Okay, we need to make the distinction of gold-rush vs ordinary economic atmosphere. A gold rush is a very specific sort of environment in which a great number o

Okay, we need to make the distinction of gold-rush vs ordinary economic atmosphere. A gold rush is a very specific sort of environment in which a great number of people descend on a particular economic activity in order to get rich. In an ordinary economic atmosphere, one can choose many different ways to get ahead. In a gold rush, everything revolves around this one activity. Either you're actually doing the activity, that is, mining the gold, or you're facilitating others doing the activity, i.e. selling shovels. What started this discussion was a third category of gold rush activity, that of owning the underlying platform / land. This was accused to be survivor's bias. I'm saying that unless you can come up with a fourth category of even more successful economic activity that's still relevant to the discussion, survivor's bias doesn't apply, and we can accept the model of causation as stated on the tin.