Wealth is stolen not created | Hacker News Reader

Wealth is stolen not created

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18 pointstop2569 comments

This article keeps asserting its core premise, but never offers any evidence. It cites people who agree with the premise that wealth is underserved, but this is not the same as an argument.

You don't need economic theory to refute an article like this - you simply need to point to reality. Every human need beyond picking wild berries off the trees takes effort to produce. The vast wealth of modern industrial society relies on complex forms of organisation and specialists in discovering and applying knowledge. Anyone's who's built a company, or even advanced in a demanding career, knows that success doesn't just fall in your lap. Beyond a certain point you have to really want to succeed and be willing to put in place the actions that lead to success.

I've always thought of life as being a series of opportunities, and depending on how you live your life and how lucky you are, that number differs.

Having opportunities is very different from success though; the successful are those who are smart, clever and quick enough to realize that the opportunity exists, and are diligent enough to actually realize that opportunity. After all, isn't Y-combinator quite literally an incubator of those who have noticed an opportunity and chosen to pursue it?

You can't guarantee success. you can do things to improve your chances. and real success usually doesn't happen without a team.

To top it off, the author doesn't seem to be an economist, but rather a professor of Geology. He appears to have studied and written about wealth, but the fact is as you say the article lacks any references to studies that back up his point.

All the research quoted in this article is about the amount of wealth that is purely attributed to luck. All good so far...

> Most wealth is appropriated from others, not made.

There is no support given for this theory, or even no connection made between the actual research and this point.

Easy way to disempower everyone all at once by saying "yeah you might reap what you sow, but it's mostly up to luck" I think just because people don't necessarily know the causes for wealth or the causes to bring Y or Z into their lives, does not mean there are not such causes. The fact that they are still a mystery to so many people probably means that the causes are very non-obvious. I think writings like this tend to assume that the Universe is random, and that success will come when it does, but I for one take huge stock in Causality and would like to encourage everyone contemplating "luck" to consider that there are prior causes to every result, what would the prior causes to great wealth be?

If poker is both a game of chance and a game of skill how can life not be?

I definitely agree that luck plays a part, but I like a phrase I've seen often here about "increasing your luck surface".

https://plus.google.com/116160612483689327039/posts/b3FPV13d...

Also mentioned on comments:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Get-Lucky-discovering-ebook/dp/B0...

Maybe the title should be changed. The article doesn't use that phrase and in fact undermines it: "Most wealth is appropriated from others, not made."

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