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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

#201

Post by heurist »

prostoalex wrote: post #191
heurist wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd have to be precise in targeting the social network in which the subject individual wields influence. Networks are more important than money in many ways. An individual who is friends or whose family has friends in VC or PE has a better starting position in an entrepreneurial career than someone who has no connections, even if they have money. You also need to consider the social implications of your category ch…

> The millionaire doubles their wealth by doing nothing and the small business owner fights tooth and nail to bring home a modest income. If a large group of millionaires reads your comment, sees the light and shamefully decides to do something by pulling their investable assets out, the small business owner will likely face high capital costs and in many cases be simply unable to raise any money at interest rates at…

That's what happens when unrestrained capitalism moves production of goods outside of the local economy and into distant foreign economies which are more difficult to access. Capital aggregates in the few international trade hubs and starting a new business becomes more difficult as various gates are put in front of the newly foreign production. As capital becomes more centralized, fewer people are in charge of the decisions to invest and innovation becomes more difficult because rather than being distributed across the range of economies and lifestyles in the US (or any country) it is invested in the few who have access to the gatekeepers. Usually that requires physical access over time, which means living in an increasingly expensive city and successfully competing with an increasing amount of individuals vying for a limited amount of investor attention. Innovation comes from people responding to a wide variety of different problems and situations - how is that going to happen if everyone lives in the same place and is competing to solve the same problems that the relatively few available investors want to put money in? Markets that retain capital are much easier to find money in than markets which leak it.

If an American with wealth wants to help the US economy, they should focus on rebuilding the production capacity of underfunded economies across the US by redistributing wealth from the main international hubs into smaller domestic markets. It probably won't produce optimal returns, which scares off most investors. I have seen a couple funds starting to do this, for what it's worth.

P.S. Banks used to be small and local! Look at how far we've fallen:

- https://ilsr.org/number-banks-u-s-1966-2014/ - https://ilsr.org/vanishing-community-banks-national-crisis/

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

#202

Post by darawk »

fireflash38 wrote: post #95
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…

I feel like your response here is only against the title, not the content of the article, since your complaints are explicitly addressed in the article .

They're mentioned. They're not addressed.

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

#203

Post by Tomminn »

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…

Your first two paragraphs make a very important point. Outliers from every cohort exist, and often it is due to a kind of inner drive, and we should not ignore that truth. Your final paragraph is cruel. From every cohort the vast majority of people in that cohort will end up with around the mean outcome for that cohort. This is a statistical fact. Only a few can be outliers, and expecting everyone to be one is mathematically guaranteed to cause suffering in the world.

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

#204

Post by stcredzero »

gamblor956 wrote: post #198
stcredzero wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. ” This is kind of like that cartoon of a New Yorker's view of the US, where Manhattan looms large, then there's New Jersey, and at the fringes there is the rest of the nation. I met this veteran taxi driver in South C…

The big irony is that this happened much more in liberal California than it did in conservative Ohio and South Carolina. Not sure where you've come up with this bizarre and selective understanding of US history. Ohio is notorious for racially-based restrictive covenants on housing. There were entire neighborhoods where deeds had restrictions preventing their sale to blacks. They got the idea from southern states like…

Not sure where you've come up with this bizarre and selective understanding of US history. Ohio is notorious for racially-based restrictive covenants on housing

Note that I was specifically talking about the unintended impacts of such laws on the youth of one's "own" group. California is singularly bad about that. (I have a different view on these things, outside of the usual polarization. So people tend to project a "side" to my comments which isn't intended and actually isn't there. As a non-white person whose parents experienced ethnically based exclusion, such projections make little sense to me.)

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

#205

Post by weberc2 »

astrodust wrote: post #152
weberc2 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be lucky perhaps to be wildly successful, but you'd have to be quite unlucky to work hard and take smart risks and fail to be successful at all. Similarly, you have to be very, very lucky to rise from poverty to wealth without working hard or taking smart risks. In particular, seeing and executing on a narrow-window opportunity that others miss is itself an accomplishment. The idea that self-made success…

You can do everything right, work very hard, and still fail. You can do everything wrong, be a complete idiot, and still succeed. There's ways you can increase your luck, or be more observant as to opportunities, but it's self-deluding if you don't think luck plays a huge factor in success.

It plays a huge factor in the specific degree of success, but a much smaller factor in whether or not you are successful at all. If you do everything right and fail, you are an anomaly pretty much by definition.

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

#206

Post by darawk »

rchaud wrote: post #128
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…

> If you immigrate from Africa with nothing, and you get yourself a law degree and an upper middle class income - that's self made success. A student from Senegal who attended my alma mater now works in Wall Street. In an alumni issue, he described what it was like to go from his tiny village to the capital city in Senegal for an interview for a scholarship at a prestigious international school (where his grades got…

Are you trying to say that this Senegalese fellow would be remiss to describe his own success as "self made"? Sure, people helped him, but he worked extremely hard, and overcome tremendous odds to get where he was. I think he deserves credit for that. Don't you?

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

#208

Post by jxramos »

treyfitty wrote: post #21
jxramos wrote: post #16

Isn’t there a stat that says something like at most 10% of millionaires inherited their money/assets. The rest were supposedly “self made”

This article goes a little deeper in exploring the definition of "self-made." Did those millionaires who didn't inherit money have their college paid for? Did they get help from their parents for a down payment? ...etc. The author makes a valid point by exploring this definition, and it suggests that most people, especially the well off received some substantial help that isn't available to many.

There's an interesting exchange Milton Friedman has about the inheritance of social capital https://youtu.be/hoFdVuqrMZw?t=3928 The video cuts off an interesting follow up exchange

"""FRIEDMAN: Well, the major source of inheritance is the inheritance of human qualities not of physical assets.""" https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/friedman_images/Collection...

He talks about the inheritance of talent here https://youtu.be/YRLAKD-Vuvk?t=650

I think in all the exchanges he makes a point about how none of it is fair, just as much as an inheritance of a negative hindrance of some kind also isn't fair. I think another person would play as, "there's no cosmic justice"

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

#209

Post by foldr »

darawk wrote: post #199
foldr wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>because it gets harder and harder to luck into that kind of money. But it also gets harder and harder to get that kind of money by skill and hard work. Large amounts of money are more difficult to obtain by any means than small amounts of money. That tells us nothing about the role of luck. And again, if you are just going to assert that obtaining vast wealth by hard work and skill is more likely than obtaining it b…

> But it also gets harder and harder to get that kind of money by skill and hard work. Large amounts of money are more difficult to obtain by any means than small amounts of money. You don't seem to be understanding the point. Let's take an example. Do you think that it is more common, in general, for the wealthiest person in the world to be the result of skill or luck? I think empirically, and simply reasoning a pri…

Yes, so you are simply begging the question. The reasons you give for skill being the more likely explanation are purely speculative. Investing is a good example. Even if success in investing were largely down to chance, you'd still expect to find a small number of individuals who were enormously successful.

Compare misfortune, which no-one wants to take credit for. A small number of people are struck by lightning or die from rare diseases. There's nothing necessarily special about them - they're just unlucky.

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

#210

Post by prostoalex »

heurist wrote: post #201
prostoalex wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The millionaire doubles their wealth by doing nothing and the small business owner fights tooth and nail to bring home a modest income. If a large group of millionaires reads your comment, sees the light and shamefully decides to do something by pulling their investable assets out, the small business owner will likely face high capital costs and in many cases be simply unable to raise any money at interest rates at…

That's what happens when unrestrained capitalism moves production of goods outside of the local economy and into distant foreign economies which are more difficult to access. Capital aggregates in the few international trade hubs and starting a new business becomes more difficult as various gates are put in front of the newly foreign production. As capital becomes more centralized, fewer people are in charge of the d…

I am not sure your observation is correct - in industries such as oil and gas the investment community was quick with redistributing wealth to previously underfunded rural areas of Oklahoma, Texas, Alaska, or North Dakota. Another example is Las Vegas, which prior to hospitality industry investments was essentially a piece of desert.

And those are just the big-name examples. Some extended family of mine lives in a rural area of Central Washington, which anecdotally in the past decade has experienced high growth in manufacturing, driven primarily by Japanese money.

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