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One huge thing the 'self-made' vs. 'privileged' classification misses is pure and simple luck. Two equally competent candidates apply for the same highly selec
by smallnamespace 10y ago
One huge thing the 'self-made' vs. 'privileged' classification misses is pure and simple luck.
Two equally competent candidates apply for the same highly selective position, but one of them gets the job and the other doesn't. Two people try their hand at the stock market, but one person buys in right before a recession, and the other buys right before a boom. You can claim that over a lifetime, luck evens out, but I don't think that's really the case -- there are key junctures in every person's life where luck plays a huge factor in their eventual path.
It's supremely hard to disentangle luck from all the other factors, because for every random factor you can always come up with an ex-post rationalization that gives yourself all the credit ('I built a better rapport with the interviewer', etc.), and successful people I've noticed tend to be unusually good at assigning themselves credit.
A classic paper that looks at how wealth is distributed if every time two people randomly interact, the richer one is slightly more likely to gain money [1]. Everything else about individuals is identical. The rich always get richer.
[1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s100510050249 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s100510050249
- yomly 10y agoDespite being a fairly rational person, I have come to believe that there is some wisdom to the phrase "you make your own luck". The experience is purely anecdotal, but you see it manifest in all walks of life, granted you would expect luck to be streaky or not evenly distributed on the local level, but there seems to be an observable relationship between "lucky outcome" and confidence - think sports, business decisions etc. If I had to offer an explanation for it, I would go with the fact that our brains are complex machines that have developed heuristics that are better than we realise at predicting outcomes and when we give ourselves to it (through confidence) we end up with outcomes working out positively more often than negatively. The obvious counter argument would be selection bias - when you're up on your luck and your confidence is high, the losses don't seem to matter so much (and vice versa).
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago>One huge thing the 'self-made' vs. 'privileged' classification misses is pure and simple luck. I thought the whole point of that classification was to point out the role of luck.
- smallnamespace 10y agoPrivilege is a form of luck, but not all forms of luck are privilege.
- lmm 10y agoThe accidents of birth are luck in a certain sense, but it's probably worth drawing a distinction between the luck of inheriting wealth and the luck of winning it on the slots.
- AstralStorm 10y agoIn fact winning in slots is less lucky... You have to play the slots. Having random advantage also takes some capitalising on it, but then, a lot of it is our of your control, especially early in life. Even winning in slots can be smartly capitalised upon.