Uh, I think xtisme was talking about “gaming the system” more or less theoretically. If not, it was kinda dumb of him to admit it and clue us in to what’s really going on, instead of encouraging us to persist in our cutesy-poo dreams of meritocracy. 
On the “big picture” level, though, I agree with a lot of your points.
Capitalism IS a meritocracy. If you think just having a lot of money is a guarantee that you will make more, I suggest you look up the history of lottery winners, and see how many of them manage to hang on to their money.
There used to be a saying, “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in two generations”. What it meant was that people get rich by working hard, or by being smart, or usually both. When they die, their heirs may be rich as well, but if THEY don’t do the same things that made their parents rich in the first place (work hard, be smart), then their own children will wind up poor again.
Now obviously there are a few very, very rich people that will never have to work because of their immense trust funds. But note that they get by this way only because their money is safely controlled by those who are managing it intelligently. In other words, the capital is still being put to good use.
And if the capital is spent foolishly, it will slowly trickle away to be collected by someone who can make better use of it.
Or to put it another way: If you could pull a magic lever and suddenly make everyone equally wealthy, and then left them totally free to manage their wealth, do you doubt that the same people who have the wealth today would wind up rich again, and the people who are poor would wind up losing it? There would be exceptions, but the general rule would hold.
I know lots of poor people. Most of them aren’t poor because the ‘man’ keeps them down. They aren’t poor because they are discriminated against, or because they lack ‘opportunity’. They are poor because they make bad choices. They lack self control. They can’t defer gratification, so they don’t save, and they chose to work rather than stay in school because they didn’t like studying. One person I know who is poor has had ten times the opportunities I ever had. He was given a down payment to his first house as a gift. He lost the house because he quit his job after fighting with his boss. He was accepted into college after an alumni went to bat for him (he didn’t have the grades oetherwise), and he squandered the opportunity and dropped out after a couple of semesters because it was too much work. He got married, had two children, and then divorced. He can’t hold a job for more than a year or two before he gets mad at something and quits. He’s in debt to his eyeballs, because every time he gets a job he’s certain that this time he’s going to be rich so he loads his credit card up to buy new stereo gear or other toys. He bought a new truck once, and totally trashed it by not taking even rudimentary care of it. Everything he owns has fallen into disrepair, even though he has twice the free time I do.
Give him a million bucks, and he’ll probably try to make the world’s largest bong or something. Or he’ll buy himself a quarter-million dollar speedboat and smash it up after a wild party.
And you know what? When I talk to him about his life, he says the same thing you guys do. He’s poor because the system screwed him. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. It’s someone else’s fault. If only the government cared, and did more to help, his life would be ever so much better. Damnit, he is OWED a better life, and someone oughtta pay.
While I agree with Sam, I’d also emphasize that pure dumb luck plays an important part of success in business.
Bill Gates was in the exact right place at the exact right time with the exact right product, and that luck was the foundation of Microsoft. There were plenty of other guys who were smarter with equally better products that never made it nearly as far because they were a bit late to market or whatever.
Think of it like evolutionary biology. The dinosaurs didn’t die out because they were dumber and lazier than the mammals, they died out because they got hit by a comet. Companies adopt business practices pretty much at random, some work and some don’t. However, it’s also not completely random either. Companies that adopt too many bad practices are more likely to go out of business than companies that avoid bad practices. Companies are able to copy practices from more successful companies, a Lamarckian strategy that doesn’t exist in biological evolution.
But the marketplace doesn’t much care WHY one company is successful and another isn’t, they just are. You can only screw up so many times before your company dies. And big companies fail all the time. Look at the list of Fortune 100 companies today, and compare that to the list 30 years ago in 1975. How many companies on today’s list didn’t even exist 30 years ago? How many companies from 30 years ago no longer exist?
I just want to point out that many people at my firm (a management consulting firm specializing in litigation, economic and distressed business consulting) have created a great deal of wealth through enforcing regulation. Enrons are the exception, not the norm and the fact that they are prosecuted proves that the system does work. That is not to say it couldn’t work better.
elucidator - I’m going to ignore your comment on “human nature” for the next part of my post
There is something in human nature that causes us to perceive imbalances in wealth as “unfair”, even if we aren’t that badly off ourselves. Theres was an experiment where you take two individuals. You give one person a reward and tell them they have once chance to split it with the other however they see fit. The catch is that if the other person doesn’t agree on the split, no once gets anything. They found that people rejected pretty much anything that wasn’t close to 50/50. Logically this does not make sense. It is better to have 1% of something even if the other person gets the other 99%. Even still, people would rather have both get nothing than get the short end of the stick. (if I find a cite to the exeriment, I’ll let you know).
We apply this kind of thinking in real life too. When we see CEOs making $xx millions a year, it is in our nature to feel that they don’t deserve it.
Well, it’s not like you can do anything about it 
The system is “gamed” not by any master design on the part of the powers that be. It’s gamed because of the cumulative effect of a number of phenomenon:
-It’s easier to make $1M if you start off with $10M
-Success tends to build on previous successes
-We tend to associate with people similar to ourselves
Yes, our system is part meritocracy. But lets not deny that a big part of it is luck, who you know, and where you start off. If you grow up in even a moderately wealthy family, you can afford to be a B or C student. You can be President as a B or C student. If you come from a poor family, you won’t be considered unless you are an A student.
I want to also point out that our modern highly flexible capitalist economy allows for goods and services that are both distributed and centralized, depending on the product or service. There is no “one size fits all” economic system. Free market works in some instances, regulated markets work best in others. Even socialized or communal services have their place.
I tend to agree with the general thinking here, except that I don’t think business practices are adopted “at random”. But man did you get the dinosaur thing wrong. 
It was an asteroid, not a comet, and we really don’t know that that was the reason most of the dinos went extinct. Of course the real answer, though, is that they didn’t all go exinct-- the ones that had evolved into birds survived.
Elucidator: Sam’s criticisms were directly related to the two suggestions **BG **made about capping salaries and limiting the size of business. While most of us would agree that it’s good to help those at the bottom by raising the floor, BG’s suggestion is to go further and to lower the roof. As for the suggestion that a company’s size should be artificially restricted, why are we to assume that small = good?
And your organic co-op may not compete with Wal-mart but it sure as hell competes with every other supplier of organic foods, and if it’s less efficient than others it’s less likely to survive (all other things being equal).
As noted elsewhere, the plural of “anecdote” isn’t “proofs”.
One hastens to point out your use of the word “most” as in “most of them aren’t poor because the ‘man’ keeps them down”. Which seems to imply that some of them are poor due to oppression.
Would you be so kind as to explicate the distinction, in your experience? And how this injustice might best be addressed?
Do you have even anecdotes to offer? What’s your proof that the plight of the poor is some systemic form of oppression?
I don’t deny that racism and other forms of discrimination exist. Those should be fought. I just don’t believe that it is the cause of the vast majority of poverty. Most people in poverty are not that way because of systematic oppression. They are that way because they make decisions that keep them impoverished. Bearing children outside of marriage, dropping out of school, being lazy on the job, not saving money, etc. Poor decisions leading to poor outcomes.
Then there are those who are in poverty because they know nothing else. They live in poor neighborhoods. They come from broken families. They don’t have father figures. They are the victims of the welfare state. They’re the inevitable result of decades of a system that rewarded their parents’ poor decision-making and collected them all up into ghettoized poor neighborhoods.
I don’t deny that some have been oppressed or discriminated against. I just oppose any ‘solution’ to their plight that creates even more dependency.
Look at what’s happening in France right now. The French were proud of their ‘highly advanced’ social welfare model. And it did exactly what it did here - created ghettos of people living off the public teat. A breeding ground for resentment and despair. You can see the same thing on native reservations here in Canada. Heavy social payments and economic incentives to stay on the reservation has created a permanent underclass.
“Oppression” is not necessarily a willful conspiracy. It can derive its power just as readily from neglect and ignorance.
You recite the Conservative Catechism as though it were proven points, immune to criticism and needless of proof. I simply assert that while this may be so, you are far from any substantiation. So far you have offered us only your assurance that you “know lots of poor people.” So do I. Need I say that my estimation of their character is considerably at variance with your own? And that I regard my estimation as equally worthy?
Is it your contention that if one makes none of those mistakes, his success is assured? Have you never, ever, met a man who worked hard, played by the rules, and got nowhere? You need to get out more.
Is it your contention that poverty is a recent phenomenon, only decades old, and directly attributable to liberal social policies? News to me.
Fine then. Let’s hear a solution that doesn’t. I’m open to alternative solutions, so long as they are, in fact, solutions and not evasions.
I have heard it suggested that the problems in France have to do with discrimination against “stereotypical Arabs”. Which is to say, a third generation Frenchman of Algerian origin has difficulty obtaining gainful employment so long as he “looks Arab”. I am not in a position to judge such. Neither, I warrant, are you. I refrain, you do not.
Truth be told, the economy tends to expand, even with racism and oppression, unless the government of other forces act to keep it from expansion. Growth is its natural state. Oppression does happen, but it is the tendency of natural economic systems to eliminate it over time.
Indeed, looking at history, we can say that this has tended to happen in the US with all social groups. While they have not become equal, economic utility has greatly reduced the attraction of racism. Simply put, modern economic actors (corporations) are less and less interested in social factors and more and more interested in success. Similarly, economic factors led to the greater integration of women in the national workforce: it was simply not cost-effective economically or legally to keep them out.
Over time, all social groups have tended to rise in status and thereby disperse, except one. The black underclass. No doubt they do see real racism. Yet, I tink the underlying reason they remain an underclass is historically and culturally dependant. After all, black immigrants from Africa succeed no less than other immigrants, and most move up in the world in fairly short order.
I think the reason begins with the urban renewal projects of the mid-20th century. Up until that point, the black underclass was becoming less poor relative to other social groups***. In short, they were on the way up like recent immigrants. Urban renewal, however, destroyed the social cohesion and the communities around which this growth had taken place. The Great Society programs furthered stunted growth, buy making hard work and success less attractive in the short and long term. Why work to get out of the only neighborhood you ever knew, when it was easy to slack a bit? Where would you go if you did? The combination was toxic, no doubt. Moreover, it tended to maintain itself. Those with broader horizons, who did succeed, tended to leave and thereby further isolated th ghetto in failure and poverty.
The last nail in the coffin was the crack epidemic of the 70’s. While partly the goverment’s fault, crack cocaine was, well, crack cocaine. Older drugs, used since the rise of general pharmacies in the 19th century, had been bad enough for the user. With the breakdown of social order, and a new generation with no hope of leaving and nothing to do, hyper-addictive crack (and other forthcoming engineered drugs) shattered what was left of the social order.
This led to a total breakdown of any kind of civil culture, of which the black underclass, while always poorer than other Americans social groups, had nevertheless been a proud participant in and creators of. I also feel it’s responsible for the general state of affairs of the current black underclass. Without any idea of how to live well, they just live.
***In addition, I suspect that racism was becoming less prevelant, though I can’t prove that. It might take the 60s to finally break it, but I believe that the groundwork for that was being laid in the 40’s and 50’s.
Fascinating term! What is a “natural” economic system? What characteristics distinguish it from an “unnatural” economic system? And by what mechanism does it operate to “eliminate oppression” over time?
Strawman. Nobody said that “having a lot of money is a guarantee you will make more”. We simply pointed out that capital tends to flow to those who already have capital, as well as to those who have political clout, etc.
So capitalism is sometimes a meritocracy, and sometimes not. Claiming that capitalism only rewards those who deserve it is faith-based economics, not a serious argument.
I don’t think economic utility is necessarily as influential in reducing prejudice and discrimination as you’re suggesting. Yes, it has a tendency that way, but human bias and bigotry have pretty strong tendencies to resist it.
For example, the economic impulse to end racism against American blacks remained pretty damn feeble for nearly a century until the civil rights movement came along, and in particular the legislation that outlawed discrimination. Obviously, treating black workers equally with white ones was not seen as a path to “success” by most economic actors before that time.
Similarly, the decrease in discrimination against women that you airily ascribe to “economic factors” was legally founded in the provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibiting sex discrimination in employment. Prior to that, women’s share of professional and technical jobs had actually declined even while more of them joined the workforce. So again, economic utility is getting the credit for the achievements of activism and legislation.
And couldn’t it be the case that money flows to to those who have capital in exactly the same way that tournament wins tend to flow to those athletes who already have tournament wins? i.e. having lots of tournament wins is a predicter of future tournament wins because it’s an indication of ability. A correlation, not causation.
In other words, the fact that someone is already rich tends to indicate that they are good at creating wealth. Therefore, they will tend to create even more wealth.
And the corrolary is also true - give a lot of wealth to someone who isn’t very good at managing it, and he will lose money faster than a poorer person will. So what?
And of course having money is an advantage. Just like being in really good shape is an advantage in sports. It doesn’t imply that there is anything at all unfair about the system.
Not only that, but those without capital but who have a proven ability to work and who have good ideas can find investors. Venture capitalists, banks, etc.
But what we are really talking about here is income mobility. If the rich really have such a huge advantage, you would expect them to stay rich. And if the poor are really so disadvantaged, you would expect them to stay poor. But this is not the case. There is significant income mobility through all economic quintiles in the U.S., and this has been the case for a long time.
This summary is very good. From it:
(bolding mine)
How significant? In any given year, about 19% of the people in the bottom economic quintile rise at least one quintile in wealth. Over five years, 38% of the people in the bottom quintile move at least one quintile up. At the same time, 19% of the people in the top quintile drop at least one, and over five years about 22% of the people in the top quintile drop at least one.
And note that these studies control for age, whcih to me doesn’t seem to be valid, because it seems natural to me that you should be in a lower quintile when young than when you are old. Two studies that did allow for age found even higher mobility:
Almost none of the poorest people in 1975 were still poor by 1991, and a full third of them made it all the way to the highest income quintile!
This has profound social policy implications. If the poor are destined to be poor and are in a chronic state due to the injustices of society, then all we can do is make them more comfortable by giving them more money. If the rich have such a huge amount of power that they are immune from bad mistakes by virtue of their wealth, then maybe we need to tax them and move some of that money down the chain.
But if the poor are merely poor because of temporary circumstances, or because they are young and therefore haven’t collected wealth yet, or because they aren’t trained or because they are just lazy, then perhaps we’re hurting more than helping by making it easier for them to just sit in the lower income ranks. And if the rich really do have to work hard to hang on to their money and that means they tend to use it more responsibly, then maybe it’s not such a bad thing to let them keep it, trusting that the market willl ensure that should they decide to be greedy and lazy with their money they will lose it anyway and it will flow to those who are trying harder and creating more wealth.
The conclusion of the survey:
So it’s clear that many, many poor people due improve their own situations. In fact, the vast majority of them. And it’s also clear that it’s not as easy to remain wealthy as some of you would like to claim.
Why didn’t you quote the next paragraph which says:
That study gives a higher number becuase it didn’t hold for age.
Right, thats the whole point of controlling for age. It eliminates the effect of increasing earnings as someone ages.
Whoa, slow down buckeroo before you start concluding too much about that study perhaps you should read the footnote:
Well this claim isn’t quite true. Its clear that very rarely do the poorest pull themselves up by their bootstraps to the top of the food chain. So while it is true that slightly more people leave the bottom quintile than remain there not many of them make it to the top. Looking off this easy to read table you can see that only 2.7% of the lowest quintile makes it to the top while 42% of the top remain there.
Anyone that has seen a school room in the inner city and compared it with a school in a rich suburb can easily see that the oppurtunities for the two classes is not the same. I am all for the victors taking the spoils provided that the playing field is even. Give the poor people the same schools that the rich kids have. Give them access to birth control, abortions and sex education that the rich kids have. Give them the same oppurtunity to go to the same colleges that rich kids have. Then come and try to convince me that our system is fair.
By an astonishing coincidence, I was going to post precisely the same points. Would you mind terribly if I asked the Mods to edit the username?
Which I pointed out in my post. Why should we correct for age? When we talk about the number of poor in society, we don’t correct for age. When we talk about the people who work minimum wage, we don’t correct for age. Unless you are born into wealth, then by definition you are going to start out as lower class, and work your way up. When I got out of school, I had nothing but a used car and about $500 worth of junk. Most people start out, even out of college, making lower class or lower middle class salaries. So when someone says, “There are 20 million poor people in the United States!” the first thing I wonder is how many of them are poor simply because they are starting out in life. But that point is always ignored. When people talk about how awful minimum wage is, they never point out that the majority of people working minimum wage are young people or second income earners.
But when we’re talking about income mobility, suddenly we have to correct for age? Sorry, I’m not buying it. Age is crucially important. It’s fine to be poor if A) you’re young, and B) you are on a path that will take you out of poverty as you build up equity, improve your skills, and settle down. In fact, I’d say that’s the American Way. The self-made person. But suddenly we have to exclude that from the discussion?
Which is why it’s wrong to control for it. Or rather, it’s wrong to control for it in a discussion of this sort. It’s perfectly valid to control for it when you’re trying to draw other types of conclusions or study other aspects of income inequality.
But that’s because few from ANY group make it to the top! If the top quintile makes up only 10% of Americans, then very few people from any larger group will make it into that quintile. And it’s impossible anyway, because if suddenly half of the people in America were making what the top quintile does today, it would no longer be the top quintile, would it? It would be the middle.
What do you think the poverty situation would look like if we compared the incomes and standards of living of the poor to the middle class of, say, 50 years ago?
And it’s not important anyway. We’re talking about getting yourself out of poverty and into a comfortable life, not rocketing your way from the bottom all the way to the top. And it’s clear that an overwhelming percentage of the people who are poor when they are young are no longer poor by the time they retire.
If 2.7% of the bottom quintile are making it into the top 10%, that’s pretty good. That means that fully 27% of the people in the top quintile started out from the bottom.
And if the market is truly a meritocracy, it also makes sense that large numbers of the rich would remain so. What’s astonishing is that over half of them drop back out of those rarified heights and back into the middle class. Apparently, being rich isn’t such a sure thing after all.
The schools in Canada are much more evenly balanced between rich and poor neighborhoods, and yet income mobility is almost identical to that in the U.S.
As for access to birth control and abortions - I was under the impression that abortions were available in free clinics to almost everyone. And birth control isn’t all that expensive. And if you can’t afford that, you can always NOT HAVE SEX. I come from a large extended family where there are numerous young females. My extended family is also highly religious and wouldn’t tolerate birth control or abortion. And not one of those kids got knocked up. Because they didn’t have sex.
If birth control and abortion were critical tools for pulling yourself out of poverty, what did the poor do before 1962? How come there were fewer out-of-wedlock children born then than there are now, especially among the poor?
As for opportunities to go to college… Sorry. You can make a good income without going to college. You can work your way through college. Or you can take on a trade. Around these parts, a journeyman plumber will make more money than a teacher. My company hires programmers with 2-year diplomas from the local technical school and pays them a very good salary. And once they are in the company, they can rise as high as their abilities take them. We promote purely on merit, and have a couple of those 2-year grads leading teams of people who have Master’s degrees.
No, poor people aren’t likely to get into Harvard or other Ivy League schools. But the belief that that’s a pre-requisite for success is just elitism masquerading as a concern for the poor. There is nothing wrong with state college or trade school. For that matter, there’s nothing wrong with going to work for Radio Shack with a high school diploma and working your way up into management, or with starting your own company. There are many paths to success, and only a few of them pass through the rarified air that you think the poor must pass through to be ‘equal’.
Yes becuase the point is to see if its possible for a poor person to move up society not to see if a 55 year old person earns more than a 20 year old. We want to know if guy X whos family income is 15K when he is 15 can surpase guy Y whos family income is 30K when he is 15. We don’t care if Guy X can earn twice what he could when he started out in the world. That is more a measure of overall economic growth instead of measuring income mobility.
Well no kidding, I never said it was any different. My response was to the contention that the vast majority of poor people pull themselves up. That is incorrect as 46.7% of those that started in the lowest quintile remain there.
Right, this is exactly why you control for age. If not then the mobility would be ridiculously high becuase everyone in society is moving up.
My arse we aren’t. Why should poor people be content with a chance of a small increase while being denied an equal chance to really succeed? Unless the field is nearly completely leveled any talk of poor people needing to work harder or be more careful with their money is junk.
No, it means that 2.7% of the people in the top quintile came from the lowest quintile. Its 2.7% of the 10% not 2.7%/10%
Do you have a cite for either of these statements?
I am not aware of comprehensive free abortions for those that can not afford them.
Good for you, not all 16 year olds are as chaste as you and your family. Plus we are talking about economic equality here and this is an important issue in regards to equality. Birth control to rich people isn’t all that expensive but to a poor family that is counting each dollar it adds up. A rich girl that gets pregnant can drive her car to a local clinic and pay for an abortion if she wants one. A poor girl doesn’t have the same oppurtunity. Considering how damaging a pregnancy in your teenage years to future economic earnings this an important issue.
Who knows? But thats not the point. The point is to see if the system is equal not find ways to blame poor people.
Is it easier or harder to move to the top quintile as a plumber or a Harvard graduate? Is it easier or harder to make it through college on daddy’s dime or working? Is it easier or harder to make a good buck with a college degree?
Unfortunately anecodotes don’t count. If you look at it statistically those with masters degrees will significantly outearn those with 2 year degrees.
Yeah there are many paths to success but growing up in a rich suburb, attending a great high school and getting a degree from a world class institution has a heck of a lot higher chance of success than some poor guy trying to work his way up at Radio Shack. You are arguing possibilities here. Its possible for me to beat a guy with a baseball bat in a fight with one hand tied behind my back and a blindfold on but its not likely. Just becuase I can win that fight or at somepoint someother time a person with their hand tied behind their back won doesn’t mean its a fair fight. Looking at both how society is set up and the results in a statistical manner show the same thing. Poor people don’t have nearly the same shot as rich people and its not becuase they are lazy or bad with money. The system is set up for those with money to be able to pass it on to the next generation. It is by no means a fair meritocracy.
I had no idea nonsense could be so complex. It’s kind of like trying to pick out one earthworm from a bowl of writhing bait, drenched in motor oil, with chopsticks.
So many bald statements of fact, limping along in rags, beseeching passersby “Please, sir, have you a cite to spare…”
Maybe that’s why I never heard about it, because no one ever talks about it. But, if so, where did you hear about it? And these second income workers? How many of them are supplementing another minimum wage job?
Not at all, grab a couple of cites and bring it. Failing that, you can understand why one might regard that as little more than a cliche that fits snugly with your theories.
That’s too many for me. I fold. I read it, scratch my head, read it again, try to wrestle it to the ground…
Mother of mercy, what possible point could you make out of this? Yes, of course, the full bulk of human misery has decreased, and that is good, and that is important. Nonetheless, the distribution of misery is not equitable, and that’s what we’re on about, Sam. The advance of human progress is the most important thing, but the distribution of the * benefits* of that progress runs a very close second.
Oh. Well. Never mind, I suppose.
It is? Or it was? Was that before or after pension plans started to go pop like the champagne corks at a Young Republican victory party? You mean, by chance, the beneficiarys of pension plans carved out of the living flesh of the ruling class by labor unions? Which have ceased to be.
That’s wrong. If I had stayed awake in that class, I’d know why it’s wrong. Somebody here does, they’ll take care of it. Moving right along…
See, this is why I don’t start in saying “Cite?” every twenty five words, by now, I’d be sick of typing it…
Sam, m’lad, when it comes to straight lines, you have no equal, you are the Gracie Allen of the SDMB.
And an exhausted 'luc stumbles towards the edge of the ring…Tag team! Tag team! Somebody take over…
I heard an interesting theory about this. After slavery was over and the black population started becoming wealthier they were still discriminated against. The racist cities shunted black professionals away from the good side of town into the bad i.e. black secitons of the cities. You had doctors and lawyers living next to factory workers and poor people. The professionals helped to enforce societal norms and kept the neighborhoods nice albiet poor places to live. When discrimination in housing became illegal in the 60s and informal discrimination subsided these professionals started moving out into nicer neighborhoods. Eventually all that was left behind were those that couldn’t get out. The people that were enforcing the social norms left and thus the norms deteriorated. As they began to worsen those that could get out did and the situation further deteriorated to what we have today.
Its a believable theory to me but I am not sure how much truth there is in it. Certainly if a kid only sees bums around him and hears how the man is keeping him down he will learn that. He sure as heck isn’t going to have his mind changed by going to a shitty school with no materials and crappy teachers. If that kid had doctors, engineers and other professionals living next to him that came from the same place and looked the same he might learn that he too can suceed by applying himself. Today if a kid in the ghetto starts applying himself and working in school his peers accuse him of selling out and becoming white. Coupled with the message he is getting at home is it any wonder that he won’t apply himself in school?
Sometimes that certainly is the case, as I’ve already acknowledged. Sometimes, on the other hand, using existing money to make more money has nothing to do with ability. For example, if you have an extra million dollars that you don’t need for your living expenses, you can just stick it in an interest-bearing account and it will generate lots more money. You can be a completely untalented cretin, but as long as you have legal title to that money, you’ll reap the benefits. Effortlessly.
If, on the other hand, the excess money you don’t need to live on is only ten dollars, you will reap far fewer effortless financial benefits from it, no matter how smart and talented you are. That’s simply a financial fact of life.
Sometimes this is quite true, as has already been repeatedly acknowledged. Sometimes, however, it isn’t. Sometimes people acquire more wealth because they are politically influential, or because they break the law without getting caught, or simply, as noted above, because they already have lots of money that they don’t need to spend and it generates more money.
In other words, sometimes a capitalist system works meritocratically, and sometimes it doesn’t. I swear, I’m absolutely mystified as to why you’re contorting yourself into so many logical knots just to try to defend the completely untenable position that capitalism is perfectly meritocratic.
Being in really good shape, of course, isn’t something that your parents leave you in their wills. Sure, some health and strength advantages can be inherited genetically, just as money can be inherited legally. And to the extent that your advantages are inherited rather than earned, the system is not meritocratic. Similarly, to the extent that your advantages are the result of political power or influence or cheating rather than talent and achievement, the system is not meritocratic.
Now, we could have a reasonable and interesting debate about the relative levels of meritocracy vs. non-meritocracy in a capitalist system, and I’d be willing to listen to a well-argued case that the system is strongly meritocratic. But trying to argue that it’s solely meritocratic is patently ridiculous on the face of it.
I’m not sure it’s fundamentally intended to make sense. It’s basically a massive cloud of verbal squid ink distracting attention from Sam’s completely unsustainable claim that capitalism is a perfect meritocracy. Let’s get that absurdity cleared up first, and then, if we feel like it, we can tackle the question of income mobility.
Or if we prefer, we can return to the actual topic of the OP and debate distributism. I wish I had got more response here to my suggestions about the advantages of a minimal level of distributism, for environmental and security reasons as well as economic ones, but that was when we got all clogged up in Sam’s ink cloud.