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Comment by trjordan | Hacker News Reader

I wish I could remember where I read this, but I once heard it explained to me as this:

It's easy to deride the journey of the rich college student: 80-hour internships at Goldman Sachs, unpaid positions in government, etc. But, the things that are done by successful people are hard, as hard as walking a tightrope. The difference is that rich students walk this tightrope over a bed of pillows. Poor students walk it over an open pit of spikes.

Obviously falling off onto a cushion is easier. What's less obvious is how nerve-wracking it is to know that there are real consequences. Danger creates stress, and stress ruins results. Paradoxically, if you know you have more than one shot, you're more likely to succeed on your first try.

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I knew someone who was so aggressively proud of their success, having founded and grown a successful business. He'd talk your ear off about how people like him were the ones adding value to society and how unsuccessful people are just lazy and don't try hard enough or don't take enough risks, or are just deadbeats, and how successful, hard working people are punished with taxes--you know, the standard soapbox speech. I mean, reading that description, he sounds like that cliche "Cartoon Republican Villain", but it really was that way!

What he wouldn't easily admit was how this successful business was his sixth try, having blown what, to me, seemed like a small fortune on each of his previous attempts. He always had a rich family to fall back on, living off of them while he dreamed up his next attempt to "add value." Finally (inevitably), one of them stuck, so obviously this is proof that he's self-made and his success was due entirely to his own "hard work".

If you grow up poor without a fallback, you pretty much have one shot, if you're even able to save up for that one. You mess up, and you're pretty much hosed. On the other hand, with an infinite money cushion, you get to keep shooting until you hit the target. What's the saying? Going from $0 to $1M is almost impossible--going from $1M to $2M is almost inevitable.

I see what you're saying, but to be the devil's advocate - someone at some point in the family of "Cartoon Republican Villain" was also a poor sob with a single shot to make it. The tragedy is that he forgot, or never knew about it.

Not necessarily. There's been intergenerational wealth transfer going on in continuous unbroken lines for hundreds if not thousands of years.

You've comparing the success of one poor sob with the success of a lineage of rich/poor sobs. It's much easier to be rich than to get rich, because a lineage has several shots to make it big.

When society becomes too rigid for social mobility then of course it becomes a huge problem, but at the same time, if you do become wealthy - wouldn't you want your kids to have it easier and give them any advantage you possibly can?

Grants for entrepreneurs/basic income could be a good idea to boost the chances of those at the very bottom, but it probably won't come to pass. First, who would willingly part with their own money to funnel it to those programs, except perhaps for very wealthy philanthropists, and second big business will never support it as their costs will skyrocket and retention will drop like a stone as desperate employees will be able to get the .... out. In Switzerland with direct democracy, something might happen, anywhere else - doubtful.

>wouldn't you want your kids to have it easier and give them any advantage you possibly can?

You're missing the point. It isn't that the wealthy are being incriminating for "wanting their kids to have it easier".

They're pointing out that the success for kids born into wealth is typically attributable to family money.

>They're pointing out that the success for kids born into wealth is typically attributable to family money.

That's pretty obvious to me, it wasn't obvious to you?

I don't think any of the newly rich, such as say - Zuck were hiding these facts. Zuck went to Harvard, an elite school, and got 100k from the bank of mom and dad to work on his own thing.

The issue is that this data doesn't filter to the masses. Since it doesn't filter to the masses we now have a cult of "entrepreneur porn" where anybody can grab themselves by the bootsraps and become the new Zuck. I think with a little reflection most people know that this is false, however they've deluded themselves otherwise.

If it's obvious to you, then why did you go off topic about parents' intentions with their kids?

The article is about how having safety nets only for wealthy children leads to a net loss of talent in society. What does "entrepreneurship porn" now have to do with this?

Because in my mind "entrepreneurship porn" is still relevant to this article, by pushing people who should know better than to take a risk when they can't afford to, into risking their livelihoods for uncertain gains. In an ideal world every kid can be what they want to be, but in this one its good to know your limitations as well.

That seems to be an issue you've come up with on your own, because nobody is being pushed into entrepreneurship here.

In fact, the article states that without a safety net, talented people aren't taking the risks that can generate a net benefit for society.

>> That's pretty obvious to me, it wasn't obvious to you?

There are literally dozens of "how to get rich" books, that are actually "why it's your fault that you aren't rich" books in disguise, which try to explicitly disprove that statement.

So yes, apparently, to a lot of people, it's not actually obviously true.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis - one of the biggest sources of suffering in the world.

> There are literally dozens of "how to get rich" books, that are actually "why it's your fault that you aren't rich" books in disguise, which try to explicitly disprove that statement.

Do they succeed?

Succeed in disproving? That's debatable. I would say no, many others would disagree.

Succeed in selling the book and making some decent profit for the author? I think so, judging by the sales figures.

> someone at some point in the family of "Cartoon Republican Villain" was also a poor sob with a single shot to make it.

Sure, at a time of much greater economic opportunities, (i.e. after WWII), than people starting from $0 have today.

Yes, and a bit of empirical data that one might think about in relation to this theory is the long term decline in small business starts.

>>What's the saying? Going from $0 to $1M is almost impossible--going from $1M to $2M is almost inevitable.

For the very same reasons going from $2M to $0 is easy.

It takes a lot of character to handle money and power, if you don't understand the work that goes behind it or it value. You will lose all of it soon.

Edit: Why the down votes?

I don't think it takes "character" to handle money. It's a skill like any other, and people who grow up with wealth have more opportunity to learn that skill.

What's meant by character is that your skills with money management won't tell you where to spend money when its discretionary, and what level to set your discretionary shares at.

Some people will fritter away their wealth on useless things, even if they know that they can make guaranteed returns by investing in X. Some people will continually reinvest in bad ventures, each time thinking the risk is worth it.

There's no skill to say what is too much risk. That's a judgement call that everyone has to make for themselves.

>your skills with money management won't tell you where to spend money when its discretionary, and what level to set your discretionary shares at.

Yes they will? That's an aspect of money management.

>There's no skill to say what is too much risk. That's a judgement call that everyone has to make for themselves.

By even framing the decision in these terms, you're already displaying far more experience in money management than many people have had opportunity to acquire.

It's not about opportunity, you could learn that much in an hour on /r/investing, or an afternoon of Googling "money management". It's about inclination to learn it, which requires a (very) little discipline.

Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.

Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.[1]

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Barry_Switzer

> Going from $0 to $1M is almost impossible--going from $1M to $2M is almost inevitable.

I know plenty of people who inherited money and blew it all.

Very, very few people, even children from ''rich'' families, have an ''infinite money cushion''.

People who come from poverty or communities rampant with discrimination often times have to work harder for opportunities. But hard work is hard work, and there is fierce competition at every level, no matter who you are. I hesitate to take anything away from anyone's success.

And if you think making your first million from scratch is ''almost impossible'' you should look around any suburb of Silicon Valley at the many, many immigrants who came here with nothing and have saved up that amount, or more. Lots of luck, to be sure, but lots of planning, discipline, deferred gratification, and hard work too.

If they're talking like the person that was described was talking, I absolutely would take away from their success, especially because they've never had to worry about any of the stuff that someone who doesn't come from means has to worry about.

Don't get me wrong; finding success is hard, and whenever someone does find it, it should be celebrated. But those that do find it shouldn't discount the struggles of those who aren't able to try, especially if it takes them several tried to find it themselves.

>I absolutely would take away from their success

Why? Because they are an asshole about it? That doesn't reduce their success in any way. If they have offset the losses of their previous endeavors, they have provided a net gain and it's still a success.

Because they're an asshole about it, and because they're ignoring the pure luck advantages they had which made their success possible. And it doesn't matter if they've offset the losses of their previous tries, they still took multiple tries (in and of itself not a problem), which is something most people don't get.

Let me ask a question - what does your attitude benefit you? It seems mostly to make you bitter about things that were never in your control, which seems like an unvarnished negative. Maybe you've found something more helpful.

I don't think many people have an attitude of "we need to recognize built-in advantages, and should call out people who try to play down or hide them" to benefit themselves - it's an attitude and position adopted to try to benefit those without those advantages. E.g. by showing a beneficial side of certain social safety net policies, or the downside of the default position becoming graduating with massive amounts of student debt, etc.

I'm not bitter, I just think that guy is an asshole.

With that attitude, nobody could ever take any credit for success because there is someone else that had it harder.

"Warren Buffet didn't do anything impressive because he grew up with his parents."

What a petty way to live.

Warren Buffet doesn't discourage and shit on those who haven't been able to do what he has. Again, I would discount the person's success because they're an asshole, and refusing to acknowledge that they were given many privileges and benefits by pure random luck. Buffet routinely acknowledges that he had lots of help getting to where he is today.

thats both a false dichotomy and a strawman.

Well played

Because a lot of humanity wants to shit on others' successes. It's why it's mostly futile to seek outward validation.

It depends on where one lives. Where I currently live, it takes about $25M in wealth just to get out of middle class and into lower upper class. And, to get into the true upper class requires maybe $500M to a billion. And, at that level, it is effectively infinite money (like > $250k a day in passive income, at the lowest level).

-4 in less than 30 minutes. that's a record for me. I must have said something controversial. So, glad that I could help :-)

I'm not aware of any place on earth where someone who has $24 million in wealth is considered 'middle class'.

That's $180,000 annually at a measly 0.75% interest (what my peon savings bank currently gives) for doing absolutely nothing. If you can quit your job and ride on 180k passive, risk-free income, you're not middle class.

You're not alone - trust me. Most people don't believe me.

But, then, I grew up in a place where many if not most household incomes are less than $15k / year.

It's all relative though - I have enough saved up to probably live as a rich man in probably 99% of the earth. Yet, I keep pushing myself to get into the upper class of a minuscule area of the world. It's kind of screwed up.

Sorry, I should have been stricter with my phrasing.

There is no place on earth where you can consider yourself middle class only having $24m in net worth. What you are referring to is likely a small community filled with people with net worths above $100m, but that doesn't change the class level because of what I pointed out. If you can quit your job and make 6 figures off of interest, you are not middle class anymore wherever you live.

Just because you can't afford a penthouse apartment in downtown Manhattan doesn't mean you are middle class.

I get what you're saying - but the reality is that globalization is to blame. Years ago, if one was born ambitious and able, with enough luck they'd get relatively 'rich' and most likely stop when they hit that point. Nowadays, the same type of person has to accumulate a much larger amount to feel any satisfaction. And, it doesn't help that those with wealth have clustered together.

Can you give us a hint as to where this place is? I believe that you believe this, and it may be true, but the rest of us are having a hard time figuring out where this place is that the upper class is half a billion dollars, and tens of millions only makes you middle class. Again, within a city or perhaps some particularly small but remarkably wealthy country, maybe. But which one?

Places such as the UK have a socio-economic class system where class really has rather little to do with money - upper class here means aristocracy not just rich. Money really doesn't have that much to do with it.

You're not alone - trust me. Most people don't believe me.

It might help if you actually stated where you live. As it stands, you're talking about your girlfriend who "goes to a different school". Which school, and what's her name?

Loudoun county, which is ranked as the highest income county in the US.

According to this, middle class in Loudoun county is ~$150K household income.

http://www.loudountimes.com/news/article/the_loudouns_at_122...

Looking at Zillow, it's cheaper than where I live (Boulder, CO).

Thank you for clarifying. Virginia, and not Tennessee, I take it. What that means is that few, if any, in Loudon County, VA are middle-class. It does not mean that you need $25 million to be middle-class in Loudon County. It means you need to be rich to live in Loudon County.

LOL - of course many of you just seem to want to rebuke me. Makes sense, given today's culture. But, you're just adding to the problem.

Most current problems in our society stem from people getting more satisfaction out of pushing web buttons than doing real things out in the real world.

Oh, well, sucks to be many of you but I guess really good to be me. It's just really sad. Especially sad given how poor I grew up.

It's sad that you have been sucked into a life of such competitive materialism that you can't find satisfaction with a net worth less than 25m. If you grew up poor and have 20m now and are still not satisfied, there is likely no number that will ever satisfy you.

If you're earning over $180k (which you would on the interest of $24mm), you'd be in the top 0.2% of earners for Loudoun County.

That's not middle class at all.

That seems really off, considering that the top 1% (down with the 1%, etc.) make at least $428k nationwide.[1] Where are you getting the information?

[1]: http://www.kiplinger.com/article/taxes/T054-C000-S001-what-s...

I got it from here [0].

I just rechecked my numbers, and it turns out I was reading from the wrong column, earning >$180,000 a year would put you in the top 2.7%

https://datausa.io/profile/geo/loudoun-county-va/#income_dis...

I've lived in Loudoun county, VA. Your characterization of middle class in that place is totally inaccurate. There are probably less than 50 square miles on earth (if that) where a net worth of $24MM places you in the middle class.

Well then you'd know that Loudoun is a large county. I'm sure you lived in the eastern part - probably ashburn where they build dense complexes of 450k townhouses that span as far as the eye can see - to house all the 'creative class' workers who make 100k a year and feel good about themselves.

I can't reply to ap22213 for some reason, but I agree with everyone else - people are not middle class in Loudon County unless they have more than 25 million. That's clearly wrong, you don't understand what middle class means. Your next door neighbors might all have a billion, and your 15 million feels like not much, but that doesn't make you middle class, you are still rich.

In Seattle, there's this area where a bunch of billionaires live on Lake Washington. If you live next door in your 5 million dollar house to bill gates, that doesn't make you middle class. It just makes you poorer than he is.

> That's $180,000 annually at a measly 0.75% interest

Actually that 0.75 is negative in real terms (after taking off inflation currently 1.1% - not to mention taxation). A person drawing $180k would be burning their capital.

Is the $25M in US dollars? If so, that seems like plenty to be upper class in any place I'm aware of. For example, at 4% return on investment, that'd yield $1M US annually. 500K would be enough money to, e.g., rent two rooms at the Mayfair Hotel in London, or the Contemporary Hotel at Disneyland for the year and eat out every night. Maybe you live in a place more rarefied than Mayfair or Disneyland, but there aren't many of those places, so your experiences may not be typical.

>People who come from poverty or communities rampant with discrimination often times have to work harder for opportunities. But hard work is hard work, and there is fierce competition at every level, no matter who you are. I hesitate to take anything away from anyone's success.

Tell that to the kid making iPhones in the Foxconn facility. Success isn't where you are, it's how far you've come. By that metric the most successful thing you can do in life is have a father like Sam Walton.

Hard work is requisite, not satisfactory. You can dig ditches in your own yard for 14 hours a day and you aren't going to be successful. Similarly, you can start a business with your $1 million inherited wealth, but it has an extremely high probability of failing without hard work.

>Tell that to the kid making iPhones in the Foxconn facility.

I'm not even sure what your point is. GP was pointing out that competition at every level is fierce. Not sure what that has to do with the Foxconn employee. Are they known for not being competitive?

>Hard work is requisite, not satisfactory.

If you're one of the Rich Kids of Instagram, hard work doesn't seem to play much of a role in their lives.

The point about Foxconn is obvious. How many Foxconn employees have a realistic chance of topping the rich list?

Hard work, like the idea of being a self-made person, is largely a self-serving mythology.

Real hard work is doing the same shitty job for 10-12 hours a day six or seven days a week and earning barely enough to pay the rent.

That's the reality of hard work for much of the population. Fetishising the hard work of the already-rich discounts that ground truth.

> Tell that to the kid making iPhones in the Foxconn facility.

The kid in the Foxconn facility is better off if he works there than if he did not have any job. If it were otherwise he would quit the job (since the kid is a poor worker, but not a slave). So indeed having a job at Foxconn lead to a better (though still bad) life for the kid. The kid should rather complain at his parents that they, as poor people, gave life to him - they should know that because of their poverty he would lead a miserable life and hazarded the consequences.

Most of the successful immigrants I personally know who have made it in silicon valley came from families with money or power back home.

I mean, there are other stories to, of course, but the student visa and then technical visa course is one mostly reserved for people who come from well off families.

(I am not trying to knock anyone or diminish their achievements, some of these people have worked hard and achieved a lot. I am just saying that if you can get a student visa or a technical work visa, you probably did not come from a poor or powerless family.)

85% of American millionaires are self-made. Source: "The Millionaire Next Door" book.

85% of wizards are educated at Hogwarts. "Harry Potter" book.

Hogwarts isn't even the largest school, that'd be Uagadou.

Woah I didnt know there were other schools and the world was so rich. Thats cool. My numbers were incorrect.

I hope theres more of a fleshing out of the harry potter world in future books or movies.

An mmo would be pretty tight lol.

Wheres the ACTUAL study? Or did the author just call up 5 rich dudes?

Seriously are we taking this number as legitimate.. simply because it comes from a BOOK?

Is that how low our scientific standards have become?

Frickin Pixar verified that talking cars exist. Good enough for me!

The book describes the studies they used. (Correction, it's 80%. I had misremembered it.) You can get the book for $2.50 from Amazon, not a bad investment if you are interested in the topic.

The numbers are not correct or even science.

Its one dude who uses that number to sell his pop psychology book.

Heres a blog from the author about where he gets his numbers:

'In my thirty plus years of surveying and studying millionaires'

http://www.thomasjstanley.com/2014/05/america-where-milliona...

A blog post of a couple of paragraphs does not give any information about the rigor, correctness, or value of the contents of a book.

That's exactly what OP is trying to point out. It's easy to be "self-made" when you can get a million dollar loan from your dad to get your real-estate business off the ground. It's easy to be self-made when your dad works at Seattle's most prestigious law firm and can arrange an introduction with IBM's PC hardware division. It's significantly more difficult to be self-made when you have no connections and no capital.

I don't understand. none of those examples are 'self-made'

In US, 'self-make' means 'privileged'

What's your definition of self-made? I like "Someone with significant wealth who didn't receive inheritance or trust fund money."

Someone with significant wealth who reached 18 without any cash/value other than what he earned himself. Meaning self-funded university studies, pretty hard in US from what I heard. Would earn great respect not only from me.

In more lenient fashion, somebody on top of this who finished university without debt, and no money apart from self-earned.

But they're still usually counted as such. Both Donald Trump and Bill Gates are regularly touted as "self-made" Xillionaires. And, at least in terms of that book, we don't know what definition of self made is used, or how they counted it.

That's the point. They're saying that those 85% of self-made American millionaires aren't as "self-made" as they claim.

Like me: I could talk about starting with almost nothing in my bank accounts, getting a job, working through the ranks, buying a home, and working toward my first million... conveniently leaving out all the advantages that I've had to get me to this point (cultural expectation that I'd go to college instilled in me from a young age, a family well-off enough to support that financially, uninterrupted time to work on the hobbies that grew into a career, etc).

Quanticle seems to be relating the origins of Donald Trump and Bill Gates. Donald describes his fortune as self-made. Bill Gates has been described as self-made. It's true, if you only consider that their wealth is much greater than any gift they've ever received. It's false from the perspective that anyone could do it with enough hard work.

Honestly no one is self-made. People who don't have financial cushions still rely on others to back their idea and hard work.

Problem is everyone on HN is talking about how to make millions when that's backwards mentality because then you'll never be satisfied. People need to strive for modest salaries and things that benefit society and the planet not filling one's pockets.

> People need to strive for modest salaries and things that benefit society and the planet not filling one's pockets.

It's a lot easier to do projects that benefit society and the planet if you have millions in your pocket that you can spend/invest on them (say for paying employees or simply having financial runway).

There is some truth in what parent is saying though. We have reach a point in the West were a comfortable life is basically possible for everyone. However, we still have the bullish culture from after the war that paints a guy that want a simple life as some sort of loser.

So we go on holiday and marvel at the simple life of artisans, farmer or other, but we teach our children that such a lifestyle is a failure.

Everybody who thinks that their salary is too large is free to donate a large(r) part of the salary to things that he cares of. So if you think you earn a more modest salary, do so. The problem is that most people who talk of "more modest salaries" mean "others should have more modest salaries". Better call this envy.

> So we go on holiday and marvel at the simple life of artisans, farmer or other.

I surely don't.

> We have reach a point in the West were a comfortable life is basically possible for everyone. However, we still have the bullish culture from after the war that paints a guy that want a simple life as some sort of loser.

And what made it possible that leading a comfortable life is basically possible for everyone? Surely not the people who want a simple life.

I can accept that technology has become too complicated for most people to grasp. I am among the first to accept this as a problem. But if this is your opinion, start to develop technology that is easier to grasp instead of complaining how complicated anything has become. The same holds for laws, too.

> And what made it possible that leading a comfortable life is basically possible for everyone? Surely not the people who want a simple life.

But is pushing everyone to push the boundaries even if they are not driven or motivated not counterproductive at some point ?

Well I may be biased by living in London and working in the financial industry, where personal enrichment seems to be the only accepted way of life. But all the scheming that is done to be on top is definitively keeping competent people out of the loop. Keeping your job is a more valuable skill that excelling at your job, and you don't need much corporate experience to know that there is a very thin overlap between the 2. I see people that are great with children, amazing artists, ... that are just grinding at their job just to keep living a life where they can afford the socially acceptable brand of car, clothes and activities, but dream of the day when they can spend more than a few hours a month doing what they are really good at.

More generally, what about all the support jobs ? Tech is very far away to replace teacher or nurses. Those jobs are loser jobs in a world that only value "potentially world changing career". You are more likely to become a millionaire as a random Goldman Sachs cannon fodder as you are as a nurse. What kind of criminal parent would encourage their kid to teach instead of getting a degree that let them into finance ?

These are two insightful and underrated points. I'm going to store them away somewhere if you don't mind. Have an up vote!

> Keeping your job is a more valuable skill that excelling at your job, and you don't need much corporate experience to know that there is a very thin overlap between the 2.

This is true in most companies, not just finance. The fact that these 2 activities are orthogonal and require entirely different skill sets is one of the more frustrating aspects of corporate life, giving rise to: very talented people who end up grinding away as drone#19221 because they aren't great at "managing upward" and smooth talkers who BS their way into higher and higher roles.

> I see people that are great with children, amazing artists, ... that are just grinding at their job just to keep living a life where they can afford the socially acceptable brand of car, clothes and activities, but dream of the day when they can spend more than a few hours a month doing what they are really good at.

Again, welcome to work everywhere. For most people, a job is the thing you do for money so you can live, and save up to finally do what you are good at or love when you're old and retired.

> People need to strive for modest salaries

So true. In today's US economy just simply having a salary, period, is something one must strive for. Continuity and regularity of compensation has become difficult to obtain.

We wouldn't have nice things like computers, coffee, indoor plumbing, jeans, books, teeth, etc. if people were satisfied with modest salaries and not filling their pockets.

Yes we would. Long before capitalism was invented the great creators of the world made great strides with inventiveness. While necessity is certainly the mother of invention, there's no limit to human curiosity.

Examples: Arabic numerals, Da Vinci, Mozart, Galileo, Maxwell, Einstein, Turing, etc. That's where a lot of those modern things come from.

Then along comes the capitalists to exploit the true discoveries for personal gain. Mass produce this-and-that, destroy the environment, etc. Build atomic bombs.

I'm curious about when you believe capitalism was "invented". Post-Einstein?

If you are born in the Western World, it is like starting a marathon 5 km away from the finish line and still be in the same race than the one starting at the beginning.

When you start thinking everything you get for free, even just in a lower middle western family, compared to someone born in a war torn village in Africa, the concept of "self-made" becomes really meaningless.

That's why a stable government that protects life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is necessary. The opportunity flows from that.

Gates was already a multimillionaire from Microsoft before the DOS deal. IBM also went to Gary Kildall first.

Bill Gates was probably a multimillionaire from the day he was conceived.

No need to guess. Biographies of Gates and Microsoft are plentiful.

Read this book if you want the sources, they are cited there and are too many to list here.

The point is that most folks that "make it" have some advantages from the start. Their parents might not have been rich, but decently well off. Went to decent schools, were able to make business contacts and network. Might not have had to work while in school either. If their business failed, it didn't mean they were sleeping on people's couches: They had a room at their parents if it got that bad, but they could usually weather the storm.

Again, contacts help with that.

The folks growing up in poverty don't have much of that. Schools are by chance, and often folks work through college so there isn't as much time for networking. Besides, networking costs money. If this person fails, they are simply homeless.

Simply moving up to lower middle class takes some work.

Sure, they are possibly "self-made", but they weren't fighting lack of opportunity.It is simply easier to make it if you have a good foundation.

(0% of families dissipate their wealth within three generations. This suggests that there is a constant up welling of people who accumulate wealth. The proposition that there is some fixed group of rich people sitting at the top is absurd.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873246624045783346...

Edit: the actual figure is 90%

For other people struggling to read this comment: "(" is on the same key as "5" on Azerty keyboards.

It's also a capital 9. I'm so ashamed. The number is supposedly 90%.

Oh, my bad, I got confused with the brackets (which are not on a digit key). I really should have checked. See, we all make mistakes!

Did you know you can edit your post? I think yours deserve it.

It appears that after a certain amount of time the edit capability is unavailable.

There is a force not unlike gravity, constantly pulling on all outliers, reverting them to the mean over time. However, that does not imply the outliers do not "sit at the top" and heavily impact whatever group in which they are the outliers.

The median inheritance is $50k. Is it possible that very large inheritances are more likely to keep accumulating?

There are many exceptions http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/05/19/the-wealthy-in-flo...

The Chinese proverb for this is 富不過三代 which literally means "wealth does not pass three generations". It's allegedly ancient.

well... He/she clearly said that:

p(success|rich) > p(success|poor)

and never implied that:

p(success|rich) = 1

I didn't read that as "if you have $1M you'll almost certainly go to $2M", so much as "if your business has already earned $1M in profit then it's almost certain to continue to earn another $1M in profit". And likewise, it's not talking about having $1M in savings from a lifetime of hard work.

Think of a business as being like an engine. Until you get the engine started and running under its own power, it's just costing you time and effort and money. Once it's running, it generates money at an accelerating rate. The $1M cutoff here is a proxy for "the engine is running."

  >going from $1M to $2M is almost inevitable.

If that were true, I could easily borrow it now and make my way there.

Average market return is 7%[0], with a competent money manager and a few years it is virtually inevitable statistically. You can do exactly what you describe, but if you don't have the assets to back it up they won't loan it to you, nor would you be able to make the payments.

[0]http://www.thesimpledollar.com/where-does-7-come-from-when-i...

Ironically, very few money managers manage to even do as well as the S&P 500. Everyone thinks they can do better, and wind up falling short.

If you have the ability to borrow $1M, I'd argue you're already there. I know people who can't open a fucking checking account.

Yeah, but borrowing it would fall under the "going from $0 to $1MM" part.

In terms of net assets, no it's not. It's going from $0 to, say, -$50,000 as now you owe interest.

But in terms of having money, it is. You now have $1MM to do stuff with, whereas before, you didn't. That $1MM can be put to work, or used to buy better tools or hire better employees. That's something you couldn't do when you had no money.

If I were given a interest free million dollar loan it wouldn't be hard to invest it and have two million in a few decades. Compounding interest is the key.

It actually kinda disturbs me in a way how easy it is to make money when you have money.

Wealthy people tend to have different attitudes about money than others, which has a strong influence on their ability to accumulate wealth. This is expounded upon in the book "Rich Dad Poor Dad". It's worth a read, especially for people who are not wealthy but aspire to it.

If you're not wealthy and aspire to it, I'd suggest not starting with a book from somebody who uses a made-up story to explain luck, giving fundamentally flawed advice.

Instead, realize that the odds are against you: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/rich-kids-stay-rich-poor...

And then work to acquire basic financial literacy. Which requires reading quite a few books. Here's a good starter list: http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/03/07/building-a-pers...

You might also be interested in Byron Tully's _The Old Money Book_. He's from an old-money background himself, and while his investment advice is unsophisticated, his advice on everything else is pretty much on the dot.

I did not agree at all. In my experience it's much easier to make 1 million then it is to invest 1 million and make another million.

Also there are many startups that require zero investment capital and if you do not have a family and you minimise your expenses you can leave on very very little. If you do have a family it's more difficult but still possible.

'Its easier to make a million starting from zero than make a million starting with a million' is the essence of what you just said.

This is easily the dumbest thing Ive ever heard on this site. Seriously.

Can we guild and save this somehow?

He may be talking about loaning the first million from bank.

Maybe, but I would argue it's probably a bit easier to get a $1m loan if you already have $1m in assets to use as leverage.

Are you talking from your own experience? I am. I made a million dollars and it wasn't easy but it was actually a lot more difficult to invest $1 million and make more money with it. I personally found it a lot more difficult.

I think most people greatly underestimate the difficulty in investing money successfully.

If you are talking about the amount of time invested ... yes of course there is a lot less time spent investing. However if you are talking about the probability of success I would argue It's not as high as you would think to take $1 million and turn it into $2 million.

So are you arguing that once you make a million, there are factors that will stop you from getting to 2 million? Kind of confused how it could get harder to make more money. Once you are at a million you can leverage that money as well as doing whatever it is you did to make the original money..

Yeah but the point of the post had nothing to do with the difficulty of investing....what are you even going on about?

>>I did not agree at all. In my experience it's much easier to make 1 million then it is to invest 1 million and make another million.

Really. Let's hear your formula.

Because the stock market returns 7% per year on average after inflation, which means it takes about 10.2 years for $1 million to become $2 million. What's even better is that this happens behind the scenes - you don't have to do any work for it.

So what's your formula for getting from zero to $1 million in 10 years without doing any work?

Lotto!!

There is no guarantee the stock market will return money in the future. The past does not equal the future and in fact some experts predict that the stock market will return around 3% on average going forward. Also even if the average return was 7% most people have achieved much less than that.

Obviously it's less effort to invest in the stock market so if you're talking about the amount of effort then yes investing is easier

>>There is no guarantee the stock market will return money in the future.

It will always return money as long as it exists. How much it will return is debatable.

>>Obviously it's less effort to invest in the stock market so if you're talking about the amount of effort then yes investing is easier

Uh, you said, "In my experience it's much easier to make 1 million then it is to invest 1 million and make another million."

What is this about, if not effort?

uhhh, then shouldn't you constantly be taking $0 and turning it into $1M?

>He'd talk your ear off about how people like him were the ones adding value to society

To take this sentence slightly out of context: There's nothing wrong with providing a service people find useful and are willing to pay you for, however this moral high ground is extremely abrasive to the soul. If someone really cared about "adding value to society," or the future of human welfare -- human rights are on the decline in our own country. Journalists are being openly, publicly and illegally prosecuted (Pete Santilli), peaceful protesters are being removed with military-style raids (Dakota pipeline protests), and whistle-blowers are being hunted by our government for revealing unconstitutional, illegal government surveillance (Snowden), while our government funds illegal wars (Syria), through arming of totalitarian and human-rights-oppressing regimes (SA), while also funding other human-rights-oppressing foreign states with funds equal to that of the Manhattan Project, adjusted for inflation (criticizing which country this is feels like a thought crime though). This all strikes me as more fitting of a nation state we associate with corruption than the USA, but we're all too busy with our day jobs to consider how hard people fought for what we take for granted, and how easily it can and is being taken away. There's a lot that is great about the USA, but as the 2016 elections draw closer and nothing seems to surprise me anymore, every time I hear this argument it just really bothers me because it feels like nobody seems to give a shit about actually "adding value to society."

Author here. Thanks for reading and for sharing this analogy—it very aptly captures the sentiment. Thanks for that.

I just wanted to say that not only was this post extremely difficult to write, but I really hesitated to publish it. When we start talking about privilege or lack-thereof, the conversation generally veers towards comparisons, which is only natural. If you grew up more fortunate than someone else, you say, "Wow, I can't imagine what that must have been like," whereas if you grew up less so: "I grew up with less than this guy or this girl and I'm not complaining" or whatnot. While that's a natural first instinct, I think we can, and must, move beyond that, to have real discussions.

I definitely had more opportunities and grew up in much more fortunate circumstances than many people. As some people have pointed out, just being born in America and having a mostly stable home was very fortunate. Just because I grew up poor, I don't claim to know or understand your circumstances, unique set of challenges, or anything about growing up as an orphan in middle America, a black kid in Compton in a broken home, or a refugee fleeing a war-torn country. But we shouldn't be comparing the sharpness of spikes or depths of the abyss below us— we should be focused on getting as many kids across as we can, and providing safety nets to as many as possible. Talking about these things is hard, but I think it's a good start.

Glad you published it, Mr. Tran. Thanks!

I happen to volunteer at a drop-in center in my town's family public housing project. As it happened, I saw your article shortly after my colleagues and I had wrangled $1000 for a poor immigrant kid on short notice.

It was a tuition payment for a program for high school kids at one of our local world-renowned medical schools.

So, I was able to send your article to my colleagues, the kid, and her mother saying "this is why we do what we do."

Now we have to support this kid while she participates in this program. Hopefully she'll talk to us about what she's going through, and put any shame aside.

Almost anybody reading this can do something to help open up opportunity. It doesn't have to be a grand gesture requiring megabucks. If you don't have time to get organized, give some money to the scholarship fund at your local community college. If you do have time to get organized, call the guidance counselor at your local high school and ask if there's a support program for first-generation college-bound students or something similar.

Who knows? Maybe you'll meet somebody who ends up taking a trip to Sweden one day to collect a Nobel Prize. You can say "I knew her when."

Family money also buys practice. As someone who grew up middle class surrounded by people above me on the social strata, the amount of activities wealthy kids get to train for life's challenges are mind boggling.

When anyone on HN sat down to their first big interview, ask yourself what practice you had with applicable social skills? (Business culture, dress, and social norms, etc.)

Now substitute someone who's never interacted with that world before, nor knows anyone from their neighborhood or social group who has.

Not to mention the additional networking opportunities provided by growing up in that environment. Even absent more formal networking events, your chances of someone at a barbecue saying "oh, you're doing X? I have a friend at BigCompany, give me your resume and I'll pass it along" are much better than someone not in that class.

The idea that "class isn't about money" is a really important one, and a distinction that isn't evident in most people's lives. I grew up in a family that was historically pretty rich and both parents had advanced degrees, but a combination of health problems and mental illness meant that for most of my childhood, we had very little money. At the same time, I went to private schools (on scholarship) my entire life, so all of my friends and acquaintances were also upper upper middle class. I'm now an adult and am extremely successful, more so than any of my acquaintances. As difficult as my childhood could be, a big part of my success is probably attributable to habits and norms I picked up from my parents.

As early as college, the amount of opportunities I've been exposed to just by impressing someone during conversation has been ridiculous. Part of this of course has been knowing my stuff, but undoubtedly it depends in part on my carriage and manner of speaking. And all of this is leaving out the direct networking opportunities inherent in the environment I grew up in.

As a first generation college student who is now an adjunct professor, I woulds extend the tightrope metaphor: many of those who grow up rich have known about the tightrope their whole life, have seen how everyone around them has managed it, and have been trained to do it. Many of us who grew up poor grew up not knowing anything about tightrope walking until we were thrown on it, didn't have anyone to teach us about it because no one we knew had ever done it, and didn't even know how to get to the other end.

That's the real issue: example. It's like the plumber who bills the customer $20,000 for tapping a steam valve with a wrench, not because of the tapping, but for the expertise of knowing where to tap.

Kids from rich families are exposed to a lot more information and guidance. I went the route of investment banking, et cetera, and I was flying blind a lot of the time.

There was an a-ha moment when I realized that advice from my parents was about as good as random advice, because sometimes they didn't really have a good mental model for my life and career.

I took a lot of bad advice before this became clear to me.

Meanwhile, one of my buddies could lean on his family for advice because they went the business route before he was born.

It's not the cushion, it's the coach on the other side of the rope that makes the difference.

I am "half-way" privileged, for my country standards (Brazil), I am part of a tiny elite, having college education, a sister that went to do masters on MIT, money to buy a computer that for brazillian standards is very high end (even if I had to buy the chassis from a junkyard).

Also knowing english is a rarity, coding, even less, both, even more uncommon (when I worked in a company that had 50 coders, only 5 knew english!)

I did things, that I know that more talented people never would, for example moving "out of the blue" to another city to attempt to create an startup, or build an arcade machine and code it with money out of my pocket so I could later use this to get a job (it worked, I did got a job with that).

This was because I knew, that if I failed, (and I actually did failed...) I had a place to return to, my parents home is not awesome, but I know I won't starve there, even if I had several weeks eating only mandioca that grows in our yard (the root that people use to make what is called in US "tapioca"), the fact I DO have a yard to grow food is already a rarity (in urban areas) in first place.

Yet, frequently people ask me: "Why you don't move?" or "why you don't attempt a job in Canada/Japan/Singapore?" or "Why you don't go for a masters/doctor/phd?"

The answer is always the same: my net worth is negative, although I won't starve, I can't risk more, having a boring job, even if just a cashier job or something like that, that pay my debts, is better than risking more debt, because here in Brazil personal bankruptcy doesn't exist, and compound debt is common, getting more debt can mean getting eternally in debt, and I want to avoid that fate, I have "richer" family members that fell to it, and their lives are absolutely screwed up (for example: I have uncles that own huge farms, yet spend most of their time hiding in distant cities, and placing their money in "strangers" bank accounts to avoid it being immediately seized, I have farmer uncle that struggle to eat because every time he has money, someone seizes it before he can buy food, and his farm is "frozen" by the government that wants it as tax payment, with taxes worth more than the farm itself)

It's a small point, but personal bankruptcy really does exist in Brazil. The rules are different from the US (may be even better for poor people), and sometimes surprising. But it does exist, and lawyers will help you if you ever need it.

I've read a OAB statements that what exists is "personal insolvency".

If you prove that (yes, you have to prove it, including hiring lawyers and all to do that), then you can't own or manage business for 5 years, all your assets are sold, and all future earnings are used to pay debts.

Also, you can't use banking services and credit cards for 10 years, and can't do any commercial transactions for 5 years.

The deal is so bad, but so bad, that in many Brazillian states the amount of people that ever tried that, is zero.

Yes, it sucks. But if you ever see yourself in a position where you can not pay your debits, I strongly recommend you to talk to a lawyer.

The main reason people don't declare insolvency is because there are better options. But I don't know enough to advise people about them - by a wide margin.

This is even more the case with the legal system.

Regular infractions (under-age drinking, recreational drugs, shoplifting) are minor speed bumps for kids in a middle-class family. But for a poor family, they can send people on the wrong track indefinitely.

That is a travesty of our justice system (or maybe any justice system). The more money you have, the better your lawyers, the better deals can be cut. The rich & upper middle-class will probably just get off with a slap on the wrist (if that). The poor & lower-middle class with not so many means and court appointed lawyers get the harshest sentences and are basically used as statistics for your public prosecutors promotion and advertisement.

I think that's an overly simplistic view. Are prosecutors dropping shoplifting charges for "upper middle class" people because they brought in an $1,000/hour lawyer? Real life prosecutors aren't quite so cartoon villain-y.

The bigger issue is that (1) laws are enforced more harshly in poor areas because there is pressure on prosecutors to focus on high-crime areas; (2) poor people are much more likely to be within one degree of separation of someone the cops are interested in. In many schools in poor neighborhoods, "kids are essentially assigned a gang affiliation." http://www.npr.org/2013/02/21/172593743/chicago-kids-say-the....

In an upper class suburb, a shoplifting charge is easy to dismiss as youthful indiscretion. In a gang-infested inner city neighborhood, where the perpetrator might have friends or family with known gang affiliations, it becomes very easy (if not fair or just) to see an indiscretion as a sign of something much bigger.

Yes, I believe they are.

Prosecutors try to spend their time on the cases they can win. You don't even have to be criminally charged to see how farcical the system is: just go to traffic court sometime and watch how the system handles people with lawyers.

Speaking as someone who has never gone to traffic court, can you tell me how the system handles people with lawyers versus people without lawyers?

My lawyer turned a moving violation into a no seatbelt ticket. This had zero basis in reality. I didn't get points on my licence, but still had to pay a fine.

People without lawyers didn't know that all that's really important is that you pay fines to the court. You're taking the court's time and you have to pay for it.

They tried to deny they sped, the cop said they did, and the ticket stuck.

We answered this on crypto nerd Slack but I'll repeat for the benefit of the class:

In Cook County, at least, you're given a time to appear in court. Everyone appears at that time. Cases are handled in alphabetical order. But: if you have a lawyer, your case is handled first --- the lawyers are on the clock, you see --- so there's about an hour and a half of waiting for lawyer after lawyer to come up and get their clients cases dismissed, while everyone else sits doing nothing.

How would myself or anyone else interested get on the crypto nerd slack?

I guess mail me and introduce yourself? It's not like super selective or anything.

Don't forget the human sacrifice to the crypto-god.

No but in all seriousness it's a good time if you like talking/learning/debating cryptography and general security things.

That's somewhat weak evidence for your original claim. (Which I don't dispute, but you've lowered the bar here.) How do much do outcomes differ for Mr. Zanzibar with a lawyer and Mr. Ali without a lawyer?

> Are prosecutors dropping shoplifting charges for "upper middle class" people because they brought in an $1,000/hour lawyer?

Yes, they are. It's not this blatant, but the result is the same.

First, the rich person has probably been told, repeatedly, "Shut the fuck up, and only talk to your lawyer." This is a HUGE deal and helps your end result dramatically.

Second, the rich person likely doesn't have to worry about losing their job or coordinating child care while being missing for 24 hours due to incarceration.

Third, the rich person doesn't have to worry about making bail.

Fourth, you mentioned "social separation". Agreed. The richer person likely has a closer contact to a friend inside the justice system. That helps.

Fifth, a rich person is more likely to "look" not guilty. So both the prosecution and defense negotiate with that in their heads.

Sixth, the rich person likely knows English well and understands the cultural norms. This is a significant advantage. For example, in the southwest US, more than a few Hispanics wind up pleading guilty to having underage sex thinking it's not a big deal without realizing that they're about to have a felony on their record.

Seventh, the rich person understands navigating a bureaucracy. Do NOT underestimate this skill. A lot of lower class people don't realize the power that lower level functionaries have and wind up pissing them off to their detriment. The number of times I have seen people mouthing off to someone in the probation office makes me cry.

Finally, your lawyer likely knows the inside game. He knows that this judge likes to slam young punks, so he'll try to avoid him for stupid pot offenses. He knows that this judge is getting back from vacation on this day and is likely in a good mood so he can get a better deal. He knows that this judges hates DUI's, etc.

The list goes on and on ...

So, the prosecutor doesn't actually think: "He's rich, so I won't prosecute this so hard." But at every point where a decision can go for or against, there's a bit of bias in the rich person's favor distributed throughout the system.

Eventually that multiplies up to a big advantage.

> So, the prosecutor doesn't actually think: "He's rich, so I won't prosecute this so hard." But at every point where a decision can go for or against, there's a bit of bias in the rich person's favor distributed throughout the system.

This is absolutely critical and I think best explains that undercurrent of things like "subconscious racism".

It's not villainy, prosecutors (largely) simply don't see promoting social equity as their job.

They get paid to bring successful prosecutions. That's the metric of success and lots of successful prosecutions will advance their careers.

If you can afford legal representation you get a lawyer who spends more than five minutes preparing to defend you. The prosecution is less likely to succeed, so the prosecutor is more willing to deal.

I've always wondered why we don't just get rid of private lawyers and legal teams. That way, no one has an advantage or disadvantage. Even the wealthiest get one guy chosen by the court and no other assistance whatsoever and we see lots of rich kids going to prison as a result.

But how do you get rid of legal teams? Maybe you can insist on court appointed lawyers in court, but you can't really stop people with legal knowledge selling research and advice to rich people.

> I've always wondered why we don't just get rid of private lawyers and legal teams.

Because bringing the quality of someone else's defense down does not solve the fundamental problems of the justice system.

The problem is that the justice system is unfair to the poor, PERIOD. And we need to fix that. The problem is not putting more rich kids in jail.

In my opinion, the better change is to remove things like prosecutorial discretion for juries. If the prosecution can't make the case without stacking the deck, he shouldn't be making it.

That's a poor opinion. I wonder if a prosecutor without that discretion would've ever been able to make a civil rights charge stick in 60s Alabama in any majority-white county.

I don't think so. If the lawyer pool is so terrible, there will be people with incentive to fix it, and those fixes will benefit everyone, rather than the few it benefits now.

It's not just the lawyers. It's even much more basic and mundane stuff, like fines and fees.

Say you parked your car in a wrong spot - a mistake that many people make at least once in their life. In US (and many other countries), the fine for that is a fixed amount. For some people it's pretty much chump change, while for the others it can be the difference between paying a different bill late or not.

Yet others can't pay the ticket at all, and then there's a fine for not doing that. If you're poor enough, you can easily rack up thousands of dollars in debt to the government for something as trivial as parking in a wrong spot, or having a broken taillight (which you don't have money to fix).

Then you get an arrest warrant, and that's when court fees and lawyer fees start piling in - on top of everything you've already accrued.

And, of course, because you can't post bail, they lock you up, and by the time you get out (assuming you're lucky with your public defender and do get out), you have probably lost your job. If you're especially unlucky, you may have also lost your rental, and your things have been thrown out onto the street.

Worse yet, some municipalities have learned the rules of that game, and decided that they want a cut. Ferguson is a prominent example, but it is one among many.

http://www.npr.org/2014/08/25/343143937/in-ferguson-court-fi...

How do you fix it? Well, insofar as fines are meant to be punitive, you scale them to the income of the person being fined, for example.

At what point does one have to start to be considered independently successful?

- You inherited a lot of wealth and a CTO position at a father's company

- Parents gave you money and bought you stuff

- Parents gave you a place to live

- At least you had one parent

- Being an orphan, at least you were born in a first-world country

- At least you were born at all, thanks to the medical care in a third world country

So, unless you are an orphan from remote parts of Africa who built a Fortune 10 company from scratch your success is not your own? We all owe it to the girl who invented the wheel. But then maybe she had a rich parent who gave her stone carving tools to play as a child, so that's not really an achievement, is it?

I would say Parents gave you money is when most would consider your success tied to your parents.

Is that because the majority of us happen to fall just below that rung and want to consider our success "real"?

Exactly. It's like the old saying "An alcoholic is someone who has one more drink than I do."

One could make the argument that everyone in the US has more priviledge than someone stuck in Syria in the midst of a civil war.

FYI the first wheels were wooden, it is common misconception that the wheel was invented in the stone age. Human civilization invented farming and pottery many centuries before the invention of the wheel

That it correct. My comment was intended to be more of an allegory than a foray into ancient history.

I'm not clear what point you are trying to make.

No-one is entirely independently successful, but there is a big gap between (for example) someone whose parents give them nothing, and someone whose parents "lend" them $1 million to get started.

It often happens that those parents in addition to $1m also "lend" a vast amount of knowledge of how certain social structures and systems work, and how to operate efficiently within them. They also can serve as a "trust provider", which is a great thing to have when executing business transactions.

If given the opportunity to choose between those things and the money, I would take the "inside knowledge" every time. So even if (for some reason) you decide to limit the amount of money parents can "lend" to their children, it still won't solve the issue of disparity.

p.s. You think Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos got to where she was couple of years ago (before the fiasco unfolded) just because her father, a former Enron employee, gave her some money?

That sounds like an interesting experiment. My parents provided neither money, nor knowledge on social structures.

Personally, I'd take the money. I can learn social structures, I can't "learn" a giant pile of bootstrap money.

> Personally, I'd take the money. I can learn social structures, I can't "learn" a giant pile of bootstrap money.

But if you already know the social structures, you don't need to learn the pile of money. You can just go ask for it!

It very much depends on the society in question. The value of social capital has a different price tag in cash (in a sense of how much real value you can derive by leveraging it) in different places.

I don't think anyone is truly independently successful. We might be able to make rough comparisons that one person is more independently successful than another, but we all share in the success and failure of other people.

I think it's more constructive to talk about whether or not people took full advantage of the opportunities that they had and whether they had more and better opportunities than others.

The fact that you found so many external factors contributing to success are maybe an indication that measuring the degree to which success is your own doesn't yield very interesting data.

I would argue that the only purpose/use of this measure is to deny that we should expand the of people benefiting from external factors of success. But I'm quite biased on this issue, so maybe you have another use for this data ?

>> What's less obvious is how nerve-wracking it is to know that there are real consequences. Danger creates stress, and stress ruins results. Paradoxically, if you know you have more than one shot, you're more likely to succeed on your first try.

I think this depends on the person. Some people work better under pressure, others not. There is a real danger of postponing, procrastination, and not taking things seriously if you have a comfortable life already.

I meet many successful people from very poor backgrounds who complain to me about their children being lazy and much less motivated than they were.

The danger on the poor person is astronomically bigger than the one on the comfortable person no matter how you slice it. A lot of the time the comfortable person is just expected to do more without a good reason for it.

A successful person from a poor background an outlier, so you would expect the personalities and attitudes of their children to revert to the mean.

>Paradoxically, if you know you have more than one shot, you're more likely to succeed on your first try.

True and I'll give an example of a technique I use (which is somewhat common) when recording vocalists in the studio.

The singer will get in the booth and I'll ask them to sing a run-through. Even say "we're not recording this one." But of course we are recording. And many times it's this rehearsal take that ends up being the best one.

And this is why Basic Income is the future; it doesn't help those with a bed of pillows to rely on, but it provides a bed of sod to those currently wary of spikes.

Even a bed of manure would be better than the spikes, which is good, because that's the only sort of safety net I imagine Democrats and Republicans could ever agree on providing.

The US will eventually catch up. What Bernie Sanders started will continue. People will demand living wages and family time. Excessive executive compensation will be questioned. Changes will come.

What about people that squander their BI? We need safety nets below the safety nets... At some point shouldn't we let people fail?

If an individual is unable to survive on a minimal fixed income then they are almost certainly in need of other social services.

People can still fail while on BI; it won't protect you from losing your home, for instance. BI makes failing just a little less devastating.

This is just letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Respectfully, this is kinda BS.

Your average American kid has already won a genetic lottery. Being born and raised in America is already great.

I grew up the kid of immigrant parents from an African country and I am an immigrant myself at 5 years old. I have a great job at a major well known tech company in a technical programming position.

I'm not the kid that got straight A's. I was the smart fuckup. I almost flunked out of high school. I dropped out of college. I could barely program worth a damn out of college. It was hard work learning not only how to program but, all of the other skills that college didn't teach but, are critical to a working professional programmer (git for instance).

Now, I'll argue there weren't a bed of nails. There were a bed of pillows. I had to move back in with my parents multiple times through my twenties. I thought back then that I was walking over a pit of spikes but, it turns out I wasn't.

Today is much different than even a decade ago, so much more than a generation ago.

You can teach yourself how to program. You can work a minium wage job while you teach yourself. You can't do it in LA, SF, NYC but, you can live in the parts of the US that no one talks about and learn.

It takes time and dedication but, one can do it.

I fully financially supported my brother for two years and he didn't learn or do really anything with that time other than barely pass a bad coding bootcamp and then struggle to find a job with that inadequate education.

The greater difference is the person and their perseverance than economic circumstances. As a poor person who made it by screwing up again and again and again and again. Unless I have astronomical luck, I really don't think it's that hard.

Seriously, if you have the intelligence to program, you should be able to find a minimum wage job or what I did, work nights doing security. I learned programming (reading programming books and coding) while I watched warehouses, trucking depots and the gate at gated communities. It was still a fuckton of hard work but, the hard part was the programming not figuring out how I was going to feed myself.

Maybe I'm somehow this unicorn of blind exceptionalism but, while I felt depressed and that it was hard at the time, it doesn't feel that hard now. I just kept working and it was more of less inevitable. Even today, I keep telling my brother that if he keeps working at it, it will eventually work.

> Seriously, if you have the intelligence to program, you should be able to find a minimum wage job or what I did, work nights doing security.

Minimum wage work may be enough to sustain someone who has a high school diploma, but well does that work for someone who did go to school, sank tens of thousands in loans, and then had to leave before finishing, assuming they have no support network?

I don't understand you talking about genetic lotteries and then using the phrase "if you have the intelligence to program".

I grew up outside of the US and I wouldn't trade that for being an average American kid at all. Being an average American kid, from what I've seen, is a lot worse than growing up in many other countries, even if overall conditions are better. There seems to be a stronger trend of immigrants making it in the US than Americans themselves making it in the US.

> I had to move back in with my parents multiple times through my twenties.

A lot of Americans have a social policy of not allowing their child to live with them past the age of 18...

Americans also assume they need to college, you skipped that entire bag of worms.

Immigrants often have advantages they don't appreciate, such as being able to see the system from the outside and simply solve it, especially given that immigrants are unusual people in general, while Americans look at the system from the inside and are molded by it, and look at it as reality itself. There are plenty of people like that in the country one immigrates from, too, but those are not the immigrants.

Perseverance is a skill, a habit one develops. I think it's worth considering what circumstances in someone's life make learning that habit easier or harder.

>all of the other skills that college didn't teach but, are critical to a working professional programmer (git for instance).

Any good CS college program will teach you version control. I learned it in college first day.

(Not specifically git because that didn't exist when I went to college)

Yeah, but you have to pay for good CS college programs, usually. Or spend a lot of effort to find them for cheap or free (and learn enough to be able the good ones from the bad ones first).

Your story is a perfect illustration of "anecdotes are not data", and self-selection bias.

Think about it: the reason why you're telling us the story is that you have succeeded. If you didn't, you probably wouldn't be hanging out here on NH.

And so we have your success story, but we don't know how many people persevered just as much, but didn't succeed because the curve was just too steep for them.

So there's no practical way to gauge your exceptionalism from this story, or derive any practical conclusion from it. Most importantly, we don't know if your success was 90% hard work and 10% luck, or 10% hard work and 90% luck.

(Note, this isn't to imply that you didn't have to work hard. What this means, rather, is whether working as hard as you did guarantees success, or merely buys you a ticket to the lottery, in which you still have a fairly low chance of winning, despite all that hard work. The latter is the "10% hard work and 90% luck" case.)

And it's especially hard to self-evaluate. When you have heavily invested in all that hard work, psychologically, you're that much more likely to attribute your success to it rather than external factors, and you start thinking of it as "inevitable". The reason is that success as a result of hard work fits our notion of fairness (which ethologists say is hard-wired pretty deep on biological level) very well, and so we automatically assume a causative link between the two, on the basis that the world is "inherently fair": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

It's too easy to generalize this as a lack of money problem. Certainly lack of money is a factor, but so is attitude and character. There are plenty of examples of people from lower income backgrounds rising above their backgrounds even with setbacks along the way because they persevered through difficulties. There are also plenty of examples of people who failed and squandered lots of opportunities. There's an element of detached elitism in the idea that spreading around more money is going to solve a lot of those problems.

As far as I can tall, people from underprivileged backgrounds make it through socializing and sleeping with people from privileged backgrounds as often as possible. Rich people attract opportunities (and are opportunities.) Being near them gives you your best chances, and your best opportunity in life to befriend those people is in university.

> There are also plenty of examples of people who failed and squandered lots of opportunities.

Rich people fail all the time. They fail up nearly as often as they fail down, though. And if they avoid drug problems, they never fail out.

Yes, there are tales. But that's all they are: Tales. They're not statistically significant. And you can have all the "attitude and character" in the world, but if you've got a family to feed and shelter, most people are going to take the rational course of action and get a job so they can provide for that family, rather than take the riskier path.

As I've posted before, my old minister used to say "We can have all of the morals we can afford"

> Obviously falling off onto a cushion is easier.

The whole notions of cushion and spikes is relative too. For some having a roof above your head might sound like a blessing. I will probably hang myself (metaphorically speaking) than go back and stay with my parents thought I will get a house and food twice a day.

Large mass of those so called "privileged" people perhaps have to take equal amount of stress even though in absolute terms we might think they are better off.

Going by the "one shot" metaphor, if poor folks even get that shot, it might just be a hand-load where the case, slug, and powder were all scavenged by sweeping the floors at the firing range, and the primer inherited from a dead relative.

You're more likely to hit what you're aiming at if you're not worried about whether you're going to blow up your favorite hand when you pull the trigger.

> if you know you have more than one shot, you're more likely to succeed on your first try

That is most likely also one of the reasons, why there are more (successful) Entrepreneurs in the US than in Europe. At least in Germany, when your first startup fails, you are broke and nobody will give you any funding any more (not to forget, that to get your first funding, is much harder in Germany).

That is all the more reason to praise and appreciate those individuals that come out ahead, despite such circumstances. But I would say it's not a reason to excuse and attribute poor performance due to difficult circumstance, which is generally the type of thing such a story/explanation is used for. And it's unfortunate that it's used for such a narrow use-case, when it could rather be used to inspire.

If I think circumstances are the problem, I'm much more interested in addressing the circumstances than trying to inspire somebody. The one special inspired case is the narrow use-case, not the other way around.

Sometimes, knowing that you have no fallback position, can be motivating. Someone growing up in a cushy life may never be motivated to try very hard at anything. Someone growing up with hardship may be highly motivated to create a better life for themselves.

Another way I've heard this put is imagine you have a classroom. "Success" is a bucket at the front of the classroom. Now, every kid gets a ball and tries to hit the bucket. The privileged ones at the front have greater odds of hitting success no matter their skill level. Some underprivileged kids from the back may hit success but the odds against them are much greater.

This is actually the opposite.

OP reasoning is more -

Everyone is at the back.

Everyone has a bucket of balls to try with.

Except underprivileged people get an electric shock when they miss.

You are also partially describing stereotype threat (there's more to it than that).

Stereotype threat is yet another victim of the replication crisis - i.e. it probably doesn't exist. It's repeatedly failed to replicate. Funnel plots show significant evidence of publication bias.

http://www.sciencedirect.com.sci-hub.cc/science/article/pii/...

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85192141/2013-ganley.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat#Failures_to_...

https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/tag/stereotype-threat...

The really poor also don't have the rope.

Sort of. It's not just that, it's that though the things successful people do are hard, underprivileged people also have to try hard just to get to the entry point. Getting people to even look at you or recognize that you could do the job is itself an extra measure of labor before the job even begins.

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