If hard work were enough, we'd all be in charge. Lots of hard workers out there.
Not shut down so much as exhausted by everyone rushing in.
High status isn’t an arbitrary designation that everyone can achieve. By definition, it requires some degree of exceptionalism and significant separation from the average.
If everyone could achieve a certain high status attribute, it’s no longer high status. It’s just average.
It’s easy to forget that high status is something given by others. You can’t become high status arbitrarily, you can only be high status if the average person voluntarily decides to see you as high status. Luxury good brands understand this perhaps better than anyone as their entire business revolves around making things appear artificially rare, unique, and hard to get while discreetly selling them to as many people as possible.
I think that there are some minimum thresholds you have to beat in terms of intellect, drive, charm, talent, etc., but I'm not completely convinced you need a significant "degree of exceptionalism" in any of these things - being in the right place at the right time can often be enough.
Most people just follow the path set for them, and among those who do set out to change they mostly just change from one standard path to another. Like switching from bagging groceries to college to become a programmer. Very few want to do the hard work required to change the world, they prefer safety, even among richer people.
> Hard work only matters when you work hard to change yourself.
Risky and difficult to comprehend are two forms of "barriers to entry". Another is who you know. One of the most obvious that you left out is: cost.
People buying their way into Harvard et al will obtain high status. People becoming a doctor will obtain high status. It's just that those things cost a 200k+. The price alone closes off that route to most people.
Risky and difficult are the routes to high status that less fortunate people MUST take, because the barriers for less risky routes are impossible to overcome by most people.
The important part you're highlighting is true: status requires barriers to limit the number of people that can acquire that status... it's just more broad than you've acknowledged.
To me, it's a huge positive signal when a group has a culture that actively embraces new people and finds way to identify and celebrate what's cool about them, rather than just the opposite. I personally found student coops at my college to be one such culture.
I think success here is somewhat incidental. No doubt the vast majority of niche workers are pursuing non-viable careers, a minority can just about wring a living from it, and a vanishingly small part will actually see some measure of success - upon which that path too will close off quickly, both due to masses of people flocking to follow those footsteps and active gate keeping by value-extracting entities.
Implicit in this model, there is a dark timeline where there are always many more people than there are opportunities. Since this system of exploring possible paths and then closing them off to the lower masses is so extremely effective, eventually every single niche will be flooded with overqualified eager young upper-class people who are just perfectly networked for success, and even though they are so many there are still untold thousands more of hopeless dregs below every single one of them.
And those that do invariably either had a scene they could grow into - like Steve Jobs orbiting around HP and landing at Atari in his earliest days, which wouldn't have happened if he'd been living in (say) Idaho.
Or they have some questionable connections and history - Russian oligarchs being the ideal examples, although there are others.
I rarely hear the argument that the USA needs gov funded heath care, BECAUSE it would be good for entrepreneurs. It's a bit like being part of a wealthy family :)
Folks who come from a high status background tend to be more willing to do low status things, because doing so doesn’t undermine their status, which comes from elsewhere.
Your summary is both a good point and a little chilling.
I've always wondered in Capitalism how this concept of a JOB for people to have a living wage is sustainable in modern times. Much less for people to innovate and thrive.
I don't think you can really have that same kind of status in tech without building something very significant which typically takes years of experience.
We are all rolling the dice here. Just be yourself and do what you find interesting. If it pays off great, if it doesn't that is okay too.
Sure, at the end it's a dice role, but you can get a better dice ;)
But your chances of being able to do that in the first place are massively dependent on your luck. It's a lot harder to get a degree or start a company if your family is struggling to afford essentials, or you're caring for a sick relative.
So for people who find themselves going into dept slavery, unable to feed themselves and their children well, unable to afford healthcare, and so on, you're saying it's all good, just a bad roll of the dice, nothing to worry about?
Seems to me more like the system is fundamentally broken if pure chance is all that seperates a millionaire and the destitute and downtrodden.
What assumption have you made about the system's purposes and functions? This is an important question and one we are currently wrestling with as a society. It's one of the BIG QUESTIONS and hard to answer. Plato's Republic might be a good starting place.
Social classes and social immobility are millenia-old phenomena and are completely independent of capitalism.
Or require being born with a rare gift or trait.
Sadly inheritance is looked down upon, and people would like every citizen to be born with the same information, and this information being delivered by public education.
Sadly, parents teach much better than teachers when it is about the little things that make a life successful. There will never be a way around this. Transmission will never be good between people who don’t care for each others, such as civil servants. Therefore we should acknowledge that, yes, some parts of success will be taught by parents, and tearing children from parents will only lose information instead of elevating everyone. We should elevate parents and teach them so that they, too, can get successful children, and make sure all kids get two parents, and as many grandparents as possible (who are very, very important for psychological stability and growth), and make sure parents can be confident in teaching their children, i.e. not criticizing them for teaching them methods to succeed which have succeeded for a millenium, like, I don’t know, marrying which is the single best predictor of success.
Sure, we can re-engineer humans without parent inheritance, tear them off and give them to childcare centers, but we already know the sad results.
I’ve once asked my Arab employee why only (foreign) Arabs applied to our job (in France) and had the skills, he very acutely noted that their parents don’t allow them to fail, whereas French-born developers were more lazy. The result is very visible here: The only decent application we have are from North Africa.
« The right parents » is not about wealth or social exclusion. It is that some parents decide to be crap parents and destroy a millenium of wisdom at their generation by not transmitting all the accumulated knowledge, generally due to some ideological dream (« my ancestors were all wrong! THIS is how you do it! I shall be free to roam! ») But the failed child is free to start again, marry, work a lot, study success, and he can give his child an excellent life, and his grandson can be CEO of a large company.
Society can’t offset crap parents. Society already does a good job at making social move possible; 86% billionaires of our generation didn’t have billionaire parents. Also, don’t believe I’m not sorry for the victims, but let’s pass the word and teach again the good tips that have worked for millenia, instead of telling everyone they can survive with a mother-and-two-step-uncles, a flat, a brother in jail and a pink dress. It is not ok to say that. We should rather tell them it will be hard and we can help them progress if they choose to live a clean life starting from now.
Also I'd love to see a deeper analysis of your "86% of billionaires" comment. Usually what happens is we discover that "self-made" millionaires grew up in quite affluent circumstances, perhaps not with millionaire parents, but with parents who earned a sufficient income to themselves retire as millionaires. That is to say, they aren't "self-made". It isn't meaningful to compare their accumulation of wealth to the struggles of those born in less favorable circumstances.
There are no "self-made" billionaires. Or very, very few (WhatsApp founder Jan Koum is literally the only one I can think of who comes close). Every single high-profile billionaire today--Gates, Buffet, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, etc.--came from a family with substantial financial means and social connections.
How many of them had hundred-millionaire parents? The way wealth has grown for the super rich over the past few decades is staggering. Children of wealthy parents attaining far greater wealth than their parents has been the norm in America for generations now, it's not some exceptional accomplishment.
I make about ten times as much as my mother did, although we are both university educated. The difference is that I can sell my products on the Internet to a much wider audience. That was a serious multiplier which affected a lot of people and businesses, even on the lower end of the scale.
But I am very definitely not a USD-millionaire and likely won't ever be.
That's a bold statement.
French-born engineers are some of the best I've worked with, definitely not lazy by any means. But the local market in France is truly disconnected, salary-wise, when compared to the rest of the world.
If you advertise French wages on the French market, you simply won't get any of that french-born talent. They are either working remotely or already in the Bay Area!
It is not. You don't choose your parents, just the same way as you don't get to choose your sex/gender, race/ethnicity or caste. If you take "equal chances for everyone" seriously, it is a primary concern for a society to allow children to prosper freely without being impeded by the misfortune or failings of their parents.
> Sadly inheritance is looked down upon
We're totally not on the same page. Not even close.
> destroy a millenium of wisdom at their generation by not transmitting all the accumulated knowledge, generally due to some ideological dream (« my ancestors were all wrong! THIS is how you do it! I shall be free to roam! »)
I think it doesn't take a millennium of wisdom to understand what's needed to raise sane, mentally healthy children. Besides, this chain of knowledge-transfer gets interrupted constantly anyway, often due to war, accidents or addictions.
> But the failed child is free to start again, marry, work a lot, study success, and he can give his child an excellent life, and his grandson can be CEO of a large company.
Why the grandson? Why not the son? (Or daughter, for what it's worth.)
According to this study[0], at least 50% of wealth persistence is accounted for by direct transfers from parents, i.e. financial inheritance, while earnings and education are only able to explain 25%.
0 - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ecoj.12535
If success means just the ability to buy stuff, the richest person gets the same iPhone, so why bother striving for more?
Perfect equality means total inhumanity and the destruction of family.
These concepts are hard to understand for a hyper-individualistic person that lives in an eternal present.
Much more impressive is when people direct their intelligence toward solving problems in high-dimensional domains. Self-contained leetcode problems, at most, break down into (1) translating the problem into known-best algorithm input (2) implementing that algorithm (3) translating the algorithm output into the expected format. Boring.
I disagree with this. Never underestimate how many people just don't show up or try at all.
Look at average screen time for Americans as a data point. It's a ridiculous 12 hours a day of media usage. Just think about that. People are basically staring at their phones/tvs for 12 out of the 16 waking hours.
As I get older I realize more often than not most successful people are not special, but simply were normally people that didn't screw up badly, showed up to work every day, and took better opportunities that were available. They graduated college with reasonable degrees, they didn't stay in bad jobs, or in dead-end cities. Eventually if you do that you will get a break, land at a successful company, get a big promotion, ect.
This idea that success comes to anyone who just shows up and puts in a little bit of effort because most people are watching TV or browsing the Internet for 12 hours a day is, to be blunt, extremely naive.
You're right that in a lot of places in western society (though not all) you can become pretty successful through good strategy and some hard work as you've described. But that's actually quite hard to do!
Plenty of things in life can get in the way and more importantly having a good life strategy requires a level of knowledge not available to many. The reason so many entrepreneurs come from moderately well off backgrounds is that the middle class is far far better at teaching their kids the strategies to success than those less well off. The upper class are even better and can use their money and access to take shortcuts not available to the rest of us.
If you're a working class kids whose family have never been to college or who hasn't been exposed to the 'professional class' you might have no idea how to get there and thus have no idea that you could get there. There are plenty of super smart kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds who would never even consider going to uni for a 'reasonable degree' because no ones implied it was possible for them.
We're conscious beings with a will, and there reaches a point where you struggle with your own will in order to evolve as a person. For some that's screen addiction. I'm only eager to write this comment so I can highlight the danger of a 'not my fault' mentality that's self-sabotaging.
Take college major choice. Why do so many people get worthless degrees? They can do a simple google search to see how much people with X major make as salaries. It's not hidden or even a remote mystery. I won't get in to how people finance their education (not even reading the terms of their loans which are invariably awful).
As for career, I lived for a year in Minnesota and was amazed at how many people were incredibly underpaid (like 80K a year for a senior software engineer) and simply did not try to change jobs. Similarly many also refused to even consider moving to a costal city with better pay. I've also had co-workers that stuck around at obviously failing companies (and then were upset when their options were worthless).
And with investments, I've an aunt who inherited 50K about 20 years ago and just kept the money in the bank. Everyone knows you should be investing that money in the stock market or an appreciating asset, yet she is hardly unusual in just not investing the money. My mom invested it and made at least 4x on the money.
There are tons of these kinds of things - which are all simple and obvious, but literally most people don't do them for reasons that are just beyond me. I had a friend who was a semester away from graduating at UCSD and dropped out to take music lessons at community college. I tried to explain to him that was an awful decision, but he was just dead set on it. I've seen this stuff happen over and over.
Obviously, you can say that people don't have this kind literacy because they were poor, ignorant, ect. It doesn't change the fact that mostly getting by and moving up in the world is not rocket science or for special people, it's a matter of just making mostly reasonable decisions: choosing a reasonable career, saving money, showing up for work, taking good opportunities when given to you.
A lot of people just want to go to art school.