Capitalism Isn’t To Blame for Your Lack of Success

once you start to succeed at something the probability that you will continue to succeed ever more rapidly increases so there's exp there's an exponential function with regards to success but there's also an exponential function with regards to failure so failure and and success aren't like this they're like this fail fail die succeed succeed succeed ridiculously like it's this weird curve and and it's funny because it doesn't just characterize economics it's it's a really fun it looks like a really fundamental economic law it was actually quite shocked when I first learned about this which was only about 15 years ago because I thought most things were normally distributed it turns out that that's not true what people produce creatively isn't normally distributed a small proportion of people produce most of what's of value it doesn't matter what it is and you know this it's like how many books does Stephen King sell it's like half the books right and then there's the next guy after Stephen King and no one even knows who he is and he sells like one-tenth as many books as Stephen King and then there's author number 50 and out of the thousands and thousands of offers and he's barely scraping by and then there's the bottom 99.9 percent and they can't make a living writing and that's how it is and it's the same with musicians and it's the same with with with athletes you know if you look at number of goals scored for example in hockey I'm a Canadian so I'll use that there's a small percentage of absolutely phenomenal hockey players even in something as amazing as the National Hockey League or any professional sports League you know you you have to be one hell of an athlete to make it in a professional sports league and still you get this tiny group of superstars who are way better at it than anyone else you know and and so there's this weird rule that as you get more getting even more gets easier and who knows why it is exactly partly it's practice but and it characterizes all sorts of situations like it characterizes the size of planets small number of planets have almost all the mass it characterizes Stars the same way it characterizes biomass in the in the in the Amazon jungle it it characterizes City size a small percentage of cities have almost all the people it's like what was that and then then you go back 10 000 years you look at a Paleolithic gravesite and you see what people are buried with and like there's one guy there's two guys there he's just covered with gold right there's the the gravesite is insanely rich and everyone else has like a bone and it's theirs and that's it you know and and so you analyze Paleolithic gravesites you see exactly the same Pareto distribution a small number of people are buried with all the wealth and almost everyone else has none and so it's this unbelievably deep proclivity of resources to distribute themselves unequally and you know this too because you play games like Monopoly right you've all played Monopoly what happens when you play Monopoly you all start out equal right exactly 100 equal and you all have an equal chance of winning because it's basically a game of chance not entirely because you can play stupidly but you know but but you can only play so intelligently because you're at the mercy of the dice and what happens inevitably is that some evil capitalist ends up with all the money and all the hotels and all the houses and just like takes you out and yet you play and you don't think oh my God you know there's something fundamentally unfair about that or maybe you play non-competitive Monopoly where after every round you redistribute the money so everyone thank you right so there's no fun in that and so and so the so the problem with Karl Marx as far as I'm concerned is that he was nowhere pessimistic enough it's like no you can't blame inequality on capitalism in fact capitalism is pretty good at ameliorating inequality like there's still plenty of inequality in capitalist societies make no mistake about that and you can make some claim although it's a tricky one that some indices of inequality have increased over the last 20 years it depends on how you measure it because it's complicated because you know even poorer people now have access to well let's say iPhones which have more computational power than the entire system that put the Apollo 11 on the moon which is you know for six hundred dollars which isn't a bad bargain um so so it's not that easy it's not that easy to do those economic calculations but one of the things you can say about capitalism and about private property and about the idea that people have a right to what they earn and a right to what they own is that it's pretty damn good at generating wealth and the wealth isn't equally distributed by any stretch of the imagination but a fair bit of it goes to the bottom and that's why we're seeing well a relative dearth of of tremendous deprivation and you might say well we want to squeeze out that last bit of inequality and it's like well maybe we do and maybe we don't it's not so obvious first of all because even if we did want to we don't know how and we certainly do know that if there are some ways that if we go about it then things really go to hell in a hand basket really fast and everyone's it ends up equal because they're all starving and dead you end up in a situation like Venezuela not that they're all starving and dead but the average Venezuelan lost 17 pounds in the last year and that wasn't from voluntary diet right and that's a very rich country and so we do know that there are ways of ameliorating inequality that just don't work and so it's a dangerous thing to mess with because we don't understand it now you know that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to understand it and that also doesn't mean that the left doesn't have a point you know if if your Society becomes too unequal and too many people stack up at the bottom and they don't have an opportunity to move forward that seems like it's bad for everyone and so we could we could agree on that and we could try to set up our hierarchies so that they're not too brutal for the people who end up at the bottom right that would be nice if we could be sensible and figure out how to do that but I think we're not doing that bad a job of figuring out how to do it we build infrastructure that everybody can use we have the universal education systems and so on and they're not perfect but they're they're far from um they're far from catastrophic and they're a hell of a lot better than they were a hundred years ago so we are making some progress on that I think the problem with the radical leftists is that they don't take the problem of inequality seriously enough they blame it on capitalism it's like sorry that's wrong it's a way deeper problem it wasn't capitalism that produced inequality of gravesite wealth distribution in Paleolithic Europe ten thousand years ago and it's not capitalism that makes some stars have all the mass right it's a different order of problem and so we have to be more sophisticated than economists were 150 years ago when we talk about inequality and when we talk about hierarchy we also have to be more sophisticated because we have to start to understand what it means for there to be a human hierarchy and and and the basis upon which hierarchies actually establish themselves if they're going to be playable iterable civilized productive sustainable um uh what what voluntary that's an important one what what are the characteristics of such things and I think that if we use a little bit of sense we can figure that out too and I like to use the example of plumbers because I actually happen to like plumbers uh partly because I don't like it when my basement is full of sewage and that's happened once or twice and oh you call a plumber and then that doesn't happen and then I'm I'm I'm pleased about that like I'm sure most of you are you know and plumbers have done an awful lot for the world and there's a big difference between a good plumber and a bad plumber I've had two bad plumbers and the first bad plumber was in Montreal and my tap was leaking a little bit and so he came in to fix it and I don't know what the hell he was doing but he was using a torch and he was burning something maybe taking some solder off some pipes underneath the sink but he lit the wall on fire which wasn't helpful because the wall wasn't on fire before he showed up and so and then and then he forgot to shut the water off at the main pipe when he took the tap apart and so then apart from the fact that my wall was charred my bathroom was completely covered with water and then he sort of panicked and he put the thing back together the tap back together with the with the with the washer which was now extraordinarily damaged and he shut it off and he turned he had figured out to turn the water off at the main valve by then and he turned it back on and he left and was like now the wall was on fire and the floor was covered with water and there was five times as much water running out of the tap this was not an improvement I joked with my wife that he was an anti-plumber you know like like like an anti-matter plumber and if he ever met a real plumber on the road and shook his hand they'd both disappear in a puff of light so so that was one plumber and you know and then another plumber we were we were redoing our house in Toronto and it was the day before the drywallers were supposed to come in and so we were working like mad because drywallers like they're fun to watch man they zip in they lift up their piece of drywall they zip it up with their screws and they're really fast at it and it's quite quite a skilled operation and but they're really fast and they don't muck about and so you have to be ready for the drywallers and so this guy had redone all our pipes PVC plastic pipe and you put this that together with a kind of solventy so you just put solvent on one end of the pipe the mail end and you put it into the female end with some solvent and they stick together and hopefully it it seals and he said my joints never leak and so we tested them we went up on this roof three floors up and filled the pipes up with water and his joints leaked it's like 32 joints leaked we had four inches of water in the basement and this was the day before the drywallers were supposed to show up and then also we found that he had put a lot of the pipes outside of the wall where the drywall was going to be which actually also constitutes a mistake right because I don't know about your house but but my house isn't the house where there's Plumbing sticking randomly out of the walls so we had to spend the whole night redoing all the joints and and cutting the pipes and you know putting the way they were supposed to and and so and so that's a bad plumber and so we're going to make the case that there are bad plumbers you know and and they don't know what they're doing and so so don't have any skill or maybe they're worse than not skilled they make things worse because that's worse than just not skilled and then you could say well maybe they lie to you when when they deal with you and maybe they overcharge you and maybe they don't treat their employees very well you know and maybe they're not good to live with at home either who the hell knows but they're not good plumbers and so we're going to say that just in the plumbing domain which is an important domain skill matters right that seems reasonable and then we might say the same thing about well what probably matters in law like if you ever need a lawyer I would recommend that you get a good one because if you get a bad one it's going to cost you a lot more than if you get a good one like like everything and you know they're good teachers and not so good teachers and they're a good massage therapists and there are good nurses and there are horrible nurses and they're great surgeons and then there are surgeons that will will definitely kill you you know and you you want to go to one that won't kill you that's that's the and you you'd assume difference in skill you know and whatever your occupation is you know bloody well maybe you're a short order cook at a diner and like some short order Cooks can whip up a pretty damn decent breakfast in three or four minutes and you're pretty bloody happy to sit there and eat it and other short order Cooks can produce some god-awful mess of of burnt eggs and wretched toast and rancid bacon and orange juice that's like had a crayon dipped in it for the color and with with a really ornery uh waitress and coffee that's been cooking since like 1953 and there's a that's a big difference in short order Cooks there's qualitative difference in skill okay and so one of the things we might point out is that part of the reason that we have hierarchies in the west is because people actually differ in skill not power skill some people are better at whatever it is they're supposed to be doing doing than other people and we think that what they're supposed to be doing is important so that it matters that they're better at it and we're what are we going to do we're going to deny that skill plays a role all the evidence suggests that it does like if you look at what predicts long-term success from a psychological perspective in a given occupation conscientiousness is the best personality predictor and conscientious people are dutiful and hardworking and they have integrity and they do what they say they're going to do and so that's the best predictor second best predictor and the best predictor is intelligence and so it looks like in a relatively complicated occupation if you're going to be successful in a western culture the best predictors of your success is whether your intelligence skilled and conscientious and that's pretty good like how else would you want it to be if you're going to set it up and it isn't power because agreeableness is another dimension you can be disagreeable men are more disagreeable than women by the way and if our society was fundamentally based on power then the most disagreeable people would be the most successful and they're not they're the ones that are most likely to be in prison so so the evidence just doesn't support that and then you know the other thing is is you don't have you imagine well our society is fundamentally an oppressive patriarchy and everything's based on power it's like okay so you need a plumber and so what you do is you go out in the street or maybe you don't maybe you cower at home and these like gangs of plumbers come to your house and they're armed to the damn teeth with their pipes and they say look I don't know whether you need like some Plumbing work done or not but maybe we'll come in here and break a few things so that so that you do need it but even if we're not going to do that it's like we're the plumbers that are going to take you out unless you call us and so the next time the toilet overflows man here's the number and you better put it on your fridge or there's going to be hell to pay or you know the same is the case of like gang affiliated massage therapists exactly the same thing tattooed to the hilt right arm to the teeth and and roaming the streets making bloody sure that if you have a stiffness fact that the most powerful massage therapist is the one that you're going to call first you know it's complete bloody rubbish

Channel: Jordan B Peterson Clips

Views: 152,590

Keywords: psychology, philosophy, Jordan B. Peterson, Jordan Peterson, JB Peterson, jordanbpeterson, jordanpeterson, personality, understandmyself, selfauthoring, neuropsychology, jordan peterson clips, jp peterson clips, jp clips, jordan peterson podcast clips, jordan peterson live, jordan peterson livestream, jordan peterson shorts, jordan peterson tiktoks, jordan peterson motivational clips

Id: PPVHFyd7nGo

Length: 15min 50sec (950 seconds)

Published: Mon May 22 2023