Wonder.....does ambition increase inequality

Philosophy & Theology
1

I’ve been hypothesizing this for a long time. Interestingly, I can’t find anybody talking about it on the internet or in academia.

Let me first define ambition, because there’s disagreement there. Some people say ambition is merely wanting to be great. Even a pipe dream is an ambition. This is a valid definition, but I want to define it a little more strongly. I think you need to be completely committed to working quite hard to ensure your greatness to be considered ambitious. Everyone wants to be a superhero, that’s trivial, and to say that this is “ambition” is to relegate the word to meaninglessness.

Between East (plus Judaism) and West, we have polar opposite views of ambition. One might consider whether there is a hidden rationalization for being pro or against ambition.

The West, inspired by Christianity, tends to dislike ambition, because the New Testament forbids it, and because Christianity generally dislikes all kinds of wealth and pride.

The East, inspired by traditional Chinese wisdom, treats ambition as being nearly morally obligatory. The traditional Chinese belief is that happiness comes from success invariably, and it only comes from success.

Now, the argument that ambition leads to burnout is obvious. But then again, people can learn to cope with long work hours.

But what if ambition leads to greater inequality? The argument is difficult enough that I can’t prove it without becoming an academic and crunching data. But conceptually, here’s how it works.

The most successful/functional/capable people in the world can make money better than the opposites. So, if everybody grinds, let’s assign some dummy numbers here: the 99th percentile people grow their wealth at 8% a year, let’s say, while the 20th percentile people grow it at 2% a year. And, of course, the whole society is a spectrum along these lines, so this just becomes a calculus problem.

To save from the calculus, let’s just split society’s wealth in half - one half to the 8% growers, and the other to the 2% growers. After 50 years, the 8% growers have about 47 times as much money as when they started. The 2% growers have about 2.7 times as much. Which means, that, after 50 years, the 8% growers have about 94% of the wealth of the entire society’s wealth.

The math is quite obvious. The more ambitious people are, and the more the ambitious people try hard to make a lot of money, the more inequality we will get over time, and the more terrible that inequality will be.

One way to stop this is for people to simply not try particularly hard to grow their wealth. This is how people behave in most of Europe. You get a rather equal society.

In Asia, the least ambitious country is obviously Japan. That’s why, almost immediately after Tokyo University opened admissions to more international students, 10% of their student body became Chinese and the Chinese students started to academically dominate. And, as it turns out, Japan is much more equal than China.

China and India are ridiculously unequal, with China also having very little charity, and they also have large numbers of highly ambitious people. I don’t know if this is a coincidence; I think it is not.

Perhaps, the anti-ambition, anti-selfishness aspects of the New Testament were created by those people 2000 years ago because they foresaw the growth of inequality, with the accompanying drop in quality of life for the lower half of society.

I don’t think that the typically-rural alt-right really fully understands how ambitious Asian and Jewish people are. It is extremely common for these folks to have one or more “side hustles” in addition to their main work. They basically push themselves to make money constantly. Their friends are doing this as well, so there is an aspect of “keeping up” there, as well. If you just do your job and then go home and chill, you look lazy.

2

I want to say something related here.

The mainstream American culture obviously lionizes ambition. I doubt that this came from gentiles. I’m pretty sure we would be exactly like Canada and Australia if we ran our own society.

I’d bet that this “American Dream” stuff was mostly pushed by Jews. The reason why, is probably that they knew that their ambition was always disliked by the gentile white people they lived around (“greedy” stereotype) and they wanted the USA to be a fresh, new society that was safe for them.

In addition, they were the only immigrant group that was immigrating with high hopes to strike it rich. During these late 1800’s, a lot of Jews from Eastern Europe were going not only to the USA, but also to Western Europe in hopes of riches. The USA let more of them immigrate. They went where they were allowed. They wrote about how excited they were that it was easy to make money in the USA, saying “the streets are paved with gold.”

The Irish and Italians, on the other hand, immigrated because they were at the end of their rope. Southern Italy had a major economic collapse following the Italian Civil War and the rebuilding of S Italy has been a loooonnnggg and slow process, which still did not really succeed. As for Ireland, we all know of the potato famine. They came to the USA merely to survive, not to get rich. They were usually poor rural people who had no skills, and so they ended up working in factories and construction in NYC. They had no “American Dream.” The idea made no sense to them. For them, the open immigration policy was an act of [the host society’s] charity.

So the irony here is that the Jewish media promotes a rather universal message of moral goodness for the behaviors which people now call “hustle” and “grind,” which used to be called ambition or even greed, while, simultaneously, Jews pretend to be leftists who maybe want equality. Same could be said of many Democrat voters in NY and California.

But the truth of Jewish people is that 90% of them are highly ambitious people. The true leftists among them are actually more rare than the alt-right thinks.

Maybe, if you want equality so much, slow down a bit? Speculating on real estate probably is driving those prices higher. Buying property and renting it out is probably preventing people from building wealth by owning their own homes, and probably is leaving them poorer. Aggressively negotiating with your company for higher pay is probably causing your company to increase the cost of its products, which disproportionately impacts the poor folk who aren’t getting the same kinds of salary increases that you are getting. Making your business profitable might outcompete other businesses, and might lead you to raise prices, which might leave others poorer.

Perhaps the political action is a big fat lie, to hide the truth: that their mindset is not a caring, leftist one, but it is a Bronze Age Mindset? I think that Curtis Yarvin would agree with that thesis! And, he at least admits and/or promotes the virtue of BAM.

3

I feel like this is not a philosophical question, but an economic one and your definition is close to the economic idea of “rationality” or perhaps “efficiency” (a rational firm being one which is motivated to decrease their transaction costs and engages in actions to do so).

I don’t know about this one. How did the West achieve scientific, cultural, and economic supremacy over the world without being ambitious? I agree that pride/greed/ambition are not Christian virtues, but they still manifest plenty in Christian culture. While it’s a a bit outdated maybe you could look into Max Weber’s - The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It touches on ambition/Christianity but i’m sure a summary would be fine.

inb4 your second post, i’ll address it. Back to initial question:

So ambition, wanting to be great and working hard to ensure your greatness. This sounds to me like a firm reducing its transaction costs and acquiring market share.

Ambition as you have defined it seems synonymous with competition in the economic sense of the term, and it is competition which incentivizes the creation of these efficiencies which allow certain firms to charge lower prices than their competitors. It is when firms succeed at this and oppress their competitors that inequality grows. This is the issue with things such as “monopolists” or “monopolies”

Once people have wealth it self perpetuates, see Pikkety - Capital in the 21st Century for a thorough description of that issue.

If you want an overview of how firms behave (as rational, incentive driven, opportunistic and ambitious people) I recommend something like R.H. Coase - Nature of the Firm or a hornbook on something like Herbert Hovenkamp’s - Antitrust. The second is at least a good summary of that sort of so-called rational economic behavior (game theory). The first is foundational but dense if you’re unfamiliar with that sort of writing.

But the answer is that YES ambition as you have defined it, or competition always leads to inequality.
Market forces, if left alone, always tend towards monopoly. This is because each firm is economically rational (ambitious) and eventually the largest will gain some advantage which enables them to eat all the smallest. Eating all the competitors decreases transaction costs for the monopolist.

4

I think there’s a few answers. The most important is that most innovative people were not really Christian. The enlightenment era was the beginning of the elite rejecting Christianity in a fundamentalist way. By the mid-1800’s, the elite was quite thoroughly not Christian. And it was the children of the elite who mostly became the leaders and highly-educated people back in those times; there was less socioeconomic mobility.

Second Idea: regarding genuine Christian intellectualism, especially before the enlightenment. To some extent, there were early Christian intellectuals in the old Universities even in the time when fundamentalist Christianity was normal, since there were philosophical disagreements that needed to be ironed-out. And those disagreements led to a bit of science. So in this sense, I’d say that the flaws of Christianity led to intellectualization. But this stuff would not go far on its own.

Lastly, the Protestant work ethic. One argument here is that some Protestants were going against fundamentalist Christianity. This has been the story in Northern Europe for a century or more. But others were going the opposite direction, towards more serious Christianity. Most of those folks were not ambitious per se but were hard-working, due to the Bible’s demands that people work and not be idle or lazy. So, for example, a person who labors in the fields for 14 hours is not exactly advancing in the world or outcompeting anybody, but they are working hard. And to some extent, a culture that works more will ultimately accumulate a bit more wealth than a culture that is equally ambitious but works less. For example, one reason the USA has more wealth than Europe is just that Americans work more.

I do not really buy the Max Weber idea; he seems to frustrated with Capitalism in itself. These anti-capitalist folks don’t inspire confidence in me. The idea that Calvinists see wealth as a sign of salvation is something that I have direct experience throughout my life (knowing quite a few Presbyterian people) showing to be false. The idea that pursuing profit in itself is bogus to Weber is quite alarming and humorous! This is common sense to most people; one does not need to be very ambitious to want to pursue profits at all; but this does show just how deeply un-ambitious and meek was Weber and his culture! One could go a step further and go to Scotland and investigate Scottish history to see if they are highly-ambitious and if this is really their worldview, since they were Presbyterian for a very long time. Were the Scots obsessed with getting rich to prove their salvation? I don’t believe so. I believe they were, for some brief period, a bit more ambitious than others in the Anglosphere (they had a reputation of good schools, and then that flipped and their reputation now is for having poor schools and a dysfunctional healthcare system), but not by much. That’s just not what we observe with their culture.

But an overworked workhorse culture will lose to the culture that innovates, works together to do smart economic competition with outgroups, and dedicates their energies to specifically lucrative endeavors. In other words, the Protestant culture is still a far cry from a seriously ambitious culture.