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My point here is that no one operates in a vacuum. We are all part of a wider society and that society determines what you are or are not allowed to do and how well you can do.

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I'm not going to address all your little points because we're going to go around and around and around, disagreeing.

But your quote above cuts to the chase. You are a pessimist, I'm an optimist. My belief is that we are all part of a wider society and that society determines to a small degree what you are or are not allowed to do and how well you can do, but you as an individual have the ability to better your life substantially if you choose to put forth enough effort.

Are there people who have incredibly hard situations, who would have a extraordinarily tough road ahead to ever get themselves better off? Yes. But I firmly believe, and I will never be convinced otherwise, that most people spend their lives making excuses and blaming society for their problems.

I worked 20-40 hours per week while getting my college degree at a difficult school. I started a career but had an a-hole boss and no training, but instead of giving up I taught myself AND got a 2nd job to supplement the money that wasn't coming in from my first job. When that job wasn't working out, I moved away to where I had no friends, no family, no connections whatsoever, and started anew. I lost $$ in a condo deal when the real estate crash hit in the late 1980s. When my career and a different boss started getting me too stressed out and depressed a few years ago, I trained myself and took classes in a COMPLETELY different industry. I left that career, started my new business as my own boss, but soon discovered I wasn't good enough and no one wanted my services. So I trained more, and worked a 2nd job. And STILL I was losing a lot of my savings. So I worked harder and got smarter. Now, finally I am stable again and doing well.

I didn't blame "society" for my first crappy boss. I didn't blame "society" because my college bills were high. I didn't blame "society" when I felt I had no choice but to move away. I didn't blame "society" when I lost a ton of real estate value. I didn't blame "society" when my career was falling apart and I was near a nervous breakdown. I didn't blame "society" when no one wanted what I was selling and I was losing money starting anew...

...I got off my ass and took control of my own life.

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I'm glad things are going well for you, but I'm afraid I don't agree with your theory. That's how the world should be, I certainly agree with that, but the world is a very very unfair place for many people. It's full of rich lazy people with great lives who don't deserve it, and honest hard-working people who never seem to get a break. I'm one of the latter. My life motto is "Good guys finish last". I know it's a cliche, and I don't like to generalise because it's not always true, but it is true far too often

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I guess we'll agree to disagree. I bolded one statement of yours above for a reason. Yes, there are hard-working people who don't make enough money. But I strongly feel that every one of those people can improve their situation:

1. Work a 2nd job, or
2. Spend your off time looking for another, better job. There are better jobs everywhere, every day. I always hear the excuse "I looked for another job, but I couldn't find anything" or "I went on those two interviews and I got turned down. I'll never get a job." Bullcrap.

You don't look for a PERFECT job, call 10 places, and then quit looking. You don't get interviews at 2 places and quit looking. You call 200 places, and you get 25 interviews, even if it takes you a year to get that done. YOU DON'T GIVE UP!

If you are someone saddled with illness or another severe personal circumstance, yes, I agree that life seems unfair and you have an excuse. But if a person is healthy, normal, with average intelligence, he/she has ZERO excuse for not getting a better financial position. There IS a better job out there for that person, but they haven't truly committed to getting it. Work harder, work smarter, get better trained and educated, and don't give up. The American (Western Civilization?) Dream IS real. How hard are you willing to work for it?

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In that case, I’ll play the Angel’s Advocate

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I guess we'll agree to disagree. I bolded one statement of yours above for a reason. Yes, there are hard-working people who don't make enough money. But I strongly feel that every one of those people can improve their situation:

1. Work a 2nd job, or

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and have no time to enjoy or do anything useful with the money.

So? I don’t understand how this is some sort of excuse for not doing what is necessary to better one’s condition, or to adequately provide for oneself or even ones family. I had parents who NEVER took a vacation, or out to a fancy restaurant to eat, or to a theatre, or any other the things we take for granted today – who worked long and hard hours to raise a large family and to provide for them as best they could. They never complained, never moaned “woe is me” or blamed society or the government. I guess I just come from a different generation, a different point of view on these things.

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2. Spend your off time looking for another, better job. There are better jobs everywhere, every day. I always hear the excuse "I looked for another job, but I couldn't find anything" or "I went on those two interviews and I got turned down. I'll never get a job." Bullcrap.

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Assuming you can find anyone who is willing to interview you outside of business hours so you don't get fired from your current job just for taking a few hours off to look for another job.

If you examine these honestly, you’ll find that they are all just excuses. In each instance you surrender some little part of control over your own life – you give responsibility for how well you do or do not do to someone else, now it’s up to someone other than you to look out for your best interests, your goals.

Why would a sane person want to do this? Why would anyone want to cede to another that upon which his ultimate success depends? This is the only reason I make an exception for those unfortunate enough to have been born mentally impaired. There can be no personal responsibility for those unable to even grasp the concept – that is what makes their lives so tragic. They are forever dependent on others to do the right thing for them. So I just think, why would anyone put themselves into that same position willingly? But when you begin to blame the boss, the man, the system for holding you back or holding you down, this is exactly what you’re doing – you move yourself inexorably toward the very same condition as the mentally disabled. This cannot be a good thing.

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You don't look for a PERFECT job, call 10 places, and then quit looking. You don't get interviews at 2 places and quit looking. You call 200 places, and you get 25 interviews, even if it takes you a year to get that done. YOU DON'T GIVE UP!

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If you are someone saddled with illness or another severe personal circumstance, yes, I agree that life seems unfair

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and you have an excuse. But if a person is healthy, normal, with average intelligence, he/she has ZERO excuse for not getting a better financial position. There IS a better job out there for that person, but they haven't truly committed to getting it.

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Work harder, work smarter, get better trained and educated, and don't give up. The American (Western Civilization?) Dream IS real. How hard are you willing to work for it? Not everyone has the option to work harder or work smarter or get training or education.

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I understand what you are saying and you are one of the lucky ones (yes, LUCKY!) who could do that. But not everyone has the necessary resources to be able to do so or the inate capability to.

In a lot of ways I think this illustrates why there are differences in perception about economic matters. The economists are right in that increased trade and more automation improves things for the society as a whole. But not everyone always benefits. People do lose their jobs and some, for whatever reasons, are not able to get new ones. Maybe they just are not capable of retraining. Maybe they are just not willing or able to move to India or Taiwan to get a new factory job, maybe no new employer will hire them or training program educate them because they are over 40. There are all kinds of reasons why the theory doesn't match the reality in this area.

The economists focus on large populations and averages in those populations. The economic critics (for lack of a better term) focus on individuals. That's part of why I was interested in discussion, to understand both sides better.

And it is this focus on individuals that is their downfall. You can ALWAYS find someone who has not benefited from free market decisions (or any type of market decision, free or not) – someone will always be negatively impacted. But that impact is not necessarily, or even often, permanent in a free market. The unemployed find new jobs (maybe not as good or as remunerative) if they really want to. And even for the hardest hit, well... every day, some person who was previously homeless, down and out has a change of heart – finds some reason to have hope and begins to apply himself and with a little charitable help (private charitable help), lifts himself up out of the muck and goes forward to become a productive member of society.

This occurs day in day out, without government intervention – the private sector in America is one of the most generous in the world. To this add countless local churches and religious organizations that take it upon themselves to help the needy.

All I’m saying here, I guess, is that I prefer to depend on myself, not someone else and certainly not the government. Yep, the world ain’t fair. Human nature has a dark side and there will always be those among us who will not do the right thing. And no amount of government intervention will ever be able to eradicate these basic truths. Placing responsibility in the hands of anyone but you is a sure route to misery and disappointment – period.

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While it is true, Dbl, that some individuals have overcome great hardships and gone on to do some amazing things, they are the exceptions. That's why they get so much publicity. Not all examples can be followed by even the majority, let alone everyone.

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As for getting by without outside assistance, how many of you went to college and paid for it on your own at the time? No tuition paid by parents, no student loans, you paid for every penny with money you earned on your own. (Now, if you wanted to really do it without outside assistance, you should be self-taught! After all, even an unpaid teacher is a form of outside assistance.)

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My point here is that no one operates in a vacuum. We are all part of a wider society and that society determines what you are or are not allowed to do and how well you can do.

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Well of course we don’t operate in a vacuum. I don’t think anyone here believes that. But if you believe that society at large has complete control over what you can or cannot do, or what you can or cannot achieve – then you are in for the longest wait of your life for success to come knocking on your door.

Fortunately, in America, society only controls those who allow it to. We are a nation of laws. The law determines what we can and cannot do within the confines of our Constitution (for the most part for now). The law does NOT determine how well we can or cannot do. That’s the great thing about this country.

We have a saying here in America – it’s a free country, you don’t like it, you can always leave. Now, while very few take that advice here, countless millions have left their countries (free or not) to seek out opportunity in another land. Usually these turn out to be Western democracies. There’s a reason for that

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The Monkey Economist
Laurie Santos, 32; Yale University

She's found that primates also fall prey to what were long thought to be uniquely human foibles

One after another, the tiny monkey yearlings scramble up a narrow tree trunk, swing dramatically over a little pond, and drop, shrieking, 15 feet into the muddy water below. The monkeys are the youngest members of a population of 800 rhesus macaques that inhabit Cayo Santiago, a small island off Puerto Rico, and their boyish cannonball competition provides an entertaining show from the vantage of the "lunch cage"—a picnic table and storage space enclosed by a chain-link fence—where Laurie Santos and a handful of her Yale students are slathering on sunscreen and preparing for the day's experiments.

Santos has been studying the monkeys on Cayo Santiago since 1993, when she was a freshman at Harvard University working under evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser. Now an associate professor at Yale and the head of the university's four-year-old monkey lab, Santos oversees students carrying out her own carefully designed experiments developed to measure the animals' cognitive abilities—with the goal of comparing the primates' thinking with our own.

Chief among Santos's monkey trials are deceptively simple tests that examine the animals for evidence of "theory of mind," the idea that an individual can infer the beliefs or perceptions of others. The concept has been a source of controversy in cognitive science for decades, with many maintaining that theory of mind is unique to humans, an essential quality that separates us from all other species.

Santos locks the lunch cage behind her and, trailed by two ponytailed undergrads outfitted identically in blue sweats, white T-shirts and huge sunglasses, crosses the island to a densely wooded hill where she kneels in front of a solitary male rhesus. She snaps her fingers to capture the monkey's attention and then steps out of its view and recites a series of instructions to the students, each of whom holds out a single grape on an identical paper plate. Both students place their plates on the ground in front of them. At Santos's command, one of the girls turns around, her back to the treat. The monkey soon snatches the grape from the unwatched plate, an outcome that Santos has recorded in 90 percent of the more than 100 times that she's run this trial. The experiment is straightforward but, like others she's designed, has been heralded in psychology circles as elegant and theoretically rich. Her work reveals powerful evidence that the monkeys are able to contemplate the thoughts of others—that is, they think like us.

Back in Connecticut, Santos is making similarly novel discoveries in the field of primate economics. Together with colleagues in Yale's neuroscience department and School of Management, Santos runs experiments that test fundamental economic principles in laboratory capuchin monkeys. Her groundbreaking approach: investigating whether the monkeys commit the same flaws in reasoning as humans do. "For the most part, people who work with animals look at how they do or do not replicate the smart aspects of human cognition," she explains. "Nobody had thought about looking at the dumb part—our errors and biases. Examining whether primates make the same stupid mistakes we do can actually tell us more than some of the successes."

In fact, Santos's capuchins have consistently demonstrated economic errors in decision-making identical to our own, including loss aversion (overvaluing what is already yours) and anchoring bias (putting too much value on early pieces of information). Trained to use tokens as a form of money, the capuchins in one telling experiment consistently preferred a scenario in which they were promised one apple piece but half the time were given two, over a scenario in which they were promised two and half the time were given only one. In both scenarios, the monkeys paid the same for their snack and had the exact same odds of ending up with one apple piece or two; classic economic theory would predict that the animals would show no preference for one choice over the other. Yet they greatly preferred the scenario in which they didn't perceive a loss, the exact behavior recorded in numerous human studies. What that suggests to cognitive scientists such as Santos, as well as to her economist colleagues, is that some of the errors that make the average citizen less than the perfect Homo economicusare probably evolved traits, hardwired into the brain. "It makes you think about human behavior from an evolutionary perspective," Santos says. "The idea that some of our irrationality might be evolved: That's philosophically cool."—Kalee Thompson

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