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Huh, interesting hypothesis. Certainly a strong claim. They must have done some really impressive and thorough work to come to this conclusion.
> a new computer model of wealth creation confirms.
Sigh.
the richest people i know (with wealth in the 10M range) are the most amoral in their thoughts and actions, and it makes a big difference financially. note that i said amoral, not immoral; they aren't malicious, they simply don't care.
they don't refuse a business opportunity because the business would be explicitly unethical; they do it, and profit from it. the same is true if the business produces negative externalities. it simply doesn't matter to them because money is money as far as they care.
they don't craft their investing strategy with the goal of investing in companies that behave well; they chase the money regardless of the ethical problems that they may be directly incentivizing.
overall, this gives these people a much greater range of freedom when it comes to making large volumes of additional money. while i don't know for sure if being amoral helps people become rich in the first place, i assume that it does because having more options on the table is never a bad thing.
so, maybe the answer to the question of "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich" is "i refuse to act unethically to make money".
in my personal experience, i think this argument is pretty good. in 2010 or so, i realized that there was a then-latent market for TDCS / consumer nootropic brain stimulation systems, and considered making a company around producing and selling them to consumers.
however, at the time, i knew that brain stimulation hadn't been proven safe to use in the long term, and selling it to consumers would require working around the FDA's rules about medical devices to essentially evade their oversight. in short, i refused to start a company whose time had come because i knew that i'd probably be harming people as part of the core business. i would have been one of the first in the space, and while i don't think i would be rich today if i had done it, i know that it would have been a chance to get rich and certainly that there were some people who did get rich. and of course, there have been plenty of consumers who have been harmed by these products, often in unidentifiable or subtle ways.
so what's the moral of this story? having morals is expensive, and it sometimes precludes you from becoming rich even if you're lucky enough to be at the right time to take action.
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…
Usain Bolt was only a tiny bit faster than other sprinters, but in this prime he won basically all the races he competed in.
It wasn't luck that had him winning them all despite such a small advantage. It was the nature of competition.
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It is the same for men, too. I had everything set up to retire at 35... then I married. Sure, I am a more socially productive person now. My kid will someday pay taxes that will finance the retirement of people that didn't bother to have kids.
We were on track to retire comfortably by 55 without even trying very hard, 45-50 with some effort, without even FAANG money or any sudden jumps in income. Three kids starting just before age 30 and now retirement ever is... iffy, and it's probably not going to be very comfortable if it does happen. They're really expensive. Mostly healthcare, child care, and housing (more space, but also need good schools, so pricie…
I don't think people typically realize it as much because they don't benchmark themselves against their classmates when they get older.
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…
Are you from america? As a european, this assumption that everyone would value getting as rich as possible as their top priority seems really weird.
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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.
But honestly, even at my low-end Silicon Valley salary living in the midwest I sometimes end up a bit more detached and cavalier about some things than I'd like.
> 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…
Just 7 standard deviations away from the mean means that you would expect only 1 in 780 billion from a population.
Given that this is far more than the number of people on Earth: No, no one has an IQ of 210.
Did the guys who went to work for Google take any additional risk? Yet, they are now millionaires. How about the entrepreneurs? A few are super rich now. The guy who went to work at McKinsey is now a pubco COO making millions.
Yes, by my direct observation, it’s mostly chance.
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Seems like this is a free will argument. In a reductionist view, yes, everything is all blind luck because the universe was set in motion at the Big Bang and has evolved according to the laws of physics since. If you got rich through intelligence, determination, and good choices, that was still luck because your intelligence and determination are largely determined by your genes and your choices by your environment,…
But, the best we know is the laws of physics are not deterministic! The quantum states that your neurons fire to is unknowable in advance and determined only at the point of measurement. Therefore, you are _free_ in the exact results of your neural mass are unknowable in advance and truly random. There's certainly a distribution of probability to the randomness... but be free and don't by the deterministic, 19th cent…