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How to succeed in America without even trying
spacekungfuman
Poor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERS regular
Poor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERS regular
B-School Billionaires - Striking It Rich by Hard Work and Dumb Luck - Businessweek
An MBA doesn't guarantee riches, but for these B-school alumni, it didn't hurt. Each of the MBA grads (and one MBA dropout) listed in the slides that follow holds a spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Some became known for their shrewd business moves—such as John Paulson, who bet against mortgage-backed securities, and Alexey Mordashov, who built Russian mining company Severstal into a multibillion-dollar conglomerate. A handful had notable family connections or inheritances, and one of them was a successor at a company controlled by his father. Others are famous for starting their own enterprises, such as Nike (NKE) founder Phil Knight and Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio. Classrooms and case studies may be a distant memory for these billionaires, but make no mistake: At one time, they, too, were binder-toting business students ambling across campus.
Note: Net worth shown is three-month average effective Jan. 29, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
http://images.businessweek.com/slideshows/2013-02-07/b-school-billionaires
Success. Some people are born into it, and others claw tooth and nail to get it. But, regardless of whether you grow up as the son of a dirt farmer or a billionaire, you aren't guaranteed to succeed or fail. Other factors, like intelligence, talent and work ethic also factor in. But what counts the most? Can we really call these other qualities innate and call their possessors credit or blameworthy based on degrees, or is everything the luck of the draw? In this topic, lets discuss how much personal characteristics and effort factor into life outcomes vs just dumb luck.
This is a continuation of the discussion. That started in the Ayn Rand thread.
For what it's worth, my view is that luck, skill and work ethic all factor in here, and I don't think it is reasonable to go all the way down then path towards everything (including work ethic) being the luck of the draw.
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it worked for me it can work for you
But what good are skill and hard luck when you don't even have a chance to display it. I have a friend from HS who has a very successful parent. Turns out she's relatively good at what she does, but she literally couldn't fail because her parent is just that influential. The work comes at her because she's good, but people struggle as no-names for years without seeing a hint of a break like hers.
Nowadays with the collapsing value of labor and the skyrocketing value of land and capitol, the best way to succeed is to already be rich. If you have that, then you need to be a complete goof to mess it up.
Intelligence, talent and work ethic play minor roles. The biggest part of those is opening up new avenues for you to spend the money you have in smarter ways, and they help prevent you from getting scammed by smarter rich people.
Luck is critical, since it enables the other talents if you don't have money. I think to succeed and become rich you need to already be rich, or lucky. Intelligence, Talent and work ethic will not get you there these days. The value of labor is just too low.
I personally think that's a horribly pessimistic definition.
Social mobility is at a near all-time low in America. Bootstraps are a myth.
If we're viewing success as high-income, high-income earners tend to work a lot of hours. Of course, plenty of people work the same hours and don't earn high incomes. Unreasonably long hours are increasingly the norm for even lower-wage jobs. The days of the nine-to-five job are quickly disappearing, and while staying several hours late at work might have once been a matter of passion it is quickly becoming the norm in a lot of industries across the income spectrum.
The investment banker who makes fifty times as much as a garbage man isn't working fifty times as hard, he might not even be working harder at all, but society has chosen to disproportionately reward one type of work over another. A successful investment banker might have worked hard to rise above other investment bankers, and so he gets offended when he's accused of getting there through luck - but people aren't saying he's lucky to have risen through the ranks of investment banking, they're saying he's lucky to be an investment banker to begin with. If his skills were in poetry or appliance repair he wouldn't make anywhere near as much money, even if he pushed himself just as hard. That's the difference.
All the rhetoric about the "individual" and the "self-made man" is one of those well-crafted turns of phrase that everyone wants to agree with, because we all want to feel responsible and to take credit for our successes. The reality is that the only difference between ourselves and our caveman ancestors is the knowledge base passed down through generations of societal progress passed down through the generations. As Bill Gates likes to ask, how much of your income would you sacrifice at birth to be born in the United States instead of Somalia?
And of failure?
There are 400 rich people in America. Everyone else is middle class.
I'm not sure that reasoning follows. If I have two oranges but had three a year ago, I wouldn't be saying oranges are a myth. Similarly, social mobility is down from where it was when everyone was getting back to work after taking a decade off to shoot Nazis, but I'm not sure what that means in absolute values.
I'm not aware of anyone claiming that anyone's success financially is entirely the result of luck. Of course there is some degree of intelligence and skill involved. Even if it is just hiring the right money manager that can make sure that you never have to actually do anything. Hard work, not so much. While many people who are rich either do work hard, or have worked hard, many that are born rich don't have to work hard.
When it comes down to it though luck really does hold most of the cards. If you happen to be born into a wealthy enough family, you have a much better chance. All the hard work in the world wont make you rich if you grew up poor (outside of a very few outliers). However, if you don't do at least something to keep the money you have (live frugally, hire good help, do the work yourself), then you wont keep that money.
So no one is a self made man, and anyone who inherits a ton of money can still be a huge dummy and piss it all away.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
In terms of sheer magnitude, or in terms of touchy-feeliness?
Once you have enough financial security, almost all of your problems are ones that you created for yourself.
We have the second one, its called Bioshock.
If that's the definition of success were talking about, then yes, the sons of kings are the most likely to inherent kingdoms. It's also fantasyland nonsense that no one that knows someone who knows someone who reads this post will likely ever achieve.
If we're talking success as an actual person who is debt free, can provide for his family, and sock away enough to retire with a respectable amount of money, then bootstraps actually do exist.
I mean, fuck, I don't think my dentist is a crushing failure because he doesn't have half a billion in assets.
Umm, it wasn't all that high immediately following the war either. It has always been more of a mirage than a reality. The degree of that falsity has simply trebled in recent years compared to our grandparents' generation. A 1:25 shot is pretty miserable, but a 1:12 shot isn't exactly good odds either.
Your dentist probably didn't start his life as a poor black child of sharecroppers, born in a log cabin he built himself. And for over a generation income has hardly risen, even among modestly successful people.
Can we get the same chart with actual quintiles please? This one is missing 20-40, 60-80 and splits 80-100 out into four additional lines.
In all my travels in this world and the old, I have met like, three people,. who fit that description.
The hallmarks of living in America: huge debts, no savings, maybe with both of those you can feed your family.
What is the saying? "Most Americans are two paychecks away from disaster" or something?
This strikes me as going more than a bit too far, unless you mean it in a relatively solipsistic way (in which case existence itself is based on luck) or I'm misinterpreting you.
Nobody chooses their mental acuity. All the factors that have led to who we are are things we're not in control of. It's all luck, fundamentally.
Become an investment banker.
I find this hard to believe given that the median net worth of an American household is $110k. A large chunk of that is is probably in a house, but it seems like you should be able to last at least 3 months without pay if not more. Note this number is from 2007 because it's all Wikipedia had so it may be off by up to a third given the crash, but that still seems more than enough to be months from disaster, not less than one.
There is definitely a problem in our society with highly compensating people for doing the wrong things IMO, but that is a wholly seperate issue from whether it is luck that makes people ibankers. I think that is an absurdly broad definition of luck, unless you were born into a family of bankers or something. Back in the boom years, any idiot with a bachelors in business could get a six figure starting salary as an ibanker.
Here is a chart on average household income from 1967-2010, if that'd fit your bill.
Though I don't quite see why? It does that to increase the accuracy of portraying the top 20% since both the average and the mean would be misleading due to such a significant disparity between the top 1% even in comparison with the top 2-5% let, alone 2-80%. But I linked to where I'm drawing the charts from earlier and you can get the raw data from them to fiddle with. (Direct link to that graph.)
That figure is almost entirely because of home equity.
And I cannot see how being forced to sell ones place of residence and be out on the street, on short notice (if it is even possible), could be anything but a "disaster"
I really don't want this to be a "SKFM doesn't understand poor people thread" but I find that hard to believe. I know many many people with positive net worth, many of whom don't have high paying jobs. Hell, my inlaws are both teachers and they own their $600k house and their two cars outright, and carry no debt that I am aware of. I'm pretty sure they have hundreds of thousands in the bank. They just lived frugally their whole lives.
i was offered a job at BNP paribas because somebody there is married to my first cousin
so
lol?
As Loren Michael said, those personal characteristics are also just luck. One's ability to put forth effort results from those personal characteristics. So, we can easily reduce everything down to just dumb luck.
However, in our past free will v. determinism threads, persons have been inclined to argue for a notion of free will, or some moral responsibility, regardless of the causal factors involved in one's engagement or aversion to a particular act. One may have been born into a particular culture, to particular parents, with particular abilities, but one still has a degree of freedom despite those causal forces.
I would be interested in putting those two notions next to one another. If we can reduce the individual's agency down to "dumb luck" in a conversation about personal economic success, then that seems to require a deterministic world view wherein one's acts are causally determined by their heritage, their situation, their particular biological abilities, etc. If we are inclined to maintain a notion of freedom, and stop the causal / historical regress, then we would also maintain that one's success or failure depends upon the particular individual despite their context, heritage, situation, etc.
Either we go with
1) Determinism & Dumb Luck
2) Freedom & 'Success or Failure as product of individual actions'
I'm fine with either. It just seems strange to maintain a notion of free will and maintain that one's success or failure is fully determined by one's parents and uncontrolled / unchosen personal characteristics.
For one, you can't eat your house. Nor should you, especially if it's from before the 1970's. Wall candy contains lead.
For two, medians do not always reflect what you think they do. But even if they did, you appear to be suggesting that someone liquidate the majority of their net worth in order to make it for a few months. That strikes me as qualifying as a disaster. This chart is a better representation of my point, but it isn't visual. So here's a relatively related graph. Because graphs are fun.
Share of total household wealth growth accruing to various wealth groups, 1983–2010
Sorry, don't know why the label isn't part of the image. Added it now.
if only there was a term for a choice that was not necessary. a... false choice. dicho
dich
tomy?
yes
a false dichotomy
fuck it lets throw in excluded middle too while were yoloing about here
But the alternative is that most Americans necessarily wind up renting. And trying to engineer larger non-housing savings is highly unpopular during boom years. The refrain from the right just becomes "damn it gubmint, stop telling us how much to save" and from the left "damn it oligarchs, stop extracting rent from us".
Surely even you must understand that this is so rare that I'm almost tempted to call bullshit on it.
And even so, your in-laws are what, early boomers? Late WW2ers? Completely different world now.