The self attribution fallacy
https://www.monbiot.com/2011/11/07/the-self-attribution-fallacy/
If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren’t responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.
The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves.
Gamblers
And nepotism
Capitalism rewards capital. It’s literally in the name.
It’s in the name. Capitalism rewards capital.
It also rewards putting words like Freedom and Liberty in the names of laws that restrict freedom and liberty.
We need MAFA. Make America Free Again.
The problem is both parties hate freedom when it suites them. Which is most of the time.
No, it also rewards authors of protect-children-laws with underage sex
Capitalism rewards fraud. It’s the true american way.
Case in point - when imitation crab came out in the 80s it was freakin’ delicious - tasted just like crab, and dirt cheap in comparison. But over the years they seem to have beem putting in less and less of whatever actual crab material gave it crab flavor, so now it’s pretty much just nondescript fish + orange dye. A bad imitation of imitation crab. Instead of enjoying wonderful inventions like these we have to ruin them a little at a time so somebody can make a teensy bit more profit each time, until they’re crap.
The boiling frog metaphor comes to mind.
Surgeons and engineers make bank last I checked, so that’s a bit of a funny example. Markets do reward in-demand practical skills.
What societies (in general) really reward is dumb luck and networking, though.
The thing society rewards most is already having lots of capital to throw around. No skill, talent, work ethic, or even connectedness is as important as simply having assets. Our society has regressed to reward being rich over everything else.
If you go down the list of big billionaires, most of them didn’t start as billionaires. For the most part, they started out in the comfortable “upper-middle” class, like a lot of Lemmy users, and then got involved in a startup that took them to the top.
It’s not surprising, really. If you just have inherited capital and no extra luck, the best you can do is the same 10% rate of return as everyone else. (Although coming from a rich family is both luck and connections, itself)
Our society has regressed to reward being rich over everything else.
You say that like bloodline first and then wealth was better. That is what came before.
Also, Fauci made bank off of covid. And everyone agrees he’s a scientist.
Uhh… source?
Ehm mister or not,
What engineers does society in 2026 reward? Last time I checked everyone is fucked
The people at FAANGS (or whatever they’re calling it now) famously start with wages that would be the absolute peak of someone else’s career. Never mind comparing to an unskilled worker.
I know less about what physical/“real” engineers make in 2026, but I doubt it’s changed that much.
Real engineer here, mechanical working to design medical devices like plates and screws for trauma cases.
We average around $100k across the US, and on the extreme end can top out around $200k, but that’s a rare case. Typical top end is $150k with I’d say at least 12 years if experience.
Starting salary typically $70k.
This is for places that are average COL, so not San Francisco, and also not Alabama.
Yeah, that’s decent. Not fuck-you money, but decent.
OP asked for any example, so I went with FAANGS, but wages there are inflated by being a bunch of monopolies all headquartered in the same place. Last I heard a senior dev in Canada makes like 60k.
Yeah, buddy, hate to bring it to you, but software engineers are not the real engineers. We’re just monkeys repeating something that we barely heard of.
You can start working as a software engineer just after school. Imagine an aerospace, civil, or electrical engineer without proper education.
Okay, sure, the guy that mostly copy-pastes/vibecodes javascript is not on level with a rocket scientist. What about, like, Linus Torvalds, though? The complexity involved in a big codebase outstrips even the most complicated aircraft. Nobody’s saying mathematicians aren’t serious thinkers, and yet, we’re putting in a whole lot of effort with things like Lean to catch up with coders.
They aren’t accredited like “real” engineers, but that might be a matter of where we are in history more than anything. Charles Parsons didn’t have to certify anything when he was building the first dreadnoughts. Both are designing new technology, and that’s basically what defines the word.
in before some child comes, downvotes people and bullshits about how Elon is actually very clever
I’ve noticed a trend amongst most Musk defenders now and general billionaire simps. They have the emotional maturity of a13 year old, they never really grew up in high school so are so stunted developmentally they’re a decade behind at the least.
It rewards stupidness, cutting corners, lying to people. Capitalism has created an economy driven by forced/planned obsolecence of hardware, literal gambling with rich people just betting against other businesses, industries and entire nations.
Basing our world around a system that on average funnels the least empathetic, most callous, greedy and power hungry psychopaths and sociopaths to positions with the most influence surely cannot possibly backfire in a major way for the rest of us.
It will be studied in the far future the way we study monarchy or the Roman Empire.
Assuming we survive the extinction event we caused.
This implies neurosurgeons aren’t talented
Well, it’s not rocket science…
Spoken like a true butthurt neurosurgeon
Surely matters how we measure talent.
Is there any system that reward talent, hard work or skill ?
No, because it would be up to people to assess talent/hard work/skill and people are imperfect.
Also would you even want that system? Reward a bunch of John Henrys for killing themselves when their work should be done by machines? Reward artists for art that no one can appreciate? Reward skill that doesn’t ultimately benefit anyone?
Market socialism maybe. Look up mutualism and anarcho-syndicalism.
But personally I don’t think we need to do that. It’s to each according to need, not to each according to ability. We shouldn’t give people less because they’re disabled or more because they’re abled.
^ this.
Once we can meet everyone’s needs, then we can start talking about how to allocate the surplus. But I trust a society that takes cade of its people more than I trust us, in our current state, to have the right ideas about how that should work.
Problem is information. If you really need someone else to provide a good or service for you, then almost certainly you don’t know enough about said good or service to accurately gauge the providers skills and quality.
So by and large, we have to rely on what others say to indicate relative value. So the people most confident and/or most manipulative tend to win because they are the best at sounding good.
Just give disabled people food and housing lmao.
I would say it would be good if everyone could at least be secure in those, but life is more than food and housing.
Oh, I mean the other meaning of “just”. I mean give us food and housing because it’s so easy. Not give us food and housing and nothing else.
“Just give”. You know things don’t just spontaneously materialize right? Someone has to work to make them. Why would anyone put in effort to do that if you’ll “just give” them to someone else? That’s why all those collectivist ideas failed every time they’ve been tried.
Communism worked in Australia for 65,000 years. It was classless, stateless, moneyless. Wealth was distributed from each according to ability, to each according to need.
See, David Graeber interviewed a lot of people who work in “bullshit jobs”. Jobs that serve to useful purpose to anyone, and even the person doing the job thinks it’s pointless. People who tick boxes all day, or who look busy without doing anything, or who get a paycheck even though the company has forgotten about them.
Graeber expected the people working bullshit jobs to be very happy with how they’ve beaten the system, but most weren’t. Most were depressed. People have a fundamental need to help others; to be useful to society. If they didn’t, they would have gone extinct long ago. People who work bullshit jobs are unhappy. People who work meaningful, important, and prosocial jobs tend to be satisfied with themselves. Their moral needs are being met.
That’s the mistake capitalism makes. Capitalists think you need to scam people into working by withholding food and water and shelter. They don’t believe in human rights, they believe in using these necessities to control people. They think greed is human nature.
But Indigenous Australians have known full well for 65,000 years that people want to be good. And they have used their vast science of psychology and sociology and politics to engineer a system which makes the best use of that natural impulse, driving people to do good. That’s successful communism.
If you try to do that you need metrics for evaluation and then you get people gaming the metrics. One example is academia.
You would think, but actually there’s been some recent research that I think has interesting conclusions. The example, which is semi-related, is performance as a manager. When promoted using merit based, people tended to perform worse bcz they are promoted based on past performance in unrelated roles. When promoted randomly, the people who excelled at being a manager stayed in that position, and outperformed others who were promoted based on merit.
The point being, you don’t know who’s going to be good at something based on past performance in unrelated roles. We’ve built an entire system based on that concept, and it’s not really that surprising that it doesn’t work that well. If I can find the research article again, I’ll link it.
Edit: found it
The point being, you don’t know who’s going to be good at something based on past performance in unrelated roles.
What’s surprising to me isn’t that the random promotion system works over the performance in past unrelated roles system…
What’s surprising to me is that you practically never see the only other logical conclusion used in the business world much.
Aptitude testing.
True I honestly find the random promotion thing to be super unintuitive, and would struggle to do it if I was in a position to make those decisions.
In theory yes but in practice greedy leeches have found their way
Sports, kinda. It’s possible to go unrewarded with them, but it’s very hard to go rewarded without them.
If you mean economic system, not really. Capitalism rewards having capital over everything else, communism (if we ignore the flawed attempts and go for theory) rewards everyone equally irrelevant of how hard you work or what your skills are. Though being skilled in something that’s actually pleasant as a job is a reward in itself as you won’t have to work manual labour.
Don’t know about sports even. Probably at least a base level to get on the threshold of celebrity, but then they can lean on personality and antics rather than performance in their sport.
Academia, sometimes.
That is true. Sometimes. But then again the people with the most funding get the most papers and recognition. But agreed.
Guild Economics, where you only ascend to leadership with experience in your trade. I don’t like the idea that some kid out of university could be assigned manager of an industry they didn’t even study for. Realistically, 90% of the workforce does not need to have gone to uni and we could reorganise society around apprenticeships instead.
No, don’t be anti-education. Uneducated people make easy prey.
We can value education without commodifying it the way we’ve done. In my opinion, the current system rewards diploma mills and devalues education anyways.
I think education should be both inexpensive and completely voluntary, so that the only ‘reward’ for going to school is the knowledge you leave with.
No you create such a divide. Try learning with 3 jobs
As make educated people, because they can’t judge their education, neither before choosing nor after being formed.
I think school itself should be a million times harder, i.e actually mean something, and university should either be easier or just not pushed onto 100% of the workforce like it is in Britain, Spain, America, Ireland and Canada et cetera.
Also second baguette fish - in my country we have “degree apprenticeships” where you go to university alongside doing work for a company, and it seems appropriate because it effectively highlights where people are even needed in this completely oversaturated made up economy.
in germany the apprenticeship system is very advanced and you can apprentice your way to a bachelor’s equivalent with further study to a master’s equivalent. that’s how most trades work here. apprentices do part time studying at a trade school and part time working the trade over multiple years simultaneously, with exams issued by the school and for example a chamber of industry. it’s very effective at turning students into effective workers, and if you find the right job you’ve got good prospects for a lifelong career, but obviously it does not teach you to doubt the system. of course there are also usually no “unnecessary” courses that would take away from an apprentice’s focus. i think it’s a decent balance, and you can always educate yourself on the state of the world in your free time.
Genuinely curious, what would a bachelors level or masters equivalent for a carpenter be?
with a master’s in carpentry you can start your own carpentry business. as a bachelor you’re only allowed to work in other people’s businesses. to get there you’ll have to pass wtitten and practical exams, for example building specific things to spec
That sounds really good. I didn’t have as much of a good experience with a government program, which consisted of the company giving me one example, then sending me right off to work, without giving a fuck if their products turn out well, or if I learn anything.
Still working here, still don’t know most things, because asking gets you the low-skilled tasks.
bro, even with education they are easy prey. There simply is no getting around the bell curve of humanity here.
In fact since public education is shaped by the regime (“the regime” = WHICHEVER system is in power, be it democracy, organised anarchy, monarchy, capitalism or communism), education will usually be catered towards supporting the regime in some way. If the regime does not control education at least a little bit, it leaves roo, for other pressure groups - organised minorities - to manipulate education, thus reducing Current Regime’s staying power and providing a foot-in for themselves
Actually, the research says to do that
Promoting people into leadership positions based on past unrelated experience does not make better managers and leaders.
Wow who would have thought the research in current regime would indicate that current regime is correct! You can tell the research is unbiased because it was published by current regime. Only in current regime can research be unbiased, thank god for current regime.
Knock it all you want. This was done by Italian researchers, no affiliation with the U.S. government.
Edit Here’s the actual research paper It’s pretty short actually
This was done by Italian researchers, no affiliation with the U.S. government.
Again. Regime. Current regime, which likes organisations run by very specific people in a very particular way, has investigated itself to find that “NOBODY DOES IT BETTER!”
Okay, we seem to be in a bit of a loop here. I’m going to go do something else with my time. Talking to you is a waste of time.
One day you’ll understand :)
Well you could also ask if that’s fair. People are just born with more or less talent or skill. Nothing they can do about it. Should they be rewarded for that? Or saying it the opposite way: should people be punished for something they can’t change?
Life is never fair. not for humans and not for any living being.
If you try to make it fair by paying the person with lower skill same as skilled person, the skilled person won’t feel the need to use their skills anymore.
To make it fair you need a magic mirror that print statistics about each person (skill level, talent level, physical strength) and use these numbers to decide who used all their abilities and who pretend to be dumb to avoid using their brain/body
That’s if you force people to work. If you let them choose freely, most will align with their skills because it is the most rewarding.
I think people who are naturally better at things should can and will always be rewarded for that; we make up for the discrepancy by making sure it’s not bloody torturous to live on a minimum wage job, thay there are support systems for the disabled, unemployed, and the simply unintelligent.
Reading about 1950s America it was clear that people were so comfortable that working in minimum wage jobs largrly didn’t bother them. If a capitalist country can achieve that, a well-organised country can achieve even better.
The capitalist country achieved that to convince people of capitalism. It was highly motivated.
I’m all of those and I’m super rich
an yet, you’re on lemmy with the rest of us…
fake and possibly gay
Hey, we all love you if you’re gay. Fake, however, that’s unforgivable.
Oh shit
just kidding, homie
Do you have money? No? fuck you
as a product of generational wealth, money is not good
…the problem is I’m allowed to think about it and bitch without any agaency…
I need more upvote power.
