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No doubt Bill Gates had massive privilege (in the traditional sense the word). He came from an upper class family with particularly powerful connections. The sa
by staunch 4y ago
No doubt Bill Gates had massive privilege (in the traditional sense the word). He came from an upper class family with particularly powerful connections. The same is true of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk to a possibly lesser extent.
But almost every person with even greater levels of privilege manages to do so much less than them. Which proves that one can't rightly attribute their great success to privilege alone. If one wants to be correct (and not just feel good) one has to admit that they did some amazing things based in large part on merit.
And that's the rub. Merit alone is often not enough. Privilege alone is often not enough. And luck always plays a role in determining the magnitude of anyone's success.
It takes extraordinary merit to be a John Carmack, Palmer Luckey, Larry Ellison, or Steve Jobs. People who had no privilege (in the traditional sense) and yet their merit (and luck) was so great that they did big things despite the fact.
Many people use the privilege argument to try to dismiss what people like Elon Musk have done. As if they could have done just as well had they been privileged. Envy is clearly clouding their thinking and confusing them. It's totally understandable for people to feel this way but ultimately and obviously incorrect in most cases.
A goal for modern societies should be to give everyone the kinds of opportunities that only the privileged historically had. But this won't prevent some people from doing much more with new opportunities than others. Merit will come to dominate outcomes instead of privilege. This will make the world much richer but won't solve everything.
- melony 4y agoYou are missing the network effects. Wealth compounds, capital grows, assets beget assets. If an ordinary person is lucky, he or she may win the literal lottery and may never have to work again. If a massively privileged person wins the proverbial lottery, he or she will have enough money to rival the GDP of nations and appear on Forbes magazine. The difference is hardly linear.
- mxkopy 4y agoI think this makes sense, but luck is a weird way to put it. I'm sure Bill Gates' family had plans to create generational wealth; at the very least they didn't ignore the possibility. The question of whether or not Bill is lucky because he wasn't responsible for starting those plans is the same question of if I'm more lucky to have been born in this body or in one 500 years into the future.
- wpasc 4y agoOne of your examples I believe hurts your point: "Whether they win $500 million or $1 million, about 70 percent of lotto winners lose or spend all that money in five years or less." https://www.rd.com/list/13-things-lottery-winners/#:~:text=Whether%20they%20win%20%24500%20million,taking%20the%20money%20and%20running https://www.rd.com/list/13-things-lottery-winners/#:~:text=W....
- staunch 4y agoHow do network effects apply here? Do you mean to refer to compounding growth? It's true that wealth begets wealth. Zuckerberg's kids are billionaires without having to do anything. Bill Gates would've been rich even if he had not started Microsoft, just through inheritance. But Steve Jobs led the creation of the most valuable company on the planet. There was no blocker to him being richer than Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Larry Ellison is among the richest people on the planet. John Carmack and Palmer Luckey have generational wealth. Creating a massive company is what makes someone as rich as an Elon Musk or Bill Gates. They had more opportunity to create a massive company than a person from a lower class, but it's got nothing to do with network effects. The main driver of these people's massive fortunes is technology that scales globally.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]