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Comment by Xeoncross | Hacker News Reader

As a counter point, I've always felt that a main thing holding people back was desire & drive. You not having "it" lead to you cultivating a desire and a drive to acquire.

Self motivation > resources

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Really? So, you have Child A and Child B.

Child A - Wealthy upbringing - Always full on nutritious food - Elite, private schooling - Live in a stable, loving home

Child B - Poor upbringing - Almost always hungry, only able to eat cheap calorie dense foods - Public, underfunded inner city school - Shuffled around between foster homes

You think that the deciding factor for these examples would be their desire and drive? I don't, and I think the science out there agrees with me when I say poverty has numerous adverse effects on how a human turns out.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f16e/845b8222cb92541902c19b... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2528798/ https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1196/an... https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/policy-brief/how-poverty-and-dep... http://www.apa.org/pi/families/poverty.aspx

I would say Child B would be a lot more successful if he had drive than if he didn't. Same with Child A. I've known a lot of rich kids that didn't amount to squat. (I went to one of those elite private schools, but my dad was a teacher there, so we got steep discounts).

Sure, but we're not comparing the child to themselves with and without motivation holding all other factors constant. The question is, if two otherwise equivalent children are placed in living situations of vastly different quality how likely are differences in drive going to influence success?

The fact that some poor kids succeed and some rich kids fail isn't nearly as important as the what percentage of these groups succeed and fail.

deleted

because that's easier than writing a long edit pointing out the specific context in which my comment was intended (a context that should have been obvious based on the parent comments).

You think it is more likely for a poor person to ascend to a higher class than for a rich person to remain rich? That is surprising.

And I'd take that bet, and quite likely your money, because study after study has shown that growing up in poverty is most likely to result in that person remaining in poverty.

Wealth cannot replace desire and drive. If both kids had these the same, then yes, the wealthy one would be better off. As theī say, one man can bring a horse to the water, but even forty cannot make it drink if horse does not want to.

I disagree. Enough wealth can easily replace that, to where one would be moderately successful. You might not turn into Elon Musk without desire & drive, but you're also never really going to be wondering where your next meal is coming from.

> Wealth cannot replace desire and drive.

Desire and drive are not independent of experience of what happens when you try and push limits, and if you think that things like race and wealth don't impact that in the real world we live in, you aren't paying much attention.

You didn't understand my comment. I'm not saying that someone who has nothing is better off. I was entirely responding to a 1st-world experience.

I'm saying that the OP is probably better off for having to develop drive to get that computer working than he would have been having it handed to him.

Long after that computer, drive and self-modification is still serving him.

Fair enough, I just see a lot of the "poor people just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps" sentiment around this site.

Wow, thanks for those references.

Not the case. Also, motivation comes down to a range of environmental/societal factors. Some quick hits on "hard work"

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-couch/201208/the...

https://commonwealthmagazine.org/economy/sociologist-thomas-...

https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=h...

There's a spectrum. It seems like the highest source of ambition external to genetics is growing up lower middle-class / poorer than many of your friends and neighbors, but with opportunity to succeed. Anecdotal, of course. My friends who grew up wealthy or upper middle class tend to dream much smaller, even if they are only first generation-wealthy / likely have some ambitious genes.

A lack of desire and drive makes it very easy to lose a lot of money. The inverse is not really true, though. You'll never be able to afford college if you're flipping burgers through high school. You'll never be a doctor if you aren't smart enough, no matter how much you want it.

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