Literally all the data agrees with me here. Don’t know what you’re arguing for exactly. That some people get lucky and some of those lucky people worked hard?
I just quoted several data points that did not agree with "all the data".
If they can succeed, why can't you?
I also know a Microsoft executive who didn't attend college, and I'm not sure even graduated from high school. His father owned a hole-in-the-wall store. Fortunately for him, he didn't listen to "it's all luck".
Most of the people I know don't fit into your "it's all luck" data.
For all the people who think it's all luck being a CEO, how many have even read a book on how to run a business?
Imagine 4 integers
(MeritWeight * Merit) * (CircumstancesWeight Circumstances)
We can disagree what respective weights ought to be assigned but its pretty clear that it circumstances favor you sufficiently your trajectory is high regardless of merit. If your Merit is high enough your trajectory may be high regardless of merit.
I don't think anyone disagrees much even though passionate arguments are passed by all.
The thing is that only a minority are gifted by circumstances and most people are neither worthless nor extremely worthy. The merely average are bound for average lives at best in most cases and often for lesser lives depending on how other circumstances of their lives play out.
When people say that life is unfair, which it is, and you say but look here is a list of a minority of worthy who made good despite middling or worse circumstances as if this itself were a refutation you are aren't even addressing the same argument, let alone refuting it.
For the record. The average small business owners salary is 66-73k in the US. By contrast the median individual income is 40k. A middle class individual whose father owned a "hole in the wall" had a family that probably had more to start with than 70% of their fellows. This example is itself a demonstration of your lack of perspective.
You literally think someone who started off better than average started out with substantial disadvantages.
I knew him, and you didn't. The idea he was in the top 30% would certainly make him laugh. Lots of store owners barely scrape by.
The issue is that using averages, making blanket statements, and dismissing exceptions to the averages as pure luck and statistical happenstance is a pretty common form of frequentist bias and leads to even worse policy, if used as justification for a remedy.
Exceptions are routinely waved away as statistical noise or survivorship bias, rather than taking a more nuanced and Bayesian look at the exceptions.
For all the libertarian bias Hacker News is accused of, this particular issue is exceptionally neoliberal/socialist in nature and persists on the site for some odd reason.
None of that matters much in terms of what the individual should do in response. I wrote a shitty attitude college financial aid application essay saying how I intended to use my college education to “get rich enough that my kids wouldn’t have to write college financial aid essays.” That was 32 years ago and I still remember the fight it caused with my parents who were doing everything they could to help generation N+1 do better than generation N while I was spitting in their face in essay form.
Just like it’s hard to deny the benefit of coming from means, it’s equally hard to deny the benefit of dedicated, concerted, well-directed effort in raising your individual and family outcome. Coming from means is no guarantee of success either, but since you have a lot more control over your choices of life than of birth, why not take advantage of them?
Life is not fair, and you can't fix it. Play the cards you're dealt. The good news is every hand can be a winner in life (as in poker), it's all how you play. You get to choose.
Me, I will never be tall or handsome or muscular or have depth perception or have hand-eye coordination. I'm only good at one thing, and I take advantage.
No, I don't expect to change your mind. But I'm happy to try.
I don't think the fatalistic attitude towards changing the system is any more (or, as much as I hate to admit it, less) reasonable than the "you could be Steve jobs too." Odds for both are pretty bleak, albeit non zero.
As advice to an individual in a rotten system, "make the most of what you've got" is fair enough. But when folks talk about politics they're not usually fishing for personal career advice. So when you bring this up in that context, either you've missed the point, or you're trying to distract folks from the issue at hand.
You don't have to build a trillion dollar company to be nicely successful, but using a nicely successful person as an anecdote is impractical because they are not public figures. But they are still all over the place, in plain sight. It's well within an ordinary person's ability to become one.
A wrong, convenient excuse is slightly less useful but is much more satiating than a correct excuse.