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Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

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Re: Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

#61

Post by 1auralynn »

ForHackernews wrote: post #20
Consultant32452 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I live in a 2nd tier city. My friends who are home owners have very middle class blue collar jobs. Examples include auto mechanic, security system installer, and local delivery truck driver. None of them got "help."

How old are they? I know plenty of people who bought a house 30 or 40 years ago on blue collar salaries. I don't know any <30 year olds who bought property without parental help.

I bought a house in Pittsburgh when I was 26. Sold it and moved to the West Coast, where I rent, though.

Re: Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

#62

Post by mikeash »

ip26 wrote: post #8

I came away from this feeling like it's a very short jump from "Maybe some of the people doing impossibly well got help" to "Everyone who is doing better than me must have gotten help". I can't help but feel this element of dismissal is present even in this piece. E.g., Pierson turned a $15,000 loan into a business with $300,000/yr in revenue. She says, her biggest fear was hearing “she’s only successful because of h…

Turning a $15,000 loan into a successful business is certainly a big accomplishment that does not warrant dismissal. On the other hand, is it not true that this success depended on her parents? How many people out there are capable of doing what she did, except they would never have access to a $15,000 loan in the first place? We can acknowledge that the deck is stacked without blindly dismissing those who succeeded with the deck stacked mildly in their favor.

Re: Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

#63

Post by Consultant32452 »

ForHackernews wrote: post #20
Consultant32452 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I live in a 2nd tier city. My friends who are home owners have very middle class blue collar jobs. Examples include auto mechanic, security system installer, and local delivery truck driver. None of them got "help."

How old are they? I know plenty of people who bought a house 30 or 40 years ago on blue collar salaries. I don't know any <30 year olds who bought property without parental help.

They are in their mid-30s.

Re: Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

#64

Post by ForHackernews »

ijpoijpoihpiuoh wrote: post #51
ForHackernews wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How old are they? I know plenty of people who bought a house 30 or 40 years ago on blue collar salaries. I don't know any <30 year olds who bought property without parental help.

Where do the people you know live? That might inform the probability of being able to buy a home with or without parental help. I just picked a metro: Baton Rouge. Median home price there is around $160k, although naturally there is plenty of inventory available for less than $100k. Some of it's in pretty dismal shape, but, looking at Zillow, there are non-zero houses in this category that look livable. The median HH…

I grew up in the midwest. Most of the people I know are in Iowa, some in Illinois and Missouri. Saving up a down-payment is a significant obstacle, I think. I know that in some areas, you can get a rural development loan that requires a much smaller downpayment, but my friends don't want to live in the boonies and it would lead to a pretty miserable commute for them.

Re: Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

#65

Post by j-c-hewitt »

ForHackernews wrote: post #20
Consultant32452 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I live in a 2nd tier city. My friends who are home owners have very middle class blue collar jobs. Examples include auto mechanic, security system installer, and local delivery truck driver. None of them got "help."

How old are they? I know plenty of people who bought a house 30 or 40 years ago on blue collar salaries. I don't know any <30 year olds who bought property without parental help.

Go on a digital spirit quest with Zillow to towns and cities where you have never been. Be prepared to be amazed!

Re: Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

#66

Post by beaner »

koolba wrote: post #42
darawk wrote: post #26

This is such nonsense. First of all, there are absolutely people who come from dirt poverty and become wildly successful. Second of all, plenty of people receive lots of help from their parents and amount to precisely nothing. IMO it's fair to refer to your success as "self made" if you exceed the median success level of your class peer group by a substantial margin. If you immigrate from Africa with nothing, and you…

> But if you say, start Microsoft and become a billionaire i'd say that it's fair to call that self-made success. Bill Gate’s family clearly contributed to his and Microsoft’s success. His mother in particular had direct contact with the chairman of IBM which lead to a scrappy software company landing a life changing contract. I’m not saying that to discount the rest of his achievements or effort either. The greatest…

Not everyone, if put in Bill Gates' shoes, would have been able to take advantage of such an opportunity. Can you say that if you were there, you'd have done the same? And executed as well afterward, into a multi-billion dollar company?

Re: Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

#67

Post by AboutTheWhisles »

latencyloser wrote: post #14
Isamu wrote: post #2

>She told me, “I was curious, but I don't know how a single person in America who doesn't have family money could buy anything, I really don’t, if they're not working in finance or they're not a doctor. ” Easy, there are vast areas of America where housing is more affordable. I certainly got zero cash from family when I bought a home. My family put money into giving me food and shelter growing up though. This is kind…

This reminds me of when I was working at Microsoft and a colleague said to me: "I don't know how anyone raises a family off less than $130k/year." I laughed and asked him if he'd ever been anywhere in the US outside of Seattle before. Turns out, he hadn't and assumed the insane cost of living we're subject to in this area also exists in the rest of the country. My point of reference is my family's house in a rural ar…

The same extrapolations happen with population density. People in LA and New York think the world is overpopulated and everyone is on top of each other. They don't realize that 45 minutes north east of San Francisco there are no houses, no street lights and no cell phone reception.

Re: Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

#68

Post by learc83 »

ralusek wrote: post #49
sarchertech wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Where you start matters, but so do the choices you make. Of course it does...but the single largest predictor of future income is parental income. >I would argue the exact opposite. I would argue that with the rise of socialist tendencies among millennials, and the hyper fixation on gender, racial, and economic privilege, there is almost an outright rejection of the existence of merit at all. I think that the positi…

Most people don't have a problem acknowledging individual privileges they have been afforded. People object to broad assumptions made on their behalf by using their race or gender as a proxy.

>Most people don't have a problem acknowledging individual privileges they have been afforded. People object to broad assumptions made on their behalf by using their race or gender as a proxy.

You're painting one side as, "they don't have a problem with acknowledging privilege", and the other side as "they don't even acknowledge merit".

For every millennial who believes that racial privilege is 100% responsible for success, I'll show you a baby boomer who believes that they are 100% responsible for their own success and have had zero privileges. You'll find some of them arguing here right now. I've argued with many of them in the past.

In fact surveys show that there is a large chunk of the population that believes that being a white male makes it harder to succeed.

>People object to broad assumptions made on their behalf by using their race or gender as a proxy.

Privilege isn't about absolute life difficulty scale. Of course there is a given white man who has had a harder time than a given black woman.

Privilege is about relative advantages. The average white man would be less successful if he were a black woman--all else being equal.

Re: Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

#69

Post by dev_dull »

radmuzom wrote: post #22

Resonates strongly with me. Many of my school friends went to the best colleges in my country - all the time attributing their success solely to "hard work". However, they always seemed to ignore the fact that their parents paid a lot of money for them to attend the best tuition outside of school. I did not have that option and did not get admitted to any of the famous colleges (I am discounting the constant mental t…

> I did not have that option and did not get admitted to any of the famous colleges (I am discounting the constant mental tension associated with poverty here). Luckily, I have done quite well for myself

Rather than confirm the articles premise you seem to be discrediting it.

Re: Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

#70

Post by adventured »

ForHackernews wrote: post #20
Consultant32452 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I live in a 2nd tier city. My friends who are home owners have very middle class blue collar jobs. Examples include auto mechanic, security system installer, and local delivery truck driver. None of them got "help."

How old are they? I know plenty of people who bought a house 30 or 40 years ago on blue collar salaries. I don't know any <30 year olds who bought property without parental help.

A $180,000 30yr mortgage will cost you ~$880 per month. These days the median of all home sales in the US is about $225,000. The hard part of that $225k purchase for most people under 30 is the down payment of $45k.

The median full-time income is about $50,000 in the US. Emphasis that that is the median, not average.

Two household incomes is ~$85,000 or higher at median type wages (assuming a pairing of one full-time median, one lesser).

Home ownership is very much within reach at the median, so long as your income matches your market. You can't live in major US cities, earn the median, and ever hope to own a home.

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