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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this in general normal for the poor? Poor are poor because they prefer instant gratification and don't think about what it means long term.

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It's uncivil to make baseless claims about other people. This violates the guidelines, so please don't do this.

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I'd say it's the general normal for people with low IQs, many of whom happen to be poor.

However, when a poor person wins the genetic lottery and is born with a high IQ, that's a predictor of moving up a socioeconomic quartile, as well as increased lifespan and lower chance of smoking.

Conversely, a child of a rich person that has inherited wealth but regressed to the mean tends to become poorer.

It seems that general intelligence is the driver behind both accumulating wealth and living longer.

Sadly, it is an oversimplification. Maybe low IQ means a high chance to get poor, but high IQ doesn't mean a high chance to get rich. There is no IQ band in which you are most likely to earn in a $1M+ a year band, and i know a ton of quite average intelligence guys and girls who make it. If you are smart enough to finish a somewhat better than average college, becoming even smarter doesn't help you much in making more.

Recent studies [1] have found that genetic markers for intelligence strongly predict adult outcomes, even when controlled for social-class origins.

[1] https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/handle/10161/12447

Wow, you're in pretty serious need of some perspective - historical, cultural, sociological, you pick.

The rich only outsource long term thinking. Humans are generally bad at long term thinking, no matter how much money they have.

Whereas rich are rich because their parents were rich.

There have been studies and the vast majority of millionaires in the United States are still self made, whereas Europe is largely old money.

And there is another study saying this is bullshit and rich people tend to be rich and keep it in there familie in US as well.

I think you and parent are right...

It's just easiest to become self-made after going to business school funded by parents, receiving cars from parents, wedding funding by parents, moving into a house with a down payment in cash split by both parents, receiving daycare from 2-4 grandparents, then career advice from successful parents in the same industry.

This describes lots of people around me. Self-made... but not from the ghetto or nothing, from fans all on sides feeding the flames.

Not that I think it's wrong or should be changed overnight, but I wish there were some ways to help people without doing everything for them.

For example, one person in my family had a screwed up life. A group of us got together to buy this person a basic car. That transportation changed their whole life- it was like a keystone that got them self-sufficient. After begrudgingly paying their rent for many months, the one-time car cost wise much wiser.

I wish that could be replicated. E.g. public transport could/should have the same effect, but it's such a convenient income source, it just gets opportunistically priced upwards...

That is true only for UK. Simply because in rest of EU there is no way to be 'old money' due to world wars and/or Communism where old money lost everything.

That is wrong. E.g. one of the richest families in Belgium is the de Spoelberch family. They owned the brewery Artois, which through various acquisitions and mergers turned into ABInBev. Together with the de Mévius and Vandamme families, they were estimated to be worth about 49 billion Euros in 2015 [1]. Another example in that list is the Janssen family (Solvay and UCB) whose fortune goes back a long way.

[1] http://deredactie.be/cm/vrtnieuws.english/News/1.2362216#

That is simply not true, at least not in any even minimally developed country.

You're both talking in extremes. There is a lot of inherited wealth in the developed world [1]. There is also a relationship between "marshmallow test" impulsiveness and peoples' tendency to squander the opportunities their life presents them [2]. The relative balance between these factors is debatable. Their presence is more difficult to dismiss.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-23/how-to-st...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_gratification

This study claims 67%[0] of millionaires in the US are self made, with only 8% having inherited all or most of that wealth.

[0]http://www.fa-mag.com/news/most-millionaires-self-made--stud...

Whether they are self-made or not is not the right question to ask, it's whether their parents were rich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the...

Even if most millionaires are self-made, many of them are still born to affluent parents that gave them the opportunities to get there.

What happens if you click that up to $10mil?

$1mil isn't what it used to be with housing rising as it has over the past couple decades.

(It doesn't actually reference the study, so I can't look at their data.)

I expect that "millionaire" now reflects the top tiers of middle class people without an accompanying increase in purchasing power -- they just inflated across a boundary and now suddenly there's a bunch of "millionaires", without that term meaning what it used to 40-50 years ago.

In any income bracket short of outright billionaires (at least up to top 0.01% of population), majority of income is salaries. Not return on capital in any form. So, it can't possibly be inherited (of course your daddy paying for good college and providing you with good upbringing and mindset still counts, but you don't need to be very rich for that).

We're discussing asset brackets, so your point is less relevant.

My point was that a middle class family (say, 120-150k/yr) is going to have around a million dollars in assets by retirement age. But that's not what most people think of when they hear "millionaire", because our cultural expectations are a generation or two old -- they don't reflect the effects of the last couple decades on housing value or inflation.

So instead of looking at families with assets of $1mil, it probably makes more sense to look at families with assets of $10mil if you want to discuss the mobility into "wealthy" instead of "upper middle class".

Definitely. A mostly paid-off house and two retirement plans = millionaire family at say 55 years old.

In a country of 300 million people, 8 million households are are millionaire households.

Since you mixed units: there are about 115 million households, so 7% of US households are millionaires, and (to speak to my point) being a millionaire doesn't make you part of the "1%".

35-45% of wealth as a raw figure is inherited, if you consider wealth ownership by the top 1%, that is a hell of an advantaged start. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2015/01...

But it also means that, outside of top 1%, wealth (as in: assets, vs income) is totally unimportant.

The marshmallow test showed that people who have a well-founded lack of trust in their environment show shorter term thinking. Aka making the best of their bad situation.

The same can be said about your original comment.

This is a joke right? You don't _actually_ believe that's how poverty works?

I may be missing something on a larger scale, but that is definitely true about all poor people i know (for almost all of them, i see an easy way how they can quit poverty in a few years, apart from a couple very sad examples), and every rich person i know, too (while again, it may be just my perspective: i don't come from a rich family so i don't know anyone who was born rich).

It doesn't work as easy for older poor people. Sad for them, but it is only a result of their mistakes in younger age.

The difference is when poor people screw up, they suffer, when rich people screw up everyone else suffers [1][2][3][4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007–2008

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer#Yahoo

[3] http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/08/technology/business/yahoo-ve...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron#California.27s_deregulat...

You may be mistaking cause and effect. Many poor people have grown up with such a dire outlook that instant gratification is all that's essentially worthwhile.

but it is only a result of their mistakes in younger age

This is just uncharitable Ayn Rand style sophistry. Environment and simple luck has a fantastically large multiplier on one's odds of being poor or not.

Luck is a factor but often I have met people (I grew up poor) whom don't play the odds in a rational way. For example a lottery ticket has a very low chance of paying off and yet many poor people play, those same people can't find the time or resources to submit a healthy number of resumes or job applications each week even though the odds of finding a better paying job (and one that can potentially lead to an even better paying job in a few years) is statistically speaking vastly more likely. My point being its luck to pick the correct number in a game of roulette but its up to you how many times you attempt to spin the wheel.

So, nothing happens in your world to drive older people into poverty though no fault of their own? It all has to be because of what they did? No financial crises, stock market crashes, stolen pensions, healthcare related bankruptcies, etc?

Perhaps you could share your easy three year get out of poverty plan with the poor people you know and gain an informed perspective on your position.

The money they spend on cigarettes might be considerable but not enough to take them out of poverty.

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