Blaze Spinnaker <[email protected]> wrote: They should do an experiment. Randomly select 100 kids in high school and > tell them that they'll get paid a min income for the rest of their life. > . > Find out where they are in 4 years versus a control group >
This experiment has been done millions of times throughout history, and it is done thousands of times a year in any first-world country. The high school kids are called "trust fund babies." They are the children of the rich. We know what happens to them. Some screw up and live irresponsibly, like the character "Arthur" in the movie by that title. Others make ordinary contributions to society. Still others -- such as Thomas Jefferson -- take advantage of their wealth and position in society to accomplish great things. Middle class and poor people also diverge in this way. Some ruin their lives; some are normal; others do great things. It is difficult to say whether having money enhances the likelihood of success, or subverts it. I suppose it depends on the person. I know for a fact that some people who are free to do anything they like will spend a lifetime doing difficult, painstaking work, and even boring work because they feel it is worthwhile and of value to society. Work such editing cold fusion papers and organizing a web site devoted to them. I expert the contributions of such people make up for the lost productivity of several wastrels and lazy drones who waste their lives. In his masterpiece "Profiles of the Future" Arthur Clarke described the ultimate machine, the replicator, which can supply any material good at no effort or expense. In the chapter titled "Aladdin's Lamp" he described the effect it might have on society: "It is certainly fortunate that the replicator, if it can ever be built at all, lies far in the future, at the end of many social revolutions. Confronted by it, our own culture would collapse speedily into sybaritic hedonism, fol lowed immediately by the boredom of absolute satiety. Some cynics may doubt if any society of human beings could adjust itself to unlimited abundance and the lifting of the curse of Adam—a curse which may be a blessing in disguise. Yet in every age, a few men have known such freedom, and not all of them have been corrupted by it. Indeed, I would define a civilized man as one who can be happily occupied for a lifetime even if he has no need to work for a living. This means that the greatest problem of the future is civilizing the human race; but we know that already." - Jed
