Screw Up In High School, If You Are Rich

Matt Bruenig

First, notice the collectivist nature of McCardle’s point. We should encourage kids to take failure-prone risks because a handful of them will pan out and that will be good for society as a whole. Why should individuals take on risks that have high chances of failure for the benefit of society as a whole when the individuals are the ones that will suffer the consequences of the failure? If taking failure-prone risks is, in aggregate, a social good, then maybe society should bear some of the costs of those who fail by, for instance, making sure that they do not wind up destitute, hungry, without health care, and so on.