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Comment by throwdecro | Hacker News Reader

Looking at the top 10 richest people [0], most of them weren't born into anything close to the level of wealth they have now. None of them were poor, so "essentially anyone can become successful" is almost certainly an overstatement, but the ability to go from "raised by dentists/lawyers/professors/engineers" to "among the richest in the world" is evidence of considerable mobility.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires#Ann...

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I spent more than a year working for the guy who went from "raised by ..." to "the richest man in the world". And when I say "working for", I mean "worked in the same converted garage".

Bezos' stratospheric economic "mobility" is not evidence of a more generalized economic mobility. In a system that is even vaguely capitalist, there will always be people who become incredibly wealthy without inheriting most of it. Their existence is not evidence of "considerable mobility", it's merely evidence of some sort of capitalistic economy.

The fact that the 10 richest people on earth were not born into stratospheric wealthy is a testament (of sorts) to capitalism; if you want to know about economic mobility, you're better off focusing on statistics, not the exceptions that prove the rules.

Exactly. We could have a system where every year 10 random poor people are chosen to become super wealthy. That isn't "economic mobility" in any meaningful or healthy sense.

How many of those 10 richest people came from families which weren't already in the top 5th income percentile?

Is that the social mobility that we care about? Anyone who is willing to work hard and already has the means to attend an Ivy League school can become a billionaire.

Top 5% in the USA, or top 5% in the world?

Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Sergey Brin were NOT top 5% in the USA. Depending what period in his childhood that you look at, Sergey Brin wasn't top 5% in the world either. (His family was educated, but they arrived in the USA as refugees from the Soviet Union.)

Several others started with rather less than you might expect. For example Elon Musk arrived in North America with only a few thousand dollars to his name, and had to work manual labor to get by. (Yes, his father was a businessman, but the two of them have a..difficult..relationship.)

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