Conversely there's a lot of unsuccessful entrepreneurs who blame bad luck entirely for their failures. There's a lot of "I didn't deserve that. I worked hard, I made smart decisions. I should have succeeded".
Conversely there's a lot of unsuccessful entrepreneurs who blame bad luck entirely for their failures. There's a lot of "I didn't deserve that. I worked hard, I made smart decisions. I should have succeeded".
I've seen people attributing Taylor Swift' success entirely to luck. But eventhough of course she has inherent advantage, she still has to defeat tons of people who also has the same or even more inherent advantage as her. The numbers are arbitrary and a spectrum, and I've seen too many people treating it as black and white.
Billionaires optimize for very different goals than most other people. You don't become one by accident, while you are actually focused solely on your work. That will at most get you to a few million, maybe tens of millions. At higher wealth, you need to focus on the wealth itself. I don't think that that is something good if (even) more people tried to do.
People getting better like Taylor Swift is IMHO much better than people trying to be like a billionaire. The latter is all about controlling more and more important aspects of important parts of society, from production to sales, and in the end politics in general.
Taylor Swift getting really good does not negatively influence others, or force them how to live. Billionaires controlling more and more does. It's a tradeoff. Having more centralized control, like creating a Walmart or an Amazon, has advantages, but it also has disadvantages.
Also, the reason there even is the option of becoming that wealthy, controlling so much value, is almost entirely outside the hands of the individual. Like every human, billionaires too rely almost entirely on the context they live in. The vast majority of what we have was created by the dead, knowledge, infrastructure, culture. Even the most capable human only adds a very tiny amount. Mostly billionaires are good at gaining control over already existing things and other people.
Not necessarily a negative, a central control is essential for anything higher level. The point is that one, they did NOT create most of the things they use, second, there are only so many "chief" positions available in the human network to begin with (even if that number is somewhat flexible).
However, I think the laws of competition don't work for those positions of central power like they do in other "markets". I doubt billionaires are so rich (meaning just the resources they use for themselves) because there is little supply and competition for those positions (you may have trouble finding another Warren Buffett, but many billionaire positions are about the right time and place, especially when it's about resource control and not about innovation). I think there is plenty, and many would be just as capable as many currently holding those spots, but that does not cause their "wages" to fall.
Humanity is all about specialization, but those of us close to or inside of the controlling system - i.e. closer to the money - use their positions to get a much larger share. We also have a lot of circular reasoning and justifications: It's just, otherwise the (finance) system would not have created that outcome! Which makes questioning that very system impossible, because it tautologically justifies itself no matter what.
Luck is the crossroad of opportunity and preparation. The "opportunity" here is basically "luck" with a tiny bit of sway. Sometimes opportunity is missed or never comes from no fault of your own. If more people saw it this way they may not cast it off purely as happenstance.
Deterministic chaos in the sense of "fixed, non-random rules producing outcomes that are unpredictable in the long term due to extreme sensitivity to initial conditions".
A life lottery of initial conditions and then it plays out via deterministic chaos is just such an unacceptable idea to the modern protestant self conception.
Instead we will continue to pretend the harder you work the luckier you get because at least then we have some free will in the situation.
Buffet is a great example and has made this point practically. Won the life lottery to not have been born in the year 1400 and the idea of buying 6 packs of coke to sell to my friends for a profit as a little boy is just not in my nature, again because of my initial conditions.
You can't emulate luck, you can't control luck, you can't explain luck.
I suspect luck has less to do with Buffet's fortune than most billionaires since he's in investments, so he gets compared to other hedge funds with similar starting resources. He seems to have made it work over the long term and not just had one lucky break.
Apparently he started his first investment at age 11. 8 decades is a long time to compound even at low rates.
Compounding ensures that he will probably have a lot of money either way, which is why total $$ is a bad proxy for luck vs skill.