&gt;&gt;Professional athletes typically spend 6 hrs a day, 6 days a week in the gym, because there are diminishing returns on 12 hours a day.<p>May be in the gym. But on the game as a whole? A lot more. Gym work isn&#x27;t all there is to sports. Just like just writing code isn&#x27;t all there is to programming. You need to learn new things, read other peoples code, review code, learn a new algorithms etc etc.<p>Similarly sports people have their stuff to do when they are not actually practicing.<p>&gt;&gt;Your crafted hypothetical and false analogy that American workers are athletes, all to support the argument that working harder is meritous, proves the &quot;hard working&quot; bias that I&#x27;m talking about.<p>People who do more work get ahead. This shouldn&#x27;t even be surprising to you. Because this is common sense. Students who study hard score more marks than students who while away their time with friends.<p>We could keep handing out free marks to non performing students, subtracting equivalent from performing students to make non performers feel good. But that doesn&#x27;t change anything about those students. Good students are going to do well in the coming year, with more advanced subjects. And the bad ones will do worse. When they are done with their education, merely marks being same will mean nothing at all.<p>Check back after a few years, what kind of jobs performing and non performing students are doing. It will be clear to you why that tiny equality exercise can never actually work.<p>&gt;&gt;Socialism is hinged upon making everyone get ahead. Meritous people still have opportunities to rise above.<p>Socialism gives incentives for people to stay in the back, because its assumed those getting ahead are supposed to make up for them.