Science Quote by Esther Dyson

Dyson is doing something sly here: she grants the comforting civics-class premise of capitalism while simultaneously puncturing it. “In the sense” is a hedge that acts like a scalpel. It concedes that, yes, producers “get rewarded” - but only “statistically,” at the population level, where averages can look like justice even when individual lives feel like roulette. That single word drags the reader from moral desert to probability, from “fair” to “often enough.”

The pivot - “You don't get rewarded precisely for your effort” - strips the meritocracy story down to its inconvenient mechanics. Markets don’t pay for sweat; they pay for leverage, timing, information, social capital, and whatever the current system can measure and monetize. Effort becomes a sentimental metric, not an economic one. Dyson’s scientist brain is showing: she’s talking about distributions, not anecdotes, and she’s refusing to confuse correlation with moral order.

Then she lands the comparative punch: “in Russia you got rewarded for being alive.” It’s not nostalgia for socialism so much as a clinical description of its baseline promise: survival as entitlement. The deadpan add-on - “but not very well rewarded” - is where the critique bites. Guaranteed security can flatten aspiration; universal provisioning can become universal mediocrity, a reward so small it’s barely distinguishable from maintenance.

Contextually, this reads like post-Cold War tech-optimist realism: a defense of capitalist dynamism without the fairy tale. Dyson isn’t selling a system as righteous; she’s choosing which set of distortions she finds more tolerable, and insisting we name them plainly.