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The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

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Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

#21

Post by DoreenMichele »

Years ago, a friend of the family said "You're so smart. Everyone thought you would be a millionaire by age thirty. What happened?"

I pointed at my kids and said "They happened. And they take all my time."

I was a full-time wife and mom. This is not a career known to lead to great wealth.

So, for starters, not all interests or career paths have equal potential to lead to wealth. Intelligence in no way guarantees that your interests will happen to nicely line up with things that lead to wealth.

Everything I've read suggests that being born into the right family plays a huge role in wealth, a la the joke "He made his money the old fashioned way: He inherited it."

Health issues are another thing. Miracles of modern medicine can be very expensive and come directly out of your pocket if you live in the wrong country. At the same time, you typically will be less productive and less competent while enduring serious health issues.

Personal relationships are another biggie. My mother used to work for an heiress whose husband ran through her money. After the divorce, she had to get a job to support herself.

Divorce, scandal, drug addiction and various other personal issues can all be financially ruinous.

Even if you are good at earning it, that doesn't mean you are good at keeping it or growing it, a la some tagline from some magazine "How money becomes wealth."

Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

#23

Post by GuB-42 »

omarhaneef wrote: post #3

Ugh, I wish the author had made the point without the computer simulation. I think there might be merit to the argument people make more money than their intelligence, or effort, seems to indicate. And the author lays out some basic arguments here: "But there is a problem with this idea: while wealth distribution follows a power law, the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal distribution that is sym…

The simulation is useful in the sense that they managed to obtain a wealth distribution similar to the real world based on that argument.

That's how science works in general. Build a model and make it match the observations. That model is what will be used to test the hypothesis. Without a model, it is just speculation with little value.

Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

#24

Post by pmoriarty »

throwaway13372 wrote: post #18
pmoriarty wrote: post #8

"So if not talent, what other factor causes this skewed wealth distribution? "Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck," say Pluchino and co. "The team shows this by ranking individuals according to the number of lucky and unlucky events they experience throughout their 40-year careers. "It is evident that the most successful individuals are also the luckiest ones," they say. "And the less su…

Still the comment about citing one unique sample to overthrow a general assessment from much larger sample size... You seem to be blindly lucky and do not really appreciate that...

My entire point is that you can be lucky (and smart, if I can flatter myself so) but not rich.

It can take more than intelligence and luck, it could take a desire and a choice to make money a big priority in your life, which it rarely was for me.

If Bill Gates had said "Fuck Microsoft, I don't want to do this shit anymore" and quit early on in his career, (which, if he had free will, he could have done at any point) then he probably wouldn't have wound up the richest person in the world, no matter how lucky he was.

He chose to do what he did (didn't he?), and that (in large part) was what made him unimaginably rich.

Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

#25

Post by neogodless »

aivisol wrote: post #11

> For example, intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000. True, but can IQ be, say 210? If yes, then standard deviation cannot be applied here, right? Because for that you would need someone with opposite IQ, i.e. -10? > The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some people work more hours than average and some work less, but…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification#Historical_I...

I can't find a particularly ironclad source, but I read recently that the test structure is such that scores over, for example, 175, are not meaningfully variable. At that point, the test isn't capable of or effective measuring further differences.

Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

#26

Post by winrid »

Even more luck is required with the way a lot of people on this site are trying to get rich (startups).

Want to require less luck? Open some kind of store/service yourself and it'll pay off faster than investing in a startup most likely.

A friend of mine runs a shipping office, single location. Not a giant or complicated business with 99.999% uptime. He always has much nicer race cars too.... :)

Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

#28

Post by omarhaneef »

__s wrote: post #9
omarhaneef wrote: post #3

Ugh, I wish the author had made the point without the computer simulation. I think there might be merit to the argument people make more money than their intelligence, or effort, seems to indicate. And the author lays out some basic arguments here: "But there is a problem with this idea: while wealth distribution follows a power law, the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal distribution that is sym…

IQ tests are also a bad example because they have a normal distribution by design. It's like saying grades fall into a normal distribution when you're graded on a normal distribution curve

I did not know that.

However, from what I can tell -- and these studies are always controversial and not convincing -- IQ is only tangentially related to financial success. If I recall, a little helps but a lot doesn't help more.

Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

#29

Post by dsfyu404ed »

ta1234567890 wrote: post #13
martinni wrote: post #7

Rich people got "lucky" but they don't define what luck is to begin with. To quote Naval, there are 4 kinds of luck. 1. Blind luck - Where I just got lucky because something completely out of my control happened 2. Luck from hustling - luck that comes through persistence, hard work, hustle, motion. Which is when you’re running around creating lots of opportunities, you’re generating a lot of energy, you’re doing a lo…

However, 2, 3 and 4 can be reduced to 1. You don't choose your genes or where you are born. Those factors, which are blind luck, determine all of the other lucks for your whole life. In the end, everything is just blind luck, but our egos want to feel like they are in control somehow.

Hustle and preparation are not luck, they're skills you have to hone for them to be useful. You have to actually do something. They aren't something you can be born into (much to the dismay of rich parents with deadbeat kids). By reducing 2 and 3 to luck you're implying that people have no agency. Sure, the person who develops those skills in rural Africa isn't going to go as far as someone who develops those skills in Chicago but they'll both go a hell of a lot farther than the average persona around them.

Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

#30

Post by semiotagonal »

jerf wrote: post #14
posterboy wrote: post #5

Perhaps it is stupid to want to be rich? Few people are stupid enough to take the chance, so a few rich people are no thread to the mental health of society at large. Whowhat?

I'm being totally serious: The more I learn about riches & fame, the less I want them. I'll be honest: I'm not quite to the point where if someone tried to thrust a million dollars into my hand, I'd say no. (That isn't even necessarily enough to take you out of "middle class" anymore as a one-off payment, honestly.) But I think I'd say no to 10 million and I'm fairly certain I'd say no to 100 million. Or really wish…

You should take the $10 million. That's "fuck-you money"; with that amount, you're beholden to nobody. $1 million doesn't cut it. $100 million is unnecessary.
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