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Tim O'Reilly's avatar

Or, as Upton Sinclair famously remarked, "It is difficult to get a man to understand a thing when his salary depends on him not understanding it."

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Alex Tolley's avatar

"’I’m consistently shocked in my undergrad Econ classes how inequality of opportunity almost never comes up. In a world where everyone is perfectly rational, it seems like pretty big deal!"

The answer is pretty obvious. The economist undergrads consider themselves elites. It reminds me of when I was in Grammar school and the English class was reading "Brave New World". Did we see it as a dystopia? No, because we saw ourselves as Alphas, at worst Betas,, and life was good for Alphas. We certainly were never going to consider ourselves as "Deltas or Epsilons". That is why we are blind to such conditions. This blindness carries us to a range of other arenas, the food sources we eat, the countries we exploit, etc.

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