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Comment by Bubble_Pop_22 | Hacker News Reader

I have met people with fortunes in the hundreds of millions (which is basically the same as billionaires) and rock stars and actors.

They are all just dudes, and I didn’t expect anything more than that because although I loved to party back in college I made sure to be sober for the lecture on Powers law.

As the sample gets bigger a layman observer can be fooled into thinking that subject x or y is special , whereas in reality it’s just a combination of a big sample and powers law doing its thing

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You met someone and you can confidently judge their life's work and how deserving they are of their position? And then you can make the correct judgement for when and to what degree someone has become too successful and how to enact countermeasures to undo the effects of the 'power law' and unequal luck distribution? I don't think anyone has this amount of wisdom. You are correct that some people are disproportionally rewarded for their efforts, but the other side is true too. Some people are disproportionally punished for no reason at all. You can't do anything about either, it's part of nature. How do you know to what degree a very successful person is successful due to luck vs. hard work? You are going to track the minute details of every person on the planet's life path and make a fair judgement? It seems out of resentment society could arbitrarily punish the most fortunate people by redistributing their earnings and removing them from their position, but that doesn't stop the misfortunes on the other end. So the result would be a net negative direction. A person could certainly be born unlucky, or experience injustice, but we would guarantee that no one could be successful. This experiment has already been played out multiple times throughout history.

Stop making this topic romantic and poetic. It’s just statistics.

Big ass sample (8bn individuals) and power law produces stuff like billionaires.

> fair

It’s not about fairness, people have been saying loud and clear that they can’s stand billionaires and the uber wealthy. They also been saying they want them out.

JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Prudential, General Electric, General Motors… they have been in the hands of pension funds forever, with the CEO taking a salary, and they have been working just fine.

If you diluted the whole Forbes 400 into oblivion or just transfered their shares to pension funds the companies they lead would go along just fine .

we know because there are countless examplers

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