You Don’t Deserve Credit for Anything

Pretty relevant thoughts to many r/neoliberal darlings (friends and foes).

The core move: take any trait we use to sort people into "winners" and "losers" in a market economy and trace it back. Every single one bottoms out in luck.

"Your IQ, your height, your capacity for sustained concentration, the grit and work ethic that self-help books treat as the ultimate personal achievement: none of it was yours to begin with. The kid who sits still in class and does her homework has a prefrontal cortex that developed on schedule, probably because she had adequate nutrition, low household stress, and parents who read to her. The kid who can't sit still didn't choose his ADHD. The person who works eighty-hour weeks may have been luckier in temperament, executive function, and motivational wiring than the person who can't get off the couch. We hand people the hardware, then congratulate or condemn them for the software it runs."

This sub loves equality of opportunity, but the argument here is that equality of opportunity doesn't do what we think it does, because the ability to seize opportunity is itself distributed by the genetic and developmental lottery. You can remove every structural barrier, build the most frictionless meritocracy imaginable, and the kid with the lucky neurochemistry and the stable home still walks away with far more. Not because they worked harder in any deep sense, but because they were luckier in their capacity to work hard.

The piece also has a line from Adam Smith that is worth wrestling with:

"Adam Smith noticed this two and a half centuries ago, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He observed that we judge outcomes more harshly than intentions, even when we know we shouldn't, and he attributed it to an 'irregularity of sentiments' that every human shares."

Even the patron saint of markets noticed that our moral intuitions about who deserves what are systematically distorted.

So here's my question: if desert is philosophically incoherent, and it's (basically) luck all the way down, what's actually justifying the current distribution of market outcomes? I think there is a good answer, and it's the one this sub usually gives: incentives, efficiency, information aggregation, the fact that markets produce enormous surplus even if nobody "deserves" their slice. But that's a purely consequentialist argument for markets. It's not "you earned it, you deserve it." It's "this system produces the best outcomes for everyone even though the allocation is morally arbitrary."

And once we've made that concession, the case for significantly more redistribution gets a lot harder to resist. If the justification for markets is consequentialist, then the case against redistribution has to be consequentialist too, not "taxation is theft from people who earned it." Rawls was essentially making this argument in 1971 with the veil of ignorance. The piece goes further than Rawls and argues the problem might be even worse than he thought.