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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

The other way to look at this is that you are punishing children that draw parents that don't care.

I think it's likely that society will probably work better with high mobility vs the random draw that "perfect" mobility requires, but that's a fuzzy feeling based on human groups being complex, not the distilled moralization that you are using.

I suppose the less complicated discussion is about raising the baseline outcome being better than working to make outcomes the same. Raising the baseline is about absolute outcomes rather than relative outcomes, so the latter aren't as big a piece of the discussion.

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> you are punishing children that draw parents that don't care.

Worse: you are punishing poor children who don't draw parents who sacrifice everything until they rest in an early grave, while rich children who have parents who don't remember how many kids they have after a few drinks get every opportunity in the world.

This is a specifically middle-class moralization that defines merit as the product of the ability to suffer and "giftedness," and measures merit by looking at outcomes.

Rich kids such as you describe get every opportunity except one: having parents that actually care about them. Don't minimize how much it hurts to not have that. (I don't just mean psychological hurt, either. I mean things like broken relationships, drug use, and suicide - things that can destroy the ability of talent to manifest itself in any productive way.)

I’d take that any day over having rich parents who are control freaks and dress that up as “caring” (but really only caring that I get good grades and follow their standards of ‘morally upstanding’)

There’s a huge distance between the majority of parents who “care” in that way and those who truly care about their children.

I'm not sure random draws are even better from a zoomed-out "total welfare" score. People get lot of value from preparing for the future and believing good things will probably happen, especially when it comes to their kids. The random straws outcome makes that impossible. That's a lot of utility to leave on the table.

The flip side is that parents who could not ordinarily build for their kids' futures might feel better. I wonder if that's enough to compensate.

Yes, my second paragraph is addressing random draws probably not being ideal.

But I'm saying that I think that because humans and groups of humans are complicated, not just because I think it's important to reward parents that value and plan for their children's future.

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