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Comment by Grue3 | Hacker News Reader

Consider the following experiments:

- a poor man and a rich man are going to work when they each see a dollar coin on a sidewalk. Which of them would bother to pick it up?

- a poor man and a rich man are both drunk after spending a night at the bar. Which one would take a $50 taxi home, and which one will take a bus for $5 (you have to wait 15 minutes for a bus).

- a poor man and a rich man are both hungry and walk by a restaurant for rich people. It would take an extra 15 minutes to walk to a crappy diner for poor people, but a lunch costs 5x cheaper there. Where would each man dine?

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>sidewalk coin

Rich man would pick it up, that's $720/hour if it takes 5 seconds. It's things like that that make you rich. Poor guy would probably pick it up too unless he's paranoid people will think he's poor.

>bus

Again looks like huge earnings per hour. He'll take the bus in this example unless he has something very lucrative that he's missing out on, but he's drunk so that's very unlikely.

>restaurant

Depends on the cost of the different places. It might not be worth the time to walk to the other place if the difference isn't great. If he's on a weekday lunchbreak, his time might be better spent elsewhere. Same thing for the poor guy.

You're assuming all rich people are pennypinchers like Warren Buffet. In reality most rich people are rich because they were born into a rich family and had the ideal opportunities to win at life from the start. The fact that in reality you won't see rich people riding buses or picking up coins on the street just shows that it's not about making most money per hour.

And in marshmallow test specifically you don't have kids who are good at business and kids who are bad at business. You have kids of rich parents and kids of poor parents. The fact that the former are supposed to act like pennypinchers, despite not ever having to worry about money or being fed seems counterintuitive to me.

If you define rich as the top 1% than yes it might be from inheritance but studies I've seen say over 80% of millionaires are self-made and didn't grow up wealthy.

Your whole premise is contradicted by the study.

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