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."
If I’m remembering your previous posts correctly, you’re quite aware that mental health is absolutely a part of this. It’s a very big part for some people.
I’ve never felt that I’ve lack “smart”. What I lack is passion, willpower, and consistency. From where I sit, I expect that I’d be much better off both financially and emotionally if my situation were reversed.
It is the same for men, too. I had everything set up to retire at 35... then I married. Sure, I am a more socially productive person now. My kid will someday pay taxes that will finance the retirement of people that didn't bother to have kids.
> Divorce, scandal, drug addiction and various other personal issues can all be financially ruinous.
This is well-said. James Hughes advocates families account their balance sheets on human, intellectual, financial, and social capital. For very-long-term (50-100+ years and >3 generations), the human, social, and intellectual components are arguably more important than the financial one, and it is essential to mitigate liabilities like divorce etc.
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.
For every success story with those traits are thousands of failures.
If Bill Gates had been born and raised in Ruanda, you wouldn't know his name today. Same IQ, same hustler. But no parents with connections, no upbringing devoid of war and violence.
It's just like in sports. Usain Bolt is not the fastest man alive. He is the fastest professional runner. Within a sample set of 9bn people, there are likely ones with better genetics - but no access or chance to become a professional runner.
This is why the slogan "Billionaires should not exist" is not without merit. A net worth of 100mil still means generational wealth. But once you're in the billions, the gap to all the other employees in your company becomes just crazy - but none of the billions would have been possible without their labor.
Remember: a million seconds is 11.57 days. A billion seconds? 31.71 years.
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.
No, this article is entirely about blind luck. None of the things you describe matter.
There are plenty of prepared, hustlers who can capitalize on lucky events. For every one of them that becomes mega-rich, there are thousands who are exactly as fit who do not.
That is, 2 3 and 4 follow a normal distribution, wealth follows a power-law distribution. The attributes don't correlate strongly.
My guess is that it's some kind of distribution curve.
You can certainly improve your odds via 2, 3 and 4, but some people will do all those and end up not doing well. The average person who does them all will end up a bit better-off than average, and some will end up very well off.
In other words, they help, but don't guarantee 'success'.
You can't frame things like this without talking about misfortune in the same terms. Lots of things can happen that are 'unluckly', but are vastly skewed to certain demographics. Being unlucky like:
* Receiving little or no schooling
* Having to labour as a child
* Being abused
* Having your primary carers be addicts of some kind
* Growing up in a relatively poor/deprived
* ...
Really this list is endless, and other than blind luck (a lotto win, something that can really elevate you out of this situation, as well as having the sense to use the opportunity correctly), no amount of 'hustle' is really going to get you out of this situation.
The kind of attitude in parent's comment is prevalent amongst people who have grown up in relatively rich, successful environments, and see vastly more lucky people than unlucky people (when in reality there are orders of magnitude more unlucky people than lucky).
> but they don't define what luck is to begin with.
They do though, the paper is focused on what you call "blind luck" in (1). I suppose it can be summarized as a evidence based counter argument to the cultural narrative weight given to 2,3,4, especially in the US.
I don't think it is complete of course, but it is interesting.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Yes, by my direct observation, it’s mostly chance.
Wait, what? Are you sure you're reaching the right conclusion? It sounds like your anecdote supports the opposite once you stop looking inter-your-small-group, and start comparing groups. Have you compared median wage data for your elite university versus median wage data for the country you are in? I suspect the difference is noticeable.
It appears you are making the mistake of comparing a group of successful entrepreneurs, failed entrepreneurs, and people who went to work at Goog and McKinsey with each-other, but you really need to compare that group to people who couldn't get a job at Google or McKinsey at all. Obviously life is not nearly that uni-dimensional, but I'd wager your median "all really smart" colleague is wildly beating the median person, even if some of them are broke.
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
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.
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.
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
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).
> 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.)
> 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...
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.
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.
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)...
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).
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.
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.
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.... :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|6 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] maerF0x0|6 years ago|reply
I would say it leads to the greatest form of wealth. We just do not measure it in $$$.
A society that has bad parents will soon be a bad society.
[+] [-] citronlakris|6 years ago|reply
As a european, this assumption that everyone would value getting as rich as possible as their top priority seems really weird.
[+] [-] LyndsySimon|6 years ago|reply
If I’m remembering your previous posts correctly, you’re quite aware that mental health is absolutely a part of this. It’s a very big part for some people.
I’ve never felt that I’ve lack “smart”. What I lack is passion, willpower, and consistency. From where I sit, I expect that I’d be much better off both financially and emotionally if my situation were reversed.
[+] [-] umvi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 609venezia|6 years ago|reply
This is well-said. James Hughes advocates families account their balance sheets on human, intellectual, financial, and social capital. For very-long-term (50-100+ years and >3 generations), the human, social, and intellectual components are arguably more important than the financial one, and it is essential to mitigate liabilities like divorce etc.
http://www.jamesehughes.com/articles/FamilyBalanceSheet.pdf
[+] [-] sosuke|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tutfbhuf|6 years ago|reply
You could have reacted (slightly confused) like so: I pointed at my kids and said "I am."
[+] [-] otikik|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] truebosko|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vearwhershuh|6 years ago|reply
Thank you.
[+] [-] meiraleal|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] martinni|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shadowtree|6 years ago|reply
For every success story with those traits are thousands of failures.
If Bill Gates had been born and raised in Ruanda, you wouldn't know his name today. Same IQ, same hustler. But no parents with connections, no upbringing devoid of war and violence.
It's just like in sports. Usain Bolt is not the fastest man alive. He is the fastest professional runner. Within a sample set of 9bn people, there are likely ones with better genetics - but no access or chance to become a professional runner.
This is why the slogan "Billionaires should not exist" is not without merit. A net worth of 100mil still means generational wealth. But once you're in the billions, the gap to all the other employees in your company becomes just crazy - but none of the billions would have been possible without their labor.
Remember: a million seconds is 11.57 days. A billion seconds? 31.71 years.
[+] [-] ta1234567890|6 years ago|reply
You don't choose your genes or where you are born. Those factors, which are blind luck, determine all of the other lucks for your whole life.
In the end, everything is just blind luck, but our egos want to feel like they are in control somehow.
[+] [-] hnhg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ohyes|6 years ago|reply
There are plenty of prepared, hustlers who can capitalize on lucky events. For every one of them that becomes mega-rich, there are thousands who are exactly as fit who do not.
That is, 2 3 and 4 follow a normal distribution, wealth follows a power-law distribution. The attributes don't correlate strongly.
Makes me feel better to have a study confirm it.
[+] [-] davidw|6 years ago|reply
You can certainly improve your odds via 2, 3 and 4, but some people will do all those and end up not doing well. The average person who does them all will end up a bit better-off than average, and some will end up very well off.
In other words, they help, but don't guarantee 'success'.
[+] [-] fredley|6 years ago|reply
* Receiving little or no schooling
* Having to labour as a child
* Being abused
* Having your primary carers be addicts of some kind
* Growing up in a relatively poor/deprived
* ...
Really this list is endless, and other than blind luck (a lotto win, something that can really elevate you out of this situation, as well as having the sense to use the opportunity correctly), no amount of 'hustle' is really going to get you out of this situation.
The kind of attitude in parent's comment is prevalent amongst people who have grown up in relatively rich, successful environments, and see vastly more lucky people than unlucky people (when in reality there are orders of magnitude more unlucky people than lucky).
[+] [-] ska|6 years ago|reply
They do though, the paper is focused on what you call "blind luck" in (1). I suppose it can be summarized as a evidence based counter argument to the cultural narrative weight given to 2,3,4, especially in the US.
I don't think it is complete of course, but it is interesting.
[+] [-] adventured|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
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-...
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.
[+] [-] fingerlocks|6 years ago|reply
But actual talent, like human height or average running speed, is probably normally distributed.
[+] [-] LeftHandPath|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ttul|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] simonsarris|6 years ago|reply
Wait, what? Are you sure you're reaching the right conclusion? It sounds like your anecdote supports the opposite once you stop looking inter-your-small-group, and start comparing groups. Have you compared median wage data for your elite university versus median wage data for the country you are in? I suspect the difference is noticeable.
It appears you are making the mistake of comparing a group of successful entrepreneurs, failed entrepreneurs, and people who went to work at Goog and McKinsey with each-other, but you really need to compare that group to people who couldn't get a job at Google or McKinsey at all. Obviously life is not nearly that uni-dimensional, but I'd wager your median "all really smart" colleague is wildly beating the median person, even if some of them are broke.
[+] [-] akhilcacharya|6 years ago|reply
They probably are smarter though! If they weren't, they wouldn't get in.
[+] [-] zornado|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omarhaneef|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Udik|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] __s|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duaoebg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjornsing|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] georgeecollins|6 years ago|reply
I don't think people typically realize it as much because they don't benchmark themselves against their classmates when they get older.
[+] [-] thrownaway954|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maerF0x0|6 years ago|reply
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)...
[+] [-] program_whiz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moosey|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kangnkodos|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] winrid|6 years ago|reply
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.... :)
[+] [-] m3kw9|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] robmay|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giardini|6 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16591908
including the Pluchino paper (scroll/search on the above page to find the reference).
[+] [-] jkingsbery|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Wh1skey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RenRav|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] auiya|6 years ago|reply