the tests.

You guys talk like I'm the CEO. If I get sick and don't work, I don't get paid. I live paycheck to paycheck. If I didn't earn what I have (I'm still in the red) than nobody ever earned anything....

I’ve got to say that the irony in this post makes me laugh. Somehow, I seriously doubt that a young optometrist who is trying to scrape his way out from under a mountain of student debt is what EAllusion had in mind when he was talking about people who are rich.

[_subgenius]

All the talk about Bull-Moose and Marathon runners made little sense about a person "earning" money. Trying to draw some sort of simile with physical attributes seems rather reckless.

No simile here, you are the sum of your physical attributes, including your brain, as is a Bull Moose and a marathon runner. Physical attributes are normally distributed. Do you understand the point this far? Taking smaller slices of the economy might show compatibility with the belief that people earn their money by skill. A solid grocery checkout clerk might make, on average, 12$ an hour, I don't know how much it really is. That average should take into account cost of living. Maybe a great clerk will earn 20$ an hour or more. But if you met a clerk who made a couple hundred an hour, I'm pretty sure you'd be thinking of an arrangement to explain the pay where the clerk's skill is negligable when compared to other factors. You wouldn't believe it.

If you're not with me this far, there is no point in saying more. Does the above make sense?

i have understood what you are trying to argue but i disagree.
Take your clerk example...it is wrong.
The example in this context should be...if a clerk making $12/hour gets paid $24 for the week, then i could easily conclude that the clerk worked 2 hours. If another clerk made $480 for the week ,then i would conclude that the clerk worked 40 hours....additionally it would be reasonable for a "chief clerk" to be compensated at a rate higher than $12/hour.
The reality is that no clerk gets paid several hundred an hour for being a clerk, so your extrapolation is absurd.

So, the real question is, why does the CEO of the grocery store likely make so much more than a clerk?
Simply put, because he is the CEO. The clerk is just as capable of becoming the CEO as anyone else...that is the reality and it has been demonstrated time and time again...as has been the rather incestuous route to power that you are suggesting.

If we are, indeed, the sum of our physical attributes then what? You are proposing that equality exists in as much as it is naturally selected with extreme failure and extreme success being attributed to defect and anomaly?
What if Tiger Woods? for quite some time he dominated his profession in a most unbalanced manner...contrary to your marathon runner example...what of his skill?
What about Bill Gates?

If not by skill, then by what? magic? happenstance?

i would be interested in how you would distinguish "skill" from some yet to be spoken of attribute that allows a rich person to be rich while a poor person remains poor. Success and its sustainability is merely by crap-shoot unless the government intercedes?

[_subgenius]

...if one clears a million a year and another a hundred million, it's tough to say one is a hundred times smarter or harder working than the other.

why?
would be as difficult to say they were just 2 times smarter or harder working? or that they worked less and were actually dumber?

You seem to be proposing that compensation is divorced from effort, regardless of effort's quantity or focus. If so, then whatever is compensation compensating for?

[_Droopy]

My argument is simple, and I'm sure the point has been made many times, but I haven't seen it brought up here. Human attributes for success, like all attributes of biological entities are normally distributed. Even if intelligence, motivation, and ambition aren't easily quantified by tests, we have no reason to believe any attributes or combination of attributes defy a normal distribution. Yet, income and wealth are nowhere near normally distributed.

More sly, seductive sophistry from the Gadster. He never slumbers nor sleeps.

Skills, talents, and aptitudes are very likely normally distributed. However, the sheer quantity, kaleidoscopic combinations, and unique manifestations of those attributes among a vast plethora of unique, individual personalities coming from a wide variety of personal backgrounds, temperaments, social environments, and psychological dynamics are not and are not quantifiable in so simplistic a manner, nor distributed evenly. They aren't.

This is why mathematical economists trapped in Ivory Tower abstractions constructed of equations and trend lines can be so dangerous when they're taken seriously.

A lot of people are competent in the Asian martial arts. Far less are what one would term "experts," and only a tiny handful are or ever will be "masters." That's the real distribution that history and experience tells us exists within the human sphere and, beyond elementary basics of most life skills, exists in most areas of human endeavor.

Gad needs to put down his calculator, come away from his abstract, mathematically simplified and idealized theoretical model world, and do some actual study of the human condition for a while.

Wealth isn't "distributed" at all in a free-market economy, and this misnomer (the effects of generations of the facile, unexamined leftist propaganda that saturates every nook and cranny of American intellectual life) conditions (like all forms of political correctness) the terms and acceptable assumptions upon which debate takes place.

The fact of the matter is that while substantially higher levels of motivation, a certain kind of intelligence, knowledge, work habits, temperament, and innate aptitude are important to the acquisition of really great wealth, the market is the ultimate arbiter of who is successful and who isn't, and the market is everyone - regardless of IQ, aptitude, or business acumen - who determines to buy - to not to buy - what John Q Business seeks to sell.

Gad's fundamental premise is the problem here. It isn't the distribution of core human attributes among the population that becomes entrepreneurs, or their concentration in a small number of more highly creative, motivated, or clever people, that generates higher levels of wealth for a relative few, but this combined with the proper anticipation of and foresight into the desires of their fellow beings and how their desires/wants can best be served.

Those who properly anticipate and foresee such desires tend to become rich, or at least wealthy through entrepreneurial ventures. Those that do not, do not, irregardless of their genius, talent, skills, smarts, education, or motivation.

The "he earned it..." argument must be stated to explicitly allow for a zero-sum element, which it never is. So this thinking would go: to assure the best and most competitive environment, we should allow disproportionate rewards for small differences in acheivement at the top.

Who's this "we"? Do you want to live in a free society, Gad, or not?

In the wild, the biggest bull Moose mates with disproportionately more females than the second biggest bull Moose. A lot of leverage is packed onto that small, defining edge. But, in the wild, no bull moose is too big to fail, and the disproportional benefits of the biggest bulls are still nowhere near as disproportionate as US income distribution. The closest analogy in nature

Let's not take analogies from nature, which are of no relevance whatsoever, and let's stick with discussion human action, human nature, and human incentives and motives.

Anyone who supports world peace would seem to support the olympics, and the fastest runner "earns" far more prestige than the fifth fastest runner, even if the physiological differences and amount of hard work are slim between the two.

But not between those two, or between those two and everyone else in the same race, even those who came in last, who are vastly beyond the average human in athletic ability.

Perhaps we psychologically feel the same about rich people, but at minimun we should acknowledge the leverage involved: Hard work/skill + leverage = rich, not hard work.

Dead wrong, and save for a few individuals who inherit their wealth or marry into it, most great wealth is and always has been earned primarily by hard work, sacrifice, preparation, time, effort, and personal responsibility. You don't know what you're talking about. You really, really, really need to get away from your cartoon carnival perception of teh human condition and read George Gilder's book Wealth and Poverty for a serious excursion into what most people do and have always done to become rich.

The vast majority of the rich, and especially those who have come to this country from other countries of low or nonexistent opportunity with little more than a few dollars in their pockets, have become rich by hard, sustained work, effort, preparation, and creative energy.

Period.

As I've long maintained, class envy is a fever that runs a high temperature, and once taking root, tends to rage at ever higher temperatures until it creates delirium in its pathetic victim.

And the super rich are impossible to fatham without introducing major gobs of luck.

This is one of the core caveats to the human, mortal condition that the Left must introduce into everything to justify their gnostic, expert ministrations on the behalf of "the people" to make everything right (all in the name of "compassion" of course).

If substantial wealth is the result of the luck of the draw, then it follows that substantial, intractable, entrenched poverty is also little more than a matter of "luck," which removes cultural, lifestyle, and personal choice factors from that condition as well. Having removed personal conduct, choices, and culture from the causal mix, liberals are then free to step in and steady the arc.

Gad has no living idea how wealth is created, so the best he can do with his differential equations, probability theory, and computer model outputs is to pronounce on the role of "luck" and "leverage" in acquiring wealth, while minimizing hard work. Hard work (mental or physical) doesn't create wealth; lying around on a yacht sipping Manhattan's in the Bahama's creates it.

Like the Eloi said about the fruit they ate, "It grows. It just grows."

[_Droopy]

No simile here, you are the sum of your physical attributes, including your brain, as is a Bull Moose and a marathon runner.

That's a philosophical, or metaphysical claim, not anything that could be legitimately derived from scientific data or evidence.

Physical attributes are normally distributed.

1. The assumption that all mental attributes are nothing more then epiphenomena of human physiology is a philosophical proposition and pre-assumption for which there is no compelling evidence of any salient sort. Few people who have not already swallowed the secular humanist/positivist Kool-Aid without taking a breath are going to accept your fundamental assumptions here.

2. Physical attributes are normally distributed. Mental/psychological attributes in a simplified, core form are evenly distributed. The combination of physical, psychological, environmental, cultural, and social attributes interacting and interpenetrating one another within each unique individual psych is not, and is far too complex and subtle to disentangle with resort to idealized, oversimplified abstract modeling of such phenomena using statistical analysis.

Try engaging reality, for a while, Gad (and try studying real economics, which in its legitimate form is really more a branch of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy much more than of mathematics).

Do you understand the point this far? Taking smaller slices of the economy might show compatibility with the belief that people earn their money by skill. A solid grocery checkout clerk might make, on average, 12$ an hour, I don't know how much it really is. That average should take into account cost of living. Maybe a great clerk will earn 20$ an hour or more. But if you met a clerk who made a couple hundred an hour, I'm pretty sure you'd be thinking of an arrangement to explain the pay where the clerk's skill is negligable when compared to other factors. You wouldn't believe it.

Why does Madonna make so much money, Gad?

[_Tarski]

Why does Madonna make so much money, Gad?

Some possibilities:

1) Madonna deserves money 5000 times more than Droopy (The Market has spoken)

2) Madonna worked 5000 times harder in life than Droopy. (Thus spake the Market)

3) God (as expressed in The Free Market) loves Madonna 5000 times more than he does Droopy.

real economics, which in its legitimate form is really more a branch of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy

wherein we learn that capitalism is an impersonal amoral system that provides the setting in which psycho-social and game-theoretic forces such as greed, deception and infuence brokering can work as a sort of insideous thermodynamic ensemble.

Because that which is acquired (capital, wealth and power) catalyzes the acquisition of more of the same, we have a nonlinear feedback loop that concentrates more and more wealth at few and fewer locations within the economy leaving behind larger and larger deserts of relative poverty in a process akin to the gravitational clumping of interstellar matter.
---or at least that would be the case if it wasn't for the fact that capitalism is moderated, complimented, and regulated by human institutions not the least of which is democratically elected government.