Not always, but that is a very common and prevalent problem. Math techniques and proofs often don't yield insight into how or why they were developed. For example, when I do analysis proofs, it's common for me to calculate what tolerances will lead to the desired result and then strip those calculations away for the final proof.
"Why did he pick this delta or set that coefficient to that value?" Because I figured out what would work well enough and got rid of the scaffolding. Here, you see the finished result, not what went into finding the finished result.
Good math books discuss the scaffolding in detail not just the proofs or techniques.
The beauty of math, is that once the problem is solved, you can teach any average idiot how to go through the motions and arrive at the correct the solution without understanding it.
Ugh, I have to disagree. I'd call that utility not beauty. For me, the beauty of mathematics is that you can contemplate just about anything and come up with relevant and nontrivial mathematical puzzles, problems, or features.
You do realize that most attempts to preserve Western labor privilege have the unintended consequence of hastening that race to the bottom? Bottom line is that currently there's vastly more supply of labor available to the Western markets
You second statement disproves your first. Most of the increase in labor is coming from China and other rising countries. Those countries do not answer to America or those who attempt to preserve Western labor privilege. Those attempts do not speed up (nor slow down) that increase in the labor pool.
Where's the contradiction? To disprove, you have to show that the one statement somehow runs against the other. It doesn't happen here. Note that I explain how the attempts fail to improve the situation by raising the cost of developed world labor not by increasing the overall size of the global labor pool.
Or put it another way: it's not your (West) fault that China is becoming better than you, much like how it's not Europe's fault that America became better than them in prior centuries.
If that were only true. It's not though. There's no inherent advantage to being Chinese any more than there was an inherent advantage to being American back in the day. Where was the economic opportunity for all those ethnic groups of Europe who fled to the US in the 19th century? It was in the US. The profound injustice, lack of economic opportunity, and sometimes just the need to survive drove many people out of Europe.
Obviously, the developed world is a better place than it was then. The failures of today are not those of yesterday.
Then feel free to suggest that other way. Better yet, implement it yourself (convince some investors to help you if you must). You could become a second coming of Henry Ford and become rich as a result.
Ok, end most entitlements, be they social welfare or business. End minimum wage. Greatly reduce regulation of businesses and people and for that regulation which you keep work on finding ways to make it less onerous for those that to comply.
I find your "Henry Ford" comment telling. It's not a innovation matter or something that can be fixed with a business. It's a matter, as I wrote, of getting rid of the societal and political attempts to preserve an ideal of privilege that is no longer sustainable.
The develop world collectively values capital over labor
Because capital hasn't increased in supply like labor has.
The Kings of Spain were threatened with excommunication on multiple occasions.
But were those threats conditioned on the ending of the Spanish Inquisition or mere power plays? You give an example of a power play and it ended with the next pope.
Dubious justice but still better than Guantanamo...
Yea right. Guantanamo is still a few centuries shy of the Spanish Inquisition and fundamentally, it's a POW camp. Indefinite imprisonment legally goes with that territory. The war which it's associated with is some nebulous affair that might drag on for generations or it might be ended in a legal sense in a few years. I think the Guantanamo Bay prison is unjust, but it's not at the level of the Spanish Inquisition.
There's also the matter of number of prisoners and punishments meted out. Current number of prisoners in Guantanamo is less than two hundred. They have yet to execute any prisoners (though apparently the wheels are turning) while the Spanish Inquisition executed people from its founding all the way through to 1826.
Whatever TVA's efficiency is, and whatever their wisdom in ordering new nuclear plants, when they generate electric power, they're definitely contributing to the GDP.
No, because there are costs associated with those services. Those also have to taken into account.
You could apply the same thing to, say, biology: "find out how exactly life developed on Earth, in all levels of detail".
Well, how "exact" is "exact"? It's ill-defined. You can't exactly do anything with respect to physical measurement nor do we try. We can approximate and that's something that can't be done with these hard math problems. There's no way to approximate whether a program ends or not.
There is certainly spending that represents a consumption of wealth as well as spending that represents the production of wealth. I think you might be interested in this graph [wikipedia.org] The bottom 40% have.2% and yet we are led to believe that we should tax them more. The government could tax everything they have and it would be almost nothing.
Let us keep in mind that the "bottom 40%" engage in wealth-wasting behavior such as drug use, excessive and financially foolish spending, gambling, etc. Even if they don't have wealth, they do get an income. If we're going to spend more money, might as well get more from the people who aren't using it.
Piles of printed paper, digital records in computers, lumps of shiny metal, various crystals are all completely and totally valueless with economic activity defining their wealth.
No. Such things are considered wealth because they either have value to someone or they can be exchanged for things that have value to someone.
It is the trade in goods, resources and, skills that define value and hence wealth.
No. It is the goods, resources, and skills that have value to someone and hence, are wealth. Trade expedites the matching of the providing of such things to those who need such things. Yes, it does create wealth by enabling cooperative behavior that wouldn't exist in the absence of the trade. But the trade itself is not the wealth.
Your simpleton view, that somehow you can survive in a capitalistic world sitting on your meaningless hoard without spending it and creating economic activity, is just so unfathomably ignorant.
Well, you're clearly not the person to enlighten me. You don't even understand the point of trade.
For an example of why economic activity is not wealth, disasters routinely encourage economic activity while simultaneously destroying wealth.
Look at the post I replied to. Original poster was whining about how every dollar (or other unit of currency) that a government spends was taken from someone. His response was that that the money seized would be spent multiple times (In practice less than two times). Note the mismatch of meaning, wealth is compared to activity (not even GDP which can be construed as a weak measure of wealth creation, but merely activity). This is deceptive since as in the example above, you can easily have considerable economic activity in the presence of wealth destruction.
In my link above, I discuss the "SNAP" program which is some sort of food assistance program in the US. They use the same obnoxious deception. $5 of wealth becomes $9 of economic activity. Apples are compared to oranges.
If we were doing a legitimate comparison, it would be $5 of wealth resulted in a person getting some food (which they could have otherwise obtained themselves) and that's it. The economic activity would have no real value since the $5 taxed would also have been used for such purposes or for investment (what you call "hoarding"). So $5 of someone's money is used for fairly frivolous purposes (much less than $5 of value).
So why wasn't the King of Spain threatened with excommunication for this grievous abuse of power in the name of the Church? Why didn't the Church just nip that in the bud and refuse his requests for an Inquisition. Because his military support was necessary to keep Rome from being overrun by the Ottomans. They also had centuries to reverse that mistake and yet the Inquisition lingered until the mid-19th century.
Just because the Spanish Inquisition was run by the King of Spain doesn't absolve the Roman Catholic Church of its role in creating, legitimizing, and maintaining that odious organization.
Also, wouldn't you think that an actual Catholic education service would have better things to do than act as apologists for tyranny and terrible mistakes of the past?
and market interventions (right down to war) don't artificially reduce the price of oil
How much do you really think that's going to change the price of oil? I think the last time I checked such things, even if we tossed the entire US military complex as a tax on gasoline, that would mean a few dollars per gallon tax. AGW costs in Europe are priced at a few dollars per ton of CO2 emitted (which is on the order of cents per gallon of gasoline).
Of course, the opposite will happen: the West will race to the bottom on labour conditions and freedoms.
You do realize that most attempts to preserve Western labor privilege have the unintended consequence of hastening that race to the bottom? Bottom line is that currently there's vastly more supply of labor available to the Western markets than there was decades ago - hence, the price of labor is going to decline no matter how much you complain. It's basic supply and demand.
Rather than find ways to make your country's labor more competitive (merely reducing wages is one way, but not the only way), the developed world collectively seems to be about how to restrict Western labor markets and adding even more costs to Western labor to encourage even more business flight to the developing world.
And I might add the "money quote" also uses the infamous "jobs created or saved" metric. 3,000 jobs created for only a billion dollars spent? They should be embarrassed for even dropping that line in there.
The government is just as capable of producing wealth as any other entity.
Capable != actually doing it. The private world has the profit motive for keeping it productive. The activity has to generate some sort of value to the actor beyond its cost or it isn't generating a profit.
If the government spends money on a program that adds more value to the economy than the cost of the program (such as food assistance, which has close to a 2:1 return), then the government has produced wealth.
Where is this study that claims a 2:1 return? I decided to google for this and came across this study. The money quote:
SNAP brings Federal dollars into communities in the form of benefits which are redeemed by
SNAP participants at local stores. These benefits ripple throughout the economies of the
community, State, and Nation. For example:
* Every $5 in new SNAP benefits generates $9.00 in total community spending.
* Every additional dollarâ(TM)s worth of SNAP benefits generates 17 to 47 cents of new
spending on food.
* On average, $1 billion of retail food demand by SNAP recipients generates close to 3,000
farm jobs.
Note that $5 in spending produces $9 in spending not wealth. So right there we don't have a 2:1 return. As I see it, we take $5 of someone's money and use it to generate far less than $5 of value - feeding someone who can feed themselves. That's negative return on investment right there.
It's a destructive economic gimmick to conflate spending or economic activity with wealth creation. They aren't equivalent or even correlated. For example, a disaster creates a lot of spending and economic activity (from reconstruction efforts), but it results in a net loss of wealth.
Why any student would want to understand a math proof paper reading it by himself?
There's a variety of reasons. First, maybe he's the only one wanting to understand that proof or he just wants to figure it out by himself (that can yield considerable insight into a problem).
If you know the math and understand it you still can teach the basic concepts behind that proof
Basic concepts only get you so far. If you want to understand a proof, then you need to learn both what the proof does and the hidden maths and insights that led to the proof. A proof often gives little clue into how the proof was devised.
Sorry, I didn't catch that part of the article till later. In my defense, they only mentioned one school by name, Winthrop University in the entire story.
I see that Eyelock is testing its stuff in at least one elementary school.
There aren't that many nuclear plants owned by TVA. You were heralding the allegedly remarkable competency of the TVA with respect to nuclear plants. Where does that appear in the construction of the two nuclear reactors of the Bellefonte plant, both which were well over halfway completed (88% and 58% complete)? It doesn't.
A valid counterexample to a claim is a legitimate cherry-picked fact.
Second, even if I do not have a counterargument, so what? You seem perfectly happy to not step up your game unless that other AC gives you a reason to.
It's the principle of reciprocity. That lazy ass AC demanded that I put a bunch of effort into fleshing out my opinion without doing anything on his or her own part to contribute. So I didn't bother.
Sure, you have people like the Walton kids who have lots of money due to being the right human egg cells fertilized by the right sperm. They don't have a good claim to inherent business aptitude (unless that sort of thing is partly hereditary, which it might be). On the other hand, a Sam Walton, who parlayed a $20,000 family loan into a vast chain of retail stores (Walmart and Sam's Club) which had revenue of $50 billion by the time of his death, probably had some natural ability. For example, he apparently restarted his business in several different locations before it really caught on. That's not simple to move a business and start over from scratch more than once, much less turn it into one of the largest businesses of the day.
So my view is that yes, you'll have a bunch of rich people who got lucky with who they were related to. But you also have the people who actually built up that wealth. I think that latter group (which actually consists of several different subgroups depending on the strategy used for wealth accumulation, some which can be rather underhanded or innovative) is very different from the normal population. There is a sample bias here which people aren't acknowledging.
I was simply asking how you feel about a caste system, because, with the way you seem to believe rich people are so different (better) than us, a caste system may better utilize their gifts, and result in a better society for not just them, but you as well.
Did I ever say "better"? No. That's evidence of your belief system speaking. Sure, being able to manage a billion dollars successfully may indicate that you are suitable for membership in some sort of ruling elite which is a dubious proposition in itself, but I remain puzzled why ruling is considered a good use of their talents.
Why should we desire a politician Sam Walton over a businessman Sam Walton? To the contrary, I think having Walton as a businessman has worked much better for society and humanity than having him as a politician or government bureaucrat.
And of course, there is the conflict of interest. I'm not better served by an extremely talented person who happens to be exercising that talent by robbing society blind.
Suppose I'm inherently really good at swimming and training for and performing in swimming competitions. Should that qualify me for membership in the ruling elite? Suppose I'm naturally intelligent and pick up some hard degrees in college. Does that qualify me for membership in the ruling elite? I suspect from what you've wrote that the answer would be a resounding NO for all three cases above no matter how much natural advantage I might have or how much it might contribute to successful rule over others.
Historically, having moral grounds or insight has never been that important of a criteria to be a ruler. In fact, some of the biggest problems with society and government throughout history is when the state tries to resolve moral issues, but in turn creates new ones and other unintended consequences.
What made the US Founding Fathers (and those in the Age of Enlightenment) so brilliant is not that they had moral grounds, but they recognized that the government does NOT (and should not) have moral grounds over the people, and that government should stay out of people's way as much as possible, including (especially) their moral issues. Separation of church and state an all that.
Let the people sort out moral problems themselves. There are lower level needs on the hierachy for government to worry about, which is the rich's cup of tea -
But which 25% of that other country do they rank with?
When I was teaching and grading low level college level math a few years ago, I ran across many students who were near the top of their class, but very weak at math. I think US college students have gotten weaker over the past few decades and not just in math. Further my suspicion was supported by observations from long term faculty who had been teaching such classes since the 70s.
Now there could be all sorts of biases which could explain that, but it is a well known problem that students are coming into college with great looking grades, but also with rather misguided expectations, weak study skills, and poor preparation. I think that's contributing to some of the very nasty problems brewing at the college level - such as high levels of student loan debt and a student unprepared for a lot of what the modern world can throw at them.
Or you could teach them to read the numbers on the side of the bus
if these were regular kids, you'd have a point. But these are college students. It's not fair to expect people like that to master such sophisticated mental tasks.
Well, there aren't many fields with well-defined problems that have solutions which can't be found without many human generations of effort. And many math problems are known to be intractable. For example, the Halting problem.
I mention that example because there is probably a Turing machine with input that can be fully described in modest time by a human, but which can't be determined to halt even using the entire resources of the known universe converted optimally into a computer and run for the rest of eternity.
When I asked people in the industry to name the best-run nuclear power plants in the U.S., they named the TVA (and Commonwealth Edison Chicago). There are standard metrics, particularly down time, for nuclear power plants and conventional plants, so you can judge them with reasonable objectivity.
You mean like the Bellefonte nuclear plant? $6 billion dollars sunk cost and the TVA gave up on it until recently.
Slashdot Mirror
Not always, but that is a very common and prevalent problem. Math techniques and proofs often don't yield insight into how or why they were developed. For example, when I do analysis proofs, it's common for me to calculate what tolerances will lead to the desired result and then strip those calculations away for the final proof.
"Why did he pick this delta or set that coefficient to that value?" Because I figured out what would work well enough and got rid of the scaffolding. Here, you see the finished result, not what went into finding the finished result.
Good math books discuss the scaffolding in detail not just the proofs or techniques.
The beauty of math, is that once the problem is solved, you can teach any average idiot how to go through the motions and arrive at the correct the solution without understanding it.
Ugh, I have to disagree. I'd call that utility not beauty. For me, the beauty of mathematics is that you can contemplate just about anything and come up with relevant and nontrivial mathematical puzzles, problems, or features.
You do realize that most attempts to preserve Western labor privilege have the unintended consequence of hastening that race to the bottom? Bottom line is that currently there's vastly more supply of labor available to the Western markets
You second statement disproves your first. Most of the increase in labor is coming from China and other rising countries. Those countries do not answer to America or those who attempt to preserve Western labor privilege. Those attempts do not speed up (nor slow down) that increase in the labor pool.
Where's the contradiction? To disprove, you have to show that the one statement somehow runs against the other. It doesn't happen here. Note that I explain how the attempts fail to improve the situation by raising the cost of developed world labor not by increasing the overall size of the global labor pool.
Or put it another way: it's not your (West) fault that China is becoming better than you, much like how it's not Europe's fault that America became better than them in prior centuries.
If that were only true. It's not though. There's no inherent advantage to being Chinese any more than there was an inherent advantage to being American back in the day. Where was the economic opportunity for all those ethnic groups of Europe who fled to the US in the 19th century? It was in the US. The profound injustice, lack of economic opportunity, and sometimes just the need to survive drove many people out of Europe.
Obviously, the developed world is a better place than it was then. The failures of today are not those of yesterday.
Then feel free to suggest that other way. Better yet, implement it yourself (convince some investors to help you if you must). You could become a second coming of Henry Ford and become rich as a result.
Ok, end most entitlements, be they social welfare or business. End minimum wage. Greatly reduce regulation of businesses and people and for that regulation which you keep work on finding ways to make it less onerous for those that to comply.
I find your "Henry Ford" comment telling. It's not a innovation matter or something that can be fixed with a business. It's a matter, as I wrote, of getting rid of the societal and political attempts to preserve an ideal of privilege that is no longer sustainable.
The develop world collectively values capital over labor
Because capital hasn't increased in supply like labor has.
The Kings of Spain were threatened with excommunication on multiple occasions.
But were those threats conditioned on the ending of the Spanish Inquisition or mere power plays? You give an example of a power play and it ended with the next pope.
Dubious justice but still better than Guantanamo...
Yea right. Guantanamo is still a few centuries shy of the Spanish Inquisition and fundamentally, it's a POW camp. Indefinite imprisonment legally goes with that territory. The war which it's associated with is some nebulous affair that might drag on for generations or it might be ended in a legal sense in a few years. I think the Guantanamo Bay prison is unjust, but it's not at the level of the Spanish Inquisition.
There's also the matter of number of prisoners and punishments meted out. Current number of prisoners in Guantanamo is less than two hundred. They have yet to execute any prisoners (though apparently the wheels are turning) while the Spanish Inquisition executed people from its founding all the way through to 1826.
Whatever TVA's efficiency is, and whatever their wisdom in ordering new nuclear plants, when they generate electric power, they're definitely contributing to the GDP.
No, because there are costs associated with those services. Those also have to taken into account.
Yet to me is seems that this doesn't show that math is hard; it merely shows that in math, it's easy to come up with hard problems.
If math was easy those problems would not exist.
You could apply the same thing to, say, biology: "find out how exactly life developed on Earth, in all levels of detail".
Well, how "exact" is "exact"? It's ill-defined. You can't exactly do anything with respect to physical measurement nor do we try. We can approximate and that's something that can't be done with these hard math problems. There's no way to approximate whether a program ends or not.
That depends entirely on what algorithm you try to use do determine whether the given TM will halt on the given input.
Ok, any algorithm where you don't already know the answer in advance.
There is certainly spending that represents a consumption of wealth as well as spending that represents the production of wealth. I think you might be interested in this graph [wikipedia.org] The bottom 40% have .2% and yet we are led to believe that we should tax them more. The government could tax everything they have and it would be almost nothing.
Let us keep in mind that the "bottom 40%" engage in wealth-wasting behavior such as drug use, excessive and financially foolish spending, gambling, etc. Even if they don't have wealth, they do get an income. If we're going to spend more money, might as well get more from the people who aren't using it.
Piles of printed paper, digital records in computers, lumps of shiny metal, various crystals are all completely and totally valueless with economic activity defining their wealth.
No. Such things are considered wealth because they either have value to someone or they can be exchanged for things that have value to someone.
It is the trade in goods, resources and, skills that define value and hence wealth.
No. It is the goods, resources, and skills that have value to someone and hence, are wealth. Trade expedites the matching of the providing of such things to those who need such things. Yes, it does create wealth by enabling cooperative behavior that wouldn't exist in the absence of the trade. But the trade itself is not the wealth.
Your simpleton view, that somehow you can survive in a capitalistic world sitting on your meaningless hoard without spending it and creating economic activity, is just so unfathomably ignorant.
Well, you're clearly not the person to enlighten me. You don't even understand the point of trade.
For an example of why economic activity is not wealth, disasters routinely encourage economic activity while simultaneously destroying wealth.
Look at the post I replied to. Original poster was whining about how every dollar (or other unit of currency) that a government spends was taken from someone. His response was that that the money seized would be spent multiple times (In practice less than two times). Note the mismatch of meaning, wealth is compared to activity (not even GDP which can be construed as a weak measure of wealth creation, but merely activity). This is deceptive since as in the example above, you can easily have considerable economic activity in the presence of wealth destruction.
In my link above, I discuss the "SNAP" program which is some sort of food assistance program in the US. They use the same obnoxious deception. $5 of wealth becomes $9 of economic activity. Apples are compared to oranges.
If we were doing a legitimate comparison, it would be $5 of wealth resulted in a person getting some food (which they could have otherwise obtained themselves) and that's it. The economic activity would have no real value since the $5 taxed would also have been used for such purposes or for investment (what you call "hoarding"). So $5 of someone's money is used for fairly frivolous purposes (much less than $5 of value).
No. Let me guess, you `invest' your money into gold. *snicker*
No, I was merely stating the obvious.
So why wasn't the King of Spain threatened with excommunication for this grievous abuse of power in the name of the Church? Why didn't the Church just nip that in the bud and refuse his requests for an Inquisition. Because his military support was necessary to keep Rome from being overrun by the Ottomans. They also had centuries to reverse that mistake and yet the Inquisition lingered until the mid-19th century.
Just because the Spanish Inquisition was run by the King of Spain doesn't absolve the Roman Catholic Church of its role in creating, legitimizing, and maintaining that odious organization.
Also, wouldn't you think that an actual Catholic education service would have better things to do than act as apologists for tyranny and terrible mistakes of the past?
and market interventions (right down to war) don't artificially reduce the price of oil
How much do you really think that's going to change the price of oil? I think the last time I checked such things, even if we tossed the entire US military complex as a tax on gasoline, that would mean a few dollars per gallon tax. AGW costs in Europe are priced at a few dollars per ton of CO2 emitted (which is on the order of cents per gallon of gasoline).
Of course, the opposite will happen: the West will race to the bottom on labour conditions and freedoms.
You do realize that most attempts to preserve Western labor privilege have the unintended consequence of hastening that race to the bottom? Bottom line is that currently there's vastly more supply of labor available to the Western markets than there was decades ago - hence, the price of labor is going to decline no matter how much you complain. It's basic supply and demand.
Rather than find ways to make your country's labor more competitive (merely reducing wages is one way, but not the only way), the developed world collectively seems to be about how to restrict Western labor markets and adding even more costs to Western labor to encourage even more business flight to the developing world.
Nevermind the fact that their laptops are the least-service-friendly machines I've ever laid a screwdriver on.
You sound like a crazy person. I bet you want to clean the fans or some such nonsense.
Economic activity != wealth creation.
And I might add the "money quote" also uses the infamous "jobs created or saved" metric. 3,000 jobs created for only a billion dollars spent? They should be embarrassed for even dropping that line in there.
The government is just as capable of producing wealth as any other entity.
Capable != actually doing it. The private world has the profit motive for keeping it productive. The activity has to generate some sort of value to the actor beyond its cost or it isn't generating a profit.
If the government spends money on a program that adds more value to the economy than the cost of the program (such as food assistance, which has close to a 2:1 return), then the government has produced wealth.
Where is this study that claims a 2:1 return? I decided to google for this and came across this study. The money quote:
SNAP brings Federal dollars into communities in the form of benefits which are redeemed by SNAP participants at local stores. These benefits ripple throughout the economies of the community, State, and Nation. For example:
* Every $5 in new SNAP benefits generates $9.00 in total community spending.
* Every additional dollarâ(TM)s worth of SNAP benefits generates 17 to 47 cents of new spending on food.
* On average, $1 billion of retail food demand by SNAP recipients generates close to 3,000 farm jobs.
Note that $5 in spending produces $9 in spending not wealth. So right there we don't have a 2:1 return. As I see it, we take $5 of someone's money and use it to generate far less than $5 of value - feeding someone who can feed themselves. That's negative return on investment right there.
It's a destructive economic gimmick to conflate spending or economic activity with wealth creation. They aren't equivalent or even correlated. For example, a disaster creates a lot of spending and economic activity (from reconstruction efforts), but it results in a net loss of wealth.
Why any student would want to understand a math proof paper reading it by himself?
There's a variety of reasons. First, maybe he's the only one wanting to understand that proof or he just wants to figure it out by himself (that can yield considerable insight into a problem).
If you know the math and understand it you still can teach the basic concepts behind that proof
Basic concepts only get you so far. If you want to understand a proof, then you need to learn both what the proof does and the hidden maths and insights that led to the proof. A proof often gives little clue into how the proof was devised.
Sorry, I didn't catch that part of the article till later. In my defense, they only mentioned one school by name, Winthrop University in the entire story.
I see that Eyelock is testing its stuff in at least one elementary school.
Cherry-picked facts aren't too useful.
There aren't that many nuclear plants owned by TVA. You were heralding the allegedly remarkable competency of the TVA with respect to nuclear plants. Where does that appear in the construction of the two nuclear reactors of the Bellefonte plant, both which were well over halfway completed (88% and 58% complete)? It doesn't.
A valid counterexample to a claim is a legitimate cherry-picked fact.
Second, even if I do not have a counterargument, so what? You seem perfectly happy to not step up your game unless that other AC gives you a reason to.
It's the principle of reciprocity. That lazy ass AC demanded that I put a bunch of effort into fleshing out my opinion without doing anything on his or her own part to contribute. So I didn't bother.
Sure, you have people like the Walton kids who have lots of money due to being the right human egg cells fertilized by the right sperm. They don't have a good claim to inherent business aptitude (unless that sort of thing is partly hereditary, which it might be). On the other hand, a Sam Walton, who parlayed a $20,000 family loan into a vast chain of retail stores (Walmart and Sam's Club) which had revenue of $50 billion by the time of his death, probably had some natural ability. For example, he apparently restarted his business in several different locations before it really caught on. That's not simple to move a business and start over from scratch more than once, much less turn it into one of the largest businesses of the day.
So my view is that yes, you'll have a bunch of rich people who got lucky with who they were related to. But you also have the people who actually built up that wealth. I think that latter group (which actually consists of several different subgroups depending on the strategy used for wealth accumulation, some which can be rather underhanded or innovative) is very different from the normal population. There is a sample bias here which people aren't acknowledging.
I was simply asking how you feel about a caste system, because, with the way you seem to believe rich people are so different (better) than us, a caste system may better utilize their gifts, and result in a better society for not just them, but you as well.
Did I ever say "better"? No. That's evidence of your belief system speaking. Sure, being able to manage a billion dollars successfully may indicate that you are suitable for membership in some sort of ruling elite which is a dubious proposition in itself, but I remain puzzled why ruling is considered a good use of their talents.
Why should we desire a politician Sam Walton over a businessman Sam Walton? To the contrary, I think having Walton as a businessman has worked much better for society and humanity than having him as a politician or government bureaucrat.
And of course, there is the conflict of interest. I'm not better served by an extremely talented person who happens to be exercising that talent by robbing society blind.
Suppose I'm inherently really good at swimming and training for and performing in swimming competitions. Should that qualify me for membership in the ruling elite? Suppose I'm naturally intelligent and pick up some hard degrees in college. Does that qualify me for membership in the ruling elite? I suspect from what you've wrote that the answer would be a resounding NO for all three cases above no matter how much natural advantage I might have or how much it might contribute to successful rule over others.
Historically, having moral grounds or insight has never been that important of a criteria to be a ruler. In fact, some of the biggest problems with society and government throughout history is when the state tries to resolve moral issues, but in turn creates new ones and other unintended consequences.
What made the US Founding Fathers (and those in the Age of Enlightenment) so brilliant is not that they had moral grounds, but they recognized that the government does NOT (and should not) have moral grounds over the people, and that government should stay out of people's way as much as possible, including (especially) their moral issues. Separation of church and state an all that.
Let the people sort out moral problems themselves. There are lower level needs on the hierachy for government to worry about, which is the rich's cup of tea -
America's top 25% of kids ranks with any nations.
But which 25% of that other country do they rank with?
When I was teaching and grading low level college level math a few years ago, I ran across many students who were near the top of their class, but very weak at math. I think US college students have gotten weaker over the past few decades and not just in math. Further my suspicion was supported by observations from long term faculty who had been teaching such classes since the 70s.
Now there could be all sorts of biases which could explain that, but it is a well known problem that students are coming into college with great looking grades, but also with rather misguided expectations, weak study skills, and poor preparation. I think that's contributing to some of the very nasty problems brewing at the college level - such as high levels of student loan debt and a student unprepared for a lot of what the modern world can throw at them.
Or you could teach them to read the numbers on the side of the bus
if these were regular kids, you'd have a point. But these are college students. It's not fair to expect people like that to master such sophisticated mental tasks.
Well, there aren't many fields with well-defined problems that have solutions which can't be found without many human generations of effort. And many math problems are known to be intractable. For example, the Halting problem.
I mention that example because there is probably a Turing machine with input that can be fully described in modest time by a human, but which can't be determined to halt even using the entire resources of the known universe converted optimally into a computer and run for the rest of eternity.
When I asked people in the industry to name the best-run nuclear power plants in the U.S., they named the TVA (and Commonwealth Edison Chicago). There are standard metrics, particularly down time, for nuclear power plants and conventional plants, so you can judge them with reasonable objectivity.
You mean like the Bellefonte nuclear plant? $6 billion dollars sunk cost and the TVA gave up on it until recently.