For example, a craps table has a negative expected value for the players, and positive expected value for the house. But on a winning streak (these streaks are fairly common, just like losing streaks) the table might lose money if you look at the period of a few hours.
https://www.distinguished.com/Site/programs/hospitality-and-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion
This is why poker players who are good enough to play at a certain table level can't maintain it if their bankroll falls too low. At each stakes level the game not only gets harder, but the minimum bet can eat up your bankroll if you get large string of unplayable hands (let alone bad beats or bad plays). What ends up happening a lot is that players will win a significant amount of money at say the $5 table, then try to play the $10 table, and lose enough money they find themselves back at the $5 table. The really unlucky ones may end up back at the $2 table because they may not have moved back to $5 early enough to be able to bankroll that level properly.
I find the economics of poker to be completely fascinating, and when I found out about kelly betting from a HFT friend if mine, it really changed how I looked at the topic.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068
" The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, efforts or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain degree of luck could also play a role in achieving significant material success. But, as a matter of fact, it is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual successful stories. It is very well known that intelligence or talent exhibit a Gaussian distribution among the population, whereas the distribution of wealth - considered a proxy of success - follows typically a power law (Pareto law). Such a discrepancy between a Normal distribution of inputs, with a typical scale, and the scale invariant distribution of outputs, suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind the scenes. In this paper, with the help of a very simple agent-based model, we suggest that such an ingredient is just randomness. In particular, we show that, if it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals. As to our knowledge, this counterintuitive result - although implicitly suggested between the lines in a vast literature - is quantified here for the first time. It sheds new light on the effectiveness of assessing merit on the basis of the reached level of success and underlines the risks of distributing excessive honors or resources to people who, at the end of the day, could have been simply luckier than others. With the help of this model, several policy hypotheses are also addressed and compared to show the most efficient strategies for public funding of research in order to improve meritocracy, diversity and innovation."
You also just made a claim without evidence. It would be more compelling with some.
For example, I have several colleagues who started their careers around the same time as me. Some are much wealthier than me partly because they spent considerable time and effort accumulating real estate portfolios (among other investments). Others have accumulated less wealth than me because they spent much of their incomes on ephemeral pleasures.
Also many things cost less for wealthy people. They literally spend less as a fraction of their wealth than anyone else for credit, for example. Wealth will naturally gravitate towards them even if they do nothing more than act like anyone else because of that kind of thing.
Your second point is accurate, but not really a rebuttal.
A few very unusual people in each generation start with nothing and become billionaires, but for most of the population a running start will get them much further towards a comfortable life than almost any combination of luck and talent.
This is a problem, because many of our social myths suggests that the most reliable and predictable way to become richer is through hard work - and therefore rich people are more socially valuable than the poor, who stay poor because of laziness.
Both of those beliefs are absolutely untrue.
What the OP was pointing out was that, there are people who understand money and people who don't, and that plays just as big a role as having wealth (see lottery ticket example cited in sister comment). I think I've demonstrated I understand your point; do you think you really understand that one?
Also, > the most reliable and predictable way to become richer is through hard work
Do you know a more reliable and predictable way to become richer? It may not be fast and it may not be fair, but in a capitalist society, I believe it to be true.
People who were never exposed to having money to begin with don't know what to do with it. Having money from the start (rich parents) gives you a head start.