[FRIAM] Nautilus: Investing Is More Luck Than Talent

[Marcus Daniels]

"The rigging is, IMHO, of not doing anything about the unabated and disproportionate flow of wealth to the top and, hence, giving rise to the resulting, ever-skewing, descriptive Pareto distribution of wealth versus population.  It certainly does seem like an increasing biasing of the metaphorical fair coin [e.g., the busted "trickle down" metaphor of President Ronald Reagan]."


I think it depends in part on the source of the wealth and how it is used.   There's a qualitative difference between a Google and a payday loan company that preys on the poor.   Are these wealthy people creating new high-paying jobs or locking-in people to dead-end jobs like coal mining?  Do they have a vision of advancement of humanity (Gates) or just a unnecessary assertion of the `need' for a lowest-common-denominator dog-eat-dog view of things?  How does their wealth and power matter in the long run?    It is at least good that there isn't just one kind of billionaire, like the sort that destroys the environment and enslaves people.


A problem with government is that the agency it gives people is either very limited (you get food stamps so you can eat), or it is also hierarchical like these enterprises (you don't get much agency unless you fight your way up or are an elected official).  For people to truly be free means creating a commons that facilitates other kinds of motivators that are rewarding in more complex ways than just salary or status.   Universities don't really deliver on this, except perhaps for some professors who are in that world for most of their adult life.


I would say neoliberalism is trying to engineer biased coins that land in a coordinated ways to build something more complex.   One way is with trade laws.


Marcus


P.S. RT is the Russian Propaganda news outlet.   Of course, they'd have their own motives for wanting to diminish Chinese power.

________________________________
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Robert Wall <wallrobert7 at gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2017 4:57:14 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: [FRIAM] Nautilus: Investing Is More Luck Than Talent

This is just an exploratory thought piece to try in this forum ... please skip if it seems, right off the bat, as being too thought-full ...  😴😊

Does Pareto's Principle<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle> (with the attending, so-called Power Law<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law>) provide good moral justification for an amped-up progressive tax strategy or a reverse-discriminating set of rebalancing policies [e.g., changing the probabilities for the "everyman"]?  And, is the argument one of morality or one of necessity?  That's what this thread and the subject Nautilus article intend to explore, especially with the events that will begin the next four years tomorrow.

Nautilus:  Investing Is More Luck Than Talent<http://nautil.us/issue/44/luck/investing-is-more-luck-than-talent?utm_source=Nautilus&utm_campaign=f5f998a451-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_01_18&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_dc96ec7a9d-f5f998a451-56531089> (January 19, 2017).
The surprising message of the statistics of wealth distribution.

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,
neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill,
but time and chance happeneth to them all.  (Ecclesiastes 9:11)

[an introductory aside: As computational statisticians, we love our simulations ... and our coin tosses.  😎 We are always mindful of bias ... as, say, apparent with the ever-widening wealth gap. Money, Money, Money<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETxmCCsMoD0> ...] 😊

[Inline image 1]

So, as described in the subject Nautilus article, Pareto's Principle, descriptively seen so often in nature, seems to imply that the current widening wealth gap is, well, "natural?"  Judging by its prevalence in most all rich societies, it does seem so. However, remembering that this sorting process works even with fair coin tosses in investments and gambling, this process phenomenon with its biased outcomes seems to occur in many places and on many levels ...

For example, we find this aspect of luck in nature elsewhere in biological processes; from Wikipedia ... Chance and Necessity: Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology is a 1970 book by Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod, interpreting the processes of evolution to show that life is only the result of natural processes by "pure chance." The basic tenet of this book is that systems in nature with molecular biology, such as enzymatic biofeedback loops [metabolisms] can be explained without having to invoke final causality [e.g., Intelligent Design].

Usually, relatively very few winners and many, many losers. Phenotypical luck or luck in tectonic location?

According to the introduction the book's title was inspired by a line attributed to Democritus<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democritus>, "Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity."

But, is there a necessity to Pareto's Principle? To answer this I must defer to my theoretical mathematician friends who so often look to Plato for such answers. 🤔😊  My thought is that the necessity comes from a need to, perhaps teleologically, react to it ... as the planet's only available potential intelligent designers ... the purpose being, on some scale, Darwinian-level survival.

And, this aspect of fate by chance is also reasoned in the Pulitzer-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997, a transdisciplinary non-fiction book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

The book attempts to explain why Eurasian civilizations (including North Africa) have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate primarily in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops. When cultural or genetic differences have favored Eurasians (for example, written language or the development among Eurasians of resistance to endemic diseases), he asserts that these advantages occurred because of the influence of geography on societies and cultures (for example, by facilitating commerce and trade between different cultures) and were not inherent in the Eurasian genomes. [Wikipedia]

The luck of geography.  So then, should the more fortunate nations be more progressively taxed?  Maybe we should ask Greece? Or see what Germany has to say?  Followers of egalitarianism would argue yes. Followers of Ayn Rand's capitalism or her Objectivism [like Speaker Paul Ryan] would argue no. I think most of the rest of us fall somewhere in between; that is, not sure. So, let's go on ...

Is the (economic) game rigged then, as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have insisted? Personally, I would say absolutely yes, and neoliberalism is the underlying philosophy of the rigging process<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9wUGxgEFsw> [hear just the 1st 12 minutes, if you watch].  But, maybe this political ideology is just one that is eventually spawned by a conspicuous need for moralistic or even Randian justification, by the winners, for its resulting destructiveness--as we so often hear, "wealth accumulation is based on hard work and talent."  So, intelligent design?

The rigging is, IMHO, of not doing anything about the unabated and disproportionate flow of wealth to the top and, hence, giving rise to the resulting, ever-skewing, descriptive Pareto distribution of wealth versus population.  It certainly does seem like an increasing biasing of the metaphorical fair coin [e.g., the busted "trickle down" metaphor of President Ronald Reagan].

Going forward, maybe we need to think about this neoliberal meme as the next four years, with a President Donald Trump, begin tomorrow  ... while also remembering that morality is a human concept or "invention." Or is it?  Or, does that even matter?!  Perhaps, morality is just a necessity ... but what are its goals ... dare I say its "purpose?"  When did it emerge? With consciousness?  How did it emerge?  By chance, as Monad and Democritus would insist?

Conjecture: It would seem that morality's human purpose is to check, slow, or rebalance the effects of the Pareto phenomenon in social and economic processes.  Wealth has always been disproportionately distributed. Surely, just like the "selfish gene," morality arose out of self-interest; so it arose with prerequisite consciousness and not necessarily just with human consciousness [e.g., we see evidence of "morality" in other primate social systems]. As a system model, neoliberalism is connected with a positive feedback loop to morality and with a negative feedback loop to social stability. I think that there is a tipping-point distribution of wealth versus population<https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-02-04/is-inequality-approaching-a-tipping-point->.

Conclusion: The above conjecture is borne up by chance and necessity.  The necessity is manifested by the need to rebalance the outcomes of the game [e.g., wealth or opportunity] every now and then, in order to ensure social stability. This just seems like a brain-dead conclusion that even Warren Buffet and Bill Gates get. But will Trump?  Strong critics of Hillary Clinton imply that she, like her husband, would surely have strengthened the negative feedback effect of neoliberalism toward their own self-interest and toward worsening social stability, IMHO.  The results of the November election are a kind of testament to this conclusion. In an unexpected way, we may have a chance with Trump to bring even more necessary awareness to the aforementioned system model that has often played out in human history and as recounted in Jared Diamond's book-length essays.  Bernie-style revolution? Perhaps.

So, that is the idea of how chance and necessity fits here in "the game.". Now, let's dig into this idea of morality a bit more and how it fits in with the need for a different kind of evolution, not biological, but conscious evolution:

This comment from a Quora article on this subject titled Is morality merely a social construct or something more?<https://www.quora.com/Is-morality-merely-a-social-construct-or-something-more> is notable:
Mindaugas Kuprionis<https://www.quora.com/profile/Mindaugas-Kuprionis>, works at CERN
Written 17 Sep 2010<https://www.quora.com/Is-morality-merely-a-social-construct-or-something-more/answer/Mindaugas-Kuprionis>

Just recently Edge.org<https://www.edge.org/>held a conference titled "The New Science of Morality<https://www.edge.org/event/the-new-science-of-morality>". Consensus statement signed by several scholars (list below) was such:

1) Morality is a natural phenomenon and a cultural phenomenon
2) Many of the psychological building blocks of morality are innate
3) Moral judgments are often made intuitively, with little deliberation or conscious weighing of evidence and alternatives
4) Conscious moral reasoning plays multiple roles in our moral lives
5) Moral judgments and values are often at odds with actual behavior
6) Many areas of the brain are recruited for moral cognition, yet there is no "moral center" in the brain
7) Morality varies across individuals and cultures
8) Moral systems support human flourishing, to varying degrees  [aside-- so morality may be akin to metabolic systems at the level of society --regulating feedback loops of sorts]
[aside--  Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment comes to mind.  Under this eight-point new science, how would we judge the "higher-purpose" actions of Rodion Raskolnikov?]

So if it is true that there is no distributional purpose to luck other than a mechanistic, long-run, teleonomic<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleonomy> sorting mechanism of outcomes in accordance with a Power Law, then should there be a necessary, periodic re-sorting of the initial conditions now skewed by chance ...  like with a deck of cards before the next deal ...?  🤔  All poker players would insist on no less.  Don't we all insist on a fair game?  It's an interesting question, IMHO.
Yes, I know; lots to unpack here.  Sorry.  Nonetheless, I thought the Nautilus article was quite thought-provoking as they always seem to be.
[https://ssl.gstatic.com/ui/v1/icons/mail/images/cleardot.gif]Cheers,

-Robert
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