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Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

Monopolists win through regulatory capture. Are they "better"?

"Better" connotes a value judgment. The author of the article takes the neutral concept of "accumulative advantage" and inappropriately ascribes moral value to it, corrupting the insight of the Pareto principle.

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I didn't read that from the author's article. I never heard any moral value being ascribed to the principle. If anything, the author seemed to be speaking about it in a fairly detached way, and describes it more as an emergent, amoral property of nature.

Where did you infer moral value in the author's words?

He implies over and over that it's all very innocent: the 1% are "better", but unfortunately the rewards for being "better" are in a feedback loop that makes them ultra outsized.

This way, it basically removes culpability and replaces malfeasance with a technical bug.

It's a very moralizing article.

That sounds more like the reader ascribes a moral perspective to the 1%, and a neutral position subtracts from that.

The ideologue aligned with the mainstream always wants to believe that their perspective is non-ideological and objective.

Funny that you think the article pushes a "neutral position" when it repeats the word "better" over and over.

The neutral position is that people who are better at something even by relatively small amounts will receive outsized rewards for it. Are you trying to claim that people are not legitimately better than others at a variety of activities? There's nothing moralistic in observing that - it's really just a fact. Some people are, for example, "better" swimmers than others. Some sports franchises are better than others, etc.

That is the sense the author used the word "better" in - to describe the initial cause that results in a power law distribution. He never praises people for accumulating wins and outsized rewards, he merely observes that it is the case. "Better" in this sense is not being used to describe classes of people, it's being used to describe small advantages.

If anything, the author is probably doing the opposite of your claim here, in that he would probably agree a lot of the reward is due to initial luck. If I observe that people who inherit wealth are more likely to accumulate more wealth, am I implicitly defending that phenomenon?

EDIT: For whoever is doing so - I don't mind if you downvote me, really. But several of my comments have just been downvoted once or so without any actual reply. If you disagree, you should consider engaging in a proper response. Letting my comments stand may as well be conceding the point, and if you actually have a persuasive counter it's certainly not going to help the discussion (or your stance) by keeping it to yourself.

"The neutral position is that people who are better at something even by relatively small amounts will receive outsized rewards for it. Are you trying to claim that people are not legitimately better than others at a variety of activities?"

One consequence of the system is that people born to wealthy family with a trust fund get money they did nothing to earn. They were simply born to a family with money. The people managing their fund will work to ensure the money keeps coming in or grows. The beneficiary can use that money to all kinds of advantages.

Receiving more and more of the pie isn't happening because the beneficiary is better. It's happening because the system is structured to move that money toward the beneficiary. We could also move it somewhere else (eg taxes), make beneficiary work for it (eg incentivize helpful investments), or some other tradeoff.

Indeed. You wouldn't say that someone is "better" if they succeed due to "initial luck". They do have an "advantage", though.

The difference between the two analyses is moralizing.

A spoon is "better" for drinking soup than a fork. That's a morally neutral statement but it is a value judgement based on the functional properties. No need to overreach by corrupting the author's insights. We'll get farther with a more charitable interpretation.

One is forward-looking, predicting the outcome (winning) by looking at current data (objective comparison). The article tries to twist this around to be backwards-looking: if it won,it must be better.

Which is a sickening and illegitimate argument.

The author never makes that claim. Where did you read that, specifically?

I think the author is trying to explain naturally-occurring feedback loops, not necessarily trying to justify them as a positive thing. Understanding that these are natural phenomena that occur due to hard physical or natural factors is crucial to being able to formulate a plan that accounts for them.

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