Regarding the Uneven Application of Structural Incentives

A structural incentive is anything X which, when utilized by an individual or a collectivity (like corporations) rewards certain choices Y. A common rhetorical talking point is that if one person, like a son of a wealthy family, utilizes a structural incentive and another person, like the son of a laboring family, does not, then the utilizer is virtuous and the other complacent or lazy. While both may have access to the same incentives, those incentives are unevenly applied due to two core factors: education and energy.

It should come as no surprise that those who know the existence of incentives are inherently more willing to utilize them. This itself is the driving cause of unevenly applied incentives. The wealthy son is more likely to come from a family who understands the FAFSA, knows the pathways to college, utilizes 1031 exchanges, and operates with the mentality of borrowing money to make money through business ventures. This education is not just through elite schooling, but through his or her interactions with classmates and family members. The wealthy son picks up understanding of the pathways to success through dinner table conversations, classmates discussing their own family's history, and observation of their parents. Awareness precedes application.

To put it simply, those who are better educated, formally or otherwise, are more likely to have a blueprint for personally gaining through incentives.

Contrast this with a young man whose parents work at Amazon factories. The job is grueling work that afflicts the laborer with the breaking down of the body: aching feet, persistent exhaustion, the lingering pains even during days of rest. They are marked even beyond work. The primary concern of these people is not learning through self-education how to navigate bureaucratic systems or complicated tax codes that would benefit them. One thought remains on their minds: survival, not flourishing. The parents themselves must be educated on the existence of incentives to teach their son how to utilize them. To expect this is to expect a crushed man to perform a miracle.

Those who argue that the laborer's son fails through laziness have never felt the strikings of a father that reorientates his brain from flourishing to survival, the hunger pains that colonize the mind, or the shame that forever others him for not pursuing "the path of a real man."

However it is true that both the wealthy son and the laborer's son do hold the same agency to utilize incentives. Especially given the rise of access to information through the internet, hypothetically the laborer's son could learn to utilize these incentives. I personally come from a poor background, but through relentless self-education I was able to attend college for free, to plan for a healthy financial future, and to become a data engineer at 19. My capacity to achieve the above was a miracle that came at great cost, and to apply the expectation of a miracle across all is dehumanizing through the hypothetical abstraction of equivalent agency.

Attempts at holistic reviews of college candidates is an example of a catastrophic failure to capture the nuanced humanity of the disadvantaged applicants. Students who come from a stable and wealthy background are more likely to be admitted and afforded the opportunity of personal advancement through higher test scores and legacy admissions. Even admissions departments who attempt to see the humanity of the laborer's son fails because the reduction of a life of poverty and anguish can never be truly seen through an impersonal document.

Systems like this are structurally incapable of humanity.