alt Hacker NewsYeah, most people probably underestimate the effect that several things have on where they end up in life: education, self discipline, hard work, making good decisions, persistence, and, especially, chance. If you screw up majorly on any the factors under your control, you dramatically reduce your chances of “the good life.” But, even if you do all of them right, you are still at the mercy of chance. Get born in the wrong year or at the wrong place or into the wrong family or with the wrong genetics and that's all it takes to set you up for a hard life.
The tragedy is that we could have a society that gives people more opportunities to escape the downward pull of chance gone wrong early in life. Maybe someday we'll get there.
Most of life is luck, with regards to success and economic prosperity. We’ve built a system that ignores that for the benefit of a privileged few, using fairy tales around exceptionalism and faux meritocracy. We should build socioeconomic systems where luck is less a component for survival and living a good life, imho. I think we’re on our way there (support of democratic socialism and their candidates is at record highs, mostly around the young, and the old age out at a rate of 2M per year 55+ [higher supports of capitalism because they were lucky under it]), but it’s going to take another decade or two to see the improvements (political cycles, electorate turnover, policy implementation lag, etc.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027462 (citations)