Unearned advantage is like playing the same game on a lower difficulty setting: the game is still hard and every encounter is slightly easier.
Scalzi's device was rhetorical and deliberate: he wrote that he could reach an audience through a gaming metaphor that would not hear the same argument in academic language. The analogy carries a specific claim, which is that the advantage is cumulative and per-encounter rather than decisive in any one, and that is the part that does the work.
In practice
- An advantage that changes nothing about any single interaction can still change the distribution of a career.
- A person who worked hard and had an easier setting has done both, which the analogy is constructed to permit.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation offered is that unearned advantage acts on every encounter slightly rather than on any one decisively, which is why it is invisible to the person who has it and cumulative in its effects.
- In its favour
- As an analogy it does the work intended, and the underlying claim about small repeated advantages accumulating is supported by research on cumulative advantage.
- Against it
- It is an analogy rather than a claim, published on a blog rather than in a reviewed literature, and it cannot say how large the effect is in any particular setting, which is where the argument it entered actually turns.
- Standing
- Published on a blog rather than in a reviewed literature, and spread by linking. An analogy rather than a claim, offered to make a contested argument legible to an audience that rejected its usual vocabulary. Its accuracy as a model of advantage is disputed in both directions.
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- Proverbs that recur across cultures