The Progress Paradox

It starts with a thought: I don't so much mind being poor, so long as my child is free to pursue wealth.

I believe this concept is referred to as 'social mobility' but my experience of when this term is (rarely) invoked, the emphasis is on mobility upwards. Poor people's ability to penetrate the strata of the rich.

Then to borrow and mutilate a phrase of the Jerry Seinfeld of Economics James Maynard Keynes 'social mobility is rigid downwards/sticky downwards' 

That then would describe a world that sounds something like this 'I have succeeded, but it will be all for nought if my children can fail and lose everything I have.' 

I'm aware of a similar paradoxical statement, from the world of cycling: 'Brakes make you go faster.'

This I find easier to expand upon. The ability to decelerate (slow down) quickly and effectively allows you to maintain higher top speeds. I feel most people would not attempt to ride a bike with no brakes, but it can be done, and safely. It just means you have to ride at max speeds so low that you will lose momentum quickly and/or be able to use your feet to brake and come to a full stop. This is kind of the default of skating though parts of the board, the feet and riding the skateboard on a diagonal all function as brakes.

But if you can just squeeze a trigger and basically come to a dead stop descending a steep downhill, then you can fearlessly pursue speed.

Shifting over to another analogy borrowed from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and bringing us back to the more general progress paradox; if you wanted to lose weight, it would be absurd to demand that our weight simply never increase. Fasting aside, people at the very least require hydration, and it would be pointless for a person to weigh themselves after their morning ablutions (shit) and then eat breakfast and weigh in again and chastise themselves for gaining weight.

Our weight is going to fluctuate over the course of a day, weight loss may involve a series of days where we both gain and lose weight. The more weigh ins we do, the less likely we are to observe the desired outcome. Nassim Nicholas Taleb then talks about the likelihood of realizing a profit decreasing the more frequently we check our share portfolio's performance.

Alas, I want to get back to the progress paradox. Which is people who dogmatically insist on progress, hinder progress. 

One of my core heuristics is: failure must be an option.

Elsewise, we are in the root of all evil that is rigging. 

I don't actually want to live in a world where my progeny can't fail. To be protected from their own performance.

Sure time and chance happen to us all, but one such example of a progress paradox, an inefficiency in a market is private schools.

Ignorant as to where you might be reading this from, including the future, in Australia 'private schools' are the expensive schools well-heeled people send their progeny too. And to wax cynical they also offer full scholarships to students who need their services the least in order to look like they can do more for their prospective customers.

The main thing my own private school did, was have a virtually unlimited photocopy budget to hand its senior students phone book sized practice exams that with an application of effort, allowed us to ace subjects like maths and physics.

But a more insidious form of rigging by private schools I will call the 'further maths' scam. 'Further Maths' was a VCE subject designed to give students that were weak in mathematics some rudimentary mathematical skills that might pay off in later careers. On the flipside there was a highly selective subject 'Specialist Mathematics' that taught students to calculate the concentration of salt in a brine, prove that triangles have no right angles, and do hypothetical equations involving the square root of -1. 

Our school, and I would presume many other private schools, took the students expected to do 'Specialist Maths' and heavily encouraged them to do Further Maths. That is, put all the most talented maths students into the subject that was a last ditch effort to teach maths to people with almost no aptitude. 

I did not participate in this scheme, somewhat aware that my life was finate, my youth even more so and I didn't want to spend a precious fraction of a year essentially waiting for a perfect score when I could be doing Studio Art. But I had many friends that derisively laughed at their essentially free perfect score, and subsequent improved odds of obtaining a scarce university position.

This is a common and flagrant gaming of a system for allocating scarce tertiary places. Though I increasingly speculate that in the future it will be only poor kids that go to University while rich people's kids will be bought a bakery to manage when they turn 18 in the future; this isn't so much what the progress paradox is, as how a progress paradox can manifest.

Namely, it was my experiences attending both a public and private secondary school in Australia that left me struggling for ethical grounds as to why private schools should exist. I mean I would cynically say that private schools do exist to: ensure your child is not judged on their merits.

I think education in general is inefficient and not very effective. I recently saw Steven Pinker allude to the phenomena that most people could not resit and pass an exam one year after graduation. I believe education is primarily there to test for trait conscientiousness-industriousness, because this is what is largely demanded by the labor market, and secondarily/incidentally can test for intelligence.

Private schools rout both tests, nominally through a process known as 'spoonfeeding' with failure being unacceptable more resources are simply thrown at students so they look on paper to be conscientious, industrious and/or intelligent. When left to their own devices, such as a busy and stressed employer might, they are not necessarily any of these things. Or they may simply have poor judgement, like industrious, intelligent people that are protected from the consequences of getting black out drunk two nights in a row.

I believe in inequality, and am for it. Where I take issue with inequality, is how that inequality is allocated. Like I don't think everybody should have equity when it comes to the production of birthday cards. I think some talented creatives should be able to make gift cards that they mass produce and other people pay for. That kind of shit I'm totally cool with.

I am happy for risk-takers to receive a risk-premium. I'm happy for the opportunity to win an Olympic Gold medal to go to the fastest athletes. etc. etc.

What I can't abide, but can understand, is when a brilliant, talented person who has generated immense value for their community and been compensated for it; can somewhat reproduce their genes and cannot reproduce the environment etc. that rendered them a brilliant, talented person capable of generating immense value for their community.

In other words the crucial difference between 'How do I leave a better world for our children?' (as in the next generation of everyone's children) and 'How do I leave a better world for my children?'

So...so, so, so, so, soish... Malcolm Gladwell I think introduced me to this question in sporting analysis which is: 'what's most important? how good your best player is or how good your worst player is?' in Soccer the skill level of the worst player has a bigger impact than the skill level of the best player vs basketball the skill level of your best player has a greater impact than the skill level of the worst player. 

So too, I feel is progress much more impacted by the question 'how poor is poor?' than 'how rich is rich?'

Because in the abstract I am philosophically okay with my progeny winding up under a bridge sucking cock for crack money; emotionally I am probably not okay with being confronted by such a reality.

This in turn makes it understandable why the wealthy are most preoccupied with status and wealth and success. People in general are more loss averse with something like losing $50 having a greater emotional impact than winning $100. 

In some ways, its a kind of abstract perversion of the kind of calculus many young people contemporarily face in their 20s. Live with the parents or go rent, because often their parents houses are much nicer, cheaper and more conveniently located. The question becomes 'what is the price of dignity?' even though personally I feel that 'dignity' is a bit of an illusion, given what I understand of the housing market.

I digress. 

It's just that... to put it bluntly... useless fucken turds exist, and it is often not even their own talents that design the wealth lock-in mechanisms that keep the market from evaluating them as such. Sure sometimes nepotism will actually put a completely unqualified person in charge of a business that they then run into the ground ruining not just their family wealth but the lives of those in the community that depended on that business being profitable, but there's also a vast amount of economic rents, which is where somebody collects 'rent' not by virtue of doing anything useful, but simply because they own stuff.

An attempt to impress me, and certainly made an impression upon me, early on by a Christian friend was the following joke: 'A scientist says to God 'we don't need you, science can do everything you can.' and God says 'go on then, make Man then.' so the scientist starts scooping up some clay to fashion a man and God says 'hey! get your hands out of my dirt!''

Ha ha ha. God's a mean spirited prick, tell me more about this Jesus. Anyway, this problem of multi-generational squatters is the essence of the progress paradox. There's people sitting on the stuff people need to make progress and they basically need to be paid off to do anything. 

There's people who need to lead, follow or get out of the way. Instead, for fear of their own regress, they hinder progress. Progress can only be made so long as their historical progress can be preserved.

So tohm? what's your problem with dismantling white supremacy and rebuilding an equitable society from the ground up? 

Mainly that it's not necessary. We just need 'shit or get off the pot' mechanisms.