Years ago, a friend of the family said "You're so smart. Everyone thought you would be a millionaire by age thirty. What happened?"
I pointed at my kids and said "They happened. And they take all my time."
I was a full-time wife and mom. This is not a career known to lead to great wealth.
So, for starters, not all interests or career paths have equal potential to lead to wealth. Intelligence in no way guarantees that your interests will happen to nicely line up with things that lead to wealth.
Everything I've read suggests that being born into the right family plays a huge role in wealth, a la the joke "He made his money the old fashioned way: He inherited it."
Health issues are another thing. Miracles of modern medicine can be very expensive and come directly out of your pocket if you live in the wrong country. At the same time, you typically will be less productive and less competent while enduring serious health issues.
Personal relationships are another biggie. My mother used to work for an heiress whose husband ran through her money. After the divorce, she had to get a job to support herself.
Divorce, scandal, drug addiction and various other personal issues can all be financially ruinous.
Even if you are good at earning it, that doesn't mean you are good at keeping it or growing it, a la some tagline from some magazine "How money becomes wealth."
I've always wondered why we devalue parenthood and make people feel like they aren't contributing when they choose to raise kids over having a career. As a parent, I don't see how much of any work I do could be more important than my child. It's just twisted to me, that we devalue something so important and meaningful.
For Americans, getting rich should be the top priority. There's not much of a safety net if you fall ill and can't work. You have to use your healthy/productive years to build up wealth so you won't be homeless later.
This is a great point. It's not (necessarily) that Americans are just inherently money-hungry; we just have to be because we live in a system that is really callous and unmerciful compared to other places in the world.
There are plenty of people in America who continue to chase money long after their safe retirement is assured.
I don't know if I'm qualified to compare Americans to Europeans, but many Americans really are enamored with money and judge material wealth as the be all and end all goal of life.
When you live without a real safety net, no amount of money is ever enough to guarantee anything whatsoever. Plus decades of doing what you have to do to survive at all and not end up being a victim of such a system powerfully shapes your psychology. It's hard to just put it down one day after your net worth hits $X.
> There are plenty of people in America who continue to chase money long after their safe retirement is assured.
That's probably because, over time, you become what you practice. So, even if you were not obsessed with money and work at 20, you might be at 40, after 20 years of chasing money and success to stave off potential disasters.
As an American I can say that we value human character over wealth. Most true wealthy Americans, those who have more than what they owe and still have a lot left over to to live comfortably are not enamored by money. They are enamored with survival, leaving money behind to their family, and philanthropy. And of course nice experiences (like a good meal and at good restaurant) and a few toys (typically centered around one or two hobbies, way of life). I might be way biased though with my assessment.
The US is #15 on the debt relative to GDP country list according to [1,2]. So you are saying in the US "spending is unsustainably high" AND "life is really callous and unmerciful" at once?
Well let's be generous and also include Portugal and Spain for good measure, both of which have seen an entire generation's prospects suffer massive harm due to EU (eurozone) policy. It's always funny to me how blithely the destruction of millions of people's lives and potential is waved away when it doesn't fit the narrative.
And then lets take a look at the North: Germany employs the Euro to support its economy by decreasing the true cost of its exports, resulting in the impoverishment of the southern European countries already mentioned. France's economy has been facing calls for major reform for decades now and - not sure if you've missed it - the latest economy related political problems have led to a minor civil war. Both economies also now face the prospect of integrating millions of low-skilled, penniless new arrivals. Those are the two biggest economies by far in the EU (if UK leaves). And then there's no shortage of other economies snapping at Europe's heels, all perfectly capable of manufacturing products that are equal if not superior to what comes out of Europe. Many think that German automotive engineering dropped off a cliff in terms of quality in the early 2000s and never really recovered, as a consequence of superior quality from Japan and Korea. And now China are just starting to penetrate Western markets with cars that are plenty good enough.
Also don't forget the Euro does not have the privilege of being the world's reserve currency. This gives the US a massive advantage and lessens the impact of deficits.
I live in one of these high benefit economies and having been taxed for years feel I'm owed something in return. But I don't expect it. Given the trends afoot I think anyone below 50 in Europe that thinks the welfare state will continue to be like it is now over their lifetime is utterly delusional.
Well, that's one way of looking at it. Another way would be think that it's smarter to have a social safety net and cooperate with other people to that end.
Don't confuse smart for the individual with smart for the society. Of course a good social safety net would be great. We don't have it. Nothing in my short life tells me this political system or culture can produce it.
I am not putting my bets on a change in culture or government. I see what's happening to people who counted on Social Security/Medicare and discovered too late that it wasn't enough.
I’ve been surprised at how uncomfortable people are with capitalism in various parts of Europe
Talk about my fintech venture or trading and young people are visible apprehensive
Very distinct from the general awe and congratulations and “wow but you're so young!” that comes with completely misunderstanding what personal and liquid monetary wealth is
Outside of Monaco and Zug I just started telling people I was a student studying communications
I really appreciate the business climate of the US, the tax and accounting rules are so complex that even communists likely wouldn't achieve much if they gained representation. they'll focus on "income tax" and "wealth tax" because its all they know, and their state planning would never gain consensus.
Mark to Market elections on securities transactions at arbitrary prices causing Net Operating Losses forever no matter what the income tax rate is? 60/40 rule on futures trades? Its unlikely they would ever notice.
If I’m remembering your previous posts correctly, you’re quite aware that mental health is absolutely a part of this. It’s a very big part for some people.
I’ve never felt that I’ve lack “smart”. What I lack is passion, willpower, and consistency. From where I sit, I expect that I’d be much better off both financially and emotionally if my situation were reversed.
If I’m remembering your previous posts correctly, you’re quite aware that mental health is absolutely a part of this.
Yes. I do a poor job of making that clear because I feel so strongly that physical health and mental health cannot be neatly separated. "A sound mind in a sound body."
To me, (a lack of) "passion, willpower, and consistency" really sounds like someone with low energy due to a hidden health issue.
I was called lazy until I got diagnosed with a genetic disorder in my thirties. I've often joked that life got a lot better "after they found a better name for my condition than lazy and crazy".
> To me, (a lack of) "passion, willpower, and consistency" really sounds like someone with low energy due to a hidden health issue.
Oh, without question it is. The problem has been identifying and treating it appropriately. I’m seeing help, but it’s slow going. It will pass - I’ve beaten it before and will do so again.
Wow, that sounds like me! Do you mind sharing what the genetic disorder was? Or how you get tested for it in the first place? I have a feeling that if I asked my doctor about laziness, they would refer me to a therapist instead.
My children nursed me back to health after doctor's wrote me off for dead. It's supposed to cost about $100k-$250k annually to treat my condition conventionally.
My oldest has the same condition. Between the two of us, that's up to a half million dollars per year.
We were diagnosed over 18 years ago. You can conservatively guess that my kids have been worth at least $1.5 million to me, and potentially more than $9 million.
(That's just the dollar value saved on treatment. You can put no price on the improvement in quality of life that I got out of it.)
Right. Once you figure out there are more columns in the life-ledger than cash, decisions change. To the bafflement of folks that haven't figured it out yet.
It is the same for men, too. I had everything set up to retire at 35... then I married. Sure, I am a more socially productive person now. My kid will someday pay taxes that will finance the retirement of people that didn't bother to have kids.
We were on track to retire comfortably by 55 without even trying very hard, 45-50 with some effort, without even FAANG money or any sudden jumps in income. Three kids starting just before age 30 and now retirement ever is... iffy, and it's probably not going to be very comfortable if it does happen. They're really expensive. Mostly healthcare, child care, and housing (more space, but also need good schools, so pricier houses, unless you wanna pay for a good private school which is even more expensive). Probably food next, way under those three. Everything else negligible compared to those.
Good schools are more about the parents than location. We opted our kid into the poorest school in the city: the one where many of the students speak Spanish at home so they made it a dual language immersion school. The school administrators were shocked when we said we didn't want to waste our time applying for the subsidized lunch program (It would probably be cheaper to give every kid a free lunch than process the paper work for those who qualify)
Those poor kids are just like every other kid in the world - other than they lack money. Their parents love them, and the best for them. What they define as best might not match my definition, but they want the best for them. And my son is well on his way to a second language, something that will be useful - in our opinion.
It depends on the city, hehe :) In my childhood kids from "bad" families would easily convince you that you're risking your kids every day they visit that school :) My parents were convinced when one of my schoolmates broke 4 fingers of his arm while was beating the face of my another schoolmate - half of my schoolmates had police records.
Wouldn't it make sense to "retire", start a business and teach your children how to take over and run it instead of worry and invest in their "education"? If it is profitable and succeeds they can get their education in whatever they wish without breaking your bank or going to college before they are sure what they enjoy.
> My kid will someday pay taxes that will finance the retirement of people that didn't bother to have kids.
That's an unnecessarily reductio characterization. That kid might, say, end up working for a business started by someone without kids.
New people are only an element of a diverse, functioning economy.
For the record I'm a parent myself, and glad to be, but it's not right for everyone, and, I believe, not right for a significant percentage (>10%?) of those who do have them.
>My kid will someday pay taxes that will finance the retirement of people that didn't bother to have kids.
All things considered, that is definitely not a given.
Social security for instances is tied to one's lifetime earnings, throw in the correlation between life time earnings and longevity and it smooths out to getting what you put in (roughly).
There are also a lot of benefits, both employer funded and tax payer funded that goes to people with children.
And parents likely have lower lifetime earnings than non-parents. So its possible they're not only funding the future of social security, but also getting less for themselves...
It would be great if someone had a source if parents are net recipients of benefits beyond the societal benefit of having children.
> So its possible they're not only funding the future of social security, but also getting less for themselves...
Social Security payouts relative to withholdings are strongly progressive, such that the less that you pay into social security, the greater percentage you take out once you start receiving benefits. Absent a difference in mortality (or to a much lesser degree, the age at which you start drawing), the less you contribute, the greater percentage of what you contributed will be paid out to you.
There's a plethora of tax breaks and deductions related to children that you can claim. Besides that, the people who don't have kids are subsidizing the education of yours through their taxes.
Regarding social security, I'm fairly confident the system will collapse before I see a penny of what I'm paying in.
You could also say that society subsidised your education and will do the same for other, future citizens.
Also, most families who were eligible, maybe even your own, got the benefits of the tax breaks available to parents.
For some reason many people seem to have a blind spot where they believe that benefits for "parents" or "children" aren't relevant to them if they aren't parents right now. But every adult was a child! ... "like, sure, but what have you done for me lately?".
Why? How old are you? Current forecast is that 80% of benefits are funded, as of 2035. Even if the funding ration continues to decline, as long seniors don't vote themselves out of Social Security, there will still be a pot of revenue from younger working people.
Assuming I retire at 65, which is pretty much guaranteed not to happen based on economic factors as well as rising retirement age it will be around 2060, 30 years after people are projected to lose 25% of their benefits.
Those kids will be paying taxes the rest of their lives which go to fund education. Either directly (through property taxes on their home), or indirectly (the landlord has to pay property taxes, which comes from rent money).
So in a way everybody pays for their own education after the fact.
Many parents are supported by their children when they get older (especially in cultures where parents and older people are still valued and respected).
I've got no kids and no retirement savings. No one's going to support me when I get old. If I had kids there'd be a chance that they would.
These benefits are largely theoretical, I don't get any of them. Here (Brazil), unless you are a public servant, regular jobs with such benefits are all low-pay. I have been working as a consultant for my whole life.
Or not. Society might just as well support adults who are a net net loss and expense. There is no telling if the future generation would be productive.
Making progeny is not a ‘virtue’. Willing to procreate should not be considered a speculative way to raise monies for taxes.
> Divorce, scandal, drug addiction and various other personal issues can all be financially ruinous.
This is well-said. James Hughes advocates families account their balance sheets on human, intellectual, financial, and social capital. For very-long-term (50-100+ years and >3 generations), the human, social, and intellectual components are arguably more important than the financial one, and it is essential to mitigate liabilities like divorce etc.
Microeconomics classes in America teach undergrads that 'rational' people only care about increases in wealth and do not care about non-wealth-increasing activities. It is such a wrong model about human behavior but it gets repeated like gospel every year at most schools in the country. So it's no wonder that people are out there, suggesting that we're all idiots for not focusing exclusively on wealth accumulation through our 20s as they were taught that is what 'rational' people do.
It's a tactless question, sure, but it should also be expected from a society that idolizes wealth the way ours does.
"Microeconomics classes in America teach undergrads that 'rational' people only care about increases in wealth and do not care about non-wealth-increasing activities."
This is not true, (or if it is being taught, the professor doesn't understand what he is supposed to be teaching.) What first year economics courses do teach--what is meant by the term 'homoeconomicus'--is that in aggregate, people rationally pursue their own self interest. 'Self-interest' is defined here as a subjective utility threshold. So, for example, if someone cares about their children, they will work hard and make a lot of sacrifices to support their children. The idea is that the market follows the aggregate self interest of people and so we don't have to worry about the miss-pricing of goods because the market will take care of that.
The difficulty with this idea isn't that people have wrong values--modern economics presupposes that values are inherently subjective and thus cannot be judged--it's that people are capable of making consistently rational decisions in pursuit of their subjective goals despite information disparities and cognitive biases.
This was an extremely good friend of the family whom I called "tante" (German for aunt) from the age of seven, though she wasn't related to me.
You could more charitably think of it as a compliment and an attempt at awkward social critique of how life works. An attempt to ask someone whose intelligence she admired to try to explain why life doesn't work like she thought it was supposed to.
Your ability to get back on track is hugely determined by your circumstances. If you're the child of a wealthy white family, you probably have the connections to get a decent job even with some gaps on your resume and a couple of drug convictions. If you're a poor black kid? Forget about it. Recovering from a mental health crisis is vastly easier if you have the financial resources and the family support to avoid homelessness and access prompt and effective treatment.
Wealth and privilege buy you (and your children) a lot of safety nets and a lot of second chances. People without those advantages are often in an incredibly precarious situation, just one tough break or one bad decision away from total ruin.
> Wealth and privilege buy you (and your children) a lot of safety nets and a lot of second chances. People without those advantages are often in an incredibly precarious situation, just one tough break or one bad decision away from total ruin.
People without those advantages have to build them. That is what smart people do. That is what I (a poor black kid) did with an old used computer that my father left behind after leaving my mother alone with 3 kids to raise. That is what I tell the young-lings from my poor neighborhood (that I don't live anymore so to not be hold by past circumstances). They get much more motivated by that than by reading that they are going to be stuck there forever because circumstances. Most of them will.
Yeah, I think you want to tell different people different things.
You want to tell poor people to take responsibility for their own success, because that's the best way to motivate them.
But you also want to tell those running things that they have a huge impact on poor people's success, and things like better public schools would go a long way. Because if the people running things shrug and say "those poor people are responsible for their own success" then systemic inequalities will persist way longer than they do in places like, say, Finland that have widespread, high quality public education.
> But you also want to tell those running things that they have a huge impact on poor people's success,
They already know it. They know that it would make sense to raise corporate taxes to offer free and good education to everybody. But in most of the countries, the people in power were not elected to do that but to lower the corporate rates.
That is why I focus on the individual side, although I'm ideologically communist. To hack capitalism and live well coming from a violent/poor background is one of the most revolutionary acts we can do and teach how to do currently.
I have not found this to be generally true. A PhD in physics confers zero ability to pick good romantic partners. They are entirely different domains of expertise.
The world is full of brilliant people who can't figure out how to handily resolve their personal issues.
Rich people got "lucky" but they don't define what luck is to begin with. To quote Naval, there are 4 kinds of luck.
1. Blind luck - Where I just got lucky because something completely out of my control happened
2. Luck from hustling - luck that comes through persistence, hard work, hustle, motion. Which is when you’re running around creating lots of opportunities, you’re generating a lot of energy, you’re doing a lot of things, lots of things will get stirred up in the dust.
3. Luck from preparation - If you are very skilled in a field, you will notice when a lucky break happens in that field. When other people who aren’t attuned to it won’t notice.
4. Luck from your unique character - You created your own luck. You put yourself in a position to be able to capitalize on that luck. Or to attract that luck when nobody else has created that opportunity for themselves.
For every success story with those traits are thousands of failures.
If Bill Gates had been born and raised in Ruanda, you wouldn't know his name today. Same IQ, same hustler. But no parents with connections, no upbringing devoid of war and violence.
It's just like in sports. Usain Bolt is not the fastest man alive. He is the fastest professional runner. Within a sample set of 9bn people, there are likely ones with better genetics - but no access or chance to become a professional runner.
This is why the slogan "Billionaires should not exist" is not without merit. A net worth of 100mil still means generational wealth. But once you're in the billions, the gap to all the other employees in your company becomes just crazy - but none of the billions would have been possible without their labor.
Remember: a million seconds is 11.57 days. A billion seconds? 31.71 years.
> If Bill Gates had been born and raised in Ruanda, you wouldn't know his name today. Same IQ, same hustler. But no parents with connections, no upbringing devoid of war and violence.
Flip that around. There are thousands, if not millions of other kids who grew up with wealthy, connected parents. Why aren't they all billionaires if that's all it takes?
They're still wealthy, though, that's the main point. It's not that wealthy parents = billions of dollars, it's that the path to billionaire status overwhelmingly starts with abnormally good starting conditions.
Billionaire is a bad metric. These are outliers of outliers. Obviously everyone can't be a billionaire. That's like asking why everyone isn't an Olympic gold medalist. Of course the path to a billionaire is going to start with abnormal conditions. It's also going to be completely abnormal along the way, too. It's an abnormal outcome. Why would you expect anything different?
Because if you're not born rich your chances of dying rich are astronomically low. We pretend social mobility exists when in reality it does not, or at least it's extremely rare (even in the US, now more than ever).
I think the problem is the flipping from "Billionaire" to "rich". To get to the most insanely abnormal outcome imaginable, you need crazy good conditions and lots of luck. To get to the level of "rich", by most people's standards, you don't need anywhere near the same level (though of course, luck still plays a role depending on how you define luck - I mean in some sense, you're crazy lucky to even be alive given the odds against the particular sperm/egg matching that made you up.)
Should anyone run a sub-4 minute mile? Should anyone be 7 feet tall? Should anyone make the world's largest pizza? What other outliers are you going to put yourself in charge of regulating?
None of these (except the pizza?) are the result of policy, a billion dollars is. None of these polarize undemocratic power, a billion dollars does. None of them are innate in the sense that they cannot be separated from the person like extreme wealth. Height and athletic ability are neutral in a way that extreme wealth are not. Height and athletic ability are biological and meritorious in a way extreme wealth could never be. These aren't in the same category and cannot be reduced to a value neutral "outlier".
You are missing the point. When you start talking about what "should" be, you imply that there is some authority in charge of deciding the rightness of what is or isn't. Who is that authority? Which bureaucrat in Washington do you want to sit at a desk and decide how much money you are allowed to have?
Right now Jeff Bezos "has" umpty-billion dollars because he owns so many shares of Amazon stock and the market values those shares at a certain amount. So, how do you propose to make him not a billionaire? Are you going to confiscate his shares and hand them over to the government? Would the government be better at running Amazon than Jeff Bezos is? Are you going to pass a law that forbids anyone from buying a share of Amazon for a value any more than what would make Bezos a billionaire? What exactly is the plan here?
People who spout off nonsense like there shouldn't be billionaires, haven't ever though through what that means or what it would imply to make their half-baked notions into a reality.
I'm not missing the point at all. Yes, in short, I believe the government could make that choice. Yes, I believe in redistribution. Taxes are one means for that. Your argument seems to be that literally no one has thought this through, which is patently false. Anyway, we've shifted from a theoretical question about billionaires to a question of practical implementation, which is beyond the scope of an HN comment from a dumbass like me. If you want to know who I think is doing some of the most serious and noteworthy research and writing on this and many other topics related to social welfare and redistribution, check out the People's Policy Project: https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/
> This is why the slogan "Billionaires should not exist" is not without merit. A net worth of 100mil still means generational wealth. But once you're in the billions, the gap to all the other employees in your company becomes just crazy - but none of the billions would have been possible without their labor.
On the other hand, suppose you employ 30,000 people each with 10,000 in savings from working at your company. Without your initial labor to get everything set up and get the business going, none of their combined $300 million in assets would have been possible without your labor, so actually your net worth seems ever more justified.
>It's not like you're creating money out of thin air.
No, but money (and value) is created out of ideas, of labor, and adding value to products.
When an IPO happens, for example, and a company owner holding 50% of the company is suddenly valued at $20B, that value did not come from taking $20B from other people. It's the value of the company. It is value simply created out of thin air, that didn't exist before.
If the next day, someone prices the stock 30% higher through market forces, the owners value shoots up 30% also. That 30% increase in a single day was not taken from anyone - it is made up out of thin air.
When a craftsman buys a piece of wood for $10, crafts it such that others value it at $1000, that craftsman just added $900 of value. It might have taken a week, or might have taken 15 minutes. It's not simply some labor value per hour times hours. The amount of value is created out of thin air, but it took some labor to allow that increase to happen. The labor amount and value added is somewhat related, but varies greatly across all endeavors.
And saying the employees could have just worked somewhere else is shuffling the truth - to have somewhere to work, someone has to start a company, which often takes significant money and risk to begin with, before thousands of workers can have a stable job. That money too was created previously through invention, innovation, labor, and previous investment.
When an IPO happens, for example, and a company owner holding 50% of the company is suddenly valued at $20B, that value did not come from taking $20B from other people.
Unless you were the first to market in a completely new field, it's very possible that some of a firm's worth comes from gaining market share from existing players. That's the whole 'disruption' effect. This might be more economically efficient from one perspective, but that's not necessarily better - both because perfectly efficient systems lack slack, and because people are bad at valuing things.
So take Amazon back when it specialized in selling books. Good part - Amazon has pretty much any book you want, yay. Bad part - it kills brick-and-mortar bookstores. even today, while I'll go to Amazon for a specific book I want, I'll usually wait until I've looked around some other bookstores first. Not only do I like the chance discovery of books I might not otherwise have picked up in bookstores, I like bookstores themselves, especially used bookstores. And I don't like the fact that there are not as many bookstores as there used to be.
And saying the employees could have just worked somewhere else is shuffling the truth - to have somewhere to work, someone has to start a company, which often takes significant money and risk to begin with
So what? Make co-op financing better, figure out a tired grant system for allocating startup capital from a public pool. You're just underlining the article's hypothesis - rich people often get that way because they start out with or have access to more capital than others of equal or greater ability, rather than through any inherent virtue.
In a previous life where I worked at a boutique computer supplier, I got a client who was running a small stock market research/analysis business with only a few employees, and needed high power workstations. I'm not a big people person, and I was looking at his operation and thinking that I'd prefer it to what I was doing, and (from seeing his work product and helping him get going technically) that it was well within my capabilities. So I put in a bit of extra effort to get friendly with him and to figure out how he got his operation off the ground. Turned out his dad was an investment banker and had given him a million $ to set up (at a time when that was a much more significant investment than it is now). I also learned that his biggest obstacle was not his competitors but the chip he had on his shoulder about how his brother was the favorite son and had been given $10 million.
That was the day I realized that wealth isn't a meritocracy.
>Unless you were the first to market in a completely new field, it's very possible that some of a firm's worth comes from gaining market share from existing players.
It is possible, but you can simply check that the size of the US and world economy has grown tremendously, so that argument doesn't explain the growth.
>So what? Make co-op financing better,
There are plenty of ESOP companies. If they consistently did well enough, then the excess capital they generate could be used to start more employee owned companies.
That this doesn't happen perhaps points to an inefficiency in this process for company creation. Perhaps simply having workers is not enough to drive the economy. It shouldn't be a surprise that when an investor takes a risk to allocate capital to a fledgling company, that the investor would expect a return for resulting growth.
Creating companies without investment is possible, but likely less capable overall.
>That was the day I realized that wealth isn't a meritocracy.
Nothing is a meritocracy - everyone has luck and genetics. Income correlates both with IQ and hours worked, and I suspect most would consider the latter factor merit, and some consider the former merit too.
But wealth, correlating with many things one can control, is also not simply a random variable completely detached from merit.
> It is possible, but you can simply check that the size of the US and world economy has grown tremendously, so that argument doesn't explain the growth.
Can it keep growing forever? If not, how much longer can it keep growing? Should we alter our economic system to account for the change in economic environment?
> Can it keep growing forever? If not, how much longer can it keep growing?
I mean, I guess the strict answer to the first question is "no", but the answer to the second question is - it can keep growing for so long that it really doesn't matter.
There's no real reason to think that we've reached the end of innovation - we keep innovating, we keep finding ways to squeeze more stuff out of less material and labor - the economy keeps growing.
There are people that argue that innovation has slowed down - but I don't think everyone agrees, and even if they do, the mechanism is not well understood. And most importantly, even if it slowed down, it doesn't mean that innovation stopped.
> Should we alter our economic system to account for the change in economic environment?
Well it depends on what the change is and what our goals are. Most people who want the "economic system" changed have, I think, different goals than the ones who want it kept the same (e.g. what is more important - growth or equality? There are real, honest debates one can have about this, but if people land on different sides of this, obviously they may want different changes enacted).
Why not? Can people keep adding value to things? Only once there is no possible to add value to anything would an economy have to stop growing. I suppose in some heat death of the universe scenarios, this may happen, but we’ve got billions of years before even our local sun destroys earth, and I suspect mankind will have changed significantly if we make it that far.
Why do you imply economies cannot grow for the long term foreseeable future?
Actually yes.. Production of goods does indeed create money out of thin air (and raw materials).
They could have earned just as much elsewhere. However since we are not in a situation of labor shortages yet, every income providing job is still important. If your employees worked elsewhere they may be as rich as they are with you, but the guy whose job they replaced would have to look for another job.
Kinda. The usual rate is apparently 5 failed attempts before a successful one.
Survivorship bias is looking at only the successes and not the failures. All those self-help books about "the 25 things all successful entrepreneurs do" without acknowledging that thousands of unsuccessful entrepreneurs also do the exact same 25 things.
It's standing up on stage and saying "I worked really hard to get here, I deserve this", without acknowledging that other people are working just as hard but didn't get the same result.
Survivorship bias is not acknowledging that there is luck involved in success. That "meritocratic" blindness that divides the world into "winners" and "losers" and blames people for not being successful.
Yeah, of course. If the chances of some success are distributed geometrically, so that "winners" are randomly chosen at e.g. 0.001% per year, then somebody who wins the dice roll looks pretty smart to themselves and the rest of the world, having done something seemingly difficult. However across a population of a million individuals, 10 or so will achieve that success in the first year.
What is usually achievable through hard work, and worth achieving, is an honest life, a home of one's own, and for some, kids. These are things that bring contentment and happiness. Wealth and power beyond a reasonable measure only endangers these things.
> If Bill Gates had been born and raised in Ruanda, you wouldn't know his name today. Same IQ, same hustler. But no parents with connections, no upbringing devoid of war and violence.
same IQ, same hustler and you'd have a warlord or a revolutionary leader. There are genius everywhere, and they don't create only software.
>2-4 are great examples of survivorship bias.
>For every success story with those traits are thousands of failures.
I guess that is the reason why 2-4 start with "luck from...".
I read it like this: from the ones who do/are X only a few lucky succeed. But (almost) all who don't do/are X fail. To succeed you need both: luck + X.
"If Bill Gates had been born and raised in Ruanda, you wouldn't know his name today."
You are unfairly using an extreme example. It would be like saying that someone wouldn't be 6'5" if they had been born in extreme poverty with malnutrition. Yes, extremely bad environment can stunt your growth, but you can't use poverty and malnutrition to explain in general why some people are shorter or taller than others.
There are wealthy people outside of the USA and those who weren't born wealthy.
It's a mistake to claim that differences in wealth (or height or IQ) can be explained by environmental factors.
When I was a teenager we hosted at our home kids running from Rwanda , my mom was working in an hospital that cured them, doing the best possible for kids (kids!) with arms or legs amputated or a big part of their skull chopped off with a machete.
You're assuming Gates had probably more chances when the chances weren't there to begin with.
Libertarians who talk about how the state just gets in the way of innovators like Gates forget how hard it is to start a business when the central government fails and people start hacking away at each other with machetes instead of programming computers.
Okay, but this is a strawman, because a basic tenet of libertarianism is that a government is necessary to forcefully (if necessary) prevent others from trampling on your individual rights. You are describing anarchy, not libertarianism.
In theory yes, but in practice most libertarians involved in politics want to ruthlessly prune government down to courts for arbitration of contractual disputes, and police for enforcing property rights.
What you are describing is not anarchy, for that matter. Anarchy means absence of rulers, which is not the same thing as chaos and warlordism. Political anarchists are concerned with the establishment of systems that disallow concentrations of power or wealth that enable oppression.
It's doubly wrong to describe the situation in Rwanda as anarchism because the genocide that occurred there was not due to some lack of contractual or property relations, but planned, engineered, and carried out because of tribal animosity, partially pursuant to grievances stemming from a particularly brutal period of Belgian colonialism and subsequent civil war(s). That genocide was highly organized by social elites of one tribe over a period of about a year. To maintain otherwise is either product of ignorance or bad faith, so I hope you'll abandon this erroneous position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide
I haven't said anything about rwanda. I wad only adding nuance to your extremely blanket characterization of libertarianism which clearly calls for a government of some kind.
If you read back up the thread, the whole context of people hacking each other with machetes arose from speculation on how well Bill Gates would have done had he been born in Rwanda. I default to assuming that people read the threads to which they are commenting, and that it's not necessary for everyone to restate all the context every time.
I have in fact read from libertarians that the government has no business doing such a thing and that's the rightful place of private militias and police to enforce.
Seems like this is a free will argument. In a reductionist view, yes, everything is all blind luck because the universe was set in motion at the Big Bang and has evolved according to the laws of physics since. If you got rich through intelligence, determination, and good choices, that was still luck because your intelligence and determination are largely determined by your genes and your choices by your environment, both of which were determined before you were born.
This argument may be true but it isn't very useful, because the concept of "useful" itself implies free will and active decision-making. In other words, yes, maybe it was all predetermined before we were born, but if you're the sort of person that believes in free will, that decision was predetermined before you were born, so why challenge that belief? And the reason we evolved to believe in the fiction of free will is because humans who did do better than those who don't, so whether it's correlation or causation, it's still adaptive.
But, the best we know is the laws of physics are not deterministic!
The quantum states that your neurons fire to is unknowable in advance and determined only at the point of measurement.
Therefore, you are _free_ in the exact results of your neural mass are unknowable in advance and truly random. There's certainly a distribution of probability to the randomness... but be free and don't by the deterministic, 19th century nonsense!
My physics professor met with the Dalai Lama to discuss this exact point - whether the indeterminacy in quantum mechanics can give rise to free will.
The thing is, the randomness in quantum mechanics isn't really the same as what we talk about with "free will". Quantum mechanics is really a statement about coupling - it finds that you cannot separate the results of a measurement from the act of measuring, and so you will always introduce uncertainty into the measurement of any physical quantity.
There are a lot of possible philosophical interpretations of that. Does it mean nature is inherently random? Or is nature deterministic underneath, but our knowledge of nature is inherently random? Does it leave room for God in the machine? Free will? Are the laws of physics lines of code in a computer program, and we're Sims trying to reverse-engineer them?
Physicists tend not to concern themselves much with these quesions: as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, there is uncertainty in the measurement of any physical quantity, and this uncertainty can be quantified. The laws of physics are just models anyway: they've worked remarkably well at predicting reality, but we'll never know whether they're actually reality, and that's not really the point.
"Free will" usually implies some form of agent that can shape actions in the future. The mind, soul, whatever is a distinct thing that determines our actions. Personally, I'm of the opinion that we don't actually have free will, but I was predestined to believe that I do, and as a model of reality it works fairly well even if it's false, so there's no particular reason to discard that model. Similarly, I don't actually have a "self" - I'm just a collection of neural impulses firing - but it's convenient to believe that I do, so why not?
free will doesn't necessarily require quantum uncertainty. it could also be that the force that set this universe in motion (as opposed to one of the infinitely many other possibilities) is the same stuff that composes our own free will. we simply don't know enough to believe in the lack of free will, either.
self-awareness means that you might. it's why there are no sure things in the stock market, for example. we humans incorporate new information swiftly and deftly.
Quantum events might not be completely predictable by our puny human brains, but that doesn't mean that they're not pre-ordained or pre-determined in some sense.
The world could be 100% a "clockwork universe", but we just aren't capable of understanding how it all works or fully predicting what will happen.
To say that something is "random" is more of a statement about our own inability to see a pattern in the data than about the data not having some pattern in it.
I favor the idea of free will but I don't buy this argument. Everything in the universe is bound by the same physics/quantum mechanics but you wouldn't say a rock has free will.
To me, free will implies choice. I don't see how non-determinism is equivalent to choice. I can see it as necessary but not sufficient. I do not see how the "free will theorem" shows that elementary particles are choosing their spin. It seems that they mean free will differently than I do.
>It seems that they mean free will differently than I do.
No, they mean it the same way you do; they only made it precise.
You probably suppose a scientist doing an experiment can choose between A and B for some setup. If so, then so can particles, because one can make experiments where a physicist can make a choice affecting the outcomes, and the particles in the experiment can choose their behavior in exactly the same manner.
So, since there are experiments that allow you to "choose" freely, and such experiments have particles able to do whatever you are doing, then either your free will implies their free will, or neither has free will.
Follow the links from the wiki page to learn more. It's quite precise, and is exactly the usual concept of free will.
> This argument may be true but it isn't very useful
It's useful to some in the sense of justifying the taking and redistribution of the outcomes from whatever mix of luck, skill, and labor went into the creation of wealth.
it doesn't have to be a free will argument at all, but rather luck overwhelming skill when it comes to outcome. we still have some margin of control, but on a much smaller scale (and effect) than we believe.
it's not even surprising we'd jump to such conclusions: our brains are designed to tease out and magnify the significance of the things that we do and control.
Life, in most cases, is built upon all 4 points listed by OP with a varying degree of applicability. If magically, everyone decided to just accept 1 without doing any of the others, you would likely find society going down the drain or the few who attempt 2,3 or 4 with an exceptional return of investment.
I find it difficult to undermine all four 'kinds of luck' when you look at someone studying hard to get into a certain university, or you look at a foreigner deciding to uproot their lives to hopefully get a better life in US/Canada,etc or someone who decided to knock on every door to get their first client and hone their skills throughout that process.
Hustle and preparation allow smaller quantities of blind luck to be turned into success. Otherwise it takes a lot more blind luck to overcome a lack of preparation, and large quantities of blind luck are harder to find.
So, yeah, it all boils down to #1. But #s 2-4 determine how much of #1 you need.
You can’t choose your luck, but your originating genes aka parents did...more reason why there should be a checklist for responsible procreation.
Having children without a plan puts ones own copies of genes at risk. As is not having the resource to raise them well. It’s self sabotage..as it were..by two people who decided to combine their genetic material and their immediate circle of friends, family and acquaintances who enable their sub optimal decision. Society and media should be ignored anyways while making important decisions.
> You don't choose your genes or where you are born. Those factors, which are blind luck, determine all of the other lucks for your whole life.
if you workout and are in the best shape your genes can provide, you will be more lucky when meeting people and more interesting people will be interested on you. That would be 3, not 1. And if you have a good conversation and go out every day, you will also have more chance of meeting interesting people. That would be 2.
If you have, for example, chronic fatigue you will struggle to work out. That would be 4 constraining 3. And if you have significant social anxiety, or are bedridden with illness, or various other health limitations you will struggle to have a good conversation and go out every day. That would be 4 constraining 2.
Hustle and preparation are not luck, they're skills you have to hone for them to be useful. You have to actually do something. They aren't something you can be born into (much to the dismay of rich parents with deadbeat kids). By reducing 2 and 3 to luck you're implying that people have no agency. Sure, the person who develops those skills in rural Africa isn't going to go as far as someone who develops those skills in Chicago but they'll both go a hell of a lot farther than the average persona around them.
Lots of people hustle and prep who are not rich. Luck is largest factor and its usually the luck of already being in a position to capitalize on opportunities.
I think it's a mistake to assume that just because something is a skill it's not influenced by "luck".
For example, from what I understand, in the big five model of personality, conscientiousness is over 40% heritable.
Anecdotally, I remember how even in the first grade there were kids that were clearly low in conscientiousness and kids who were clearly high in conscientiousness.
Pretty sure the kids in the latter group didn't instill a work ethic into themselves by age 6.
I hope that it's possible to develop conscientiousness as an adult, at least to some degree, but clearly it is something that you can be born into.
I'm using "conscientiousness" as an example, I don't think it's the same thing as "hustle", in fact I'd even suspect that there's some conflict between the two.
However, my point is that development of skills aren't independent from luck, since we all are dealt different cards with which we then have to play.
No they are not. Yes, there is more opportunity in some settings than others but the people with the skills are much less likely to be passed by by that opportunity than everyone else. There's a lot more opportunity that usable to the people who are in a position to take advantage of it (preparation) and have the drive to do so (hustle).
Again, imagine 1 does not occur. You hustle and there is never a lucky opportunity. Do you still achieve success? You prepare for a job interview and you never get the opportunity to interview. Do you still achieve success?
No one is saying that there aren’t factors to increase luck insofar as people are saying that success doesn’t necessarily have a linear relationship with preparation or hustle.
IE. Person A who earns 100x more than person B did not necessarily prepare 100x harder, or hustled for 100x as much. Person A may only have hustled/prepared 10x or 5x as much, or 0.5x as much and just got exposed to better opportunities.
> You hustle and there is never a lucky opportunity. Do you still achieve success? You prepare for a job interview and you never get the opportunity to interview. Do you still achieve success?
You don't achieve success, nor do you experience luck. In this case you describe, are you unlucky, or are you simply bad at "hustling" or whatever work you are putting in?
Hustling on its own doesn't guarantee good luck. Nothing does; it just (if done right, sometimes) increases your odds.
I think one of you is saying that neutral situations should allow one to scramble up just due to willpower alone. I'm not sure I agree.
But some people are born with one foot in a bucket. They just keep getting hit by sic relatives and floods and what have you and everything they get never lasts.
> the people who are in a position to take advantage of it (preparation)
In a great many cases this boils down to already having enough money to survive a failure in a condition that you can get up to hustle again.
If you are supporting a family, the size of that financial backstop needs to be bigger. For every story of person X who bet their family's security and ended up a big financial success, there are far more who ended up in the negative.
Hustle and preparation are very important, lucking into wealth vastly outweighs those factors, because a) it provides room to fail and b) it makes it easy to hire the busy and well-prepared.
Try playing multiple games of monopoly with 4 or 5 friends (or run monte carlo simulations if you want a fun machine learning project, since Monopoly is a game that can easily be taught to computers), but randomly assign one player 10x the starting capital and $2000 every time they pass go instead of the normal $200.
Of course not, but you still have to either be born as the type of person who would seek out and hone this skill, or have been born into a situation where someone showed you this and you were naturally receptive to it.
I had a coworker who went to Stanford on scholarships. The thing that surprised him about all the rich kids there was how prepared they were for life already. It was no wonder to him how they get ahead and stay ahead, and it wasn't just money.
But one of my theories in life is that power is money, not the other way around. We know that's something that the newly rich run into over and over. We even have movies with that story arc.
'They' are all too happy to see us get hung up on how much money we're going to allow them to have. They'll still be just as powerful and influential. Probably the easiest thing they spend that 'currency' on is to have enough money to cover the exchange rate with people outside their circles.
I've never heard Calvinism talk about either "fortune" or the "prepared mind". I get that you're denigrating Calvinism here rather than making a precise statement, but what part of Calvinism are you referring to? The Calvinists I know would be more likely to say that God willed your situation or gave you the preparation for your mind. This is more akin to fate than fortune. ("Fate" being what will inevitably happen, and "fortune" being chance events.)
If you work hard and sacrifice you will be rewarded. Frequently it is presented as quid pro quo.
At the end of the day if you work hard and do well, you could still have been lucky. Rather than that negating all of your hard work, a better reaction to this fact is a bit of charity for others. And I’m not talking donations, I’m talking about being a decent person and not judging others who haven’t got what you got.
It all boils down to just how deterministic you're able to believe the universe is.
Is there a such thing as my own willpower that allows me to improve my position more than an equivalently-placed person would, or is the willpower to act to improve my own situation derived from the blind luck of where and when I was born?
So you claim there is no correlation between, say, hours worked and money earned? That pay is some random variable not causally connected to any decision a person makes?
Genghis Khan was exiled and had nothing by age nine. At the time of his death he left the biggest land empire the world has ever seen to his children. You need very little of 1 to make a difference
Not really agree with this, you can change the country you live in. And it's more important where you live not where you are born.
For example lots of people from poor countries go to US or Europe and are quite successful there.
> 2,3 can be reduced to 1.
Don't agree either. Let's be realistic, what are the chances of success for a person who stays at home watch movies vs. someone who go out talk with people get involved in all sorts of activities + prepare the homework for those social events.
>Let's be realistic, what are the chances of success for a person who stays at home watch movies vs. someone who go out talk with people get involved in all sorts of activities + prepare the homework for those social events.
Probability of success depends what environment you are in. A person with poor uneducated and possibly negligent parents living in a slum with no network has a very different probability of "success" than a person with well educated, well connected, and rich parents.
Even they are able to see that perhaps instead of a minute chance of success on par with winning the lottery, perhaps they ought to spend the present enjoying a movie. Many times, not being around the right people and environment leaves you in the dark about opportunities in the first place. I'm not saying that one should despair and sit at home watching movies, but it can be rational to feel that way. We need to do better as a society to even out the odds.
Totally agree with you, parents and environment is one of the most important factor but this is not 100% of the odds, there are still things that you can influence yourself (especially in these times when we have access to the internet).
I spent most of a year living in Cambodia. I met some amazing people there. People who had put way more effort and work into improving their lives than anyone I had met in either the UK or Australia. But they were still (comparatively) poor. And that was never going to change, because they just didn't have the opportunities there that we take for granted. In some places, birth and family is more important than any amount of effort, talent or intelligence.
I couldn't get a visa to work in the USA even if I wanted one. My right to work in Europe is about to be taken away and replaced with... something. I don't know what other countries I can work in but there'd be visa requirements for most of them.
I could change country if I tried really hard but it isn't straightforward. And I'm an very experienced frontend dev. Other people would find it harder.
I think the person you are replying to is making the more basic interpretation that such propensities (someone who stays at home watching movies, someone with the motivation to move to another country, etc) are themselves composed of variables outside of one's control-- genes, gene expression, nutrition, etc, etc-- i.e. blind luck
lots of people from poor countries go to US or Europe
Have you noticed the existence of extremely anti-immigration politicians who are trying to reduce that number to zero by rewriting the rules in the most inequitable fashion possible?
I remember another study that looked at people who had made it very rich, and they saw that luck was something like 'being educated in a field just when that field is about to make a huge impact in the world' - in other words, great timing in addition to raw talent. I don't have the link to hand now though.
I loved the Whats App founder talk at the YC online class (I don't have the link either). I paraphrase: "we decided to make a messaging app just when that was the best, most profitable thing we could possibly have done." There was a ton of experience and talent behind it, but they acknowledge that they got lucky and timed it perfectly.
No, this article is entirely about blind luck. None of the things you describe matter.
There are plenty of prepared, hustlers who can capitalize on lucky events. For every one of them that becomes mega-rich, there are thousands who are exactly as fit who do not.
That is, 2 3 and 4 follow a normal distribution, wealth follows a power-law distribution. The attributes don't correlate strongly.
My guess is that it's some kind of distribution curve.
You can certainly improve your odds via 2, 3 and 4, but some people will do all those and end up not doing well. The average person who does them all will end up a bit better-off than average, and some will end up very well off.
In other words, they help, but don't guarantee 'success'.
Will they? Wouldn't you need to not only do them, but do them better than average? So it's not just that you need to work hard, it's that you need to be working harder than average. But also if someone was already ahead of you, they could work less than that and still wind up ahead of you.
So now, is it the hard work that determined the end result, or just the luck again?
There are tons of people right now trying really hard to do all sorts of things. Many of them will fail, for a myriad of reasons. That's the idea of "luck". You can't know which reasons will lead to your downfall, because reducing labor and life to "hard work" is so absurdly reductive it's meaningless.
Basically, your individual circumstances are your own and comparing yourself to others might be helpful but it also might not and nobody can definitively tell you one way or the other if luck is even real.
You can't frame things like this without talking about misfortune in the same terms. Lots of things can happen that are 'unluckly', but are vastly skewed to certain demographics. Being unlucky like:
* Receiving little or no schooling
* Having to labour as a child
* Being abused
* Having your primary carers be addicts of some kind
* Growing up in a relatively poor/deprived
* ...
Really this list is endless, and other than blind luck (a lotto win, something that can really elevate you out of this situation, as well as having the sense to use the opportunity correctly), no amount of 'hustle' is really going to get you out of this situation.
The kind of attitude in parent's comment is prevalent amongst people who have grown up in relatively rich, successful environments, and see vastly more lucky people than unlucky people (when in reality there are orders of magnitude more unlucky people than lucky).
That reminds me a short fictional story by Jorge Luis Borges (if you excuse the quasi non-sequitur): The Lottery in Babylon. It describes how the lottery became so popular in Babylon that they began not just to play for money, but all kind of prizes, and then not only prizes but punishments. Finally, they decided that people didn't even need to buy a ticket. Everybody was implicitly part of the game, where good or bad things could be made to happen to you just by random chance... At the end of the day, The Lottery in Babylon became indistinguishable from normal life.
> but they don't define what luck is to begin with.
They do though, the paper is focused on what you call "blind luck" in (1). I suppose it can be summarized as a evidence based counter argument to the cultural narrative weight given to 2,3,4, especially in the US.
I don't think it is complete of course, but it is interesting.
That's a spot on point about the various types of luck. The common derogatory saying about smart / rich (referenced in the title) reveals more about the person saying it, than it does the person that it is directed toward. It's the surface assessment equivalent of thinking someone is rich based on the car they drive (or watch they wear etc.). It's a shallow & easy appraisal that someone runs because they're either incapable of deeper analysis or are too lazy to bother. In my experience it tends to reveal that the speaker knows absolutely nothing about money or wealth.
They used a normal distribution for "Talent", but that's false. There is plenty of evidence that , like everything in life , it's power-law distributed
And the assumtions of the model are rather childish: each random event either doubles or halves your capital (In real life, the multiplier can be much much higher or lower). In fact that's the most flawed point of their tiny "model": by changing the factor 2 and the multiplier distribution they can come up with any result they want.
Also, everyone meets lucky/unlucky events in the same frequency - the presumumption that smart people make paths that provide equal opportunity as the rest or take chances with equal frequency is just false.
They could at least have compared the lifetime wealth fluctuations with real data for a sense of how wrong thir model is. This is a model of a very simple casino game, not real life.
The paper has no discussion, no justification for its parameters, no critical presentation of its limitations , no sensitivity analysis.
Good conversation piece, everyone has an opinion on the subject, but the experiment is rubbish.
Both of your links show a power-law distributions for the returns on talent, not the underlying distribution of raw talent in the population. We already know this. Wealth begets wealth- a successful book author is more likely to sell another successful book than a new author. Likewise with artist paintings and salesmen.
But actual talent, like human height or average running speed, is probably normally distributed.
> But actual talent, like human height or average running speed, is probably normally distributed.
Talent would be normally distributed if it was e.g. the sum of your partial talents, as a result of Central limit. There are different kinds of talent though, and gifted people are talented in one thing, but may even suck badly in others. If there are 5 talents, a person barely above average, with 0.6 in everything has total talent 3 and Mozart who has 1.0 only in music has total talent 1. That's not how talent works though: extremely gifted people are almost unstoppable. It would take extremely adverse circumstances for Mozart of Maria Callas or Michelangelo to not be successful. So, i don't think Talent works at all like a bell curve. It's futile to make parallels with IQ (which IS a sum of variable representing partial skills).
That's why i think those studies find those power laws (and frankly, there are not many ways to measure talent directly). Also: Note that they didn't measure the wealth of the artist, but the price of their works since the time they lived , as a long-term testament to their talent.
> Good conversation piece, everyone has an opinion on the subject, but the experiment is rubbish.
Agreed. The paper also seems to be promoting a view of wealth inequality that would support modern socialist policies.
The paper seems to be trying to scientifically support redistribution of welfare, without actually doing or saying anything, or posing the question directly.
Someone is warping the numbers to fit their agenda. Since it's a popular (and polarizing) agenda, of course everyone will have an opinion to chime in with.
I went to an elite engineering school. My colleagues are all really smart. After 20 years, some are wealthy, some are poor. There is no apparent link between how hard they worked and how rich they became. However you can definitely trace how a few good breaks led to one guy being rich and another not.
Did the guys who went to work for Google take any additional risk? Yet, they are now millionaires. How about the entrepreneurs? A few are super rich now. The guy who went to work at McKinsey is now a pubco COO making millions.
Yes, by my direct observation, it’s mostly chance.
> Yes, by my direct observation, it’s mostly chance.
Wait, what? Are you sure you're reaching the right conclusion? It sounds like your anecdote supports the opposite once you stop looking inter-your-small-group, and start comparing groups. Have you compared median wage data for your elite university versus median wage data for the country you are in? I suspect the difference is noticeable.
It appears you are making the mistake of comparing a group of successful entrepreneurs, failed entrepreneurs, and people who went to work at Goog and McKinsey with each-other, but you really need to compare that group to people who couldn't get a job at Google or McKinsey at all. Obviously life is not nearly that uni-dimensional, but I'd wager your median "all really smart" colleague is wildly beating the median person, even if some of them are broke.
This is a very good point. I would be shocked if the median income among grads from an elite engineering school is not considerably higher than the median income of the population.
I've contracted with Google a couple times, just like >50% of their workforce.
Would I like millions? Sure. Do I have that? No. Would I work myself to death for it? No. Do I believe Google [or whatever FAANG company you want] is The Greatest Everest Of All? I'm smarter than that and you should be as well.
Out of 170 graduates, 27 went to facebook, 21 went to google, 13 went to microsoft, 6 went to amazon, 2 went to apple, etc. That's basically half the class including a lot of people from the bottom half of the class (the best people I knew usually didn't choose FAAMG and their outcomes were a crapshoot).
Really cool report. Looking through the list the Google and FB numbers go up including Waymo, DeepMind, and WhatsApp.
Out of about ~150 graduates at my undergrad, I think 3 went to Amazon (including myself), 1 went to Facebook, 1 went to Microsoft in a support role and the rest went to Cisco, IBM, and consulting companies.
I wonder why CMU only had 6 to Amazon. That seems low! I think trading firms like JS, Two Sigma, Jump and Ansatz had more combined...
It seems kind of asshole to say this but Amazon is considered low-tier at CMU so people don't choose it unless they got rejected from everyone else. =/
> It seems kind of asshole to say this but Amazon is considered low-tier at CMU so people don't choose it unless they got rejected from everyone else. =
Why is that?
Also, MIT's distribution seems very different. Amazon and Facebook are near equal and GM takes a big chunk, which is not what I would have expected. Oracle is also around the same as my undergrad.
The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Ecc 9:11
Ugh, I wish the author had made the point without the computer simulation.
I think there might be merit to the argument people make more money than their intelligence, or effort, seems to indicate. And the author lays out some basic arguments here:
"But there is a problem with this idea: while wealth distribution follows a power law, the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal distribution that is symmetric about an average value. For example, intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000.
The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some people work more hours than average and some work less, but nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else."
However, you don't need the simulation to add to this argument. If anything, the simulation undercuts it because now you point out small errors and end up doubting the whole argument.
The whole argument seems naively flawed to me: given a certain individual, with some defined IQ and personality, there are problems that they won't ever solve, no matter how much time they live. I'll never write a single novel, Georges Simenon wrote 200 of them. The average person wouldn't discover relativity, or write Mozart's music, in any amount of time.
It's not true that abilities scale linearly. Not even the difference in the amount if work people can perform is linear: there are people that can start successful companies in the time it takes me to set up an appointment with the dentist (weeks of procrastination).
Frankly it doesn't surprise me at all that this research comes from my country: a country that is deeply suspicious of success and, especially in the public sector, of any form of reward based on results. In fact the study finds exactly what most Italian public employees (such as university researchers) ask for: indistinct financing for everyone without the need to show anything for it.
IQ tests are also a bad example because they have a normal distribution by design. It's like saying grades fall into a normal distribution when you're graded on a normal distribution curve
However, from what I can tell -- and these studies are always controversial and not convincing -- IQ is only tangentially related to financial success. If I recall, a little helps but a lot doesn't help more.
It's a good example because most human traits are normally distributed. There aren't any 1000IQ humans, just like there are no 18ft tall humans, or ones that could run a marathon in under an hour.
Comparing IQ as a measurement to measuring height would require we create a non linear unit of measurement so that humans fit into a normal distribution of "Height Quotient" where most humans are 100 units tall. Then every few years we adjust these units so that most humans are always 100 units tall
100 IQ fifty years ago wasn't the same as 100 IQ today
IQ numbers are normalized which should make it no surprise that histogram of IQ numbers form a normal distribution. It's in the definition. IQ numbers only indicate a relative position to the rest of the population. Basically (110IQ-100IQ) != (120IQ-110IQ).
'However, you don't need the simulation to add to this argument. If anything, the simulation undercuts it because now you point out small errors and end up doubting the whole argument.'
I would say that if the author is making an argument based on probability distributions, then that's a fundamentally mathematical one, and they should see it through instead of hand-waving via rhetoric. Am I missing something?
[Edit: I read the paper when it came out (2018) and it seemed mathematically sound. Was I mistaken?]
I don't know I can say it more clearly. I can sort of repeat what I said.
Instead of two factors (intelligence, and effort), let's just take one factor (effort).
One person works 12 hours a day. We know people can only work 2x as hard as this person. Yet, there are many people who are more than 2x as rich. Hence, effort alone doesn't fully explain the difference.
That is it. You can get that argument right there.
Do you need me to do a computer simulation? Will that make the argument stronger? Even if the argument is mathematical?
Or will you look at my simulation and say, "ah, I think you made an error here by not accounting for sleep efficiency fully, so I think this theory is wrong."
My point is that the mathematical simulation is more precise because you've exactly stated the model and ran it. While doing it verbally allows for all kinds of interpretation and is therefore much harder to interpret.
I apologise but I also really sincerely don't understand your verbal reasoning in the context of this particular paper. They took two underlying distributions and managed to produce something that looks like a real world one. I'm not sure what you're trying to say that's equivalent to that?
I reread our back and forth, and I think my clearest explanation is in the original post where I quote from the author. So I think we might be at the limits of my ability to communicate in this medium.
But even in the instance you are talking about -- let's just abstract away everything else -- we know that the output of a gaussian process over time will be a very wide dispersion.
If you assume stock prices follow some kind of gaussian distribution (yes, I know they don't), and just follow them in time you get this crazy wide distribution.
Its a "stylized fact". And running it as a metaphor for some other process doesn't give me more insight. But I fear this explanation is even more confusing, and not less.
I won't dismiss what you're saying but tbh it's very opaque - do you have a link to something that explains what you're trying to say? Something mathematical would help (for the reasons I outlined in my earlier reply!)
Let's take a function that produces normally distributed random variables. Let's run this function at every moment in time starting at t=0, and then sum it with the prior sum.
You can use a function that sort of looks like that to simulate a lot of different processes (a random walk, brownian motion etc).
Here is a more mathematical write up of the properties:
Thanks. I dived into this and tbh I'd like someone to take what you've mentioned and extend the discussion in the original paper further.
IMO, the paper's simulation tells us explicitly the full extent of what they've been considering, so it's a useful tool for the reader to judge the ideas. I know you might disagree but it gives a firm definition of ideas to me, at least, and avoids me having to over interpret based on my own biases of what I'm reading.
Given the starting numbers, the math is fine. But because the starting numbers are not real data, they had to create them out of a simplified model - and all the decisions that went into that model can be criticized and used as reasons that the output is wrong.
I don't think that's a problem. A lot of valid work has been done on simplified models and they're there to illustrate what might be going on rather than absolute proof. And yes you can criticise them, since that is the point.
It seems fairly obvious that wealth distribution would not perfectly mirror the underlying talent distribution. In a competitive environment small difference have large impacts on results.
Usain Bolt was only a tiny bit faster than other sprinters, but in this prime he won basically all the races he competed in.
It wasn't luck that had him winning them all despite such a small advantage. It was the nature of competition.
The simulation is useful in the sense that they managed to obtain a wealth distribution similar to the real world based on that argument.
That's how science works in general. Build a model and make it match the observations. That model is what will be used to test the hypothesis. Without a model, it is just speculation with little value.
This isn't how science works! I can make a model giving similar results as real world data which shows that wealth is 100% determined by talent, or 100% determined by luck, or any number in between, doesn't prove anything at all.
> So some people are more talented than average and some are less so, but nobody is orders of magnitude more talented than anybody else. This is the same kind of distribution seen for various human skills, or even characteristics like height or weight. Some people are taller or smaller than average, but nobody is the size of an ant or a skyscraper. Indeed, we are all quite similar.
I realize this is the politically correct world view in many circles, but it’s simply not true. The variation in cognitive ability is enormous. You can ask yourself for example how many randomly selected people would you need to produce a score aver 200 on an IQ test, produce a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem or build something like the SpaceX Falcon.
(Now that fact is not a justification for the enormous economic inequality we see on this planet. Neither is it proof that luck is not a major component in success.)
> how many randomly selected people would you need to produce a score aver 200 on an IQ test, produce a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem or build something like the SpaceX Falcon.
It's been proven time and again that IQ numbers are more or less meaningless. Setting that aside, I think the point of the article is exactly that you might not need a huge sample to find someone with the potential to do these things, key word here being "potential", nor these things require a different order of magnitude in talent or intelligence, just the right combination of drive, luck, inspiration, opportunity, etc...
I agree IQ is largely meaningless, and I could have formulated my standpoint better, but...
> I think the point of the article is exactly that you might not need a huge sample to find someone with the potential to do these things
If it is then I'm quite sure this conclusion is in no way backed by the referenced scientific article.
> nor these things require a different order of magnitude in talent or intelligence, just the right combination of drive, luck, inspiration, opportunity, etc...
It would be great if this was true, but it's just not. For example, I see myself as a few standard deviations out on the mathematical talent/ability scale, but I would not stand a chance against somebody like Andrew Wiles or Terence Tao. Why is it so important to pretend that it isn't so...?
I just went with my wife to an anniversary event at her graduate school, which is fairly prestigious. We are older, and one of the things we were thinking about was how some people had really striking success in their twenties, some in their thirties and forties, and some later still. The point being that coming out of the first few years of school you may feel like your cohort is sorting for success, but actually early bloomers sometimes revert to the mean and late bloomers happen all the time.
I don't think people typically realize it as much because they don't benchmark themselves against their classmates when they get older.
I chased the dollar and lost my wife and Pomeranian in a divorce :( I was rich, but never realized that love and companionship is worth more in the long term than money. I would give a billion dollars to wake up with my wife in my arms and that little dude licking my face.
You can have both good things in your life again. Dust yourself off, learn what you need to learn and find someone who will uphold her commitments (I'm making some assumptions about your vows)...
while I appreciate it... i realized that it would never be the same. too much time has pasted, we're both different people now. i'm just happy that they are both happy and healthy. divorce doesn't mean you have to hate each other forever.
Ok. So, it's over, and you aren't filled with hate. That's great news! You might miss the people and pets of past still, but surely you can continue to move on and find that you can be happy with other dogs and with other lovers.
dude... you find one true love in life. if you haven't been married, you won't know what I mean... and if you are married, then you don't want to find out what I mean.
I used to think the same thing, but after my divorce I found a new love.
Nobody is perfect, and there are so many women out there. The chance that you had the most "optimal" one is very small.
You have what my wife would call a "limiting belief". Believe that you can find an even better match than before, and maybe you will. I'm sure the chance of that happening is higher than you think.
Watch a survival documentary. 10 contestants, many battle-hardened. The conclusion after watching 5 seasons of "Alone" is -- its all luck. The fittest didn't win, it was the person who happened to be dropped off in a relatively safe area, with access to resources, and had some good luck day to day. The people who randomly dropped into areas filled with predators or hazards, they were forced out (despite many being hardened survivalists). People with random equipment failures, or where the fishing suddenly dries up, they have to quit too. No matter how hard your will, if the resources disappear you aren't going to win (one contestant stumbles on a moose and literally has hundreds of pounds of food fall in his lap, only to have the fat stolen by a wolverine).
I think I watched a few episodes of that with my father-in-law and all I remember is that several of the contestants spent the first 8 hours or so building shelter (and if I recall correctly is was summer, so freezing was not an issue) and only then started to think about finding food. If they had any trouble at all finding food (which basically everyone did), then pretty soon they were too weak to continue searching for food because all of the physical activity had caused them to burn far too many calories for their meager food intake.
The people who had a lot of experience hunting and fishing tended to know how long it would take them to find food and went about it with much more urgency.
I do remember bad luck striking as well for sure, but it seemed like strategy was at least as big of a factor as luck for many of the contestants.
I agree that no matter how hard your will, you can't make it past certain things, but a lot of contestants hamstrung themselves right off the bat by badly underestimating how many calories they would need or not accurately predicting which sorts of problems would instantly end their bid.
> Watch a survival documentary. 10 contestants, many battle-hardened. The conclusion after watching 5 seasons of "Alone"
That's a reality TV show, not a documentary.
That aside, the conditions for basic survival in harsh, solitary, conditions are vastly different that those for economic success in first-world society.
When I was young, it wasn't that I was necessarily smart, but I did enjoy reading. My typical fare from when I was very young included books on biology, archeology, anthropology, etc. Everyone took this to mean that I was smart, and I ended up in the classic 'smart trap'. I forgot what it was that made me knowledgable (practice), and instead believed it was innate.
Regardless of this, now that I am an adult, I find that I would love to spend my time learning. It's a primary value. I have children, and have to focus on their upbringing as well, which is a massive drain on the time that I can bring to bear on learning new things - and I mean taking classes to advance my understanding of mathematics, not learning a new programming language.
When I think about being wealthy, I actually think about spending my time going to classes, doing research, and advancing human knowledge. I know others who would use their time for leisure, and probably a dozen other possibilities.
In the end, I simply don't value money beyond giving me the basic necessities of life. I find my time outside of work is best used focusing on studies like what I described (I mean, they are all free now, for the most part). I find that people who are focused on wealth, unless it is inherited, put most of their time in gaining new wealth. I just don't see anything revolutionary in gaining more power, which is what wealth is to me. True revolution comes from technological development, which is typically done by the public sector. Sadly, work there is poorly rewarded by the private sector (companies making billions on the internet don't donate money back to DARPA for more research, or for that matter GPS, chip technologies, etc.).
I just think it's a difference in values. Getting to where I wish I could be at this point of my life would come at too much cost to my family, so now I find myself working for profit for the rest of my life. Not so bad, of course... I have some time for the leisure that allows me to expand my knowledge, and maybe catch up enough to understand the incredible things that are happening in the space of scientific advancement.
The experiment design was flawed in the following way. What if, in real life, there are people who are much more likely to take big chances with their whole career trajectory? Also, what if there are people who are much more likely to perceive which products will change the world, and when. The combination of these two qualities is the key.
Even if these qualities are distributed on a normal curve, the result of possessing the right combination of qualities will have an extremely large effect in a winner take all world.
Sure, there will be some randomness involved. Start with two kids who both have the same optimal qualities, and only one will end up a billionaire. But my guess is that the second kid will also end up ahead of the average. If the simulation did not end up with this result, then my guess is that something was left out of the simulation.
This presumes intent from those that “made it”. I’m not so sure the people that reached the top knew that their actions would take them there. For example, I doubt anyone in the early days of facebook understood why it was going to be as big as it was going to be. They wanted it, yes, but they didn’t know. Facebook’s success is down to luck in making the right choices. And ofcourse, once you reach a certain level of wealth you create your own luck, so one hit is enough to lay the seeds for a string of successes.
My point is, we praise captains for industry for their unique insights, but I doubt they’re really that clever. Yes, they have skills, but not skills as rare as their wealth would suggest.
Even more luck is required with the way a lot of people on this site are trying to get rich (startups).
Want to require less luck? Open some kind of store/service yourself and it'll pay off faster than investing in a startup most likely.
A friend of mine runs a shipping office, single location. Not a giant or complicated business with 99.999% uptime. He always has much nicer race cars too.... :)
Anyway plenty of people are terrible with their money from a young age. When I'm a parent I hope I can instill better money management practices in my kids. :)
First. You had an idea and went with that one that worked out, that’s luck. Also luckily, you had the physical, mental and monetary capacity to follow through with it, is lucky to have these resources.
Second way to look at it. You were smart to reject many ideas because you had the experience and smarts to say no to non-sense. Also you had the grit and persistence to grind it out despite all the challenges.
I'm sure the authors will not use this paper in their grant proposals or on their resumes: "Oh, no, don't count that paper, we were just lucky on that one."
More seriously: without reading the work more in depth, this seems to show that luck is sufficient to have the current distribution, not that it's necessary.
Anecdotally, there sure seem to be people out there that are 10x or 100x as productive, not by doing the same tasks faster but by identifying a different set of tasks that accomplish the same thing, or by imagining new possibilities that others couldn't. Clearly, some luck is involved in that, but so is some skill, and this paper seems to exclude that as a possibility.
I don’t understand this line of thinking. My father worked a minimum wage job most of his life and was able to retire a multi-millionaire simply because he saved and invested his disposable income. Most people can become wealthy but they choose to drive fancy cars and go to the movie theaters instead then complain how unlucky they are. That’s simply not true. If people are lucky because they realized wealth was attainable then yes, the most successful people are lucky.
> My father worked a minimum wage job most of his life and was able to retire a multi-millionaire simply because he saved and invested his disposable income.
Inflation-adjusted federal minimum wage is lower today than it has been most of the time since the 1956, and if you measure against minimal needs it's even worse because CPI also includes hedonic adjustment. Sure, by historical standards (both before and since) the “Lost" Generation, the Boomers, and (to a lesser extent) the leading edge of Gen X spent all or a substantial share of their adulthood in times where, especially if you were a White man at least, there was unusually strong economic opportunity for the working class.
Success in life shouldn't be measured solely by someone's wealth. Not if you value happiness. Beyond a certain point wealth doesn't increase a person's happiness.
It is pathological to even consider sacrificing your happiness and compromising your life to chase higher and higher paying jobs.
Knowing when to settle and how to be content in life with what you have is a form of intelligence rarely praised.
People are quite misinformed about how wealth accumulation works. You don't become wealthy by working hard at any particular craft. You become wealthy by acquiring as much capital as possible and charging people a premium for access. How then do you acquire wealth-building capital in the first place? Birth lotto most of the time. Turns out, life isn't a meritocracy at all.
Looks like folks that believe they are smart and not rich love to side with such articles.
Successful people might be LUCKIEST, but it's not mostly luck.
If you wish to be successful, you need more than luck, hard work, determination, grit, laser like focus, working on the right stuff, working smart, proper time management, proper project organization, scheduling and prioritization of activities will make you successful.
We can't all be billionaires, but if your come from a family making an annual wage of $40k with a net worth of $0 to $10k and you one day are making $100k+ and have a net worth of $500k or a million, you are successful. Success is relative to where you start from.
It's true that some have a head start, but it is what it is. Anyone in the western hemisphere who is healthy and has their freedom can really move themselves forward if they are willing to work and apply themselves.
It's the uncomfortable truth, but the sooner you embrace it the sooner you can get on the right path if you're not already on it.
I was joking with my brother that this narrative of "being rich must be miserable" is one of the greatest cons played on the middle class -- or just sour grapes. Taleb states: if you control your preferences you are way way way ahead of the crowd--most people become rich to impress other rich people and lose their personal preferences in the process. The treadmill effect is wild.
Note: we were born in Africa moved to NA and slept in a one bedroom apartment with our parents like sardines. Fast foward to now and life is much better. I am not rich by any stretch.
When people born here (western world) say being rich isnt worth it I laugh. You're used to a certain level of safety net that we know is not sustainable and is soon to disappear (in my humble opinion). We are Zimbabwean (left 2001)
Lots of people move to SF to get rich (and succeed, for some definition of rich) but end up losing their friends, not seeing their families, forgoing having their own families, living with lots of roommates, etc.
If someone just hands you $1 million, then sure, it's great. But if you're sacrificing your mental or physical health to earn that $1 million the hard way, you could definitely come out the other side rich and worse off.
I was surprised to see this article have no mention of privilege that many people experience. Certainly if you grow up in a rich family, you have opportunities available to you that others do not. There are also privileges associated with race and gender among other things that certainly impact one's likelihood of becoming rich.
How many statisticians, psychologists, etc. does it take to re-create Ecclesiastes?
"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."
An interesting couple of quotes in the article that make me wonder about their conclusion:
The maximum success never coincides with the maximum talent, and vice-versa,
Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck
By definition, this can't be completely true, as pure luck would mean pure randomness, and apparently, both tails (the most and the least talented) are never the richest. Such situation is at odds with a random distribution.
So there is a missing part of the model that may explain it, but it's not random.
That being said, I'm not trying to nit-pick the work they've done. Clearly there is something at play here that has huge social significance for every person on the planet.
Fascinating work - I'm looking forward to seeing how this research grows over the coming years.
They seem to have a flawed core assumption – that everyone is hell-bent on maximizing their personal wealth. In other words, every person will dedicate their entire intellect toward the goal of making money. This doesn't really match up with reality (thank goodness).
It’s a model. All models are wrong, some are useful. That the models’ wealth distribution correlates well with the real world is an interesting fact and strongly suggests further investigation. Edit:grammar
The smarter you are the more you understand the risks and choose safer paths.
Getting rich involves doing stupid things.. things that others would look at and think would fail but you do it anyways. So getting rich involves stubborness and fearlessness and the ability to detact from reality.
You can get rich without risking anything (well except a little time and effort). It's called VC... If you're good and want to play it safe, you will use the money carefully and wisely and succeed. No need to be fearless or detached from reality.
I told my kid the benefits of good eduction and a willingness (but not fetish) for hard work was 1 - a more interesting life and 2 - the opportunity to "buy" more lottery tickets for the things you might ed up wanting (which aren't always $).
Okay, so I quickly skimmed the paper in question, and I'm very skeptical of it.
They are using talent as a variable in their model, but what do they mean by "talent"?
"talent Ti (intelligence, skills, ability, etc.)"
Throwing "intelligence, skills, ability, etc." together doesn't make much sense to me.
Out of these three, only intelligence (assuming they meant IQ), is an established measure, at least from what I understand. What does "skills, ability, etc." even mean?
It's not surprising to me that their conclusion doesn't seem to correspond with reality:
"An important result of the simulations is that the most successful agents are almost never the most talented ones, but those around the average of the Gaussian talent distribution - another stylised fact often reported in the literature" (what literature??).
I can't comment on this "talent" variable as a whole since it doesn't make much sense but in terms of IQ it's certainly not the 100 IQ individuals that tend to be the most successful ones.
I also question the "luck" variable, because:
"...does not change this fundamental features of the model, which exposes different individuals to different amount of lucky or unlucky events during their
life, regardless of their own talent."
I find it unlikely that "talent" and "luck" are completely independent from each other.
For example, if I recall correctly, reaction time correlates with IQ, so wouldn't that make more intelligent people less prone to accidents?
Finally, I'm dubious of their results that show that distributing funds equally among all scientists would lead to most scientific discoveries.
From what I understand, people with a specific set of traits, aka geniuses, are over-represented in scientific discoveries.
If that's the case, wouldn't deliberately seeking out geniuses and throwing money at them lead to more discoveries than distributing funds equally?
Again, I only skimmed this paper, but it seems to me that the researchers didn't look at the data we already have, and instead made up their own models that don't appear to correspond with reality.
Also, given that this is a Hacker News comment, not a scientific paper, I can't be bothered to cite anything :D
"So if not talent, what other factor causes this skewed wealth distribution? "Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck," say Pluchino and co.
"The team shows this by ranking individuals according to the number of lucky and unlucky events they experience throughout their 40-year careers. "It is evident that the most successful individuals are also the luckiest ones," they say. "And the less successful individuals are also the unluckiest ones."
This article kind of assumes everyone wants to be rich, or makes that a primary goal in their life. That's not really the case.
Some people are more career-driven, more ambitious, more interested in making money. Others have various psychological issues that prevent them from working effectively or sometimes getting or keeping a job at all. Is that just bad luck?
I grew up despising money and looking down on people who chased after money. I didn't want to be that guy. I did reluctantly get work, but I never tried to climb the corporate ladder, refused offers of promotion to management, took many years off work and lived off my savings instead, and I've burnt out many times, my career suffered as a result. Is that just bad luck?
I had a chance to work at Google early on, pre-IPO, but I decided not to. I worked at a small financial company for a year, was offered a big promotion and turned it down and quit instead, because I was burnt out and just not interested in that job. That company wound up becoming one of the largest financial companies in the world.
Being depressed much of my life, I didn't really care to plan for or save for my long term future, because I thought I wouldn't have one. This has become a self-fulfiling prophecy in some sense, though not how I expected. I didn't think I'd live, but I did live, just not with as much financial security had I pursued money money more and saved for the long-term.
In many ways I've been lucky. I grew up mostly in safe suburbs when I was young. I went to some great schools, some of the best in the country, but also dropped out of those. I'm not ambitious. I get bored easily. I like to follow my own interests rather do boring work other people tell me to do. I suffer from depression and just generally don't feel I fit well in this world, but also consider that I'm not rich (actually close to becoming homeless at this point) due in large measure to my own choices rather than pure luck.
Now, you could argue that we really have no free will. If that's so, then yes, where you are could be said to be "just chance". But to the degree we could make good or bad choices, we bear some responsibility for where we end up, though clearly luck plays some role, and it's good to be in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing.
My entire point is that you can be lucky (and smart, if I can flatter myself so) but not rich.
It can take more than intelligence and luck, it could take a desire and a choice to make money a big priority in your life, which it rarely was for me.
If Bill Gates had said "Fuck Microsoft, I don't want to do this shit anymore" and quit early on in his career, (which, if he had free will, he could have done at any point) then he probably wouldn't have wound up the richest person in the world, no matter how lucky he was.
He chose to do what he did (didn't he?), and that (in large part) was what made him unimaginably rich.
This article isnt referencing a "general assesment", its based on a computer model that tried to simulate human behavior.
Its clear that you need to be lucky to become a billionaire but i think a more interesting question is how much luck is involved in becoming a multi millionaire.
If you were as unmotivated as described and also born poor instead of well off you would have found yourself homeless instead of living off your savings when you burnt out and instead of posting on hn you would probably be rotting in the ground.
Absolutely. I'm not saying that luck plays no role. It clearly does. But it's not, as the article claims, "just luck" (unless you don't believe in free will, in which case it is).
Parenthetically, I was born poor. My family had very little money when I was born, and what little they had they left behind in the old country when we immigrated to America. So I was poor when I was really young, and middle class by the time I left high school, thanks to the hard work (and maybe luck) of my parents.
But your point is taken... if I was really poor when it came time to work and I refused to do so, then I'd feel the lash of the economic whip, as I'm just about to do so now as I've burnt through my savings yet again....
I think the explanation is that you can't guarantee success without luck, but you can guarantee failure e.g. its random how long you'll live, but you can ensure your death at any time. Its random whether your next business goes exponential, but you can walk away and it implodes at any time. Its random whether you stumble on the "big kill" and the tribe feasts, but you can guarantee failure by refusing the hunt.
I wonder if this is an artefact of the rules of the sim. There's weak evidence that supports the sim in that it predicts the current wealth distribution somewhat, but that doesn't mean the sim represents reality, of course.
The part that sticks out to me is the variation in the talent param. It's N(0.6, 0.01), so the mean person has a 60% chance of capitalizing on their luck. I wonder if perhaps that number is actually substantially lower.
Well, just a thought. I found the paper's methods interesting (simulating the agents and events random-walking until they encountered each other, etc.).
> The results are something of an eye-opener. Their simulations accurately reproduce the wealth distribution in the real world... They then repeat the simulation many times to check the robustness of the outcome.
I'm not familiar with the process and rigor that goes into a study like this, but it seems to me that for experiments like this it would be hard to prevent researchers from adjusting parameters until they get the answer they are looking for (which multiple runs doesn't really address).
While the book is not perfect, reading Outliers from Malcolm Gladwell could hint on some not so obvious conditions that could make getting rich not so random.
Visit Bogleheads.org, where many wealthy people hang out and discuss finances.
You'll find that for a great many wealthy people, the secret is simply living below your means, saving and investing for decades, and keeping costs low. That's it. Not lucky. Not necessarily smarter. Just disciplined, and having the basic knowledge of the simple steps described.
I would say there is some lucky with becoming extremely wealthy, but in general there is a pretty easy formula to becoming wealthy if you're smart. Invest a decent portion of your income into index funds and live below your means. On an engineer's salary it isn't hard to become a millionaire by the age of 40 even with modest savings.
IQ might be more accurately termed SQ (Success Quotient), as it might be measuring the traits that could make one more likely to succeed than intelligence per se.
This content of this article does not even come close to supporting the assertion in its title.
The claim it is making is that wealth and intelligence are not correlated linearly.
Its not even claiming they aren't positively correlated, and the surely are to some degree, more or less getting into some type of causality as is implied by the title.
We live in a frothy time when a relatively jr software engineer in SF can make $300k/year. It wouldn't take that much discipline to save 60%-70% as a single person and have a million saved in a few years time with the right mix of discipline and investing.
No not necessarily. Most of the housing stock in SF are houses, and people rent rooms and have roommates. On top of that, 70% (now more with the new statewide rent control law) of homes/apartments are rent-controlled.
I know very few people who rent a 1-bedroom by themselves. If you're renting a room you might be paying $1500-$2000.
I'm a mathematician because that's what interests me. My richness is not measured in dollars. As I age, I grow more concerned for my future, but I still have no regrets.
Lots of financial firms love to hire mathematicians (see Renaissance Technologies for a famous example). So you could probably secure your financial future relatively easily if you wanted to.
I'm well aware of the option. Sacrifice my happiness for how many years in the process?
Making money has never been a primary goal of mine. I'm lucky that my interests are moderately lucrative. I know that "very lucrative" is just around the corner. But so is the liquor store, and I don't drink.
Perhaps "talent" is the wrong term. I can be talented at hammering nails, that doesn't mean I'll be super wealthy.
What you need is a talent that earns revenue and the foresight to retain the net income and increase revenue. "It's all about leverage".
Another approach I have personally done is taking out a $30k loan, invested it and doubled my money paying back the loan. What does that mean, I started with zero, and ended up with $30k. I then took my newly made $30k and continued to invest it (without a loan).
My point being, you aren't rich because you didn't take a "chance". You didn't increase your net worth.
You absolutely get to choose not to roll the dice, by staying at home, by not starting that company, by not pursuing that guy/girl, by not interviewing with that company, by generally refusing to put yourself out there and see what happens.
That's not a point it's a reduction to absurdity on the definition of risk, it's not the kind of risk being discussed, and it's an excuse to ignore risk by devaluing the meaning.
the article assumes that nobody has orders of magnitude higher skills like nobody has iq orders of magnitude higher. that's extremely faulty because someone with an iq of 160 doesn't solve 60% more problems. He solves problems that others find impossible. Paul Allen and Gates hit iq ceiling
i find the chance argument very compelling, but there's another factor which to my knowledge the OP researchers didn't investigate: ethics.
the richest people i know (with wealth in the 10M range) are the most amoral in their thoughts and actions, and it makes a big difference financially. note that i said amoral, not immoral; they aren't malicious, they simply don't care.
they don't refuse a business opportunity because the business would be explicitly unethical; they do it, and profit from it. the same is true if the business produces negative externalities. it simply doesn't matter to them because money is money as far as they care.
they don't craft their investing strategy with the goal of investing in companies that behave well; they chase the money regardless of the ethical problems that they may be directly incentivizing.
overall, this gives these people a much greater range of freedom when it comes to making large volumes of additional money. while i don't know for sure if being amoral helps people become rich in the first place, i assume that it does because having more options on the table is never a bad thing.
so, maybe the answer to the question of "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich" is "i refuse to act unethically to make money".
in my personal experience, i think this argument is pretty good. in 2010 or so, i realized that there was a then-latent market for TDCS / consumer nootropic brain stimulation systems, and considered making a company around producing and selling them to consumers.
however, at the time, i knew that brain stimulation hadn't been proven safe to use in the long term, and selling it to consumers would require working around the FDA's rules about medical devices to essentially evade their oversight. in short, i refused to start a company whose time had come because i knew that i'd probably be harming people as part of the core business. i would have been one of the first in the space, and while i don't think i would be rich today if i had done it, i know that it would have been a chance to get rich and certainly that there were some people who did get rich. and of course, there have been plenty of consumers who have been harmed by these products, often in unidentifiable or subtle ways.
so what's the moral of this story? having morals is expensive, and it sometimes precludes you from becoming rich even if you're lucky enough to be at the right time to take action.
From my experience this is definitely true. Also our financial system is incredibly forgiving when it comes to unethical behavior.
For example, if you take a massive loan and then it doesn't work out, you can just declare bankrupcy, then you just wait a few years and you can start again. You can change country, then you get a clean credit history and you can try again.
You could borrow some money from the bank, bet it all on a coin toss; if you win, you can retire, if you lose, you just need to wait a few years then try again. If you do it enough times, it's very likely that you will win and retire within your lifetime.
The real losers of our society are all the honest, hard working people who are not prepared to gamble with other people's money. This is what loans are; loans expand the money supply - So when someone makes a reckless bet and they go bankrupt, it's as if everyone else was paying for that person.
Then we're surprised why the greediest and most reckless people win...
The system is not fair. Rich people already know this but it doesn't matter because they are not the ones who keep the engines of capitalism turning. So long as the majority of people believe that the system is fair, the engine will keep on running and becoming progressively less fair.
Rich people don't care about what is fair or ethical, they will do anything and say anything to get more money. Regular people are different. For example, most regular people would probably vote against a referendum to seize and nationalize all corporations with a market cap of above $1 billion... Even though such nationalization would almost certainly benefit them personally. Rich people, on the other hand, don't need any kind of justification or moral argument in order to take someone else's money; if they can do it, they will do it; simple as that. If all regular people had the mindset of rich people, we would be living in anarchy; there would be no government, only mafias and we would be killing each other over resources (of which there would be very little since we'd be spending most of our time and energy scheming and killing each other instead of creating value).
But the reality is that the rich have managed to create a society in which most people can be reared, prodded and milked like cattle under an obviously false pretext that they are the ones creating all the value.
I was just telling a friend how much I hated this article. So many flaws, of assumptions, reasoning and ethics.
1. The article assumes that IQ is "normally distributed" and that there are no extreme outliers, but how true is this really? First of all, IQ is a constructed metric that consists of multiple dimensions, and is normalized to mean 100, std 15. That's means it will be approximately normal, but not actually. In particular, AFAIK IQ tests can't reliably distinguish between extremely high IQ scores (140+). So we don't really have reliable data about the tail of the distribution... what we do have is strong anecdotal evidence that some people are extreme outliers (in either intelligence or performance) (Ramanujan, Elon Musk, John von Neumann, Steve Jobs). We also know from other examples that extreme outliers are possible, even though they're rare - example is breeding (of plants like corn or animals like chicken [1]), where just (unnatural) selection can produce phenotypes (from combinations of existing genes) that are multiple standard deviations above the original average.
2. Ok, so we have a model that produces some result. Does that make it a good model? Not necessarily! The point of Central Limit Theorem is that all models (within certain constraints) produce the same outcome.
Have we tried any alternative models? Basically their model is, Success = payoff * (a * luck + b * talent) and they argue that a is much bigger than b. But what if a was 0? In the present world, with companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon - i.e. a "winner-takes-all" scenario - I'd argue that even if success was completely skill-based, as long as the winners get outsized gains, you'd still expect 80-20 (or worse) wealth distribution.
3. Can we improve on it? Does it really make sense for the society to allocate resources / rewards equally to everyone? Maybe in academia (I'm not too familiar with that area), but in general, I'd argue not. The problem is, what means equally? Ok, so we had Fleming who discovered penicillin by chance. So, we should equally reward him, as well as the 9 other researchers that were also doing research in X and could have also stumbled upon the same substance, but were unlucky and didn't. But the bigger picture here is that we discovered antibiotics. I'm sure there were uncountable other lines of research that didn't yield any useful products or results or discoveries! (I've no experience with research, but I've read on Gwern that math discoveries are distributed with geometric (memoryless) distribution, i.e. more time spent on it does not increase your chances of solving it... that parallels my experience with math competitions, where you can be the smartestest of all but if you're approaching the problem along the wrong direction, there's no way for you to reach the goal.) Also, "same reward for same effort" sounds like a metric that can be very easily gamed.
So, in general, while I'd argue for more meritocracy and more equal rewards for producing results (i.e. inventors / workers get more money, not just investors / owners), I'm fairly biased against rewarding mere effort, and this article (X) definitely doesn't tilt my bias otherwise.
(X) I think it's definitely possible that the article is much worse than the study, and that the study actually addresses all of my concerns... Journalism is mostly sensationalism these days, especially science journalism.
It's nice to say it's luck, sure, and make everyone feel like they have a fair chance. However, I'm pretty certain the ones that obsess and plan the most to get rich and squeeze every little bit out they can into their plans have the best chance. Some lazy slob without the same attention to detail and effort just isn't going to make it.
Perhaps it is stupid to want to be rich? Few people are stupid enough to take the chance, so a few rich people are no thread to the mental health of society at large.
I'm being totally serious: The more I learn about riches & fame, the less I want them.
I'll be honest: I'm not quite to the point where if someone tried to thrust a million dollars into my hand, I'd say no. (That isn't even necessarily enough to take you out of "middle class" anymore as a one-off payment, honestly.) But I think I'd say no to 10 million and I'm fairly certain I'd say no to 100 million. Or really wish I had about a year later. (In "reality" I might try to do something where I take it but dump it into causes I approve of really quickly; for the sake of this argument I'm assuming that I'd have to actually step into that level of wealth permanently.)
That level of wealth forcibly inserts you into a class of games that I don't want to have to play.
It really doesn't force you into anything. You could just throw it into a savings account at your nearest national bank, lose a bit year over year to inflation being higher than the current interest rate, and have a whopper of an emergency fund. That would give you peace of mind if nothing else.
If you wanted to be smart you could invest it in any number of ways to not lose wealth to inflation, but that's by no means necessary.
I guess what the OP is trying to say is that throwing a million or more into a savings account, not having to worry, and peace of mind is in itself a class game. Few people have that luxury; I got a chance to be a bit better off and immediately felt much differently and more attuned to class differences than I was before. I now have the luxury of time, choice and pecuniary freedom I did not have, and a lot of my peers don’t have. If I had a billion dollars I can’t even imagine the effect it would have on how I think about things.
I feel I have that mentality of valuing the security the money gives me because I read books like Millionaire Next Door, Intelligent Investor, FIRE subreddits, etc and come from a family that has similar ideals.But I’m also aware that a lot of people are very different from that, and are known to end up playing differently with their money (status symbols, lifestyle upgrades, etc). Cultural aspects of many societies value the latter more than the former.
That comment says "class of games", and you've started writing about "class games" and then "class differences" in your interpretation of the comment. Not saying you did something bad here, but it sounds more like the telephone game than discussing what was written, all because of the omission of the preposition "of."
This is correct. I mean that having a certain level of wealth throws you into a world where everyone wants a piece of you, friendships become very difficult because are they friends or are they just after some money? Probably the latter. It basically takes you out of the normal run of human affairs into a very isolated environment. It solves a lot of problems that, frankly, I can solve well enough now, in return for handing you a whole lot of problems that are basically unsolvable. And there are other levels that become very easy to accidentally blunder into, like blackmail, and you become the target of some fairly sophisticated actors, possibly even including state actors, looking to influence you, or drain your accounts.
Rich people tend not to talk about it as much from what I've seen, but you can, if you look a bit, find a number of accounts of people who got very famous talking about this, especially if they later fell from grace.
When I was younger, I kinda thought this was sour grapes or rich/famous people trying to feel bad for themselves, but the consistency of the stories, plus my increasing understanding of human nature and group dynamics as I get older and gather more data and think more about the data leads me to believe this is the expected outcome rather than some exceptional surprise. I also thought, eh, that's no big deal, those are the soft problems and money solves the hard problems, but now I rather significantly feel the other way around. (There is a class of money problems that is hard, especially in the medical area, but they are not all that hard.)
I'm sure there's some people who pull it off, but I'm not sure I'd be one of them.
(As a bonus observation, when you are born into and grow up in this environment, I think it produces certain characteristic pathologies that go a long ways towards explaining why elites act so consistently in certain ways throughout history. Same environment -> same result. It is not good to have leadership populated by people who have never really deeply connected with another human being, yet, the very act of being in leadership inhibits those connections, and being born into it effectively destroys them entirely.)
having a certain level of wealth throws you into a world where everyone wants a piece of you, friendships become very difficult because are they friends or are they just after some money?
I've never been rich. Most so-called "friends" have wanted something from me while having little or nothing to offer me in return.
This became crystal clear while I was homeless for years. People continued to want something for me, continued to act like I deserved nothing in return and used my poverty as justification for why the things they wanted from me "weren't worth anything" and shouldn't lead to money.
Wealth just makes it apparent you can't trust people. People tend to be assholes. It's not like poor people are all surrounded by wonderful, loving, caring friends who would go to the ends of the Earth for them.
This is a good point. However, if you insert yourself among people who all have a certain level of material comfort to lack material ambition, it is much, much easier to forge authentic relationships. The prevailing social aim becomes to experience joy, learn interesting things, and grow as a person. Of course, this dynamic is still rare. Even when people aren't fighting for money, there's still an urge to fight for status, which only rarely perfectly manifests itself in a competition to create beauty. This is partly why conspicuous consumption is frowned upon by certain factions of the upper classes. It reveals you're playing the wrong game.
My mother's mother came from a low level German noble family. She was a full-time military wife for a lot of years, as was I.
My life mostly worked when I was a military wife, but a lot of the values I was raised with only really work if you are in a position that involves a. Responsibility for a larger community and b. Somehow provides for you so you can look out for other people.
Looking out for other people is a real skill, but it doesn't automatically come back to you. Many people feel zero obligation to do anything in return for you when you do something for them and this seems compounded by being a woman. "Social contract" seems like an alien concept for far too many people.
I think I could do good things in an urban planning or economic development type role. That would sort of be the modern equivalent of what European nobility did.
Historically, merchants had a terrible reputation because they just wanted money and felt no obligation to the community. So it was socially problematic for wealth to be controlled by rich merchants rather than nobility. The nobility were beholden to the lower classes and held responsible for using their privilege to serve society by filling roles that required a certain level of privilege and education.
This is why our legal system uses the term "court," which is the same word used for audiences held by the nobility. Originally, nobility heard and settled complaints amongst the townspeople "at court."
Your view is one that I'm partial to myself, but there are some other factors which you don't mention in your analysis.
One is that if you widen your view to not just being about you and how you cope with or are affected by that wealth, and consider how it might be used to help or influence those around you, the conclusion of whether to accept or seek such wealth might be different.
There was an article on HN recently about Jeff Bezos and his quest to get humans out in to space. Elon Musk has a similar ambition. Their goals, should they achieve them, could significantly change the destiny of humanity, and it would be unachievable for them without their great wealth.
Or look at what Gates has done with his foundation, or Warren Buffet's pledge to give away his billions when he dies (and all the other millionaires and billionaires he's managed to convince to do the same). None of that, which could and already has significantly helped the world would be possible without their wealth.
Or look at the Carnegie endowments, the Nobel prizes, the MacArthur awards, etc.
Very positive results could be achieved through charitable and philanthropic endeavors which would not be possible without the great wealth of their founders, even if the cost of that wealth to themselves and their families might be great.
These guys are shallow sleezebags. Bill Gates blew up the population of Africa as a PR stunt for his wife, which we see here has been successful. Nothing Bezos has done is morally praiseworthy, and many things questionable. Musk is a cool guy but clearly just a flashy narcissist.
It's much easier to make the world a better place by securing the proliferation of good ideas than to become fantastically rich. Ideas are after all what turn paper into money. I hope to raise a very large family of like-minded sons.
You could also give most of it away to a favorite charity, keeping however much you feel comfortable in owning.
There's a really interesting documentary called "Born Rich", which was made by one of the heirs to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, where he interviewed a lot of his friends who were all also born in to very wealthy families. They all had different ways of dealing with their circumstances, and I remember one of them did reject his family's fortune and tried to live an "ordinary" life.
You should take the $10 million. That's "fuck-you money"; with that amount, you're beholden to nobody. $1 million doesn't cut it. $100 million is unnecessary.
If I could completely conceal its presence from anyone else, maybe. If I was completely capable of keeping it from corroding my sensibility and connection to the world.
But honestly, even at my low-end Silicon Valley salary living in the midwest I sometimes end up a bit more detached and cavalier about some things than I'd like.
On a city tour the guide shared that a local billionaire hired the Navy Seals to break into his home to test the security system. He doesn’t want his family hurt by people who want his money.
>it says a lot that when confronted with an objectively dumb rich dude like trump (no working memory, can't apply grammar consistently, childish vocabulary, shallow concepts) people will choose to believe he's secretly smart rather than that wealth isn't a result of intellect
> For example, intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000.
True, but can IQ be, say 210? If yes, then standard deviation cannot be applied here, right? Because for that you would need someone with opposite IQ, i.e. -10?
> The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some people work more hours than average and some work less, but nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else.
Same here. If average work hours is 8 hours per day, and someone works 17 hours, then again, standard deviation cannot be applied? Am I right or making some error here?
Edit: thanks for clarifications on IQ, I got it, my bad for not doing a research. The question of working hours stands, however.
No. Most IQ tests top out around 130/160. IQ score isn't linear, its closer to logarithmic. It's designed specifically to keep 100 as the mean average so that <80 is retarded and >130 is genius.
I can't find a particularly ironclad source, but I read recently that the test structure is such that scores over, for example, 175, are not meaningfully variable. At that point, the test isn't capable of or effective measuring further differences.
Well, to be fair, it’s only “highly unlikely” that anyone on Earth has an IQ of 210.
Given that seven sigma deviation should occur one time in 780 billion and that there are ~7.8b people on Earth today, then there is a ~1% chance of a person with an IQ of 210 being alive today :)
I pointed at my kids and said "They happened. And they take all my time."
I was a full-time wife and mom. This is not a career known to lead to great wealth.
So, for starters, not all interests or career paths have equal potential to lead to wealth. Intelligence in no way guarantees that your interests will happen to nicely line up with things that lead to wealth.
Everything I've read suggests that being born into the right family plays a huge role in wealth, a la the joke "He made his money the old fashioned way: He inherited it."
Health issues are another thing. Miracles of modern medicine can be very expensive and come directly out of your pocket if you live in the wrong country. At the same time, you typically will be less productive and less competent while enduring serious health issues.
Personal relationships are another biggie. My mother used to work for an heiress whose husband ran through her money. After the divorce, she had to get a job to support herself.
Divorce, scandal, drug addiction and various other personal issues can all be financially ruinous.
Even if you are good at earning it, that doesn't mean you are good at keeping it or growing it, a la some tagline from some magazine "How money becomes wealth."