3 ms·

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 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.

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.