Or their family donated enough money to an Ivy to have a building named after them.
This is the blank slate fallacy where people believe (for political correctness reasons) that any kid had same chance of success if he was given the same opportunity as the success of kids.
And some people are born athletically gifted, or extremely attractive, or with very high IQ and a temperament for grit.
There are lottery winners that lose everything in a few years.
Just because you are born into money, doesn’t mean you will succeed.
That doesn't mean that being born into a privileged life doesn't have advantages, but it's about way more than just the money. It's also the connections you have. The best example right now is Trump, who is a complete and utter failure as a businessman yet people keep throwing money at him.
Perhaps you are judging him by the wrong metrics?
Trump has always wanted to be a “great man” of history while being able to live a life of excess.
He's failing at that to. He'll go into the history books as the worst president the US ever had by a wide margin.
Unlikely. Once the constant negative media coverage dies down the hate will fade as well.
Unless by "good at the game" you refer to the skill of dropping out of the right vagina, like royalists do.
The game the (alleged) idiot is playing is "don't lose the family fortune". If you weren't born wealthy but want to be, you are playing the "make more than you spend" game in one of its variations. There is for example an obvious slow way that might give your children a better shot at the "don't lose the family fortune" game and there are also many also many higher variability games like the "lottery" and "startup" games.
Not every game requires the same skills and personality type.
One thing to keep in mind is that the majority of businesses and products fail. Remember survivorship bias. For every successful Netflix there are a dozen failed movie streaming services. Anyone who has had a few weeks worth of software engineering can produce a Twitter clone, but none have been successful.
There are many many unemployed useless Stanford, MIT, Harvard graduates in this world.
Thus, attending a fancy school is a big advantage if you've got the money or have another way to get in.
Is this really true?
All the statistics I've read suggest otherwise.
The real question is whether those graduates are more likely to be useless and unemployed than people who did not graduate from the same universities.
After years of losses that almost nobody else would have been able (or willing) to sustain he made it into a moderate success.
Outwardly, at face value, he's doing pretty well, until you count the decade of losses which nobody talks about.
Another friend is a moderately renowned documentary maker. Again, facilitated by family wealth. Outwardly, the appearance is of being successful, which cost a fair chunk of family wealth.
I think in both cases, family wealth drove something akin to an obsession to appear successful, which they largely achieved and nobody mentions the uncomfortable facts about how they got there in polite company.
Almost nobody else would have been able (or willing) to sustain the costs that made it into a success.
What matters is the bottom line.
With more money can of course learn to fail in greater scale, but IMHO this also has benefits in it's own. Learning to think big is a skill of it's own. Small business plays by different rules than big business, even if they have overlaps.
And I also think how succesfull you really were can only be said after staying on your peak for some time, because some games go really really long.
[0] https://digitalsynopsis.com/inspiration/privileged-kids-on-a...
I like to give Trump as an example: everyone loves to blast him for being an idiot. Is he a good president? No. Is he good at the game, but most people totally miss what his game is? I claim, yes. It's unfortunate that he managed to play the US election system for his own purposes, but that doesn't mean he's just incompetent at everything. E.g. he's a rather good populist - that may not be a quality you like, but at that particular game he's not at all bad.
Surely it can't be approval ratings since you can't expect public to understand nuances behind the decisions and what the president actually has to be doing? It can't be just GDP because GDP might have been going up anyway? It can't be what the president is saying in public and how many of those facts are wrong since this doesn't mean what actual decisions the president is making.
For example the Bible has a lot of wisdom like: 'If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.' This was already written some 2000 years ago and has been proven true over time.
So I would argue you could measure the amount of unity a leader tries to create.
That’s a nice one. Yet do you think then Hitler might be a good leader? (not a joke). He united the white German population in a time of great economic disarray - in both Germany and Europe. Maybe we should measure unity and cooperation with other countries? Global solidarity
Rather, he united the country because it was in an economic disarray :)
Number of his supporters arguing that objectively there's no such thing as a good president :-p
That’s probably a bad metric because his supporters love him.
It’s the swing voters making those kinds of comments because they want to vote for him but he’s done some dodgy things.
If you look at a basket of well-being measures as opposed to raw GDP it's hard to argue that Trump has done a good job.
Of course Covid has had a big effect. But there were many policy options for handling that, and Trump - and his far-right equivalents in other countries - reliably picked some of the least effective ones.
Regarding bankruptcies, unemployment, household debt Etc, Obama's first term would show really low score on these things, presuming that's all he had, almost none of it was caused by the actions taken by him during his presidency.
It is too soon to argue any of those measures.
You can’t take a single moment in time in the middle of a crisis to judge.