Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not. We are all losing out because of this | Hacker News Reader

Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not. We are all losing out because of this

ourworldindata.org

40 pointsfrasermarlow49 comments

“To study ability, they matched a subset of their data on inventors with records of their math scores back when they were third graders.4 To study the role that circumstances play, the research team matched the inventor dataset with tax record data that allowed them to study the socio-economic situation they grew up in.”

That is when the credibility of the study is lost on me. Maths scores and creativity/innovation are not necessarily related. To invent, you not only have to pay attention (also curiosity and a keen sense of observation), you also have to work diligently, systematically AND, more often than not, diffusely. I would argue that these combinations are rare and may be the stuff that makes an inventor. Do economic circumstances play an important role? I think they might contribute, but I doubt that their contribution is significant. So many great inventions have come from people with very modest economic backgrounds (Edison, Faraday, Nikola Tesla, Alfred Nobel, to name but a few).

>the credibility of the study is lost on me.

For me it's the pure survivorship bias.

>“Who becomes an inventor in America?” is the title of a study by Alex Bell, Raj Chetty, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova, and John Van Reenen published in 2019.

>It is based on an impressively comprehensive dataset. The authors studied the lives of 1.2 million inventors in the US from birth to adulthood.

True to the title of the study, but it doesn't appear to speak about lost opportunities which were actually (not theoretically) hindering those who were not in the study.

To get a more accurate picture you would need to more intensively study those who would have realized a significant invention, with only the lack of opportunity as a roadblock. You wouldn't be able to locate subjects like that nearly as easily as published inventors. They don't have any directory of non-published near-inventors ;)

Talent is everywhere but it is quite rare.

Still in excess compared to opportunity though.

Not only is talent everywhere, but opportunity is everywhere too - it just takes different forms and the resources necessary to capture that opportunity are not evenly distributed. I live in small town America. We have a ton of opportunity here, but there's no question that the labor, capital, and similar resources needed to unlock that opportunity is far more challenging to gather here than it would be in large coastal cities. Similarly, there are talented people here - for example, we have colleges and a nearby national lab - but keeping those people here and putting them to work is not easy.

"...and the resources necessary to capture that opportunity are not evenly distributed." If the resources to capture opportunity are not available, do those opportunities actually exist?!

Sure - you can see the opportunity, you can build the business case, but you might not have the resources to make it happen... case in point... we have a nearby recreation area that had fallen on hard times for about the past decade. It was clear someone with sufficient resources could turn it around, but one of the main problems was staffing. It was going to be really difficult to get good people willing to either commute the hour to get there, or who could be trusted to live up there in employee housing year round (because there had been a lot of problems with drugs, etc...). And the buildings needed serious updating. Finally someone from outside the area came with money from another venture, plus had multiple adult children who he could put in hands-on roles where if they were successful, then this would become their inheritance. It's the only way the business could have been made to work, at least until they can get it up and running as a going concern. The opportunity was there, the resources weren't -- until suddenly they were.

If the so called opportunity is the opportunity to "build a business case," what kind of opportunity is that? I have the opportunity to slap myself, but I don't think you would consider that an opportunity in the sense we are discussing - but maybe this is the problem, we never agreed on the definition of opportunity.

I find it rather hard to take you seriously after reading your bio where you decry the population diversifying on HN.

>I find it rather hard to take you seriously after reading your bio where you decry the population diversifying on HN.

Good sir, look at the needlessly combative nature of not only your comments to me but rather all of your comments. You are at best a troll who brings down the quality of discourse on this site. I don't really give a rats patootie if you "take me seriously," HN isn't real life, it's an online thread of strangers firing away their opinions. Perhaps engage in a more constructive manner, or realize that you are exactly the kind of space waster that caused me to add that soapbox to my bio, and causes me to wonder why on earth I continue to waste time on this site - probably because I have yet to find a better option for tech, science, and interesting news.

I guess you can't answer my question because I am supposedly needlessly combative.

[Edit]

I apologize for the insulting comment I made.

There are some intriguing observations which indicate that talent is, indeed, a lot more common than thought, but needs specific conditions to thrive.

1. "The Martians" - a group of Jewish Hungarian scientists from the early 20th century, who were about the most prominent in their fields and significantly advanced global scientific knowledge, even though Hungary wasn't a particularly rich or big nation at that time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)

2. The painters of Renaissance Florence - within approximately 200 years, one (albeit rich) city in Italy produced an enormous volume of high-quality art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florentine_painting

3. The Bell Labs around 1950-1960 - an enormous concentration of tech talent that produced much of the foundations of current IT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs

Notably, none of those groups/centers are productive today. The mojo can be lost again.

Opportunity is everywhere. Talent is not.

Do you have any evidence to support your claim?

we pay software engineers 3x median income to barely know react

service jobs and skilled trades all over are facing labor shortages

We pay managers who know nothing about technology even more.

[Edit]

And who's fault is it that people who barely know react are getting hired at those rates? Hiring managers.

idt we can simply blame the next rung up the ladder. we live in a culture that increasingly glorifies mediocrity and flattery. the hiring managers and engineers alike have been reared to believe the only difference from one person to the next is sensibilities, so any judgment on talent is a failure to support

The CEO/C-Suite/Board is responsible for the behavior of the company; they set the rules, and steer the "ship." They decide what money is allocated where. I'm not sure who is glorifying mediocrity, that's an odd one.

Close, but actually large PE firms call the shots. A small number of them control most tech, that’s why all these companies look like cookie cutter copies of each other.

PE firms do exert massive influence, but they aren't really the day to day business drivers. Even including the board is tenuous. Board members are often out of touch with the business and just rubber stamps - look how well the OpenAI board performed. If you think Sam Altman should have been fired, they failed, and if you think he should not have been fired, they failed.

Mediocre employees are easier to control which leads to a more predictable business that doesn't do much but also doesn't seem like a big risk to shareholders.

Plus since mediocre employees are easier to replace you can use layoffs as smoke and mirrors to buy more time for coming up with your latest grift.

Simply rehire mediocre employees laid off.

Repeat.

The companies paying 3x median income are trying to hire smart people, not necessarily ones with particular skills.

are you hiring?

We do?

I'd really like to see where these jobs are at the moment because I'd like one so I can stop busting my ass in embedded for 1.5x median income.

Every time I search it looks to me like all the jobs that take people that just barely know React have a big long list of other requirements that are unstated and/or nutjob hiring practices and other hoops to jump through. Maybe all you need on the job is React but it looks like passing the interview is a nightmare even compared to the interviews we give for people writing embedded and systems software. The prevalence of LeetCode is surprisingly massively more common for React developer interviews it seems than it is for people like me that actually need and use that kind of knowledge regularly.

So something doesn't add up for me here. My anecdotal impression was that the frontend has a much larger amount of people that are fighting over very limited spots and is thus hyper competitive (and maybe even downright corrupt in terms of hiring practices), even if the job itself is probably the easiest if we are judging based on "CS cred" or background knowledge requirements about computers or whatever. And that makes me think once your in it that I'm going to feel compelled to work 60+ hour weeks because the danger of losing the job and needing to win the hiring lottery again is so great.

React is the programmer equivalent of the phenomenon of the starving artist with a liberal arts degree. Maybe you have a chance to strike it rich, but most just wind up unemployed or in a chop shop on some horrible contract.

If you feel you are underpaid, you should leave regardless. Re React jobs, its probably harder now to get in due to the VC bubble bursting a bit after zero percent rates went aeay, but it used to be a very viable path to earn double median US wages after a year or less of experience.

You are down pretty hard on it, when the reality is more conplicated. I personally don’t know many developers who actually work 60 hour weeks, though a lot work intense 45 hour ones thay feel like 60. 60 hours a week is a lot man, if you are working that much you should take a breather.

Yeah, everyone on this site and places like Blind says they are making a lot of money. Reality seems a bit different. Any startup has something of a hard cap at just around $200k salary for a senior. That's in the Bay Area, and for specialty occupations (AI infra, Linux internals, and the like). That number is not 3x median. Pretty sure those rich React devs exist only in dreams.

> That number is not 3x median.

You are inadvertently correct, but in the opposite way than you probably think.

$200K is more than 3x the median individual income in the US.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N

It's slightly under 3x the median household income, but it seems strange to compare a median household income to an individual's salary.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N

If we confine our comparison to only California, I couldn't find median individual income, but median household income is only 14% higher than the nationwide median, so it seems likely that individual income in CA tracks similarly: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSCAA646N

I don't think it's a weird comparison at all: households include dual-income-no-kids households too, and they would skew the average higher. To raise a family in the Bay Area one parent has to stay home, or a lot of money has to be paid for childcare (to the tune of 20-30k per year per kid).

I don't think this is quite the "gotcha, you are actually rich!" that you wanted this to be.

And hey, I googled the numbers too before posting ;)

If you claim talent is everywhere, the onus is on you to prove it. Disproving a sweeping generalization requires a single instance. For instance, I'm looking out of my window, and I don't see any talent - ergo, talent is not everywhere. Facetious, but not entirely.

I'm asking the OP to prove, or rather, even begin to attempt to argue, and I quote, "opportunity is everywhere," which is only part one of their baseless claims! That's why I asked them to support their argument with evidence. The article provides some evidence that opportunity is not everywhere.

This place is a moral sewer.

"Opportunity is everywhere" is another way of saying that, starting from any situation, you can improve your lot by being creative and taking the initiative. It would be hard to prove either way, but in my experience there is some truth to it. Our limitations are largely self-imposed.

I don't understand your "moral sewer" comment. Opinions are just that, opinions. Morality only attaches to actions.

This is like pulling teeth; so much for the guidelines about generous interpretation, no cross examining, etc.. The article is about jobs and life, I'm didn't ask to get into a debate about "What is the true meaning of opportunity?"

What does talent even mean anymore?

What did it ever mean?

Trying to quantify it through tests is such a… bullshit proposition. If you had Steve Jobs take a math test in third grade, I don’t think he would have done very well. Or maybe he would have - I don’t know. Some people only discover math later in life, some people can do trivial math in elementary school very well but completely fail once they get into geometry and logical proofs.

The point of the article is common sense - if everyone in the world had the time to develop like Steve Jobs and work through their bs, then we would likely have more successful adults in the Central African Republic. It just goes to show you how powerful environment is - and why everyone wants to move to America. A good reminder to be thankful to live in this country.

>> If you had Steve Jobs take a math test in third grade, I don’t think he would have done very well.

He apparently never passed a single test or even completed an assignment in fifth grade.

> What did it ever mean?

Probably the same thing it has always meant -- whatever people want it to mean.

> Trying to quantify it through tests is such a… bullshit proposition.

I completely agree.

I think one of the biggest disservice of modern-ish thinking is how quickly we are to write-off individuals. Humans are creatures that are full of endless surprises, and sometimes it merely just takes being in the right place at the right time to achieve greatness. A person with an IQ of 100 is considered to be of average intelligence.

However, I think it would be laughable, and a downright disservice, to claim that a person with an average IQ is only capable of average accomplishments because some proprietary test that has been arbitrarily slapped together with an equally laughably low correlation coefficient of 0.20 or whatever says so.

I find all this idea to be so damaging to people. One does not have to be "greater than" to be great. How many successful musicians have had great careers despite average abilities? How many virtuosos have accomplished nothing noteworthy? Jimi Hendrix and Bach are both talented, but who is more talented? I think the better question is, "Who fucking cares? Why does it even matter?" They both created music that millions enjoy, and that is what truly matters. At least, to me.

About 1.5 billion people were raised out of extreme poverty over about 30 years arguably because of capitalism. Similarly, large global middle classes have built up over that time. It feels like we should keep doing what we've been doing?

If you define wealth as having money, maybe, but if you define it as having food, shelter, and mental health, then less so. The middle class is collapsing, so maybe we should do things a little differently?

It doesn't make sense when the major health problem in the US is obesity.

Always these childish and clueless economic takes on this board.

What does obesity have to do with anything? People are eating unhealthy?

> Always these childish and clueless economic takes on this board.

"Avoid swipes" and "Please don't create new accounts regularly."

Obesity is certainly a factor holding back certain communities here in the USA. But I agree it's a tangential issue. On the issue of whether or not "the middle class is collapsing," I hear lots of arguments (as usual very polarized) on both sides of that debate. Does anybody have strong empirical studies to share (ideally non-partisan!) on how this statement holds up? I have googled and probably found the obvious stuff but I would love to read up more on this.

Here are a few sources[1][2] (oops, [1] is from 2020) but I don't have anything special. I think there was an article on HN that showed this well, but I can't find it. Basically, kids today have extremely limited chance to do better than their parents.

Homelessness is at an all time high.[6]

The following are loosely related to the economy, in that the cost of dealing with the problem is growing, and they prevent well adjusted growth.

There's also a mental health epidemic[3] from the Surgeon General[4].

Also consider the possible extinction level climate change issues[5].

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/fewer-americans-are-makin...

[3] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-05-02/loneli...

[4] https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-soci...

[5] https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/skyrocketing-ocean-t...

[6] https://www.npr.org/homelessness-affordable-housing-crisis-r...

Be careful how you measure that. Extreme poverty was defined as less than a dollar per day. Are you measuring progress or inflation?

It's a power law. The middle class also grew, less substantially. 86% of the world's population are wealthy enough to afford to own a smart phone. To me, that's pretty amazing.

I think that it is fair to attribute some of the ubiquity of smart phones to capitalism. However, I think that technological development is also a big factor. Even the least capitalistic/industrialized parts of the world are dramatically more technologically advanced than they where 100 years ago.

I think the point is that capitalism drives that technological innovation.

No, you see, only the bad parts of our current society are attributable to capitalism. /s

That's what I was trying to get at. It would be unfair to not give capitalism any of the credit for the advances that we have made (after all, people certainly blame it when things have stagnated), but it's probably also not fair to give it all of the credit. There were technological advances long before capitalism and many (most?) basic research takes place outside of capitalism in academia.

But there's a pretty long way to go from basic research to usable technology for regular people. Of course advancement would happen without capitalism, but would it happen at a similar pace? Society socialism didn't seem to be able to keep up (eg computers).

The Nordic countries do a lot of research & product development and they are social democracies which is a moderate form of socialism.

I think that's some of what's captured by the idea of "late stage capitalism". That is to say, capitalism worked when companies where competing on quality, word of mouth was important, and mechanisms like social norms and unions promoted a balance of power between capitalists and workers.

However, capitalists have increasingly figured out ways to compete via regulatory capture, walled gardens, planned obsolescence, financialization, etc. Increasingly sophisticated marketing makes it easier to bypass the need for word of mouth sales. The 1% are increasingly insulated from the opinions of everyone else and unions are much weaker.

As a result, capitalism no longer works particularly well. At least without policies to correct for market failures; e.g. social democracy.

Doesn't china account for like at least half of that? And even there but also everywhere else it has stalled or even reversed since 2020?

Which is not even getting into the problem that "extreme poverty" is defined by organizations operating from within wealthy countries, who have their own interests, incentives, and constraints around these figures and their boundaries.

If you want to argue for it all being capitalism go ahead, so far you've just stated it.

way more than half. the world bank says at least 75% of the reduction has been in china alone and some other stats show that globally, excluding china, poverty has gotten worse in recent decades

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