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Luck and Ayn Rand
Sep. 21st, 2009 10:52 amThere has been a lot of heat and noise from various right-wing outlets, some of which I discussed the other day. A lot of said heat and noise is ideologically incoherent. But some of it is not.
One of the more coherent ideas is that "the United States is divided into two classes--the hard-working productive elite, and the indolent masses leeching off their labor by means of confiscatory taxes and transfer programs." This is, of course, the idea of Objectivism, as advocated by one Ayn Rand.
The idea is a crock of shit, frankly. It's like saying that you need a good quarterback to win football games. That's true, but you also need a good offensive line, or your quarterback will be too busy getting sacked to actually generate offense. You also need a good defense, or the game will become one of "who can score fastest." Now, don't get me wrong - I have no problem with paying the quarterback more than an interior lineman. But the interior lineman has a role to play, and the game can be lost if he doesn't play it.
What got me thinking about this, and the source of the quote above, was this article, which dismantles Ms. Rand in the guise of a book review. It's long but well worth the read. What the article mentions but doesn't dwell on is the role luck plays in determining whether one becomes a "hard-working productive elite" or a member of the "indolent masses."
Luck, or providence, or the grace of God, plays an important role in our lives. Much like the old TV show Hee Haw I see two flavors of good luck, negative and positive. Negative good luck consists of nothing bad happening to you. For example, your parents didn't drop you on your head as a child, or you didn't get pulled over that one time when you really were driving while drunk. Or consider the case of a friend of the family. He was an orthodontist, until he got car-jacked and shot in the head. He didn't die, but was brain-damaged and can now only work in structured clerical tasks.
Positive good luck is when good things happen to you. I'm running a bit long here, so I'll only outline one such personal instance of good luck. My first civilian job after the Navy was as a computer consultant. As a consultant, part of my pay was based on how many hours I billed. If you've ever been in consulting, you know that you're either really busy or sitting on the bench with nothing to do.
About two years into my employment, I got put on the bench due to lack of customer demand, and my paycheck was feeling the effects. So, with no visible prospects, I went job hunting, and got an offer to be a PC support person at a large company with an in-house IT group. The morning after I got the offer, I went into work, fully intending to give my two-weeks notice. Knowing my boss, I knew that I'd be gone by the end of the day - he didn't believe in letting soon-to-be-ex-employees sit around.
That same morning, he'd gotten a call from a bank in the middle of a core processing conversion. The conversion was going seriously "pear shaped" as the British say, and I was the only resource we had to send. Frankly, on paper I wasn't qualified to handle the task, but he assumed that I could muddle through.
I went, and got the conversion back on track, with no muddling. That was hard work on my part. At any event, I went from a PC tech to a server tech / project manager. It was a big step up.
But I was lucky. I went in to quit on a Tuesday. If the bank customer had called the next day, I would have been gone.
Luck, however you define it, is a critical success factor. The measure of a society is not how it treats the lucky, but what it does for the unlucky.
One of the more coherent ideas is that "the United States is divided into two classes--the hard-working productive elite, and the indolent masses leeching off their labor by means of confiscatory taxes and transfer programs." This is, of course, the idea of Objectivism, as advocated by one Ayn Rand.
The idea is a crock of shit, frankly. It's like saying that you need a good quarterback to win football games. That's true, but you also need a good offensive line, or your quarterback will be too busy getting sacked to actually generate offense. You also need a good defense, or the game will become one of "who can score fastest." Now, don't get me wrong - I have no problem with paying the quarterback more than an interior lineman. But the interior lineman has a role to play, and the game can be lost if he doesn't play it.
What got me thinking about this, and the source of the quote above, was this article, which dismantles Ms. Rand in the guise of a book review. It's long but well worth the read. What the article mentions but doesn't dwell on is the role luck plays in determining whether one becomes a "hard-working productive elite" or a member of the "indolent masses."
Luck, or providence, or the grace of God, plays an important role in our lives. Much like the old TV show Hee Haw I see two flavors of good luck, negative and positive. Negative good luck consists of nothing bad happening to you. For example, your parents didn't drop you on your head as a child, or you didn't get pulled over that one time when you really were driving while drunk. Or consider the case of a friend of the family. He was an orthodontist, until he got car-jacked and shot in the head. He didn't die, but was brain-damaged and can now only work in structured clerical tasks.
Positive good luck is when good things happen to you. I'm running a bit long here, so I'll only outline one such personal instance of good luck. My first civilian job after the Navy was as a computer consultant. As a consultant, part of my pay was based on how many hours I billed. If you've ever been in consulting, you know that you're either really busy or sitting on the bench with nothing to do.
About two years into my employment, I got put on the bench due to lack of customer demand, and my paycheck was feeling the effects. So, with no visible prospects, I went job hunting, and got an offer to be a PC support person at a large company with an in-house IT group. The morning after I got the offer, I went into work, fully intending to give my two-weeks notice. Knowing my boss, I knew that I'd be gone by the end of the day - he didn't believe in letting soon-to-be-ex-employees sit around.
That same morning, he'd gotten a call from a bank in the middle of a core processing conversion. The conversion was going seriously "pear shaped" as the British say, and I was the only resource we had to send. Frankly, on paper I wasn't qualified to handle the task, but he assumed that I could muddle through.
I went, and got the conversion back on track, with no muddling. That was hard work on my part. At any event, I went from a PC tech to a server tech / project manager. It was a big step up.
But I was lucky. I went in to quit on a Tuesday. If the bank customer had called the next day, I would have been gone.
Luck, however you define it, is a critical success factor. The measure of a society is not how it treats the lucky, but what it does for the unlucky.
