If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance | Hacker News Reader

If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance

technologyreview.com

63 pointspaulpauper70 comments

All of us who haven't achieved fabulous success find this very comforting, of course.

But I'm still going to put in effort, because I don't believe in any of this fate crap, etc.

Well yeah, you still gotta play to win and put the odds on your side. You may never make it but it won't be because you didn't have what it takes.

This paper does not suggest in any way that effort is not important.

Effort without intelligence is just pointless toil though. Either this paper is saying it’s pure chance, in which case effort isn’t relevant, or some intelligence is required.

Fundamental reality of intelligence is that it can be shared. Especially more effective when it is only shared among small groups. Very few are innate to a person.

If you're saying "intelligence" as in greater than 75 IQ then sure.

If you slide that scale any further you'll quickly be overweighting intelligence to success

Show me all of the company CEOs with an IQ of 80.

Well, considering that with "zero intelligence" you're basically on life support in a coma, I'd say you're not even wrong.

Lot of folks who become rich with average intelligence so it's in no way a barrier.

It's not fate, it's simply randomness. You can be brilliant, put in the effort and still fail miserably, but your chances are nonetheless much higher than people who don't put in the effort or are unintelligent.

Counting cards or rolling d20s comes to mind here.

You can roll more, or find ways to add +5 to your favor -- tilt the odds an extra 10% -- but at the end of the day it's random.

So you either find ways to roll the dice more, roll the dice without having to bet anything, or ways to add an extra 5% onto your odds.

> The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms

This is the least credible genre of "study says" article. You can't make claims about the real world based on some of researcher's guesswork simulation of society.

Wonder what the title would have been if the simulation spit out the opposite result - “Not so lucky after all? Science confirms poverty caused by lack of intelligence, talent.”

The problem with studies like this and why they lack credibility is there probably wouldn’t have been a headline if the model didn’t spit out the result that wealth is created primarily by luck. They either wouldn’t have published the result, or they would have come up with a new model.

Oh definitely - the joke is that a headline like that wouldn’t exist in real life for exactly the reasons you mention.

This guy gets it

The failure rate for smart people who don't try and don't take risks is 100%.

Pretty sure lots of smart people got rich for working at tech/finance/etc without taking large risks - if we're measuring success by wealth.

What's the failure rate for smart people who do try?

Wrong, for those with rich parents it’s very low.

That sounds weird, how can you fail if you don't try? What sounds better to me is that the success rate for those who don't try is 0%, which btw I don't see a counter argument for the article. Obviously if you don't try you don't even enter the lottery.

Yeah feels good right, taking risks have costs and only priviledged folks can afford to do this for any strech of time. Also its not a singular risk and done kind of a thing, you have to embody failure for a while and that does not work without someone providing you with food,shelter and clothing the whole time.

One of the best predictors for financial success is your ZIP code.

https://www.opportunityatlas.org/

While I have no doubt that your zip code is a good predictor of financial success, the link you provided doesn't really support the claim that it's "one of the best". As so far as I can tell, it doesn't even bother try quantifying the predictive effect, let alone comparing it to other factors. It's just a map of income by zip code.

It also wouldn't say anything definitive about luck vs skill anyway. If smart people become richer they will be able to live in nicer neighborhoods. When smart people have kids they are more likely to be smart. Which by assumption means they are more likely to turn out rich themselves. So childhood zip code certainly could correlate with future earned wealth even in a perfect meritocracy.

Obviously this is not the case in reality, factors like access to education play a big role. But disentangling everything is complicated, and I think a lot of people instead just work backwards from the parts they want to be true.

Good thing your ZIP code is not some innate genetic quality then. It's luck where you're born, but not where you move.

If you can afford it, and you are welcomed by the indigenous of that ZIP

"no wonder you're a billionaire, kids who grew up in your zip code have a median income of $40k"

What a dumb argument.

The title implies that "if you're smart, it's up to luck whether you end up rich", yet the opening of the article states that what the article is actually about is whether "the most successful people (the richest of the rich) were actually smart or just lucky".

These are two very different things, completely different topics. Whether the richest dozens of people in the world deserve to be / are smart is a very different question than whether it's just pure luck whether a given smart person ends up rich.

The richer someone is the more it was due to luck.

The conclusion rather trivially follow from the notion of "lucky events" baked into the model. That doesn't prove much.

Mathematical models of this sort have always been a reliable way to get out whatever conclusion you put in.

It doesn't seem like there is much to say on this topic. Wealth accumulation is the outcome of many dice rolls, some that are weighted in ways that are within your control and some that are weighted in ways outside your control. The most you can do is to roll as many dice as you can and, to the best of your ability, choose those that are already optimally weighted.

Which weights in your two categories are larger is the entire discussion though.

> The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth

Don’t use “wealth” and “success” interchangably. It’s a sad Americanism(?).

The smartest people I know never optimized any choices for wealth at all. That’s why they aren’t wealthy. Many chose careers in academia or culture, actively choosing income that might be 1/3 of what they could have made. But they chose it out of curiosity and love for what they are doing.

Others chose to prioritize family over finance. I consider many of them wildly successful too.

Thank you. Wealth is a means, not an end. Many don't understand this until it's too late.

I hear it all the time but only in English. Someone is "really successful" meaning they are rich. Never mind they may be sick, alone, depressed, burned out, ... but they are "successful".

The takeaway is not that you shouldn't make efforts to gain wealth, it's that we tend to ascribe all kinds of "hard work" and "genius" properties to the rich, and we can't help attaching some sort of virtue to people with money and disdain for people who don't have it.

Also, this fantasy of "hard work gets you further" significantly blocks our society's ability to help the poor, because so much bogus morality gets wrapped up in our attempts to lift people out of poverty (see: "Welfare queens" etc etc etc).

Another article from 2016:

> The study found that grades and achievement-test results were markedly better predictors of adult success than raw IQ scores. That might seem surprising -- after all, don’t they all measure the same thing? Not quite. Grades reflect not just intelligence but also what Heckman calls “non-cognitive skills,” such as perseverance, good study habits and the ability to collaborate -- in other words, conscientiousness. To a lesser extent, the same is true of test scores. Personality counts.

> Heckman, who shared a Nobel Prize in 2000 and is founder of the University of Chicago’s Center for the Economics of Human Development, believes success hinges not just on innate ability but on skills that can be taught. His own research suggests childhood interventions can be helpful, and that conscientiousness is more malleable than IQ. Openness -- a broad trait that includes curiosity -- is also connected to test scores and grades.

> IQ still matters, of course. Someone with an IQ of 70 isn’t going to be able to do things that are easy for a person with an IQ of 190. But Heckman says many people fail to break into the job market because they lack skills that aren’t measured on intelligence tests. […]

* https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-12-22/if-you...

* https://archive.is/NxsXd

Companies make the same mistake, by considering only those IQ and IQ-adjacent skills. They have the advantage of being easy to measure, but they're not all you need to be good at your job.

We techies have a tendency to fall into the epistemological trap of "if you can't measure it it's not real". Which might work if you didn't conflate "hard to measure" with "impossible to measure".

If you're smart or talented, then that gives you a huge boost. It's yours to lose. But without effort, talent is of no use. I have seen people who have talent squander it by not putting in the effort. Family wealth obviously helps too , but of the top Substack authors I follow...most succeeded by raw talent and some effort, with otherwise minimal connections or family wealth. Same for top start-up founders...most seem to only come from middle class households.

You should tag this submission as (2018).

All the business schools' cases depend on survivorship bias.

"Again I saw that under the sun the race was not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all." -- Ecclesiastes 9:11 (ESV)

This study is disingenuous. It seems self evident to me that as the amount of wealth increases the amount of luck needed to get there increases. But, its possible to improve your chance of getting lucky. It might not be worth the effort but it is possible.

Agreed -- Working hard and strategically for an extended period of time drastically increases your odds of "getting lucky."

And the most successful people in the world aren't "just the luckiest." I'm sure that they required luck to achieve their wealth (as most if not all of them would probably admit), and if they started again from scratch, they may not reach the same extraordinary heights of success. But that doesn't mean they're just lucky. If you study any highly successful person, you'll almost certainly find specific qualities that made success for the person (in some degree) exceedingly likely.

Many people might read a headline like this and then, consciously or unconsciously, marginalize the accomplishments of successful people. I think that's the wrong approach. Instead, I think it's better to focus on (i) improving yourself and your circumstances, (ii) taking action on what's directly within your control, and (iii) learning from successful people. That way, you'll increase your odds of success, and even if you don't reach your goal, you'll be a better person.

It's hardly "just chance".

Wealth is a fitness landscape. The way to climb it is a function of talent, intelligence, perseverance, connections, leverage, charisma, mindshare, labor capital, financial capital, "right place, right time" (chance), and a multitude of other factors in an n-dimensional, m-agent game that is simultaneously cooperative and competitive.

You can start at an advantage or disadvantage. You can make choices that put you closer to an upwards (or downwards) slope. You can take low-energy paths. Comfortable paths. Wrong paths, expending your energy doing the wrong thing.

There are so many ways to explore.

It seems like the article might be addressing a slightly different question, which is "How should you distribute research funds"

(and if you're smart and want to get rich) you should distribute them evenly.

I must admit I come to HN for the comments 80% of the time. Especially given the fact that most articles are now paywalled.

I let the title serve as a prompt for discussion and short-form essays. Or I find an interesting thread to jump into.

Sometimes a comment will make me dive into the article, or if the headline is sufficiently interesting, I'll start off with it. The headline in this case sounded like a bit of a platitude.

This makes me reflect on just how messy my approach to information gathering and synthesis is. A bit everything, everywhere, all at once.

I do totally feel you, but there is twitter et al for this kind of work. And if you are jumping into the comments, you know a non paywalled link is always posted!

I really appreciate the network of conceptual connections the internet news platforms allow. This 'liberal art' of creative programming benefits from mixing thoughts.

"Connections" are mostly chance as well. If you have the same attitude towards others but you weren't born in the right neighborhood or city or country, your connections potential will be severely limited.

Sure, but a lot of those things listed are chance. Chance is the biggest differentiator. Chance is why you connected with the right person in university to start a business you two aligned with. Chance is why you were raised with parents who prioritized teaching you charisma skills. Chance is why you didn't have to work in a factory since you were 14. Chance is why you didn't get that girl pregnant despite the condom being ripped. So many moments in our life are "just chance".

I don't understand why we have to ignore this reality, I'm not wealthier than someone else because of "charisma" or "talent". I was born into a family that could afford to take risks (lucky), embraced tech early (lucky), kept me healthy and without defects (lucky), I got great teachers growing up (lucky), met the right people who kept me from falling into the traps of drugs and abuse (lucky), the list goes on. I'm grateful for so much in my life, and very little of it has anything to do with some conscious entirely isolated choice of climbing this "fitness landscape of wealth".

So much of what we believe are active choices aren't really. They're a consequence of previous choices. You are limited based off those previous choices. I mean, if you believe in free will, which is hotly debated!

I think the most interesting (and yet obvious) observation of this article is about the very non-linear distribution of wealth (and income) in the modern world. 10x/20x differences are rarely justified by effort or skill, of course. Luck and compounding effects give a partial explanation. But it’s rather clear that inherited compounding effects have a larger effect, and until we have a way to rebalance wealth, more than income, we won’t be able to change that.

Luck and chance is the best thought-terminating cliche out there!

It really does help, because following selective predictions, plans and strategies in an attempt to divine the future of the company, can really go to bad places. Sometimes it's easier to stop thinking about the ideal strategies and just send the work in, without thinking about it. On "luck".

This is particularly important when the design is already set in place and you just have to get it out.

> However, they also experience unlucky events that reduce their wealth. These events occur at random.

Seems like an obvious flaw in the study.

This is a sloppy article that summarizes sloppy research and conclusions. Any State school science graduate student could point out the various reasons why. Though I'm unfamiliar with the average quality of the MIT Tech Review, I'd guess that the article isn't worthy of it.

MIT Tech Review is pretty bad in general. This kind of flimsy speculation is common. I'm not sure why MIT allows it to be affiliated with them.

They had me until they said “computer model” halfway through the first sentence. This study thus puts forth an interesting theory but hasn’t proven it, so the headline is hyperbolic.

I mean, did Michael Jordan just get lucky every time he shot a basketball? No, he had talent. Maybe not 10000x the talent of some street baller, but then maybe wealth doesn't scale linearly with talent.

Not sure that a game of basketball has enough parallels with the activities involved in generation of significant wealth for this to be a sound comparison.

All the basketball players I can name are very wealthy.

All the players you can't, probably aren't.

It's at least true for millinnials or can even be stretched to gen X. Everything was decided before you were born if you're in that age range. Not even a debate. But as a universal principle? I don't think so. If society wasn't controlled this tight, intelligence would have actually played a role. We're just very unlucky generation. The people above were well aware of Ai cybernetics even when Baby Boomers were literally babies. Can't afford social class instability. I feel sorry for my generation.

Because if you’re wise you don’t worship money.

(2018)

They did a experiment which demonstrated that music popularity was arbitrary by showing how social interaction and recommendations arbitrarily focus on a couple of tunes and people prefer to gather momentum behind a few and that's how popularity comes from: some arbitrary randomness that meets a certain threshold then gets momentum and attracts backers purely from momentum.

Wealth creation in isolation would be no different.

>Wealth creation in isolation would be no different.

Unless you think "wealth creation in isolation" involves valuing assets with no relation to fundamentals, there's no reason to believe why that would be the same as popularity contests for popular media.

The implication is that if you are 10x richer than someone else, but not 10x smarter or more talented, then you must have just got lucky.

I disagree. Luck can certainly play a role in success, but what most people attribute to luck is just recognizing and seizing an opportunity when it knocks.

They say that 80% of success is just showing up because large numbers of people fail to do that. You often just have to be a little bit better than the competition to win the prize (and first place often pays a lot better than second place). Compound interest can make a huge difference in your retirement if you just save $1 a day more. Plenty more examples like those.

> Luck can certainly play a role in success, but what most people attribute to luck is just recognizing and seizing an opportunity when it knocks.

There are lots of opportunities being taken. The lucky ones succeed. That doesn't take away from the skill, guts, perseverance, etc. required. However, lots of very talented people fail time and time again.

One could definitely argue that failure is part of the journey to success and understanding that is part of the game. On the other hand, many smart people don't have the resources to fail over and over again, often due to factors outside of their control.

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