People who grew up with high economic connectedness earn more
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Beyond that, I just have a lot of trouble accepting the conclusion because of everything I have seen in my career. Hard working people tend to know other hard working people. Hard working people get more done. Getting more done seemed to get you promoted, at least where I worked. Getting promoted had a meaningful, positive effect on income. People who weren’t very productive languished, conversely.
Possible this experience does not generalize to all workplaces!
Has it? I was under the impression we could hardly define, much less measure that.
I worked at a (very well known) test publishing company, for some time.
You would not believe how often someone would hear where I work and lecture me about intelligence measurement being nonsense. Almost like they were offended that the test batteries exist.
But also, they had absolutely no idea how those tests were developed and validated. They weren’t even aware of the language and cultural work involved in making test variations that validate across different people.
I would mostly shrug and keep my mouth shut. I’m not an expert on the subject. But I saw a bit of what those many smart people did at work, and I’m confident that they were better informed.
Maybe it was just silly defensiveness, but for a while I started to think all the delightful, “You’re all special in your own way.” messaging of our youth had been extrapolated into more unreasonable notions.
> Has it? I was under the impression we could hardly define, much less measure that.
IQ has a strong positive correlation with life outcomes. Economic and otherwise. Whether IQ is a good measure of "intelligence" remains debated but there's no question that high scores in that measure correlate with high scores in life outcome measures: Life expectancy, economic success, relationship success, etc. Every single thing you can measure about a person's life trends upwards with IQ.
Some (maybe much) of the effect can be attributed to privilege and other covariants, so we don't know if IQ is causal for life outcomes but we have strong evidence that it's correlated.
one study of many: https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=74943
And since IQ is just a proxy for intelligence (however good), it also correlates to some greater or lesser degree with the other factors.
Yeah it turns out having positive multipliers on your inputs leads to better outcomes. Who knew!
It can't possibly be intelligence (would be inconvenient if it were) but there's something there. Maybe we can call it "shminshmellishence".
"Intelligence doesn't exist" is just a defense mechanism for above-average intelligence people to feel like they earned all their good outcomes.
But here's the thing: even if it was all hard work and not that you were born of above-average intelligence, it's pure luck that you were born someone who works hard.
But also intelligence exists and it's wildly discrediting to insist it doesn't.
That sounds... suspiciously convenient.
No, there's actually nothing convenient about the fact that most people are accidents of their genetic, geographic, and environmental roll of the dice.
The convenient view is: I worked hard because I chose to work hard. I achieved hard things because I worked to be smart. People who did not achieve the same things did not do so because they chose not to work hard or they chose not to be smart.
Very self-serving and transparently wrong.
I will grant you that there are some people who, due to handicaps or other things beyond their control, do not have the option of choosing to work hard. But I claim (without statistical proof, I admit) that by far the majority of those who do not work hard, still have the real option of choosing to work hard, but do not.
For most of those who won't, "I can't" is also "very self-serving and transparently wrong."
"Go look up twin studies" is a very strange thing to tell someone on a message board in 2026. It's like saying "go look up phlogiston".
Fraternal twins reared together: .55 correlation in IQ
Identical twins reared apart: .75 correlation in IQ
And the genetic correlation grows as children age.
No, genetic studies did not "demolish" heritability estimates, they set a floor on them. Genetic studies do not and cannot (currently) predict all phenotypic outcomes, they set the floor on how much variation can be caused by genetic differences.
The genetic predictions don't even directly contradict, never mind demolish, the twin study findings.
The "missing heritability problem" is only a problem if one believes our genetic analysis techniques are comprehensive, but we already know they're not. For example, current methods are extremely limited in detecting gene-gene interactions, which we have good reason to suspect are widespread (otherwise making new genetic drugs would be trivial).
This has come up a bunch on HN and I don't want to rehash dozens of earlier comments, but the search bar will give you plenty of cites.
I'm not sure what you mean by "hereditarian" given that even the genetic studies obviously point to significant heritability.
This is always a funny conversation because on the one side you have people saying "intelligence is both heritable and correlated with nearly every outcome we care about."
On the other hand you have people saying "nuh uh! It's only... medium-high heritability and medium-high correlation with other positive outcomes," as if it makes any material difference to any downstream question.
Again, the search bar will avail, but the answers you're giving here are very early-90s.
Why don't you just share what your estimate is?
Is it zero?
It's totally OK if we're just not going to persuade each other or develop any productive ideas in this thread! I've said all I originally wanted to say.
My brother is mildly autistic, too, but he has always had the option to skip out of socialization in favor of the computer, and we've lost the societal structure that helped my grandfather thrive.
I don't think it's diagnosis that helps people.
It might be the societal structure is good for everyone, regardless of their diagnoses, or lack thereof.
I'm not sure what the link is between your brother getting diagnosed, and him having the option to skip out on socializing. Undiagnosed people frequently make the same choice under worse circumstances, since it's hard to name why they want to choose this escape. I wouldn't be surprised if the undiagnosed made this choice more often, as they struggle in ways most people around them don't seem to, which naturally leads to the struggling seeking community in other places (= digital ones).
It may well be that a life journey like your grandfather's was more likely for mildly autistic people 50 years ago (though I'd urge you not to forget that many in that situation just break and die early), but the world has fundamentally shifted since then. IMO not getting diagnosed wouldn't improve things, people would largely live the same, but with much greater self-doubt, anger and broken relationships.
This is mostly public sector and utilities
Of course reality hits hard so I’m now good with people. Not my taste but I can fake it easily.
It doesn’t mean you need to stop being technical now, but at least start allocating a few hours a month to relationships in a meaningful, intentional way.
I do wish it were easier to fire people for poor performance though. Nothing kills morale like tolerating incompetence
If the unemployment benefits are strong then I have no problem with easier dismissal rules
There's a type of hard worker who puts in a lot of effort and hopes it's noticed, but gets stuck being loyal to jobs like this.
If you work at one of those jobs, they're going to collect around you. You might be getting pulled into that type of work without knowing it.
The successful ones know that getting promoted is just 1 out of many potential career moves for them to consider at a given point. If they're not getting promoted, they get up and leave for another company where their hard work will be appreciated.
Some people get stuck at those companies, watch people working hard and getting nowhere, and go in the opposite direction: They stay put and stop trying hard. That can be fine for people whose goal is to have a stable job that isn't too demanding. However it gives a very wrong impression of the relationship between hard work and success when extrapolate over an entire career.
There are a lot of things about dysfunctional and broken companies that shouldn't be generalized. It's too easy to get trapped in cycles of cynicism and defeatism in a place like those.
I couldn't get a job after graduation (post dot com bust). I started master, and in one of the class, I did the group project myself. One of the member of the group project was manager who got me the interview at her company and hired me.
It’s not about working hard but about creating the perception that you’re working hard for the company!
Getting promoted at a FAANG is like a micro-effect. One percent of one percent of one percent. Generalizing our experience to 72 million Americans ain't it boss.
And our experience is subject to dozens of selection bias. For example, most of the best people I know at my current job are that way in part because I trained them at my last job at a university. And then they referred me into their employer networks. Beyond the hurdles of getting into a flagship state school, having those connections matter. Nobody I know from undergrad had any employment at FAANG when I was laid off a decade ago, I just got lucky enough to have a second cohort contacts in the form of student employees at a different flagship state university doing internships, landing jobs and looking for referral bonuses. Last I checked LinkedIn I'm the only engineer from my alma mater at my employer.
Anyone who has decades of experience won’t believe this. Promotion is very much a politics thing, the “merit” serving only documentation purposes. It’s not an indicator of your long-term performance after the promotion.
It’s good to point out that a single study can’t definitively draw causality but you should apply the same level of discernment to yourself.
If hard work implies good outcomes. --contrapositive -> If bad outcomes implied bad work.
I don't think it takes a lot of life experience to see that the above is not true. I argee that hardwork can definitely be corrolated or rather feels corrolated in retrospect but its not a given. Some of the hardest working people are paid the least if you adjust for the hours they actually work, or if the inherent value of their work is low (you mentioned failure to generalize) but even in specific case of tech its not a given that hardwork will actually make the differnece.
Almost no amount of hardwork can overcome the better sitution some people are born into / inherent. Someone staving in africa just isn't going to be the next physics star or atleast the statisistics don't predict them. There is certainly an equalization curve where if you incoming connects and circumstances are good enough hardwork because the decider. But your starting conditions play a huge role on where you will land in the grand scheme of things. You certainly can change your outcome but sometimes hardwork is not the same as smart work, if getting a promotion is 5 year process at your current job or moving to a new place. The better outcome actually comes from working less. I think some other commenters mention this as well.
I definitely agree that where you start has a huge impact on what’s possible. I am not saying that a really hard working villager in sub Saharan Africa is going to get better outcomes than the lazy child of an upper middle class family in the US.
That reads so odd to me. It's like someone did a search-and-replace for "Well off" with "Hard working".
I am not aware of hard working people knowing each other. Like did they attend the same "hard working" schools or something?
Now imagine, that there are 10 teams like yours in the world. what do you think the likelihood that those top two performers know the other top two performers and at least one of those other teams?
(Hard work doesn’t hurt, either, but that goes without saying.)
Where you grow up, what schools you attend, who your childhood friend group is, luckily not getting hit by a bus and put in the hospital, etc. A whole host of factors conspire to grant or deny you opportunities.
However once the opportunity arises you have to seize it. Many people have lots of opportunity yet accomplish nothing because they lack the skills, will, or both to do so. Conversely many people with the drive and skills never hit the right opportunity and end up nowhere.
For whatever reason the broader culture seems to bounce back and forth between both extremes. The whole "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and "get a job you lazy bum" crowd acting as if you can get rich purely with hard work. Then on the other side there seems to be this well-intentioned idea on the left that if we simply give every under-privileged kid opportunity they'll be successful.
Real humans and real lives are far more complex than such simple notions.
I would add that, while “giving every under-privileged kid opportunity” wouldn’t make them all successful, for just the reasons you said, I’m not sure that’s even the bottleneck! It’s like… how do you “give someone opportunity?” It’s a very subtle problem. It’s not easy. I doubt there’s any straightforward intervention where you can give everyone 10 units of opportunity, use them wisely please. School funding and clean streets and EBT and whatnot are sort of proxies for this, but it’s just really not that simple.
(This isn’t a disagreement with anything, by the way.)
I'd be surprised if more than a tiny minority of people actually believe that. It has more to do with believing that ideally, everyone should have access to the same opportunities.
It seems rather straightforward and non-controversial that providing more people opportunities to succeed will inevitably lead to more people succeeding, even if only a small minority of people are capable of seizing upon the opportunities they are provided.
The difference is I argue from an ideological standpoint that everyone should receive the same opportunities while acknowledging that only a fraction of people will be able to turn those opportunities into success.
I should point out this ideal is core to the very founding of the US:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The original quote was a typical conservative dismissal intended to demoralize: since not everyone who's given opportunities will succeed, we shouldn't bother providing opportunity to the riffraff.
Here's Daniel Lemire dunking on PhDs: https://x.com/lemire/status/2082851447499088173
Lemire in part claims:
"For social reasons, it is highly uncommon for people to fail the oral defense of their thesis. Some people are just terrible at it, naturally. They cannot think well on their feet. They get confused and answer the wrong question."
The fraction of your 1% with the credentials to be on the panel just hands them out regardless as a consolation prize.
Who is gonna be able to challenge them. Except on the whole being 1 of billions like everyone else.
It's social status moat chasing.
Every one deserves recognition for having completed that journey, if not for having meaningfully contributed to their field of research.
Before him, I found math and physics unintuitive, but he explained it in a way that (to me) made the whole high school physics trivial.
I studied physics at the university where I learned programming, and switched to software engineering.
If someone does exact opposite of what you've did, than it's not unfair he's doing worse than you do.
Well I never had the opportunity to meet that friend. I would have been a good friend to them and kept them for ages, but because of circumstances beyond my control, I never even had the opportunity to do so. Kind of seems like a good way to sum up that notion would be to say that the OP was lucky to have been in the right place at the right time, no?
>If someone does exact opposite of what you've did, than it's not unfair he's doing worse than you do.
But why would they do the exact opposite of what the OP did? If it turned out so well for the OP, why wouldn't others also want to do the same thing to end up with the same results?
>But why would they do the exact opposite of what the OP did? Well, for example. There are lots of nerd kids with perspective to succeed in professional life but are "usual" targets of bullies in childhood.
Some kids step-up for bullied kids because that's the right thing to do, other kids join the bullies as it gave them fake feeling of power.
A lot of the decisions that define us for our entire life are made when we are at our dumbest, or at least most impulsive: our teenage years.
I, like many (most?) teenage boys, really wanted girls to like me, and I didn’t have a lot of luck asking girls out in high school [1]. If a girl that I thought was cute had offered to hang out with me and tried to get me to do drugs, there’s a decent chance I would have done it. If they had gotten me to do the really scary stuff like heroin or meth who knows how different (and probably worse) my life could have been?
[1] To be clear, I am not an incel; the girls were always actually very nice in declining me and obviously even if they weren’t it’s not like I was entitled to a girlfriend.
What we can do is apply the law equally to people.
I think Thinking Fast and Slow talks a lot about maximizing your surface area for luck.
Nothing beats luck.
Sorry to all the unlucky people. I wish you could all be lucky, too!
I think sometimes success in life is from making a series of "right decisions" when those forks in the road come along. (And not fucking up when you do in fact luck onto the right path.)
Wealth distribution is a policy issue so it's not random. It's coupled to intentional politics.
I am not going to say that I didn’t work hard for whatever success I have, but I was very lucky to have good parents who cared about making sure their kids were successful, and friends who didn’t really peer pressure me to do anything terrible, and just sort of a natural interest in computers that ended up being profitable.
I do think I am relatively ambitious and that certainly helped, but I am not naive enough to think that things would be as good for me as they are if there weren’t a lot of positive lucky factors.
Correlation != Causation
> Children who grow up with high economic connectedness earn 20 percent more as adults on average than otherwise similar children who do not.
"otherwise similar children" is doing a lot of work here.
You have high economic connectedness, which may mean you grew up in a rich neighborhood to parents that are smart and value education.
Or maybe you're connected to your Harvard classmates who are successful, which means you're likely smart and work hard.
Or you're a successful networker, so you're socially adept.
But it's almost certainly not a random characteristic like having hazel eyes. No matter how hard they try to control for other things.
It's a popular argument that doesn't make it's point very explicitly nor offer any support for it, but the main point is that college education itself has no value. That mode of expression is an old technique that people unintentionally use when they repeat the argument: By not being explicit about the thesis or any support for it, it's impossible to address - the thesis is invisible to many. (In college, you learn you have to explicitly write your thesis and your support for it.)
Necessary to it is the argument, again implicit, that the only value in the world is income. Once you see that explicitly written out, you know it's obviously absurd. (It's absurd for another reason too: knowledge and intellectual skill are great aids to income.)
People on HN highly value knowledge and cognitive skill. They spend significant time on gaining it, including right here. How much would they value years to dedicate to the very best of those things, learning from each of the very best humans and ideas from any time or place, guided and advised by other people who have spent their lifetime studying each person or idea, and who can introduce you to the best of it and to the most powerful counter-arguments, flaws, and alternatives. It sounds like a fantasy, but it's real.
There are powerful people who don't like those thinkers and ideas, because they undermine power. So they devalue them, ostracize them, defund them, ban them - all to stop you from reading them. Those must be powerful ideas.
The sweet spot for me was somewhere in the middle, taking on more of an organizer role with civic meetups and that kind of thing. I still got to do some of the hands-on stuff by teaching the rotating cast of volunteers, but formed closer relationships with other organizers.
I think there are two factors at play beneath this:
1. Your expectations of yourself. If you grow up with studious and career oriented friends and family, you expect that of yourself. Same when you grow up around enrepreners. On the other than there are social groups that have the attitude roughly "I work a random job until I get fired" - if that's the subculture you are brought up with, that can steer your own life too.
2. You self select your friends. My highschool had a mix of poor but motivated immigrant kids, and just like "bad" kids. The two groups didn't mingle, one ended up in the 1% by and large and the other group is in jail or on welfare. So you could say we did better because we had friends who ended up better off but I think it's the other way - we associated with people who are on our trajectory.
"Who you know" is important - but the first job I got through a connection was at age 45. Everything before that came from who I am not who I knew, but who know is shaped by who I am (ie I wouldn't have had the connection that got me this job if the guy hadn't known he as a high performer to begin with)
Over a period of time, when the right person thinks you are useful/attractive/interesting, you get more opportunity/promotion.
This happens to explain the networking effect implied by the post (and related analyses).
If you care about epistemic accuracy more than tribal politics, you'll quickly find yourself in the outgroup.
Logical from a 'within the game' perspective, but those who believe that humans are legitimately trying to transcend their irrational nature will be very disappointed.
You can fight the system all you like. You might make a difference but you won't be rewarded for it.
Or you can accept the game and play it. If you don't like the current game switch companies and play a different one.
Also, define "success". Even if it's just about being exceptional in economic terms, AIUI a bog-standard swdev salary is enough to be in the top 10% with no favoritism needed. And if it's about being able to retire and have grandkids come visit sometimes, I think that might be more common than not.
> Children who grow up with high economic connectedness earn 20 percent more as adults on average than otherwise similar children who do not, a gap equal to growing up in a family making 47,000 dollars a year instead of 27,000.
ie: knowing wealthier people has as much impact on your income as growing up in a family making $47k/year instead of $27k/year
But wait, something was learned! I typed in the start of the equation and after hitting space after the equal sign it yielded the answer! The Hacker News comment box can do the math for you!
And note, this can be done without being sleazy. Try to be interested in other people, try to make random friends. That will "pay off" -- both in richness of life and in just money -- more than just about anything.
(One of my personal corollaries here is "go until they stop you." This works for nightclubs, conferences, etc. etc. And even if you are stopped, hit them with a HUGE mea culpa, and back away. Which will be rarer than you expect.)
(and one more. The other thing I do in every class: Each and every one of you knows something about something WAY MORE AND BETTER than literally everyone else in this room. No promises, but that might be your good avenue.)
Also, physically attractive people earn more. https://wol.iza.org/press-releases/does-it-pay-to-be-beautif...
It also glosses over the fact that who you know is often a result of some combination of hard work and luck.
Therefore there is no greater variable in nominal differences between youth peers. How could there possibly be?? It is near all-encompassing, and sustains for the first quarter of a persons life.
This concept is true going back through the ages, with the main difference being less social and economic mobility in the past. That does not = 100% social or economic mobility now, by any means.
Still interesting train of thought that I might need, but the article is exaggerating the evidence and not adding the right disclaimers.
Out of the gate, hard work improves success rates, but not the count of opportunities.
Connections improve opportunities, it doesn't do shit for success-rate.
Luck does for both sides of the mix.
As a startup founder in my 40s, the entire VP/SVP level in silicon valley is people one or two hops away for an intro, though admittedly a lot of the first hop there is through the other founders.
The original paper about importance of weak ties is under appreciated, because people you work with tend to go on to better & bigger things - especially in the beginning of your career, if you are a nice person.
Veritasium put out a very nice video[1] about knowing which sort of game we're playing. It is a power law game.
There are only two takeaways I had, "show up" and "get lucky". There is no winning without showing up.
There are a lot of industries based on the "people I know" principle. From selling Tupperware and Herbalife to the whole Lobbying industry and politics, everything is about the right connections.
The world has been like that even before homo sapiens appeared on earth; higher primates also do a lot of making the right connections.
It’s some combination of all the above plus some additional dimensions like decision making, etc.
So we're comparing poor people to even poorer people?
I have never had an "economically diverse" group of friends. I grew up even more broke than the groups being compared. My friends were mostly lowlifes back then. I still don't know anybody filthy rich right now. I work from home in the suburbs making 6 figures and so do all my new friends.
I'm not saying there isn't some nepotism in high places, but if we're just talking about the middle class... I mean what do you want me to say other than "stay in school"?
Lifetime earnings is most strongly predicted by IQ, then conscientiousness. So those with both are considerably more likely. Social connectedness is entirely dependent on personality as well - extraversion predicts this, and extraversion also predicts ones interest in financial incentives rather curiously
This is like that hoary chestnut about the Pentagon and pizza delivery orders. Military strikes, to hear the story go, are most powerfully predicted by pizza orders. But pizza itself does not cause wars (except in Chicago and New York City).
A nit, but the point is you can't distill these problems down to a single statistic and then do policy based on them (not that you were proposing policy).
Based on what? There is positive correlation between educational attainment and lifetime earnings, but that does not imply that education is an influencer. One reasonable explanation for that correlation is that one who has qualities and habits that allow them to do well in the education system are also qualities and habits that do well in the economy. Certainly, those with crippling disabilities or other life challenges that sees them do poorly in school are also understood to have no economic future due to those same disabilities/life challenges, so it seems we have an intuitive understanding of that to some degree.
To find influence we can't just pick a top economic performer at random and compare him to a poor economic performer. We need to find the same person with and without an education. Luckily we can essentially do that, to a close enough approximation, by looking at an average person in the past when people didn't seek education and an average person after seeking education became commonplace. Unluckily, primary school rose in prominence before we had good record keeping.
But, luckily, post-secondary education rose during the time where we started having great record keeping. Here's the thing: Incomes held stagnant during that time. Lifetime earnings did not increase for the individual after gaining a (post secondary) education. They made just as much when they didn't go to college. Those with high earnings were more likely to go to college by this time, sure, but that's not the same thing.
Despite the record keeping being poor, we do know that incomes did rise during the rise of primary and secondary education. So while a post-secondary education clearly has no impact on lifetime earnings, even if someone destined to have high lifetime earnings is likely to attend a post-secondary school, the effects of primary and secondary education remains less clear. However, during that time incomes continued to rise even when there was no meaningful change in the education received, so the correlation in that case is most likely just coincidence. There was a lot of economic change happening at that time that provides a much more reasonable explanation for why incomes were rising.
I have no idea whether there's an innate structure in people that's causally determinative of lifetime income. I don't think this kind of faux-axiomatic reasoning can get you to the kind of certainty you have here. I think this argument feels intuitively true to you, and maybe it could be, but maybe any argument is true.
Not meaningfully so. Life doesn't move that fast. There is only one year between when the average person didn't go to college and when the average person did go to college. More ideal would be to put the exact same person into parallel universes on those different tracks, but let me know when you figure out how to do that. In the real world, that is the closest approximation we can get. And what we were able to plainly observe is that there was no change in earnings.
Which is interesting as it pertains to your point as it is unlikely in a vacuum that two random average people would ever have the same earnings, so the fact that they landed in the very same spot does suggest that our approximation is much closer than it seems you want to believe.
> I have no idea whether there's an innate structure in people that's causally determinative of lifetime income.
Nobody does. There are plausible explanations, but we have no scientific evidence of what the "secret sauce" is. Which, with your recognizing that, makes your earlier claim of education influencing lifetime earnings even more ridiculous.
> I don't think this kind of faux-axiomatic reasoning can get you to the kind of certainty you have here.
You must have misread something as the only certainty I offered was that college hasn't lead to higher lifetime earnings for individuals, which we know is the case as we have comprehensive income data to prove it. You cannot both earn more and earn the same. Someone with high lifetime earnings, statistically, also having a college education is not the same thing.
There is one caveat here. We can see in the data around the top 1% of earners that the majority of them have access to a restricted market (think doctor, lawyer, etc.) which most people legally are not allowed to participate in. As you know from Econ 101, an artificially restricted supply artificially increases prices, so that offers a pretty good explanation for how they are able to earn so much more than everyone else.
Here's where things get messy: Access to those markets is often granted through the colleges. That might be where you got the idea that education influences lifetime earnings, but we find the same economic benefits where access to restricted markets is given outside of colleges as well. There is little evidence that college is signifiant there—only the access part. But I can understand your confusion if that is what you had in mind, conflating it because colleges also try to offer education.
If we're both arguing that economic outcomes are messily related to lots of different causes, we're saying the same thing.
We can make this real simple: 64% of the population have a degree. The median income is unchanged since before <50% of the population had a degree. If individuals gained a premium, we'd have to have seen an increase in the median income after >50% of the population attained a degree. That is a mathematical necessity. But it didn't happen... There is no college premium, plain and simple.
While incomes are stagnant for nearly all individuals, college degree or not, I suspect what you are trying to point out is that the so-called top 1% has seen a dramatic rise in income and that most in the top 1% have a degree. Therefore, the combined income of all degree holders has risen at a rate faster than the remainder of the population, even if most degree holders have seen no change. That is definitely true, but a long way from your claim that education influences lifetime earnings. Given that only a small subset of all degree holders have found what could be called a premium, it is unlikely that the premium is influenced by college; at least not in a consistent or reproducible way to make it a useful claim.
We can do a simple thought experiment here. If 0% of the population have a degree, do you agree that the median income holder does not have a degree? If 100% of the population have a degree, do you agree that the median income holder does have a degree?
So when the degree attainment rate crosses the 50% mark, do you agree that the median income holder must have a degree? My definition says yes. And since the degree brings a premium, how do you explain the median income not rising? Maybe the premium you are imagining is just hugs and kisses?
I know, you think the median income has somehow always been filled by a degree holder, even when only a small segment of the population had a degree. But how is that possible when education influences lifetime earnings? Shouldn't those with education be making more than the median when those with education are a small segment of the population?
> We can do a simple thought experiment here.
Yes, and Yes.
> when the degree attainment rate crosses the 50% mark, do you agree that the median income holder must have a degree?
No. I don't even agree that there is necessarily a single median income holder - there may well be a hundred, sixty with a degree and 40 without.
Also possible that in a hypothetical population with 1,001 people that 1,000 people have a degree but the sole median income earner does not.
> there may well be a hundred, sixty with a degree and 40 without.
So what you are suggesting is that attaining a degree lowers your earnings and then gives you back a commensurate premium, thus restoring you back to the same level as those without a degree? That's a take, I guess, but premium usually comes with certain connotations that isn't that.
> Also possible that in a hypothetical population with 1,001 people that 1,000 people have a degree but the sole median income earner does not.
Again, where is the premium? If the only person without a degree isn't the lowest earner then we know that the person with the least earnings has a degree, but it was asserted that the person with the least earnings is given a premium over those without a degree, so... Are your numbers omitting a space alien or fairy without a degree where we earlier considered them to be people? It's not clear how to resolve this discrepancy.
So what you are saying is that someone who is the lowest paid person can remain the lowest paid person by going to college? We'll take your word for it since that has never been considered interesting enough for anyone else to study — remaining the lowest paid person isn't usually a goal one strives for — but what's the significance of that to have mentioned it earlier?
I'm still curious about what that definition might have been?
Now that you're saying that in reality college graduates don't see a premium over non-college graduates and actually occupy the lowest income class then obviously the simplified model breaks. Thems the breaks when you try to simplify. A simplified model will always be just that: a simplification.
It remains unclear what non-standard definition of median you are thinking of? You said you needed to share it earlier but still haven't...
The rest of it is not an argument worth having because I don't have strong opinions about the lifetime income premium for college attendence (or the human capital vs. signaling arguments behind it). I didn't attend; I went to work right after high school. Be as mean as you want to college!
That's true, but has little to do with our discussion. What is the purpose of this diversion? Realized that your non-standard definition you were concerned about earlier but were afraid to share isn't useful and now want to make it clear to me that you have come to understand what median normally means? It makes no difference to me.
> I don't have strong opinions about the lifetime income premium for college attendence
Was there some reason for us to think you did? Not sure what this is trying to add either.
If you really want to go back to your non-standard median definition, tell us how someone(s) in the bottom 38% can represent the median.
Tell them about the things you're working on and your business ideas, and praise every observation they make. Praise those observations so extensively that you abandon talking about your project entirely, and just talk about the implications of their astute observation. At the end, express gratitude for the universe giving you the opportunity to meet someone so much on the same page as you as they are. Ask them "why can't other people see it?" Try to develop a private joke from the conversations. Tell them about the difficulties your mother is going through.
Repeat until wealthy.
My favorite recent example is Carlos Watson. Got pulled up the greasy pole by Steve Jobs' wife, and after he slipped and fell into prison, got out through Trump circle ass-kissing. Even though I suspect owner of The Atlantic paid that bill, too, no matter the keyfabe.
and just like in business, a lot of opportunities and outcomes are depended on being in the right place right time & knowing the right person.
hard work tips the balance a little bit. not much
This is not something to be celebrated - the one good thing about capitalism and open competition generally is that you can challenge this.
I don't see how capitalism help this at all, in fact it seems to make it much worse.
Let's not let some billionaires who enjoyed friends with benefits skew the results of millions of successful people.
I'm sorry it didn't work out for you, but I attribute my success with my hard work.
And "best predictors" can be almost anything, even noncausal things.
The best predictor of wealth late in life might be rich parents at birth. Go figure.
Whom you know.
But first, we must talk about the wetness of water
Sorry but what is this even trying to say? 1=1 ?
In other words: the side effect of making more money is that you have more money to spend on your children’s education.
This other comment reflects the same understanding in different words: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49277355
Isn't that what everyone wants?
There's maybe like one exception to this rule every century.