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Being smart and working hard will both make most people richer than being stupid and lazy. There’s a share of luck, but that washes out in the population-wide s

Being smart and working hard will both make most people richer than being stupid and lazy. There’s a share of luck, but that washes out in the population-wide statistical analysis. Plus, if you’re stupid and lazy but you max out on luck and win the Powerball, the odds are surprisingly high that you will eventually go bankrupt, and if you don’t, your children will. So even if you are lucky, you need to be smart and diligent enough not to fuck it up.

KerrAvon 4y ago
Except that most rich people come from inherited wealth. Elon Musk is an emerald mine scion, for example. Sometimes it’s intelligence, but mostly it’s not.
- philwelch 4y ago
  Elon Musk didn’t actually inherit any wealth; he emigrated to America essentially broke and didn’t get rich until PayPal. Also, his father is still alive, so any inheritance hasn’t even happened yet. Setting that aside, how does being the son of a guy who owned an emerald mine in South Africa explain him being richer than the descendants of Henry Ford or John D. Rockefeller? How do explain the children of all the other emerald mine owners?
  - david927 4y ago
    He went to a fancy private boarding school as a boy and his family had connections. > how does being the son of a guy who owned an emerald mine in South Africa explain him being richer That's faulty, a posteriori reasoning.
    - philwelch 4y ago
      What I am doing is falsifying your hypothesis. If being born to rich parents, having connections, and going to boarding schools is the sole reason people get rich, then we would expect that people with richer parents and more connections who went to better boarding schools than Elon Musk would be richer, and people who grew up in similar conditions to Elon Musk would be equally rich. This is not true.
      - david927 4y ago
        > What I am doing is falsifying your hypothesis That is not what you are doing. You are picking a winning lottery number and saying why did this number win and others not? That's faulty logic.
        philwelch 4y ago
        No, I’m looking at two “lottery tickets” with the exact same numbers and asking why one of them one the jackpot and the other one didn’t. The only conclusion: it’s not a lottery and what you have picked out as the winning lottery numbers are not that.
        david927 4y ago
        You're really bad at logic but you're confident in it; that's not a good combination.
        endisneigh 4y ago
        To be fair you'd have to compare people who had the same circumstances and desires, not simply both being rich.
    - astrange 4y ago
      I don't believe Elon had any more undue privilege than any other Stanford graduate. (Which is not none, but it means none of the emerald stuff matters.) There's no need for any such influence anyway, getting rich from PayPal is already pure luck and you should be satisfied complaining about that!
  - yunohn 4y ago
    I believe most people mean significant family wealth, not necessarily post-death inheritance. You can’t seriously claim that he was broke while being part of an emerald mining family? Also, why are you comparing him to other rich/er folk? Is your point that every extra million is an IQ point?
    - xyzzyz 4y ago
      And what good was his family wealth for? How much of it actually played a role and how? Did he get millions from his family to start PayPal? I hear a lot about the role of "family wealth", but I never actually hear about mechanism, how exactly it helps. If you're a legacy of a wealthy family, and thanks to that, get into Harvard, then sure, that's a real leg up, but it doesn't explain why some Harvard graduates become billionaires, while overwhelming majority do not. Similarly, if your family is rich enough to invest $1M in your startup, that's surely a huge advantage over regular people, but given how easy it is for non-scions to get $1M in investment funding (and it's really easy), I can scarcely believe that "family wealth" is really such a huge causal factor.
      - yunohn 4y ago
        This just sounds to me like you haven’t read enough. It’s not that hard to understand honestly. Here are some randomly picked links: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8q8m/admit-your-financial-privilege https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8q8m/admit-your-financial-... https://gen.medium.com/families-like-mine-rarely-realize-their-privilege-e2d671991ba4 https://gen.medium.com/families-like-mine-rarely-realize-the... https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/how-and-why-wealthy-try-cover-their-privileges https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/how-and-...
        xyzzyz 4y ago
        I clicked on the first link. Is the point here that Elon Musk is a billionaire because parents bought him a new car when he was in his twenties? If this is the example of how family wealth allows people to get ahead in life, then, well, allow me to continue to disregard it. What kind car you drive has pretty much zero impact when it comes to achieving wealth or success.
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
Being smart and working hard will do absolutely nothing to make most people richer, unless they work hard in the specific and limited ways that maximise wealth. Many of those ways happen to be morally questionable at best, and criminal at worst. An artistic genius is very likely to lose out financially to an averagely intelligent slum landlord no matter how hard they work. Because the opportunities to make money from artistic genius are heavily skewed towards failure, while for slum landlords they're heavily skewed towards success. The handful of exceptions in the arts are survivor bias. No one hears about the many more failures, by definition. There is no sense in which wealth is a level playing field. If you're not born into wealth - still the number one way to be wealthy - the most obviously rewarded trait isn't intelligence, it's sociopathy. The successful ultra-rich are notorious for greed, selfishness, and lack of empathy. Go to any social event for the ultra-rich and you'll find a disproportionate number of criminals, narcissists, and other kinds of damaged people. Those are the qualities that make someone a "success". IQ certainly helps, but if you lack the pathological motivation to exploit others it's not going to get you far on its own.
- philwelch 4y ago
  > Being smart and working hard will do absolutely nothing to make most people richer, unless they work hard in the specific and limited ways that maximise wealth. If you’re smart enough, you can figure that out. > If you're not born into wealth - still the number one way to be wealthy - the most obviously rewarded trait isn't intelligence, it's sociopathy. That becomes more and more true as your society approaches the state of nature that your namesake discussed, but it’s less and less true in free societies, and as a consequence, those free societies become richer societies.
  - mv4 4y ago
    Re: If you’re smart enough, you can figure that out. - being able to spot situations that can be exploited has little do do with intelligence. Many smart people never figure that out.

KerrAvon 4y ago

Except that most rich people come from inherited wealth. Elon Musk is an emerald mine scion, for example. Sometimes it’s intelligence, but mostly it’s not.

philwelch 4y ago
Elon Musk didn’t actually inherit any wealth; he emigrated to America essentially broke and didn’t get rich until PayPal. Also, his father is still alive, so any inheritance hasn’t even happened yet. Setting that aside, how does being the son of a guy who owned an emerald mine in South Africa explain him being richer than the descendants of Henry Ford or John D. Rockefeller? How do explain the children of all the other emerald mine owners?
- david927 4y ago
  He went to a fancy private boarding school as a boy and his family had connections. > how does being the son of a guy who owned an emerald mine in South Africa explain him being richer That's faulty, a posteriori reasoning.
  - philwelch 4y ago
    What I am doing is falsifying your hypothesis. If being born to rich parents, having connections, and going to boarding schools is the sole reason people get rich, then we would expect that people with richer parents and more connections who went to better boarding schools than Elon Musk would be richer, and people who grew up in similar conditions to Elon Musk would be equally rich. This is not true.
    - david927 4y ago
      > What I am doing is falsifying your hypothesis That is not what you are doing. You are picking a winning lottery number and saying why did this number win and others not? That's faulty logic.
      - philwelch 4y ago
        No, I’m looking at two “lottery tickets” with the exact same numbers and asking why one of them one the jackpot and the other one didn’t. The only conclusion: it’s not a lottery and what you have picked out as the winning lottery numbers are not that.
        david927 4y ago
        You're really bad at logic but you're confident in it; that's not a good combination.
        endisneigh 4y ago
        To be fair you'd have to compare people who had the same circumstances and desires, not simply both being rich.
  - astrange 4y ago
    I don't believe Elon had any more undue privilege than any other Stanford graduate. (Which is not none, but it means none of the emerald stuff matters.) There's no need for any such influence anyway, getting rich from PayPal is already pure luck and you should be satisfied complaining about that!
- yunohn 4y ago
  I believe most people mean significant family wealth, not necessarily post-death inheritance. You can’t seriously claim that he was broke while being part of an emerald mining family? Also, why are you comparing him to other rich/er folk? Is your point that every extra million is an IQ point?
  - xyzzyz 4y ago
    And what good was his family wealth for? How much of it actually played a role and how? Did he get millions from his family to start PayPal? I hear a lot about the role of "family wealth", but I never actually hear about mechanism, how exactly it helps. If you're a legacy of a wealthy family, and thanks to that, get into Harvard, then sure, that's a real leg up, but it doesn't explain why some Harvard graduates become billionaires, while overwhelming majority do not. Similarly, if your family is rich enough to invest $1M in your startup, that's surely a huge advantage over regular people, but given how easy it is for non-scions to get $1M in investment funding (and it's really easy), I can scarcely believe that "family wealth" is really such a huge causal factor.
    - yunohn 4y ago
      This just sounds to me like you haven’t read enough. It’s not that hard to understand honestly. Here are some randomly picked links: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8q8m/admit-your-financial-privilege https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8q8m/admit-your-financial-... https://gen.medium.com/families-like-mine-rarely-realize-their-privilege-e2d671991ba4 https://gen.medium.com/families-like-mine-rarely-realize-the... https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/how-and-why-wealthy-try-cover-their-privileges https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/how-and-...
      - xyzzyz 4y ago
        I clicked on the first link. Is the point here that Elon Musk is a billionaire because parents bought him a new car when he was in his twenties? If this is the example of how family wealth allows people to get ahead in life, then, well, allow me to continue to disregard it. What kind car you drive has pretty much zero impact when it comes to achieving wealth or success.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago

Being smart and working hard will do absolutely nothing to make most people richer, unless they work hard in the specific and limited ways that maximise wealth. Many of those ways happen to be morally questionable at best, and criminal at worst. An artistic genius is very likely to lose out financially to an averagely intelligent slum landlord no matter how hard they work. Because the opportunities to make money from artistic genius are heavily skewed towards failure, while for slum landlords they're heavily skewed towards success. The handful of exceptions in the arts are survivor bias. No one hears about the many more failures, by definition. There is no sense in which wealth is a level playing field. If you're not born into wealth - still the number one way to be wealthy - the most obviously rewarded trait isn't intelligence, it's sociopathy. The successful ultra-rich are notorious for greed, selfishness, and lack of empathy. Go to any social event for the ultra-rich and you'll find a disproportionate number of criminals, narcissists, and other kinds of damaged people. Those are the qualities that make someone a "success". IQ certainly helps, but if you lack the pathological motivation to exploit others it's not going to get you far on its own.

philwelch 4y ago
> Being smart and working hard will do absolutely nothing to make most people richer, unless they work hard in the specific and limited ways that maximise wealth. If you’re smart enough, you can figure that out. > If you're not born into wealth - still the number one way to be wealthy - the most obviously rewarded trait isn't intelligence, it's sociopathy. That becomes more and more true as your society approaches the state of nature that your namesake discussed, but it’s less and less true in free societies, and as a consequence, those free societies become richer societies.
- mv4 4y ago
  Re: If you’re smart enough, you can figure that out. - being able to spot situations that can be exploited has little do do with intelligence. Many smart people never figure that out.