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Comment by interroboink | Hacker News Reader

I think in many cases when you trace it back, it comes down to ... luck (:

Which is funny, since now the descendants of some lucky people get the opportunity to take lots of chances and say "look how hard work pays off — I made my own luck!"

Though that's a pretty simplistic take; I feel like hard work really does pay off, broadly speaking, but also luck plays a (much) bigger role than most give it credit.

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Luck will never find the person living in his mom's basement playing video games and griping about inequity.

Given the number of possible alternative realities they could have been born into it, I'd strongly suggest luck has already found such people. It's even possible had they not been born into such an easy existence they might have ultimately done better for themselves ("possible", not likely).

That you cite this as the alternative shows the limits of your perspective.

I think you miss the point. I believe the point is if you don't try then luck won't help you. Or in other words you can't win the lottery if you don't buy a ticket.

I think you missed my point. All of the trying in the world isn't going to replace the luck that's required for most people to succeed-- be it being born white and in a middle-class or better household in a middle-class-or-better town, not being sidled with familial or health obligations, or even being born with a cognitive profile that has workplace utility. Being comfortable enough to live with a parent and be lazy is already a privilege that a giant chunk of the US population doesn't have. Nobody is arguing that people born into opportune circumstances can succeed without doing anything. They just have the opportunity to make that effort turn into significant results when many others don't.

Tickets are expensive, most people cannot afford more than one. Many are born into debt they have little hope of escaping, much less buying tickets.

Those born wealthy can often buy so many tickets it's virtually guaranteed they'll stumble into something that works, at least once.

No one is saying people don't have to at least lift a finger to try. Just that birth luck affords so many other opportunities that the advice of outliers and the born comfortable isn't transferable.

I was pointing out the circular logic in these explanations. Saying someone is rich because their parents were rich (ad-infinitum) is like saying someone is lucky because they are lucky. It is not a useful explanation because you can't use this to do anything. In fact if you use this explanation to decide public policy, like say socialism, then the converse is also true, you make everybody poor, then their descendants will be poor. But obviously in our history on average, we've all been getting richer in the long run.

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