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> First of all, Bill Gates had a TON of opportunity and privilege funneled to him from his parents. He absolutely did. And yet even conditional on that categor

> First of all, Bill Gates had a TON of opportunity and privilege funneled to him from his parents. He absolutely did. And yet even conditional on that category, the probability of becoming a billionaire is extremely low. Therefore, according to the parent comment, that counts as self-made. > You cannot POSSIBLY believe that there is no wealth disparity in the US? That there is not a disparity in opportunity between the wealthy and the middle class/poor? You're not following the parent comment's argument, and as a result your response isn't targeted at their specific point. Their specific point is invariant to wealth mobility. Even if you give me an extremely extremely unequal society, their definition of self-made success persists: The ability to exceed the median expectation for your category. If you're born dirt poor in a slum, and end up running a small laundromat, whereas most of your peers are still scavenging in the slum, you're self-made, because you beat your peers. If you're born as a privileged white kid to millionaires, but end up becoming a billionaire, you're self-made. Having morally invariant definitions for words is useful, because it's nice to have terms to describe things, without having to stop using terms because they offend peoples moral sensibilities. Your argument that self-made success literally doesn't exist in any facet, and all is deterministic, so we should never use that term or consider it a phenomena, strains credulity, and makes it hard to describe certain elements of reality.

heurist 8y ago
You'd have to be precise in targeting the social network in which the subject individual wields influence. Networks are more important than money in many ways. An individual who is friends or whose family has friends in VC or PE has a better starting position in an entrepreneurial career than someone who has no connections, even if they have money. You also need to consider the social implications of your category choice. Choosing a category of "US citizens" vs "millionaires" has vastly different implications. A millionaire in the set of US citizens can invest their wealth in mutual funds, do nothing for 10 years, and come out with vastly more wealth. Someone emerging from poverty who starts a small business and actively contributes economic value might take home $50k/year. The millionaire doubles their wealth by doing nothing and the small business owner fights tooth and nail to bring home a modest income. The millionaire also has the option of leveraging their wealth and time to make even more money, where the self-made individual doesn't. Capital is a gravity well. You can limit your subject set to individuals with $1M-2M in no-strings-attached cash at the start of the study, but why would you? Gates has done a lot to build his wealth but there is no way to know how many individuals would have done better than Gates if they'd started in the same position. You can start to consider that when you expand the set of individuals in the study beyond the arbitrary wealth filter and account for social mobility. Then when you figure out how many people could have done better, you can come up with a "self-madeness" score. Though the whole thing is silly IMO. No one exists in a vacuum.
- prostoalex 8y ago
  > The millionaire doubles their wealth by doing nothing and the small business owner fights tooth and nail to bring home a modest income. If a large group of millionaires reads your comment, sees the light and shamefully decides to do something by pulling their investable assets out, the small business owner will likely face high capital costs and in many cases be simply unable to raise any money at interest rates attractive to him/her.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - heurist 8y ago
    That's what happens when unrestrained capitalism moves production of goods outside of the local economy and into distant foreign economies which are more difficult to access. Capital aggregates in the few international trade hubs and starting a new business becomes more difficult as various gates are put in front of the newly foreign production. As capital becomes more centralized, fewer people are in charge of the decisions to invest and innovation becomes more difficult because rather than being distributed across the range of economies and lifestyles in the US (or any country) it is invested in the few who have access to the gatekeepers. Usually that requires physical access over time, which means living in an increasingly expensive city and successfully competing with an increasing amount of individuals vying for a limited amount of investor attention. Innovation comes from people responding to a wide variety of different problems and situations - how is that going to happen if everyone lives in the same place and is competing to solve the same problems that the relatively few available investors want to put money in? Markets that retain capital are much easier to find money in than markets which leak it. If an American with wealth wants to help the US economy, they should focus on rebuilding the production capacity of underfunded economies across the US by redistributing wealth from the main international hubs into smaller domestic markets. It probably won't produce optimal returns, which scares off most investors. I have seen a couple funds starting to do this, for what it's worth. P.S. Banks used to be small and local! Look at how far we've fallen: - https://ilsr.org/number-banks-u-s-1966-2014/ https://ilsr.org/number-banks-u-s-1966-2014/ - https://ilsr.org/vanishing-community-banks-national-crisis/ https://ilsr.org/vanishing-community-banks-national-crisis/

heurist 8y ago

You'd have to be precise in targeting the social network in which the subject individual wields influence. Networks are more important than money in many ways. An individual who is friends or whose family has friends in VC or PE has a better starting position in an entrepreneurial career than someone who has no connections, even if they have money. You also need to consider the social implications of your category choice. Choosing a category of "US citizens" vs "millionaires" has vastly different implications. A millionaire in the set of US citizens can invest their wealth in mutual funds, do nothing for 10 years, and come out with vastly more wealth. Someone emerging from poverty who starts a small business and actively contributes economic value might take home $50k/year. The millionaire doubles their wealth by doing nothing and the small business owner fights tooth and nail to bring home a modest income. The millionaire also has the option of leveraging their wealth and time to make even more money, where the self-made individual doesn't. Capital is a gravity well. You can limit your subject set to individuals with $1M-2M in no-strings-attached cash at the start of the study, but why would you? Gates has done a lot to build his wealth but there is no way to know how many individuals would have done better than Gates if they'd started in the same position. You can start to consider that when you expand the set of individuals in the study beyond the arbitrary wealth filter and account for social mobility. Then when you figure out how many people could have done better, you can come up with a "self-madeness" score. Though the whole thing is silly IMO. No one exists in a vacuum.

prostoalex 8y ago
> The millionaire doubles their wealth by doing nothing and the small business owner fights tooth and nail to bring home a modest income. If a large group of millionaires reads your comment, sees the light and shamefully decides to do something by pulling their investable assets out, the small business owner will likely face high capital costs and in many cases be simply unable to raise any money at interest rates attractive to him/her.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- heurist 8y ago
  That's what happens when unrestrained capitalism moves production of goods outside of the local economy and into distant foreign economies which are more difficult to access. Capital aggregates in the few international trade hubs and starting a new business becomes more difficult as various gates are put in front of the newly foreign production. As capital becomes more centralized, fewer people are in charge of the decisions to invest and innovation becomes more difficult because rather than being distributed across the range of economies and lifestyles in the US (or any country) it is invested in the few who have access to the gatekeepers. Usually that requires physical access over time, which means living in an increasingly expensive city and successfully competing with an increasing amount of individuals vying for a limited amount of investor attention. Innovation comes from people responding to a wide variety of different problems and situations - how is that going to happen if everyone lives in the same place and is competing to solve the same problems that the relatively few available investors want to put money in? Markets that retain capital are much easier to find money in than markets which leak it. If an American with wealth wants to help the US economy, they should focus on rebuilding the production capacity of underfunded economies across the US by redistributing wealth from the main international hubs into smaller domestic markets. It probably won't produce optimal returns, which scares off most investors. I have seen a couple funds starting to do this, for what it's worth. P.S. Banks used to be small and local! Look at how far we've fallen: - https://ilsr.org/number-banks-u-s-1966-2014/ https://ilsr.org/number-banks-u-s-1966-2014/ - https://ilsr.org/vanishing-community-banks-national-crisis/ https://ilsr.org/vanishing-community-banks-national-crisis/