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Comment by stronglikedan | Hacker News Reader

Sufficient drive begets the requisite capital, but that's even more rare, and arguably more amazing.

"Sufficient" meaning "Extraordinary"? The data doesn't really show that being hard working correlates with creation of wealth. In addition, it seems wealth plays a larger role in medical school acceptance than one might expect/hope for.

"The AAMC explains that the percentage of medical students from families in the highest quintile of household income has not dropped below 48 percent since 1987—half of students come from the richest 20 percent of the population—while the percentage of students from the lowest quintile has never risen above 5.5 percent [9]"

https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/sites/journalofethics.a...

Correlation or causation?

It’s classism, and it’s reality. Correlation and causation are irrelevant.

Doctors kids become doctors and doctors are well paid.

This is anecdotal, but my elementary school class was full of doctors kids and I can tell you that the doctor parents would almost disown their kid if they didn't get into medical school. Doctors seem to have a very strong opinion on the medical field being the only right option.

So in that sense it's more of a correlation with money, and a causation through inheritance.

That is true, up to a certain extent. I'd say that at university, about half of the medical students I met had one or sometimes two parents who were doctors. The rest seemed to come from comfortable middle-class backgrounds.

In my case.... my dad is a doctor and it was sort of expected I become one myself. Its not my thing though, or it wasn't at the time so now (like a lot of people on this forum) I work in engineering. In a way I do regret it now, because I wish I did something "useful" to society.

My younger sister however, did go to med school and is about to finish. She was very driven from a young age - I don't remember her saying she wants to become anything else but a doc. When her and my dad talk, I feel a little left out and only occasionally I have the feeling they look at me and shake their heads.

Exactly. In my country it works the same way, and doctors aren't well paid here. Some of them then go to places where doctors are paid better. Thus, they don't inherit money indirectly through going to schools for well-paid professionals, they inherit profession.

That's a bit of a tautology, isn't it? Of course sufficient drive begets the requisite capital, since any amount of drive which fails to beget the requisite capital is, by definition, insufficient :)

Just to go down the pedantry-hole with you (it's fun every once in a while!): I think a reasonable interpretation of the claim is that there's no initial condition such that some amount of drive won't get you to the level of capital under discussion. This isn't tautological, as the negation would be "there are certain situations where drive alone isn't sufficient to get you to that level of capital".

That's a claim a lot of people make (I think I'd probably agree with it), and the parent comment is disagreeing.

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