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> First of all, Bill Gates had a TON of opportunity and privilege funneled to him from his parents.

He absolutely did. And yet even conditional on that category, the probability of becoming a billionaire is extremely low. Therefore, according to the parent comment, that counts as self-made.

> You cannot POSSIBLY believe that there is no wealth disparity in the US? That there is not a disparity in opportunity between the wealthy and the middle class/poor?

You're not following the parent comment's argument, and as a result your response isn't targeted at their specific point. Their specific point is invariant to wealth mobility. Even if you give me an extremely extremely unequal society, their definition of self-made success persists: The ability to exceed the median expectation for your category.

If you're born dirt poor in a slum, and end up running a small laundromat, whereas most of your peers are still scavenging in the slum, you're self-made, because you beat your peers. If you're born as a privileged white kid to millionaires, but end up becoming a billionaire, you're self-made.

Having morally invariant definitions for words is useful, because it's nice to have terms to describe things, without having to stop using terms because they offend peoples moral sensibilities.

Your argument that self-made success literally doesn't exist in any facet, and all is deterministic, so we should never use that term or consider it a phenomena, strains credulity, and makes it hard to describe certain elements of reality.

You'd have to be precise in targeting the social network in which the subject individual wields influence. Networks are more important than money in many ways. An individual who is friends or whose family has friends in VC or PE has a better starting position in an entrepreneurial career than someone who has no connections, even if they have money.

You also need to consider the social implications of your category choice. Choosing a category of "US citizens" vs "millionaires" has vastly different implications. A millionaire in the set of US citizens can invest their wealth in mutual funds, do nothing for 10 years, and come out with vastly more wealth. Someone emerging from poverty who starts a small business and actively contributes economic value might take home $50k/year. The millionaire doubles their wealth by doing nothing and the small business owner fights tooth and nail to bring home a modest income. The millionaire also has the option of leveraging their wealth and time to make even more money, where the self-made individual doesn't. Capital is a gravity well.

You can limit your subject set to individuals with $1M-2M in no-strings-attached cash at the start of the study, but why would you? Gates has done a lot to build his wealth but there is no way to know how many individuals would have done better than Gates if they'd started in the same position. You can start to consider that when you expand the set of individuals in the study beyond the arbitrary wealth filter and account for social mobility. Then when you figure out how many people could have done better, you can come up with a "self-madeness" score. Though the whole thing is silly IMO. No one exists in a vacuum.

> The millionaire doubles their wealth by doing nothing and the small business owner fights tooth and nail to bring home a modest income.

If a large group of millionaires reads your comment, sees the light and shamefully decides to do something by pulling their investable assets out, the small business owner will likely face high capital costs and in many cases be simply unable to raise any money at interest rates attractive to him/her.

That's what happens when unrestrained capitalism moves production of goods outside of the local economy and into distant foreign economies which are more difficult to access. Capital aggregates in the few international trade hubs and starting a new business becomes more difficult as various gates are put in front of the newly foreign production. As capital becomes more centralized, fewer people are in charge of the decisions to invest and innovation becomes more difficult because rather than being distributed across the range of economies and lifestyles in the US (or any country) it is invested in the few who have access to the gatekeepers. Usually that requires physical access over time, which means living in an increasingly expensive city and successfully competing with an increasing amount of individuals vying for a limited amount of investor attention. Innovation comes from people responding to a wide variety of different problems and situations - how is that going to happen if everyone lives in the same place and is competing to solve the same problems that the relatively few available investors want to put money in? Markets that retain capital are much easier to find money in than markets which leak it.

If an American with wealth wants to help the US economy, they should focus on rebuilding the production capacity of underfunded economies across the US by redistributing wealth from the main international hubs into smaller domestic markets. It probably won't produce optimal returns, which scares off most investors. I have seen a couple funds starting to do this, for what it's worth.

P.S. Banks used to be small and local! Look at how far we've fallen:

- https://ilsr.org/number-banks-u-s-1966-2014/ - https://ilsr.org/vanishing-community-banks-national-crisis/

I am not sure your observation is correct - in industries such as oil and gas the investment community was quick with redistributing wealth to previously underfunded rural areas of Oklahoma, Texas, Alaska, or North Dakota. Another example is Las Vegas, which prior to hospitality industry investments was essentially a piece of desert.

And those are just the big-name examples. Some extended family of mine lives in a rural area of Central Washington, which anecdotally in the past decade has experienced high growth in manufacturing, driven primarily by Japanese money.

Oil money is a start, though my understanding is the workers go where the work is and take the money home when the work runs out. Those also tend to be in places people don't want to live for long. Most of the oil money is also extracted to major cities like Houston, so it's not a complete solution because it's an extremely leaky bucket.

Some places are doing better than others. But are they building products that solve local problems, or are they trying to primarily sell to a national or global market? Are they funded by local capital? Will the benefits of their production stay local?

> The millionaire doubles their wealth by doing nothing and the small business owner fights tooth and nail to bring home a modest income.

Small business owners often are millionaires; the distinction you are making is more accurately between the haut bourgeoisie (the upper class in capitalism) and the petit bourgeoisie (the middle class in capitalism) than between “millionaires” (or any other description of aggregate worth) and some other group.

Kind of proves my point that there are no easy categories. I used millionaire as a catch-all term but you can substitute hundred-millionaire, billionaire, trillionaire, or any subset of each and the point still stands.

> There are way more people who are born wealthy and continue being wealthy. There are way more people who go from poor to poor. Social mobility is piss poor right now in the US.

Can someone please point me to a study that supports this claim? Based on the Pew Charitable Trust's latest economic survey, 57% of people born into the lowest quintile rise above it. And, 60% of people born into the highest quintile fall below it.

See Figure 3: https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/wwwpe...

I just started digging into the research surrounding economic mobility in the US, and it does not seem to substantiate the claim that the poorest class are just absolutely screwed.

There are way more people who are born wealthy and continue being wealthy.

OK. But that still doesn't translate to the idea of being self-made being a "myth". There are existence proofs that it is possible to be a "self-made success" - depending on exactly how you define "success".

One thing that's important to keep in mind is that all these references to various billionaires, etc., are mostly irrelevant. For most of us, the benchmark of being "successful" is not becoming a billionaire. So the question of "can you become a self-made billionaire" is really a red-herring that contributes nothing useful to anything.

[some person] had a TON of opportunity and privilege funneled to him from his parents.

What percentage of those persons became billionaires? Is it less than 0.1%?

(What percentage of them die broke? I bet greater than 1%)

No one is saying Bill Gates didn't earn his success. But we can't deny that having access to certain levels of privlege makes success much more probably than for those without those advantages.

With Bill Gates' upbringing, it is quite unlikely he would have struggled with housing insecurity.