The top tiers of actors have the money to purchase additional coaching, can attend more auditions because they aren't holding down another job, and can generally devote more of their life to the craft.
I'm sorry but I don't think this is true or a valid argument. If I may rephrase your assertion: are rich programmers better programmers because they have more resources to attend job interviews and can program more often? Whatever your craft may be, time (or money; same thing), doesn't necessarily mean anything about level of skill. Can it be a contributing factor? Perhaps, but there are plenty of examples on both sides of the coin to say one way or the other.
Take two actors competing for the same part in an audition for an independent role. They are nearly equal down to a flip of a coin, but one just happens to catch the director's eye a hair more that day.
It sounds, to me, like you're confusing luck for someone making a decision. Your assumption, that a director makes decisions on how the actor's hair looks that day, is extremely flawed. The truth is: there aren't 300 actors each coming in and doing everything the exact same, looking the exact same, and performing the exact same. Hell, there aren't even 2. Each one is an entire collection of skills, experience, head shots, and each one will deliver a different performance.
Professional and successful directors are, for the most part, incredibly skilled; masters of observation with uncanny abilities to find the right person for their vision.
Again, allow me to make the programmer analogy: if two programmers came in and wrote the exact same code, in the exact same amount of time, and produced the same output, on the same problem, where does that leave the decision? In the hands of the many other possibilities that the person hiring will take into consideration. Luck? No, it's someone making a decision.
Could that decision be based on whether their hair looked good in a certain light? Perhaps, but that would be absolutely silly for the person doing the hiring; they would gain nothing from it. They certainly wouldn't be a director working on a successful blockbuster movie if they really were making their decisions as haphazardly and with such flightiness as you assert they are. They will hire based on a multitude of reasons from, profitability, to talent, to personality, and all kinds of things in between.
I'm so much as saying they were two equally suitable choices, who both worked equally hard, but one happened to audition right after lunch. Regardless of the uncanny observation skills, we're still human and in the case of two great choices, even superficial differences such as the serotonin level of the director at the time of the first impression can matter.
However, the one who got the part, by nature of the increased experience, is now a better actor. This doesn't at all discount the hard work of the one who made it, but suggests that luck matters as well.
This doesn't discount those of us who work hard to create our own luck. As mentioned to another reply, you may have to roll yatzhee, but it is your hard work that gives you 1,000 roles instead of one.
I'm sorry but I don't think this is true or a valid argument. If I may rephrase your assertion: are rich programmers better programmers because they have more resources to attend job interviews and can program more often? Whatever your craft may be, time (or money; same thing), doesn't necessarily mean anything about level of skill. Can it be a contributing factor? Perhaps, but there are plenty of examples on both sides of the coin to say one way or the other.
Take two actors competing for the same part in an audition for an independent role. They are nearly equal down to a flip of a coin, but one just happens to catch the director's eye a hair more that day.
It sounds, to me, like you're confusing luck for someone making a decision. Your assumption, that a director makes decisions on how the actor's hair looks that day, is extremely flawed. The truth is: there aren't 300 actors each coming in and doing everything the exact same, looking the exact same, and performing the exact same. Hell, there aren't even 2. Each one is an entire collection of skills, experience, head shots, and each one will deliver a different performance.
Professional and successful directors are, for the most part, incredibly skilled; masters of observation with uncanny abilities to find the right person for their vision.
Again, allow me to make the programmer analogy: if two programmers came in and wrote the exact same code, in the exact same amount of time, and produced the same output, on the same problem, where does that leave the decision? In the hands of the many other possibilities that the person hiring will take into consideration. Luck? No, it's someone making a decision.
Could that decision be based on whether their hair looked good in a certain light? Perhaps, but that would be absolutely silly for the person doing the hiring; they would gain nothing from it. They certainly wouldn't be a director working on a successful blockbuster movie if they really were making their decisions as haphazardly and with such flightiness as you assert they are. They will hire based on a multitude of reasons from, profitability, to talent, to personality, and all kinds of things in between.