7 ms·

1. Be born to a wealthy middle class family and go to an elite school.

drugme 8y ago
A far from incidental detail. But is there sourced information available about his parents' actual income level? We do have this quote from the Esquire interview in 2014, which is rather telling: For my eighth birthday, my parents got me a Mac LC2. And, you know, it was like… It was, like, $2,200 in 1993 dollars. It was, like, this horrifically expensive thing, that was not that good. 40 MB hard drive. And then we put it in my bedroom, and I remember about it, it was this dividing line in my life: before I had a computer and after.
- apsec112 8y ago
  The New Yorker interview said his mother was a dermatologist, so I would tentatively assume his background is upper-middle-class. That's obviously an advantage, but then, most children of such families don't become rich and famous either.
- rb808 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman does list his high school, which is very expensive.
  - drugme 8y ago
    Yup - another corroborating factor.
atom-morgan 8y ago
People will never run out of excuses for their shortcomings in life.
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
  I mean, being born poor is a serious shortcoming.
  - atom-morgan 8y ago
    True, my comment was more about the elite school part than middle class.
rguzman 8y ago
not disputing that privilege is a thing, but don't you think that if this were true, all people who are born into a middle-class wealthy family and go to a nice school would achieve outlier success? it could be that the privilege is a pre-req to outlier success, but there are counter-examples. and then, if you observe that both groups (the counter-examples and the people who satisfy the pre-req and achieve outlier success) share a bunch of commonality, wouldn't you want to share that commonality with other people?
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  The concept of privilege doesn't mean you're automatically successful, nor does it mean it's impossible to become successful without it.
- sidlls 8y ago
  not disputing that privilege is a thing, but don't you think that if this were true, all people who are born into a middle-class wealthy family and go to a nice school would achieve outlier success? No; rather the correct question is "if this were true shouldn't we see a greater fraction of privileged individuals achieve higher success rates than we see in less privileged individuals?" Statistics isn't about all-or-nothing outcomes. And the answer to the question I posted is "yes", and the data seem to back that up in numerous contexts from educational attainment to financial success.
  - XorNot 8y ago
    The movie Gattaca covers this concept quite directly - I think ironically because it frames the problem as one the individuals involved had no original say in.
- throwaway8451 8y ago
  Am I the only one who finds the concept of privilege resentful? It is shifting the reference point downwards, defining being disadvantaged as the standard and everything above as privileged. In my opinion that's a terrible idea as striving to become better has to be good and not something that you eventually should feel bad about.
dare0505 8y ago
Also, there were 18 mentions in the article about "success". Just 1 mention about "failure". Survivorship bias at its best: https://xkcd.com/1827/ https://xkcd.com/1827/
- rloomba 8y ago
  I'm curious to hear about people that: 1. worked extremely "hard" for 20 years 2. sacrificed relationships/family/living life 3. found moderate/average success, but never caught a break
  - jalgos_eminator 8y ago
    Yeah, I really would too. It always irks me when some highly successful businessman gives a talk about "do what you love and you will find success". As if billions of people before him that weren't particularly successful hadn't already tried that.
rloomba 8y ago
Agree with this point, it really makes things so much easier. Imagine having student debt, struggling to get a job out of college, and then >Once you’ve gotten yourself to a point where you have your basic obligations covered you should try to make it easy to take risks that could easily take 10+ years?
- tfehring 8y ago
  It definitely takes years. I went back to school 6 years ago and graduated 3.5 years ago, I optimized for financial security (went to community college followed by the cheapest 4-year available, worked 40+ hours a week throughout, went into a high-paying field), and I've only recently gotten to the point where I'd consider myself financially secure enough to easily take risks. 4-5 years is probably a reasonable lower bound in those cases - you could maybe get there a bit faster if you somehow land a job at a FAANG out of school, but good luck with that.
sama 8y ago
The biggest reason I'm excited about basic income is the amount of human potential it will unleash by freeing more people to take risks. Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :( It is obviously an incredible shame and waste that opportunity is so unevenly distributed. But I've witnessed enough people be born with the deck stacked badly against them and go on to incredible success to know it's possible. I am deeply aware of the fact that I personally would not be where I am if I weren't born incredibly lucky.
- eanzenberg 8y ago
  What basic income will most likely do is send vast swaths of average people to entertainment and drugs. It's already happening, as social nets get bigger and wider.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - aherz 8y ago
    There will be people that go to entertainment and drugs as well as people that take that money to add to society. The question is what the net effect is.
  - _Microft 8y ago
    Where is that?
  - incompatible 8y ago
    Where are you living that social nets are getting bigger and wider? It seems to me that the modern idea, since the 1980s, has been to constantly cut them back.
  - core-questions 8y ago
    This is a huge concern. I have known several people who, when they lose their seasonal jobs, coast on unemployment insurance until the very last minute, sometimes even going as far as welfare and couch surfing before a new job finds them (they won't go looking for it themselves). All they want is beer, weed, porn, and video games. They don't seem to want relationships, work, friendships beyond smoking buddies... it's saddening, honestly. I worry that UBI will enable large swathes of these people, permanently stunted in their personal growth, incapable of acting as real adults. Meanwhile, UBI itself may not be a sustainable system; if it results in taxation that cannot be borne by those who keep working, the result will be that it will eventually be cancelled. What happens to all those who subsist on UBI if that happens? Nothing is guaranteed...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tomjen3 8y ago
That helps. Andrew Carnegie, a Scotish Immigrant, was born in a one room cottage; in the last 18 years of his life he gave away more than 300 million But yeah, being born with some wealth to sustain you is a huge help.
onetimemanytime 8y ago
Have daddy and mommy spend $1.7 MILLION to get you through school https://www.msn.com/en-sg/money/finance-education/wealthy-families-spend-17-million-dollars-on-education-per-child-what-do-they-learn/ar-BBPEPhb https://www.msn.com/en-sg/money/finance-education/wealthy-fa... and then back you until you "succeed."
caractacus 8y ago
Seriously, it's incredible that someone could write this, redraft it at least six times, have it read by sixteen (16!) people, and not once acknowledge the boost provided to his life and career by family background (also race, but that can be for another post).
ganeshkrishnan 8y ago
Sure but just being wealthy is more than enough and if you can get VC money that kinds of covers your base. Almost all of startup success is due to money: Amazon got money from pooled funds, Bill Gates mentioned in his reddit AMA that his success can be attributed to his position, Elon Musk's own father is a millionaire.. Money is not important, it is EVERYTHING. And that's the unintended upside to Universal Basic Income. It allows "Bill Gates and Einstein's" from third world countries to shine on solving big challenges rather than "What will I get to eat tonight?"
natalyarostova 8y ago
These are such low value comments.
TrackerFF 8y ago
I have to admit, I was going to post this - but it's probably a very polarized opinion. The thing is, people do love the idealistic idea of every man creating his own luck - or that if you just work hard and smart enough, the sky is the limit. When I went a top business school for my MBA, I'd say that 70% of my peers had the same upper middle-class upbringing. Back then, the vast majority went into consulting or banking, and are by every measure successful. Ten years later and I now work in the startup industry, and it's mostly the same type people I went to b-school with. Not _wealthy_ people, but in the upper echelons of middle / upper middle-class. I'm not even talking about the "small loan of a million dollars" or trust-fund babies, but just being born into a financially secure family, that pushed you to get a good education, which in turn led you to a good job, and a decent network. I've lost count on how many ex-McKinsey, Bain, and BCG consultants I've met in the startup scene. People have this idea of entrepreneurs as your garage hacker, or avg. HS / College kid that came up with some neat solution - but from what I've seen, it's mostly kids from top schools, or ex-technologists, bankers, consultants, etc. from top companies, with the same socioeconomic and academic backgrounds. Not at all disputing list that Sam wrote - lots of the people mentioned above do share these - but I think it's healthy to point out that some people have a clear advantage over others, even in the allegedly _meritocratic_ world of entrepreneurship.
- LouisSayers 8y ago
  For sure - you have connections to money which can help fund your startup. The funny thing tho is that creating a successful startup actually involves for the most part actually being good at doing it, and following the right process. I once interviewed at a startup which was created by a rich kid and he couldn’t even explain what the company did... I’ve also worked at a startup run by an ex big company CEO where she clearly had no clue what she was doing and was used to shit talking. I could tell pretty quickly that both these companies were going to fail. They are going to spend a lot of their money and a lot of their connections money and waste a lot of people’s time... So in a sense you can actually see it as a redistribution of wealth from those that have the money to those middle class IT workers who a lot of the time simply take these as opportunities to learn and upskill on the job. Just because you do a startup doesn’t mean it’s going to be successful - and that’s going to be more true than not. There’s a lot of people with money out there but it doesn’t mean they know how to spend it correctly. So enjoy taking Ubers with their promo codes and knowing that you cost them money for every ride that you take!
philwelch 8y ago
The vast majority of people in this category are not successful by the standards Sam describes.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
driverdan 8y ago
I downvoted you because obviously if you come from a successful family success is much easier. That's not what the article is about.

A far from incidental detail. But is there sourced information available about his parents' actual income level? We do have this quote from the Esquire interview in 2014, which is rather telling: For my eighth birthday, my parents got me a Mac LC2. And, you know, it was like… It was, like, $2,200 in 1993 dollars. It was, like, this horrifically expensive thing, that was not that good. 40 MB hard drive. And then we put it in my bedroom, and I remember about it, it was this dividing line in my life: before I had a computer and after.

apsec112 8y ago
The New Yorker interview said his mother was a dermatologist, so I would tentatively assume his background is upper-middle-class. That's obviously an advantage, but then, most children of such families don't become rich and famous either.
rb808 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman does list his high school, which is very expensive.
- drugme 8y ago
  Yup - another corroborating factor.

atom-morgan 8y ago

People will never run out of excuses for their shortcomings in life.

WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
I mean, being born poor is a serious shortcoming.
- atom-morgan 8y ago
  True, my comment was more about the elite school part than middle class.

rguzman 8y ago

not disputing that privilege is a thing, but don't you think that if this were true, all people who are born into a middle-class wealthy family and go to a nice school would achieve outlier success? it could be that the privilege is a pre-req to outlier success, but there are counter-examples. and then, if you observe that both groups (the counter-examples and the people who satisfy the pre-req and achieve outlier success) share a bunch of commonality, wouldn't you want to share that commonality with other people?

ceejayoz 8y ago
The concept of privilege doesn't mean you're automatically successful, nor does it mean it's impossible to become successful without it.
sidlls 8y ago
not disputing that privilege is a thing, but don't you think that if this were true, all people who are born into a middle-class wealthy family and go to a nice school would achieve outlier success? No; rather the correct question is "if this were true shouldn't we see a greater fraction of privileged individuals achieve higher success rates than we see in less privileged individuals?" Statistics isn't about all-or-nothing outcomes. And the answer to the question I posted is "yes", and the data seem to back that up in numerous contexts from educational attainment to financial success.
- XorNot 8y ago
  The movie Gattaca covers this concept quite directly - I think ironically because it frames the problem as one the individuals involved had no original say in.
throwaway8451 8y ago
Am I the only one who finds the concept of privilege resentful? It is shifting the reference point downwards, defining being disadvantaged as the standard and everything above as privileged. In my opinion that's a terrible idea as striving to become better has to be good and not something that you eventually should feel bad about.

dare0505 8y ago

Also, there were 18 mentions in the article about "success". Just 1 mention about "failure". Survivorship bias at its best: https://xkcd.com/1827/ https://xkcd.com/1827/

rloomba 8y ago
I'm curious to hear about people that: 1. worked extremely "hard" for 20 years 2. sacrificed relationships/family/living life 3. found moderate/average success, but never caught a break
- jalgos_eminator 8y ago
  Yeah, I really would too. It always irks me when some highly successful businessman gives a talk about "do what you love and you will find success". As if billions of people before him that weren't particularly successful hadn't already tried that.

rloomba 8y ago

Agree with this point, it really makes things so much easier. Imagine having student debt, struggling to get a job out of college, and then >Once you’ve gotten yourself to a point where you have your basic obligations covered you should try to make it easy to take risks that could easily take 10+ years?

tfehring 8y ago
It definitely takes years. I went back to school 6 years ago and graduated 3.5 years ago, I optimized for financial security (went to community college followed by the cheapest 4-year available, worked 40+ hours a week throughout, went into a high-paying field), and I've only recently gotten to the point where I'd consider myself financially secure enough to easily take risks. 4-5 years is probably a reasonable lower bound in those cases - you could maybe get there a bit faster if you somehow land a job at a FAANG out of school, but good luck with that.

sama 8y ago

The biggest reason I'm excited about basic income is the amount of human potential it will unleash by freeing more people to take risks. Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :( It is obviously an incredible shame and waste that opportunity is so unevenly distributed. But I've witnessed enough people be born with the deck stacked badly against them and go on to incredible success to know it's possible. I am deeply aware of the fact that I personally would not be where I am if I weren't born incredibly lucky.

eanzenberg 8y ago
What basic income will most likely do is send vast swaths of average people to entertainment and drugs. It's already happening, as social nets get bigger and wider.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- aherz 8y ago
  There will be people that go to entertainment and drugs as well as people that take that money to add to society. The question is what the net effect is.
- _Microft 8y ago
  Where is that?
- incompatible 8y ago
  Where are you living that social nets are getting bigger and wider? It seems to me that the modern idea, since the 1980s, has been to constantly cut them back.
- core-questions 8y ago
  This is a huge concern. I have known several people who, when they lose their seasonal jobs, coast on unemployment insurance until the very last minute, sometimes even going as far as welfare and couch surfing before a new job finds them (they won't go looking for it themselves). All they want is beer, weed, porn, and video games. They don't seem to want relationships, work, friendships beyond smoking buddies... it's saddening, honestly. I worry that UBI will enable large swathes of these people, permanently stunted in their personal growth, incapable of acting as real adults. Meanwhile, UBI itself may not be a sustainable system; if it results in taxation that cannot be borne by those who keep working, the result will be that it will eventually be cancelled. What happens to all those who subsist on UBI if that happens? Nothing is guaranteed...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

tomjen3 8y ago

That helps. Andrew Carnegie, a Scotish Immigrant, was born in a one room cottage; in the last 18 years of his life he gave away more than 300 million But yeah, being born with some wealth to sustain you is a huge help.

onetimemanytime 8y ago

Have daddy and mommy spend $1.7 MILLION to get you through school https://www.msn.com/en-sg/money/finance-education/wealthy-families-spend-17-million-dollars-on-education-per-child-what-do-they-learn/ar-BBPEPhb https://www.msn.com/en-sg/money/finance-education/wealthy-fa... and then back you until you "succeed."

caractacus 8y ago

Seriously, it's incredible that someone could write this, redraft it at least six times, have it read by sixteen (16!) people, and not once acknowledge the boost provided to his life and career by family background (also race, but that can be for another post).

ganeshkrishnan 8y ago

Sure but just being wealthy is more than enough and if you can get VC money that kinds of covers your base. Almost all of startup success is due to money: Amazon got money from pooled funds, Bill Gates mentioned in his reddit AMA that his success can be attributed to his position, Elon Musk's own father is a millionaire.. Money is not important, it is EVERYTHING. And that's the unintended upside to Universal Basic Income. It allows "Bill Gates and Einstein's" from third world countries to shine on solving big challenges rather than "What will I get to eat tonight?"

natalyarostova 8y ago

These are such low value comments.

TrackerFF 8y ago

I have to admit, I was going to post this - but it's probably a very polarized opinion. The thing is, people do love the idealistic idea of every man creating his own luck - or that if you just work hard and smart enough, the sky is the limit. When I went a top business school for my MBA, I'd say that 70% of my peers had the same upper middle-class upbringing. Back then, the vast majority went into consulting or banking, and are by every measure successful. Ten years later and I now work in the startup industry, and it's mostly the same type people I went to b-school with. Not _wealthy_ people, but in the upper echelons of middle / upper middle-class. I'm not even talking about the "small loan of a million dollars" or trust-fund babies, but just being born into a financially secure family, that pushed you to get a good education, which in turn led you to a good job, and a decent network. I've lost count on how many ex-McKinsey, Bain, and BCG consultants I've met in the startup scene. People have this idea of entrepreneurs as your garage hacker, or avg. HS / College kid that came up with some neat solution - but from what I've seen, it's mostly kids from top schools, or ex-technologists, bankers, consultants, etc. from top companies, with the same socioeconomic and academic backgrounds. Not at all disputing list that Sam wrote - lots of the people mentioned above do share these - but I think it's healthy to point out that some people have a clear advantage over others, even in the allegedly _meritocratic_ world of entrepreneurship.

LouisSayers 8y ago
For sure - you have connections to money which can help fund your startup. The funny thing tho is that creating a successful startup actually involves for the most part actually being good at doing it, and following the right process. I once interviewed at a startup which was created by a rich kid and he couldn’t even explain what the company did... I’ve also worked at a startup run by an ex big company CEO where she clearly had no clue what she was doing and was used to shit talking. I could tell pretty quickly that both these companies were going to fail. They are going to spend a lot of their money and a lot of their connections money and waste a lot of people’s time... So in a sense you can actually see it as a redistribution of wealth from those that have the money to those middle class IT workers who a lot of the time simply take these as opportunities to learn and upskill on the job. Just because you do a startup doesn’t mean it’s going to be successful - and that’s going to be more true than not. There’s a lot of people with money out there but it doesn’t mean they know how to spend it correctly. So enjoy taking Ubers with their promo codes and knowing that you cost them money for every ride that you take!

philwelch 8y ago

The vast majority of people in this category are not successful by the standards Sam describes.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

driverdan 8y ago

I downvoted you because obviously if you come from a successful family success is much easier. That's not what the article is about.