Comment by kartan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kartan | Hacker News Reader

"In this case, our studies affirmed that a person’s intelligence and socioeconomic background were the most powerful factors in explaining his or her success"

If success is defined from an economic point of view in absolutes it makes sense. As the best predictor of your wealth is your parents wealth.

"Intelligence" is harder to add to the equation as it is more difficult to measure than parents wealth and there are known bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect) that makes people think that they are smarter/more competent that they really are. So it is even possible that a superiority complex or insecurity are relevant even when the participants in the survey don't think so. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Package)

This results show the consequence of a diminishing socio-economic mobility. The same traits and skills in a high mobility society are going to have a big weight in "success" achievement. In an stagnated society where the system is rigged to make poor stay poor and rich stay rich "success" becomes an inherited trait making "socioeconomic background" the only and best predictor.

> As the best predictor of your wealth is your parents wealth.

Coming from an Eastern European country, my parents were making less than $10000 a year combined in the '80s and '90s. Nowhere near "wealthy" by western standards. However, they gifted me with a strong STEM education, which translated in material affluence 25 years later on a different continent.

Might consider that the biggest transferable wealth across generations is a good education and a life long example of thrift and hard work.

I complete agree on that. I was NOT arguing against good education. Education (that gives you knowledge), love (that gives you mental well being) and good habits (that makes you more resilient) are going to have a huge impact in your physical, mental and economic well being.

> which translated in material affluence 25 years later on a different continent Yes. And that's why emigration has a big impact in improving world-wide socio-economic mobility.

But suppose that you have started your live in an already rich country. In that case that country socio-economic mobility, by definition, is what gives you how dependent is your wealth on your parents wealth.

World wide socio-economic mobility probably is quite good. As it is easier and cheaper to emigrate than ever and also because there has been a lot of growth in non-western countries. But the article was talking about North America. And in that case, as it is also true on all western countries, mobility is shrinking. In that scenario education, love, good habits are still important for your well being. But they are not strong indicators of your absolute wealth.

But there is one other factor more important than any and muddles everything..the desire to accumulate wealth.

If family socioeconomic status is the best predictor of your own wealth, it's hard to argue "wanting it" is the most important factor. Unless you genuinely believe most everyone living in poverty is perfectly happy to stay there.

You are one case.

The epitome of anecdotal evidence.

I see your agenda: Reducing other people's arguments. The Godwin point applied to factual evidence. On the opposite: he's the proof that parent's wealth is not necessary, as opposed to the opinion of "disadvantage"-ers.

So many of my mid-to-highschool classmates mates had desite for, air quote, me "working all the time", end of air quote. Can't ignore that.

No one is arguing that family wealth is "necessary" for financial success, just that it's a strong predictor of it.

I'm sure giving your kids a good and useful education is one way to transfer wealth between generations. However, it sometimes fails.

Direct ways of transferring wealth between generations never fail. And there's a lot of those going on too.

Transferring values is hard. Transferring cash is easy.

> Transferring cash is easy.

Not always easy. There are disasters too - hyperinflation, nationalization, monetary/land reform, privatization.. any of them can cause you to lose large amount of wealth.

All of them hit work-acquired wealth just as hard as inherited wealth.

"Direct ways of transferring wealth between generations never fail."

Sure it does.

Plenty of heirs "lose the farm."

It's been said that the first generation builds the business, the second generation manages it, and the third generation loses it.

Maintaining and growing wealth are different than receiving and spending.

> It's been said that the first generation

Ah, but how diluted does it get with each increasing cohort of heirs?

"Clogs to clogs in three generations": https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/clogs_to_clogs_in_three_gen...

Plenty of heirs "lose the farm."

The transfer still worked. And people who get success more on their own sometimes lose the farm too (more often, I'd bet - I don't think there are any low risk strategies of getting richer than your parents).

Maintaining and growing wealth are different than receiving and spending.

It's much easier than getting it in the first place, though.

>Coming from an Eastern European country, my parents were making less than $10000 a year combined in the '80s and '90s. Nowhere near "wealthy" by western standards. However, they gifted me with a strong STEM education, which translated in material affluence 25 years later on a different continent.

That's the very definition of anecdotal evidence and survivorship bias. Both things that a strong STEM education should help squash.

It's also based on a historical peculiarity. In the west, and in particular in the US, to get a good STEM education you statistically have to be middle class or wealthy in the first place. (It's not impossible to have one if you're not -- just more difficult and rare). That wasn't the case in Eastern Europe, where the state provided easier access to higher education.

Define "good STEM education".

I had cable internet very early in it's history, and I used to for things other than playing Half Life.

I did not end up going to Stanford, but I went to a decent state school and while I'm not rich, I'm certainly much better of than friends who had other majors.

I'm not sure I get what you're going for with this comment

A good STEM education is one that would (at the very least least) make one wary of committing such obvious mistakes when drawing up arguments.

Randomness is a more relevant factor than "gurus" want you to acknowledge, just change "strong STEM education" by "strong Non-STEM education" and keep all the rest. Probably your story would be slightly different no matter the hard work..

Intelligence isn't very hard to measure. The methods to test it are quite mature.

They do not involve asking people how intelligent they think they are, which is the only way Dunning-Kruger would influence the results.

> "Intelligence isn't very hard to measure. The methods to test it are quite mature."

Intelligence is a measure of aptitude, but aptitude applies to a broad range of activity, and not all aptitude is numerically quantifiable (in any meaningful sense, at least). For example, two broad categories of intelligence are academic intelligence and emotional intelligence. Excellence in one field does not necessarily transfer to all fields, otherwise socially gifted people would always make the best academic students, and from personal observation I can see this doesn't tie up with reality.

>Intelligence isn't very hard to measure. The methods to test it are quite mature.

On the contrary. A lot of the standard methods are crude and coarse measures of intelligence.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121219133334.h...

Good ones (consistent, calibrated) seems to exist but yes, I have read on HN about people being asked about American history under the guise of "IQ test".

That's a pretty bold statement, considering that it's currently unknown whether general "intelligence", or g, even exists.

?

> ... whether general "intelligence", or g, even exists.

I'm talking about the one that is for example measured in standardized IQ tests.

That's a little bit circular, though: "Intelligence is what is measured by an intelligence test."

And he is saying the IQ test measures very little, though the test appears at least to be self-consistent.

It's reasonably consistently measurable and has demonstrated correlations with both causative factors and outcomes. You can legitimately question the nature of what is being measured, but it's obviously something real (even if it's a composite).

The methods to test intelligence is apparently all there is of it. We know we can make tests that curve-fit to a normal distribution but beyond that, we know nearly nothing of it.

>If success is defined from an economic point of view in absolutes it makes sense. As the best predictor of your wealth is your parents wealth.

It's not the wealth. It's all of the cultural things that correlate strongly with wealth. Case in point: Two million Cuban-Americans came to the US with nothing but the clothes on their backs, within the last 60 years. Today, they've found their way to the middle and upper classes in about the same proportions as non-hispanic white people.

A bit of self-selection here. Those two million Cuban-Americans were more likely to have been upper class Cubans (or descendants of upper class Cubans). Not only would upper class and upper middle class Cubans be the only ones to afford to flee Fidel Castro's dictatorship, but they would also be the ones most affected by Castro's communist policies and redistribution of wealth.

Exactly. There's no denying that especially at first, Cuban refugees were skewed toward the middle class. But no matter what they came from, they almost all came with nothing. Which is what my point is. It's not the money, it's all of the cultural things that correlate with it.

It seems to me that was precisely the point he tried to make.

It seems to me that if it was his point, he'd have mentioned it.

The "Mariel" people were not upper class Cubans. Many were petty criminals and mental health patients. So, just so people who might think they were all people who escaped back in '59, no, most were not those people.

The Mariel numbers were around 150,000 people, a small fraction of the 2 million or so Cubans who emigrated. In the upper middle class circles I traveled in in South Florida, my Cuban friends from the emigree generation and the generation that grew up in South Florida very much fit the mold of leaving comfort to start over with nothing.

I would agree it's not income. That's just correlation.

It's whether your parents taught you to read by age 5, cooked vegetables for dinner, encouraged you to play an instrument, drove you to tournaments on weekends, picked a neighbourhood with an IB program even if that means no yard, paid for braces, etc etc.

Patents with low income can choose to do formative things, with personal sacrifice.

Anecdotally, social mobility happens when your parents choose to prioritize you, and you also somehow get introduced to the good life and determine to 'make it' at whatever cost.

Do you have data for that? It's a statement that sounds like it makes sense, but so do a lot of statements in this sort of discussion.

(I'm not disagreeing. Intuitively I'd tend to agree with you that those things would have a measureable effect. I just don't trust intuition in this sort of thing. :) )

I don't have data, only personal experience. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerted_cultivation

Malcolm Gladwell writes about this too, in Outliers [1] (chapters 3 and 4). His aim was to dispel the myth that success derives from intelligence.

[1]: https://www.amazon.ca/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwel...

Why is this down voted? It is quite insightful. Is HN that much of an echo chamber for the self-made-person myth? A shame that our collective intelligence would harbour this blind spot.

I have no idea. I don't fit the mold - doing well, grew up poorer than many, so my success wasn't dictated by my parents, but that doesn't mean GP's post is wrong at all. I upvoted it.

Edit: while I'm sure I'm smart (who isn't sure the are?), luck has a lot to do with any success I've had.

> luck has a lot to do with any success I've had.

Does anyone expect that by sitting around doing nothing they'll get lucky and become successful? Do one's choices mean nothing?

"Fortune favors the bold."

"But the world remembers only bold successes, aka history is written by the victors." --me

Fortune favours the fortunate - and sends out journalists to interview some of them.

Only the successful bold are remembered by history.

More like "misfortune filters the bold." As in "There are bold bikers, there are old bikers, but there are no old, bold bikers."

I'm more successful than most people I know. I put this down mostly to phenotype, education, and and general social background. None of this is anything to feel proud about, I didn't choose any of this.

I know (and admire) many many less successful people who work a lot harder than me, who display most of the traits that are meant to make people successful, but the halo effect, being white and male, getting easily bored, and being brought up in an environment where suggesting I could be the Prime Minister one day was met not with derision but with book suggestions were surely the keys to my success, and also the basis for all my choices.

The key belief - in my experience - between the Left and the Right is that the Right doesn't believe in luck, good or bad.

There's plenty of hardworking people who never get lucky and hit jackpot, but who nonetheless build happy fulfilled lives and can give their children many opportunities.

> getting easily bored

Getting easily bored was helpful?

It's a useful parameter that if set right will enhance new exploration over retreading territory. If set too high, you spend too much time exploring shallowly, and if set too low, you get stuck in a rut.

Many times I read about entrepreneurs they've made changes in their life because they're filled with a deep desire to blah blah blah. I quit my first job to work for myself because I bored out of my wits and couldn't face going in to work. Many of the big positive changes in my life have happened because I was too bored or lazy to cope with the status quo.

I don't think most people on HN think "luck" happens by pure chance. "Luck" is most often used to describe why 5% of startups make it, and why the other 95% fail despite the same level of intelligence and effort of its team. Another hackneyed/common phrase is "luck is where preparation meets opportunity". In the scope of entrepreneurial efforts, there's sufficient amounts of chaos that one has to attribute success to some amount of chance or luck, in addition to the effort required in running/starting a business.

The details of success are pretty much luck. But the choices one makes to recognize opportunity when it flows your way, and being prepared to take advantage of that opportunity, that is not luck.

I.e. if you're not out there swinging, you are never ever going to hit the ball.

My mental conception of this looks like a bell curve - most successful entities require a good amount of (hard, smart, strategic) work and a good amount of (pure, random, chaotic) luck. A very few succeed with a vast amount of hard work and only a small amount of luck, and equally few succeed with a tiny amount of hard work and vast amounts of luck.

The "luck" argument isn't about comparing an idle slob with a hard-working person. It's about different outcomes for equally hard-working people due to luck - such as the luck of birth. Which is not just about parents, but about ones entire environment. How many little Einsteins where born in Ghana and nobody ever noticed?

It is NOT about how hard you work. It is about how smart you work - i.e. your choices on what to work on.

Working hard on non-productive things is not going to get one anywhere. Everybody has choices on what to work on. Working hard waiting tables is not going to help create a hit album - working hard on guitar skills might.

To be successful, you have to have a plan that makes sense, then work that plan, not something else.

"Don't tell me how hard you work. Tell me how much you get done."

If hard work made ou successful old women in 3rd world countries would be billionaires.

Hard work is one of several factors.

Also not being a billionaire!= not being successful.

Does anyone expect that by sitting around doing nothing they'll get lucky and become successful? Do one's choices mean nothing?

Talk about a non sequitur. Grandparent said, essentially, that luck is necessary for success. You seem to be arguing against a strawman who you imagine claims that luck is sufficient for success.

You have accomplished much, Walter, and you deserve to feel proud. You also should feel lucky, however.

I've watched enough other people throw away opportunities, and seen enough opportunities I've thrown away to realize that most everyone gets lucky opportunities. Preparing for them, recognizing them, and taking advantage of them, is another matter entirely.

I know a number of successes and failures. The successes tend to be people who take responsibility for their lot in life, the bad as well as the good. The failures tend to be people who blame others or bad luck for their lot.

The empowering thing about taking responsibility is then you can do something about it.

I would say luck is necessary for fame and fortune, but not necessarily for success. Take for example someone who is an incredibly gifted musician, artist or writer. If that person doesn't put any work into self promotion they won't be rich or famous, but I would argue they would still be extremely successful. In fact, many of the people we today consider the greatest artists in history toiled in relative obscurity during their lifetimes.

No. Working hard significantly increases your chances of getting lucky.

That's not what the comment you were replying to says or even suggests. You are twisting words to the extreme and I am not even sure why.

Facebook, Walmart, and Ford Motor Company were built through hard work and perseverance, not through their founders' socioeconomic background. Building a successful business is so difficult, that the founders' socioeconomic background is an infinitely smaller obstacle to overcome. The self-made person is real, but there's so few of them that they are lost in the noise of this study's data.

Don't know enough about the latter two, but Facebook had the benefit of Zuckerberg being from an upper middle class family in a county famed for being filled with old money (& Wall Street money), Westchester County. Hard work obviously came into play as well, but these factors break the point for that example.

Always helps to be able to test out an idea on one of the most privileged set of class mates in the world.

Its funny a lot of people discount this but Zucks father wrote him a $100k cheque that a lot of people miss.

I'm looking at my FB friends list, counts well over 600 people, the bulk are from well to-do families all privately educated, top unis, top careers. I don't think any, would have their parents allow them to drop out of Uni irrespective of whether it was the next FB they were building and write them a $100k cheque to get going.

This is an example of luck that many ignore in the narrative. However major kudos to Zuck his ad product has basically guaranteed me a career for the rest of my life. For that alone I'm grateful for FB being invented.

>Facebook

No one denies that Facebook was built through hard work and perseverance, but how many people have doctor parents, a software engineer for a private tutor in middle school, admittance to the richest private boarding school in the country, a (former) best friend whose father is a wealthy industrialist, and a number of other untold privileges?

Using Zuckerberg as an example of a self-made person really hurts your argument.

Indeed.

Where are all the multibillion unicorn startups created by people from working class backgrounds?

Meanwhile:

Elon Musk - engineer father, privately educated

Jeff Bezos - landowning grandfather who was also regional director of the Atomic Energy Commission, engineer father

Bill Gates - father lawyer, mother on the board of IBM, privately educated

Steve Jobs - working class adoptive parents (but a complicated and interesting genetic background), father not an engineer but encouraged tinkering

Larry Page - father had PhD in CS and encouraged tinkering on hardware around the house

Sergey Brin - father maths professor, mother NASA researcher

I'm not sure if this has been researched, but it looks as if success in tech correlates with high IQ parents and plenty of opportunities for experimentation and hands-on tinkering.

I'm sure there are people doing okay in tech who had no parental input at all, but I'd guess they're much rarer than those who had opportunities and encouragement.

>Facebook, Walmart, and Ford Motor Company were built through hard work and perseverance

Yes, that of their employees, who proceeded to get bread-crumbs compared to the "owners" (ie: mostly outside investors) who did a tiny fraction of the work.

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