I think we try to jam capitalism into being about virtue because humans are pattern matching, like morality plays, and a more organic idea that you can do all the right things and lose big/win big entirely thanks to luck is terrifyingly close to acknowledging you yourself are a few steps from death.

Failing to acknowledge that a lot of it’s luck - that 35% or so at most is smarts, creativity and hard work - is what keeps us from having a better safety net in place for luck running out.

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I actually differ from a lot of Mastodonians in that I think capitalism has utility; but it’s still a crap shoot, and I think you can accept something has a huge component of luck without having to assign that luck a moral virtue (I might inherit diabetes, I grew up in the southeast pre-internet and I have green eyes, and all these kinda sorta happened without any reflection on my personal worth).

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