There is a dark side to the idea of an 'internal locus of control.' It creates a sense that the individual can and should manage the situation, even when the situation is totally unmanageable. I think it's a common problem among high achievers (particularly entrepreneurs), and conversely some 'resilient' people need to accept that there sometimes really IS an external locus of control before their efforts to control the situation break them.
Hence the serenity prayer (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer) and major parts of eastern spiritual traditions...
Good point, it's very important to have balance and be able to adhere to the "And wisdom to know the difference." part. I do think that it is important to have the experience of having too much 'internal locus of control' in order to get a good feel for that.
Or to think that it doesn't matter what happens externally.
Aurelius says something like "How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised by anything that happens in life." As in, why would external events matter or be a surprise? Things happen. The only thing you can control is how you react to them and what you choose to do about them. That helps me at least. It's all about process, not outcomes. Outcome is a roll of the die, so all you can do is make sure your internal processes are sound.
Yeah, the general idea is good, the specific techniques are limited. It's not really about control, more about Choice. Few people ever truly make choices, and instead, select from a menu of options. That gives the illusion of choice.
As I mentioned in a different comment, there are much better teachings found in wisdom lineages -- and not just ones from Eastern spiritual traditions. There are shamanic initiations one can undertake. There are specific esoteric martial art lineages that instill this as part of the training.
"At Harvard College and here, at Yale Law School (two places where students have skillfully and bravely compiled data that their Universities suppress), as many students come from households in the top one percent as from the entire bottom half of the income distribution."
Stunning. But no surprise you invest in your kids credentials if you can afford it.
Can someone propose a way the free market can be considered fair without the definition of 'fair' being defined as 'market-determined'?
> But although it was once the engine of American social mobility, meritocracy today blocks equality of opportunity.
This reminds me somewhat of the phrase "kicking away the ladder" that Chomsky mentions, in a different context:
> Well, that’s what the intellectual property rights are for. In fact there’s a name for it in economic history. Friedrich List, famous German political economist in the 19th century, who was actually borrowing from Andrew Hamilton, called it “kicking away the ladder”. First you use state power and violence to develop, then you kick away those procedures so that other people can’t do it. [1]
Here is my poorly paraphrased version of the idea:
1. use whatever means are available to obtain
a position of advantage (the ladder).
2. now, let us change the rules so from this
moment forth we shall compete upon our equal
merits, without resorting to such ugly means
as "ladders" to obtain advantage.
3. note however, that i still remain in a
position of absolute advantage, due to my
previous use of the ladder, which you now
cannot access.
4. ho ho ho, "meritocracy" / "free trade" / etc.
It's fine to include meritocracy in #4, but why free trade? I know that free trade is often a fiscally conservative issue, but it simply helps all of us by removing barriers to trade. The wealth of the world increases from it.
///edit: And actually, I want to continue and make a claim.
Barriers to free trade _are_ an act of Kicking Out the Ladder. If we look at import taxes, they're just national protectionism. Which is possibly understandable if we're protecting a vital-to-war industry. But the U.S. has sugar import tariffs and makes our sugar ~40% more expensive than the rest of the world. http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/06/us-trade-po... (I know heritage is a conservative thinktank, just using it for the graph.) Our sugar tariffs just protects a small handful of cane sugar farmers/refiners in the US, at the cost to everyone, and with lost business to poor countries in the caribbean, who could probably use some more sugar sales. We're helping people with this tariff, but they're well-off americans we're helping. We could be help caribbean economies!!
And if we actually did want to protect vital resources, then why don't we ban hard-drive imports? You saw how Thailand's flooding knocked over hard drive production. What if a hostile government took over Thailand's hard drive production?
And furthermore, most of the government's foray's into regulating the economy are, or eventually become, acts of Kicking out the Ladder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture By even giving this kind of power to the government, you're asking for it to be abused.
Let's face it. What's most important in life/business is social access and maintaining trust/confidence/respect to stay in those relevant circles in order to keep it. IOW, staying in the members' clubs, secret societies, party circuits, etc.
Example: Could Luci have met Larry anywhere other than a Stanford party? Probably not.
that is also what I have independently observed, though not phrased as eloquently.
.
(slightly off topic)
I have to say I'm very thankful to have found HN. I grew up in a decent, moderately sized city (300k) going to a private religious school with children whose parents were similarly strongly interested in the intellectual development of their children.
I had access to all the sports teams. I played soccer through Varsity, played with the golf team [but note I was not on the golf team...lol], and basketball in middle school. I played piano for 8 years. I attended one of the top 5 schools of my field in the nation, and graduated into a small company with other graduates from my school, MIT, etc. From 'good places'.
Because of this, education was always something I always took for granted. I always valued it, but always took it for granted. Some of my education, however, took humans for granted. Your value to society was sometimes considered limited by what you could produce. Additionally, many of those I highschooled and undergraduated with (mainly other purported Christians who I have since determined were not living congruently with stated beliefs) held little reservation filtering people out of their life based on, I'll call it,
'being dumb'.
This always bothered me. As fruit of my religion [mainly 'made in God's image', combined with looking at the life Jesus lived] I believed in the intrinsic value of the human, so I always sought to correct for it: because I always tried my hardest, it never occurred to me how people could willfully and knowingly not aspire themselves to something greater than what required minimal effort. Everyone I grew up with did [though, in hindsight, for different reasons than I], I did, and my parents did, so naturally I assumed everyone else did, too. As such, I was regularly perplexed at the value judgements certain colleagues would place on other members of humanity...like me...because they miscategorized generational challenges I was facing as 'being dumb'. Damaging prejudice.
So I left that company, and struck out on my own. I have since discovered what a rare breed my background nurtured, and now understand the wisdom in filtering those you spend time with. Instead of a prideful superiority [which I certainly observed], I exercise with a cautious respect for, and in protection of, talent and time. I exercise without placing value judgements on the people I come in contact with, but I do judge the values of the people I spend time with. In this way I safely continue to respect their humanity, and avoid pride.
It's only since I moved and became aware of my need to protect that I became aware of how hard it is to find knowledge seekers. And so, when I come across someone from a different field but similar excellence, who carries with them persuasive content helpful for advancement, I am thankful. I also realized I need to stop spending so much time trying to argue with people-- because most people aren't actually listening, aren't actually seeking.
And so I am thankful to have found HackerNews, this article, and shared insights like yours.
It's very important to surround yourself with excellence. You'll become the ones you're around, and believe their idiocy, if you're not careful.
May I ask, would you consider a waitress talented? Based on your value structure, I'm very curious to know how you'd feel about someone like a waitress or a cashier.
Assume that this is their full-time job, and that they have no ability to attend a university due to a series of unfortunate events which left them saddled with debts they cannot hope to overcome unless they focus full-time on overcoming them. So they take what jobs they can. Are they talented or excellent?
It would seem that if one takes your value structure to heart, then you'll end up rejecting anyone from your life who aren't among the lucky few -- as you were -- of having no unfortunate events in their life, and would deem those people not worth allowing into your life, as they certainly aren't excellent.
A friend of mine used to work in a coffee shop. They often told me about people who would come in and act as if the workers existed only to serve them. I found this hard to believe. I knew such people existed, but it seemed improbable that that they were so common. Yet they were.
Is there a chance that if your mentality is to surround yourself with excellence, then you'll end up forgetting how to respect those who aren't, through no fault of their own?
depends, how well are they putting their talents to use? Are they challenging themselves every day? Or do they not have energy to? Or are they lazy and don't give a damn?
Regardless, I still seek to show love and smile and courtesy when interacting with them, because they're human. That doesn't mean I have to spend time with them as serious friends.
If you clearly define "fairness" as you see it, you can test whether free markets or government controlled ones are the ones which come closest to satisfying your preferences. There are a number of paradigms, Haidt describes two visions of fairness: one of equality and another of proportionality.[1]
Under most definitions of social justice (though not all the ones focusing on relative income distributions), the free market has better outcomes than more socialist systems. Free markets allow for liberty and greater prosperity, and this results in healthier, richer citizens with the freedom to pursue a good life. Free markets also encourage sympathy, trust, and fellow-feeling.[2]
Focusing on a measure of equality such as national GINI coefficients, the USA is closest to Phillipines, Peru, Uruguay, and Cameroon.[3] Does the GINI translate to "fairness"? Which country of the five would you prefer to live in if you were at a given position of the income distribution? Which has the freest markets? Which is most "fair"? Does the GINI convey much information about being rich or poor in a country?
I think you've mistaken two desireable dimensions as a choice. A country like Norway beats the U.S. in both GDP per capita (PPP and nominal) and in all measures of inequality.
I was making a different point: that measures of equality are not equivalent to measures of 'goodness' or proportionality. The statistics you are using are biased against the USA because of the high rate of immigration to the USA; if you control for this, the non-immigrant US citizen PPP and per capita GDP are much closer to Norway's (though I'm not sure whether the US is higher or lower than Norway). I have lost the source for this, but can provide you with this citation that shows what a difference there is between the largely unskilled first generation immigrants (that make up a large portion of the US population), and later generations.[1]
disclosure: I am neither American or Norwegian by country of birth or residence
There's an implied choice just by bringing up the subject of proportionality.
As for stats we can attack a legion of asterisks to them but that misses the point: there are rich countries that are not unequal. Proportionality is not relevant to the discussion about what the US should do to restore truer meritocracy.
As much as I think the article makes great points (tax-loss harvesting seems oversold, and Vanguard is a much cheaper way to get a target date fund than Wealthfront), I gotta raise my hand here and point out the absurdity of this argument against proportional fees. Wealth management is like any business-- a combination of fixed and variable costs. And like many businesses, it amortizes those fixed costs against basically a variable fee structure because the value of the service to the customer (debatable as it may be for some investment products) is proportional to the account size.
It's not an SV vs WS thing. Nobody charges according to the marginal cost of the service. Why does Airbnb charge a percentage of the rental cost? Why does Uber get a percentage of the fare? Why does the restaurant charge me the same for a burger at 10pm as a burger at 7pm (after all, the staff are already being paid for the day and ingredients already purchased)?
It might sound good to say "hey, the software's not working any harder so the marginal cost is zero", but that doesn't work in almost any business.
> Why does the restaurant charge me the same for a burger at 10pm as a burger at 7pm (after all, the staff are already being paid for the day and ingredients already purchased)?
Actually, it's not uncommon for a food vendor to drop its prices at the end of the day, e.g. https://www.itsu.com/about/sale
That doesn't invalidate your point, though.
I'd also suggest that the risk associated with a transaction should also be factored in. The cost of processing small (e.g. $100) and large ($100,000) transactions may be the same but the potential cost to me if I drop the ball is several orders of magnitude larger.
Additionally, Vanguard is making money through securities lending which is also proportional and can offset much or all of the expense ratio.
"In 2012 securities lending enhanced annual fund returns by more than 1 basis point for over 60% of Vanguard's participating funds, by more than 5 basis points for nearly a third of funds, and by more than 10 basis points for over 15% of funds."
tax-loss harvesting is particularly valuable when combined with charitable giving.. the usual harvesting dynamic is that you are trading a deduction now for a larger gain-liability later, but in the case of charitable giving of appreciated stock there is no liability down the road but you get to keep the deduction-now.
