18 People Answer The Question, ‘What Is The Most Unfair Advantage A Person Can Have?’

14. John David Ward

Being born with a good personality. Specifically, having at least two of following three things:

1. High intelligence
2. Low time preference
3. Extroversion

High intelligence is associated with all kinds of positive outcomes, and not just the obvious ones like the ability to perform high-skilled jobs, but more subtle things like . This is all the more remarkable considering the best way we have of measuring intelligence is through intelligence tests, which are somewhat noisy. How noisy? It doesn’t really matter. Either intelligence tests are relatively accurate and the correlation between intelligence and life outcomes are strong, or intelligence tests are inaccurate, and the true association is even stronger, since it shows up even through observer error.

Low time preference manifests in the ability to defer gratification. It’s the tendency to invest for the future than consume in the present. Throughout history, people with high time preference have been seen by others as having an almost supernatural ability to gain wealth, and this has also lead to resentment and accusations of being selfish or miserly or hoarding wealth. In fact, Edward Banfield in his book The Unheavenly City defined social class in terms of time orientation.

Extroversion matters more than people admit. It’s trendy to say that introversion is not any sort of handicap, and the Internet is full of introvert apologetics to that effect. Obviously, the superiority of extroverts cannot be absolute or unconditional, but at the same time, it must be admitted that difficulty interacting with people without feeling drained could be a huge disadvantage. Some people say that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, but this gets it backwards. Some people always seem to know the right people, because they’re good at establishing connections in general, not because they just happen to know the right people. The better prepared you are, the luckier you are.

Someone who goes out, meets new people, and establishes a good rapport two hours a day obviously has an advantage over someone who only does that two hours a week or two hours a month. Of course, if society is radically unequal so the pool of powerful people is relatively small (either on a larger scale or on a smaller scale, as within a family with a single powerful patriarch), and especially when the average personality of powerful people tends towards the introverted for some reason, the advantages of extroversion disappear, because under those conditions quality of relationships is more important than the quantity.

Having at least two of these qualities is unfair enough, but what’s even more unfair is that some people actually have all three of these things. It’s an aspect of their personality, highly heritable, and apparently more or less frozen from from some point in early childhood onward.

15. Kyle Pennell

Ability to resist temptation. (Delayed gratification.)