21 ms·

The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

• finishground 7y ago
  The 80:20 rule described here does not hold in every society. Why would they even claim that?
• omarhaneef 7y ago
  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.
  • hnhg 7y ago
    Can you clarify this? '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?]
    • omarhaneef 7y ago
      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."
      • hnhg 7y ago
        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?
        • omarhaneef 7y ago
          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.
          • hnhg 7y ago
            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!)
  • __s 7y ago
    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
    • omarhaneef 7y ago
      I did not know that. 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.
    • mywittyname 7y ago
      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.
      • __s 7y ago
        Did you read what I said? 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
  • duaoebg 7y ago
    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).
  • GuB-42 7y ago
    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.
    • username90 7y ago
      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.
  • harryh 7y ago
    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.
  • mch82 7y ago
    Sometimes it is (unfortunately) necessary to do the computer simulation in order to get people to read/value the article.
  • Udik 7y ago
    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.
• tropo 7y ago
  ...and hard work, and social skills, and liking the challenge enough to not retire early
• posterboy 7y ago
  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. Whowhat?
  • jerf 7y ago
    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.
    • katmannthree 7y ago
      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.
      • olcor 7y ago
        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.
• martinni 7y ago
  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.
  • hnhg 7y ago
    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.
    • drchewbacca 7y ago
      There's this ted talk to a similar effect, timing is the most important factor in a startups success. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNpx7gpSqbY&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNpx7gpSqbY&t=1s
    • marcus_holmes 7y ago
      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.
  • adventured 7y ago
    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.
• pmoriarty 7y ago
  "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.
  • 7y ago
• aivisol 7y ago
  > 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.
  • neogodless 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification#Historical_IQ_classification_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification#Historical_I... 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.
  • JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
    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.
  • goalieca 7y ago
    You’re right in that it’s not a pure Gaussian distribution
  • harryh 7y ago
    Every 15 points of IQ is 1 standard deviation from the mean. So 210 is 7.3 standard deviations away from 100. Just 7 standard deviations away from the mean means that you would expect only 1 in 780 billion from a population. Given that this is far more than the number of people on Earth: No, no one has an IQ of 210.
• Excel_Wizard 7y ago
  IQ and income are correlated fairly strongly. It's obviously not a perfect correlation. https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlations-of-iq-with-income-and-wealth/ https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlation...
  • pmoriarty 7y ago
    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.
• lazyjones 7y ago
  A simplistic "computer model", interesting. But not science.
• DoreenMichele 7y ago
  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."
  • sosuke 7y ago
    Dang, your friend of the family could use a little more tact. I loath those kinds of questions.
    • cryptoz 7y ago
      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.
      • 7y ago
• golemotron 7y ago
  There's also the fact that being rich isn't everyone's goal. It looks like it is a pain in the ass to be rich, actually.
  • drukenemo 7y ago
    Why is that? I think there are many ways of being rich. For example, being rich but still living a relatively simple life.
    • rc_hadoken 7y ago
      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)
    • aianus 7y ago
      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.
• winrid 7y ago
  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.... :)
  • michaelmrose 7y ago
    What percentage of the population can do so financially?
    • winrid 7y ago
      That's a good point. Have to risk debt at that point.
      • michaelmrose 7y ago
        Nobody wants to lend a poor person a large sum of money the fact that you are presently poor is sufficient proof that you are a bad risk.
        • winrid 7y ago
          Nobody said how poor we're talking. 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. :)
• diminoten 7y ago
  True, but you can't be lucky if you don't roll the dice, and some people roll the dice more than others.
  • zornado 7y ago
    And what guarantees that rolling the dice will always be profitable. Rolling the dice can bring profits or losses.
    • bigYahnz 7y ago
      Nobody is suggesting that it would be.
    • diminoten 7y ago
      Nothing guarantees it, but without risk there is no reward.
  • mindcrime 7y ago
    As the old saying goes "In business, you only need to be right once." And the more "at bats" you have, the more likely you are to hit a home run.
  • gdubs 7y ago
    In life, you really don’t get to choose not to roll the dice, because there’s risk in everything including doing nothing.
    • diminoten 7y ago
      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.
      • gdubs 7y ago
        You missed my point: in life, even doing “nothing” is a choice, with it’s own element of risk.
• zornado 7y ago
  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
• michaelmior 7y ago
  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.
  • bigYahnz 7y ago
    Not trying to pick your response out in particular,but when we talk about growing up in a rich family, what type of rich family are we talking about? It feels like a lot of time with topics like this, we're using Bill Gates as the example of being rich. Isn't that a little off the mark? I had a bunch of friends from "rich" families growing up through high school. Most are lazy pieces of shit that haven't gotten anywhere close to achieving what their parents have. There are a few exceptions, but it is definitely below 50%. I see this all the time at work. Want to guess who the laziest employees are? The people who didn't have a job till after graduating college and came from families that didn't have much of a want for money. They stagnate. The kids who grew up struggling have largely continued to out work the others and their career progress has showed as much. The same goes for people I know who have inherited enough money to where inheritance tax comes in. When we talk about inheritance, are we talking about someone like this, or one of the few legitimate dynasties that still exist? If the former, a large percent will burn through their money within a short amount of time. There is a reason that generational wealth typically doesn't last that many generations. Again, if we're talking about someone like the Rothschild, then yeah, it is a bit different.
• kangnkodos 7y ago
  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.
  • Joeri 7y ago
    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.
• m3kw9 7y ago
  You can look at it two ways. 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. Ok which way was it?
• minikites 7y ago
  https://twitter.com/MichaelJFoody/status/1022521010078273536 https://twitter.com/MichaelJFoody/status/1022521010078273536 >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
  • foobar_ 7y ago
    All that he is good at is psychological splitting which effectively looks like divide and rule.
• robmay 7y ago
  It's not entirely random chance. You can increase the probabilities of being rich by exposing yourself to convexity. https://www.edge.org/conversation/nassim_nicholas_taleb-understanding-is-a-poor-substitute-for-convexity-antifragility https://www.edge.org/conversation/nassim_nicholas_taleb-unde...
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• bjornsing 7y ago
  > 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.)
  • wklauss 7y ago
    > 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...
    • bjornsing 7y ago
      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...?
• citilife 7y ago
  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.
  • gdubs 7y ago
    Plenty of smart people lose money through investments, even conservative ones. There’s risk in anything, and wherever risk plays a part, so does luck.
• darawk 7y ago
  > The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest Huh, interesting hypothesis. Certainly a strong claim. They must have done some really impressive and thorough work to come to this conclusion. > a new computer model of wealth creation confirms. Sigh.
• cryoshon 7y ago
  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.
  • cryptica 7y ago
    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.
• program_whiz 7y ago
  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).
  • buboard 7y ago
    you watched a survival documentary, not real life
  • ksdale 7y ago
    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.
  • jiveturkey 7y ago
    > 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.
• georgeecollins 7y ago
  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.
• ttul 7y ago
  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.
  • akhilcacharya 7y ago
    > Did the guys who went to work for Google take any additional risk? Yet, they are now millionaires. They probably are smarter though! If they weren't, they wouldn't get in.
    • ttul 7y ago
      Haha. They are all smart. Not everyone chooses to apply for a job at Google.
      • akhilcacharya 7y ago
        That's a heck of a bubble then! Usually the choice isn't the bottleneck for mere mortals like the people I went to undergrad with.
        • throwaway_bad 7y ago
          I think it's pretty typical for schools like CMU. Look at their post graduation survey: https://www.cmu.edu/career/documents/2018_one_pagers/scs/1-Pager_SCS%20BS%202018%20rev%202.1.19.kc.pdf https://www.cmu.edu/career/documents/2018_one_pagers/scs/1-P... 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).
• klyrs 7y ago
  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.
  • pmoriarty 7y ago
    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.
    • klyrs 7y ago
      > ...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.
• tempsy 7y ago
  I guess it depends on the definition of "rich". 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.
  • matheusmoreira 7y ago
    Aren't there huge costs associated with living in SF?
    • tempsy 7y ago
      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.
  • viklove 7y ago
    > We live in a frothy time when a relatively jr software engineer in SF can make $300k/year. This is just a lie.
    • tempsy 7y ago
      What’s the lie?
• gumby 7y ago
  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 $).
• jothezero 7y ago
  You can increase your luck outcome simply by trying more.
• buboard 7y ago
  But what did the reviewers say about the paper? (http://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068 http://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068) 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 https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2014/02/19/the-myth-of-the-bell-curve-look-for-the-hyper-performers/#335142626bca https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2014/02/19/the-myth-... http://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2018/11/16/power-laws-reveal-pattern-for-distribution-of-artistic-talent/ http://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2018/11/16/power-laws-reve... 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.
  • LeftHandPath 7y ago
    > 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.
  • fingerlocks 7y ago
    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.
• scarejunba 7y ago
  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.).
• gmuslera 7y ago
  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.
• auiya 7y ago
  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.
• wolco 7y ago
  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.
  • lazyjones 7y ago
    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.
• RenRav 7y ago
  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.
• tqi 7y ago
  > 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).
• danesparza 7y ago
  Because I'm smart _and lazy_. I'm 'rich enough' as it were.
• thrownaway954 7y ago
  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.
  • maerF0x0 7y ago
    ^^ Techlead spotted. 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)...
    • thrownaway954 7y ago
      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.
      • maerF0x0 7y ago
        I didnt mean have your ex back. I meant have someone you appreciate approximately as much, though maybe for different reasons.
        • thrownaway954 7y ago
          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.
          • koonsolo 7y ago
            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.
• gitpusher 7y ago
  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).
  • thedragonline 7y ago
    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
• jumbopapa 7y ago
  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.
• tomp 7y ago
  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. [1] https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2014/10/big-chickens.html https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2014/10/big-chickens.html (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.
• jstewartmobile 7y ago
  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."
• biolurker1 7y ago
  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
  • foogazi 7y ago
    Any the compounding effect of a high IQ over time It’s not about the problem at hand, but every day has been experienced differently
• giardini 7y ago
  Previously discussed on ycombinator starting March 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16591908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16591908 including the Pluchino paper (scroll/search on the above page to find the reference).
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• agota 7y ago
  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
• moosey 7y ago
  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.
• nazgulnarsil 7y ago
  Tautological for some values of 'most'. Statistical innumerracy.
• segmondy 7y ago
  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.
• not_a_cop75 7y ago
  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.
• jkingsbery 7y ago
  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.
• anm89 7y ago
  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.
• RickJWagner 7y ago
  Um, no. 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.
• MR4D 7y ago
  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.
• Wh1skey 7y ago
  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.
  • dragonwriter 7y ago
    > 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.