The sad reality is, no matter how irrational is, people don't want to be around someone who is considered unlucky. Especially at a startup. I don't agree with this at all, but I'm saying it because I don't want to pretend that that psychological influence doesn't exist.
In other words, I've never observed what you describe, never even heard of it
Consider this: You're working at a startup that is struggling, and you're interviewing a candidate whose last 5 startups they worked at folded within 6 months of them being hired. As rational as people try to be, there would be a back-of-the-mind superstition that hiring that person would be bad luck.
I've been told a past boss, verbatim, "Wow, you have shit luck." The tl;dr is that I was working for a university and thus hired "as a college hire." and post-hire the corp had no easy way to rectify this, leading to a permanently set-back promotion track. A series of compounding misunderstandings on this led to this remarkable conversation with such other kernels as "you're kinda screwed, maybe they could fix it on rehire."
That's the tip of the iceberg though, to say I've had a "colorful" life is an understatement, and while I enjoy the bar stories I get to tell, there's certainly a perception that I'm unlucky.
E.g. During schooling I was placed in a random rooming arrangement with a violent drug addict, who later was deported after multiple arrests for beating his girlfriend; but this was after ~ a year of the school covering it up, throwing out his drugs before police showed up, and saying that my attestations weren't worth pursuing further.
I realize that got dark fast but I mean to bring it up to say, who the hell has these sorts of stories. It's like a sitcom. Even looking in on myself it seems absurd, so I can understand why people call it "luck."
To bring this back to the crux of the discussion, I'd use it to say I certainly see some vestige of "luck" in that certain things happen randomly, ala my room assignment, and you may have gotten the good flip on a few key ones; and thus the GP's point is very well taken. I also agree with GP's direct child, although it makes me sad, since I think my "bad luck" has given me exposure to quite a range of experience, one does get strange looks from being repeatedly perceived as the recipient of "bad luck". ("Oh maybe there's something he's not telling us, maybe he's the common cause, etc")
And people make their own luck. You can't get lucky if you're not in the game swinging.
I've known plenty of people who just sat at their desks, doing as little as possible, waiting for the boss to direct them, reading hackernews(!), watching the clock till they could go home. They were never going to get lucky.
Then there are the ones who are always up to something. They're doing a side project, they started a band, they go to meetups, they write articles, they talk about their investment strategies, they're planning out their next venture, and you know they're going to get lucky.
The world is super unfair place and sometimes even if you work really smart and hard, you won't get the results you worked for.
the number one determinant of future success in the US is the zip code in which you're born.
The US is now one of the countries where your success in life is most fully determined by your family background.
e.g. it's in the bottom third of the OECD for income mobility, and the absolute worst in the OECD for how much your family background determines your educational success
https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi...
Let me tell you a story of two families. My step-dad was thrust into a parenting role over his siblings, a sister and a brother at an early age. The brother died early, in a train accident. My step-dad married my mother and they're still together, over 20 years later. His sister is on her second marriage.
My aunt's family is constantly teetering on the edge of poverty, having obliterated their family's nest egg over decades of stupid decisions. Our family clawed our way out of low class through pragmatic saving.
Stupid decisions are what make the difference between affluence and poverty in the US. You can have all the money in the world and still be broke. The capacity to make stupid decisions largely comes from childhood. It's the emotional makeup of a household that mostly determines what children are like when they get older. If you grow up in America feeling neglected and abused, you're going to go through strings of bad relationships and that's just going to be your life.
I call America's brand of poverty "emotional poverty." Food on the table, roof over your head, cable TV and video games for entertainment, all things people in other parts of the world can't reliably have, in the US pretty much come out of the tap like water. Even homeless people here have cell phones.
No, what's missing here is emotional warmth. People in the US just can't figure out for some reason how to treat each other well. They eat, but they don't live.
If you're lucky enough to avoid emotional poverty, then you can join America's middle class. If not, you'll fritter away all the money you ever make. It's got nothing to do with how much money your family has and everything to do with how they treat each other.
No statistic could possibly capture this reality.
2. 62.9% of the world has cell phones. The global median income is likely less than $5,000 and it seems difficult to reconcile the two without many poor people - and not just in the US- owning cell phones. More to the point, do you know how hard it is to get a job or a house without a phone? Cell phones are very hard to do without in this age, especially if you're homeless.
3. Education should help to ensure people can make better decisions, but access to decent education is terribly unequal in the US, so kids attending schools in poor districts are even less likely to learn what they need to get ahead. You're ignoring structural issues if you think people are just making "stupid decisions" and ignore the facts about inequality of education.
2. You're just making my point for me.
3. The access to secondary education that Americans have in is unparalleled anywhere else except in certain parts of Europe. It's been our collective obsession for decades, the subject of intense policy initiatives all over the nation. There's no political will to improve prisons, but an initiative to expand student loan funding will always be approved.
Anybody can take on $X0,000 in uncancelable debt to obtain a college degree with. The reason they can't follow through and actually improve their lives with it runs along emotional poverty lines. We can't educate our way out of this problem.
Re: #3 The real inequality of opportunity isn't in secondary education, it's in primary (K-12) education. I went to a public highschool in a well-off suburb that had high participation in AP programs and sent the overwhelming majority of the student body to college. A couple of miles away in the city, the high school struggled to retrain accreditation.
Sure you can claw your way out by being financially wise. I just did that this year after life hit me really hard, several times, at my weakest hours. Took me 7 months to recover and I am pretty sure I know exactly what you mean by it.
Still, this piques. Yes you can have a decent way of life -- food, own home (increasingly rare), internet, a few vacations a year perhaps. But outside of that? Real middle class? Call me biased but I am not seeing it anywhere. Even the people who believe to live a middle-class life cannot afford more than 2-3 months of unpaid vacation (or a hiatus).
I absolutely positively cannot spend 2-3 years doing only the hobby projects I have in mind without caring about money. I simply am not at the level of a CEO pay + bonuses that enable such a lifestyle, and won't ever be if I continue to be a programmer for hire.
To me "middle class" means "able to freely switch jobs or professions without any financial pressure", combined with "able to enjoy leisure time as much as they like". But again, maybe I am describing the "rich life" and not the middle class. Perhaps we use different terms?
(Eating but also living the life is something money can enable -- but I agree that money alone cannot teach you that.)
> the doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities.
If we accept this definition, and the United States scores poorly, then it means that either:
* not all people are treated as equal * or not all people have equal rights * or not all people have equal opportunities
Could you please clarify how your comment is relevant as a response to a comment about egalitarianism?
Stated differently: if your comment is true, what is the implication?
Sometimes I'm a technician, sometimes I help organize, sometimes I'm the legal front. And some projects I do fund, but not to a degree that anybody's livelihood depended on me.
I am simply very much interested in the dynamics of the process. I would like to know how do people get together to discuss such things in the first place, for example.
Apologies if I projected the wrong message before.
As for how I found the projects to engage in: I got asked for tech help, went to a meeting, and found people that had unusual takes on reality. I went with those who were doing stuff, as opposed to those discussing how it ought to be. I don't have much initiative myself and prefer working with people who have that drive.
“Investing” is hard and very risky work that offers almost no intellectual benefits (and I’m pretty sure the index-tracking bubble will burst and create a bigger mess than what happened back in 2008), I’d much rather spend my time mapping the Byzantine coins found over the Northern Balkans (a nice way to re-create regional trade routes from about 1000 years ago) or being undecided whether the people who put the Indo-European “urheimat” just North of the Black Sea were right or wrong (does Anatolia make for a better choice?). There’s nothing wrong with holding an ok job that pays the bills so you can pursuit your real intellectual interests.
I didn't say there was. I was talking about people who wanted more than that.
"Working smart"?
There is a second path too which is slow and steady wins the race. If you live well below your means and invest your money you will also end up with enough money that you don't need to work. My wife's private school just got a $3M donation from their janitor of 50 years when he passed away. If you save 30-40% of your pre tax income, then you will be able to retire at a reasonably young age, with a very high probability.