Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by heurist » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 2:56 PM UTC

prostoalex wrote: post #210

heurist wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ru…

Oil money is a start, though my understanding is the workers go where the work is and take the money home when the work runs out. Those also tend to be in places people don't want to live for long. Most of the oil money is also extracted to major cities like Houston, so it's not a complete solution because it's an extremely leaky bucket.

Some places are doing better than others. But are they building products that solve local problems, or are they trying to primarily sell to a national or global market? Are they funded by local capital? Will the benefits of their production stay local?

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

#212

Post by astrodust » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 4:36 PM UTC

weberc2 wrote: post #205

astrodust wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You do realize there's arguably at least two billion people who through no fault of their own will never, ever succeed, no matter how hard they try?

You're born in the middle of Tibet as a persecuted ethnic minority. You're on a tiny island nation with no economic future. You're from a part of Africa that's seen nothing but civil war interspersed with famine.

You can do everything right but the deck is so stacked against you there's no winning move.

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

#213

Post by darawk » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 5:29 PM UTC

foldr wrote: post #209

darawk wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Yes, so you are simply begging the question. The reasons you give for skill being the more likely explanation are purely speculative.

Erm, no. I gave a specific argument. You can call it speculation I suppose, but it is certainly more than you've given here. And 'speculation' and 'begging the question' are very different things. I am not making a circular argument.

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

#214

Post by titanomachy » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

dev_dull wrote: post #142

titanomachy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Who cares what someone wastes their money on? If you believe a “fool and their money are soon parted” then the only explanation for life-long wealthy people is that they don’t waste it. There are many problems in our country. Are you doing something personally to make it better, or just attacking others and asking someone else to fix it for you?

Wealthy people can afford to waste much more (in absolute terms) without losing their wealth. The extreme is European royalty before revolution, and eventually it was shown that people did not have an unlimited tolerance for inequality.

"There are many problems in our country..." I probably don't live in your country, but I try to work towards solving problems. There are also people in my society whose job it is to solve social problems, and I help fund the work of those people just by being economically productive and therefore paying taxes.

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

#215

Post by dang » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

Dirlewanger wrote: post #88

Spoiled delusional New Yorker has delusional view of the world, more at 11.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive, snarky, and gratuitously negative comments to Hacker News?

You've done this a lot, it breaks the site guidelines, and we're hoping for better than that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#216

Post by weberc2 » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 6:28 PM UTC

astrodust wrote: post #212

weberc2 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You do realize there's arguably at least two billion people who through no fault of their own will never, ever succeed, no matter how hard they try? You're born in the middle of Tibet as a persecuted ethnic minority. You're on a tiny island nation with no economic future. You're from a part of Africa that's seen nothing but civil war interspersed with famine. You can do everything right but the deck is so stacked aga…

I don't care to generalize the principle outside of the western world. A valid generalization probably exists, but the terms are already so abstract that I doubt it's possible to have a meaningful conversation.

Yes, there are a vanishingly tiny fraction of people in the western world who will do everything right and still fail, and a similar fraction who will do everything wrong and still succeed; however, they're the exceptions that prove the rule.

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

#217

Post by foldr » Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 8:19 PM UTC

darawk wrote: post #213

foldr wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Yes, so you are simply begging the question. The reasons you give for skill being the more likely explanation are purely speculative. Erm, no. I gave a specific argument. You can call it speculation I suppose, but it is certainly more than you've given here. And 'speculation' and 'begging the question' are very different things. I am not making a circular argument.

You claim that "the dynamical process that produces luck-based wealth is inherently more constrained by practical dynamics". I don't see any argument in support of that assertion except a list of luck-based mechanisms that don't yield billions of dollars. Here are some luck-based mechanisms that do:

* Starting a business which succeeds owing to a lucky bet on what kind of product will sell well.

* Taking a lucky guess at which high-risk investments will pay off.

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

#218

Post by RankingMember » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 1:23 AM UTC

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…

Just because there are dirt poor people who are successful and well-off people who aren't doesn't mean they're equally likely. To your broader point, no one person exists in a vacuum- one person's "self-made" is another person's "took advantage of the right tax incentives and business climate and, most importantly, had the luck of timing that they were successful instead of plunging themselves deep into debt". My experience with people who talk warmly of "self-made" people is that they tend to leave out the role of luck.

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

#219

Post by darawk » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 2:19 AM UTC

foldr wrote: post #217

darawk wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, so you are simply begging the question. The reasons you give for skill being the more likely explanation are purely speculative. Erm, no. I gave a specific argument. You can call it speculation I suppose, but it is certainly more than you've given here. And 'speculation' and 'begging the question' are very different things. I am not making a circular argument.

You claim that "the dynamical process that produces luck-based wealth is inherently more constrained by practical dynamics". I don't see any argument in support of that assertion except a list of luck-based mechanisms that don't yield billions of dollars. Here are some luck-based mechanisms that do: * Starting a business which succeeds owing to a lucky bet on what kind of product will sell well. * Taking a lucky gues…

Yes, those things can pay off. My argument is not that such things do not exist, but that there are fewer instances of those at the very tails than there are of talent-based success. You need only examine the right tail of the wealth distribution to see that this is so. The very richest people in the world are there because of their own skill and insight. Gates, Buffet, Bezos, Kochs. As you step further down into the wealth distribution, you'll see some family money, like the Waltons. If Sam Walton the original was still alive, he'd be near the top...but by exactly the process I described, his children are no longer there.

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

#220

Post by heydonovan » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 4:29 PM UTC

cableshaft wrote: post #156

heydonovan wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has come from poverty, it still blows my mind that folks who make more than $70k struggle at all. A few of the things you mentioned are strictly luxuries. College, pets, new cars, vacations are all put on the back burner until it's financially reasonable to do so. I've met many folks making more than $100k who are in more debt than someone making $40k. Just ignorant of finances.

Making more money means more people will be willing to give you the rope to hang yourself with. People aren't as willing to lend money to people who don't have a means to pay it back, but someone can be doing well, take out a decent amount of debt ("buy" a car, "buy" a house, take out loans for education, etc), suffer a health or career setback, long periods of unemployment, and it starts a debt that spirals out of c…

Makes sense! Currently going through this right now. Got laid off, have maxed out all my credit cards, and spend my days studying for additional certs or spamming LinkedIn/Indeed/Angel. Nest egg is completely gone, and at this point, might just start applying for minimum wage jobs just to get some form of income coming in. That also means less time focusing on studies and applying for jobs, so it's a lose lose.