[ExI] Computer simulations show wealthy people are not better just luckier

[Tara Maya]

The interpretation that this disproves meritocracy is simply ideological marxist nonsense. All it means is that a small advantage has disproportionate gains. Take a gazelle which is only a little bit faster shouldn’t have all the offspring than gazelle which is a bit slower (and eaten by the lion before it can reproduce). To be sure, luck may have been involved, but also speed, or else gazelles would run no faster than turtles.

Marxists want equality of outcome, which is not only not how meritocracies actually work, it’s not how meritocracies are supposed to work.

Tara


> 
> But there is a problem with this idea: while wealth distribution follows a
> power law, the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal
> distribution that is symmetric about an average value. For example,
> intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is
> 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000.