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

From my experience this is definitely true. Also our financial system is incredibly forgiving when it comes to unethical behavior.

For example, if you take a massive loan and then it doesn't work out, you can just declare bankrupcy, then you just wait a few years and you can start again. You can change country, then you get a clean credit history and you can try again.

You could borrow some money from the bank, bet it all on a coin toss; if you win, you can retire, if you lose, you just need to wait a few years then try again. If you do it enough times, it's very likely that you will win and retire within your lifetime.

The real losers of our society are all the honest, hard working people who are not prepared to gamble with other people's money. This is what loans are; loans expand the money supply - So when someone makes a reckless bet and they go bankrupt, it's as if everyone else was paying for that person.

Then we're surprised why the greediest and most reckless people win...

The system is not fair. Rich people already know this but it doesn't matter because they are not the ones who keep the engines of capitalism turning. So long as the majority of people believe that the system is fair, the engine will keep on running and becoming progressively less fair.

Rich people don't care about what is fair or ethical, they will do anything and say anything to get more money. Regular people are different. For example, most regular people would probably vote against a referendum to seize and nationalize all corporations with a market cap of above $1 billion... Even though such nationalization would almost certainly benefit them personally. Rich people, on the other hand, don't need any kind of justification or moral argument in order to take someone else's money; if they can do it, they will do it; simple as that. If all regular people had the mindset of rich people, we would be living in anarchy; there would be no government, only mafias and we would be killing each other over resources (of which there would be very little since we'd be spending most of our time and energy scheming and killing each other instead of creating value).

But the reality is that the rich have managed to create a society in which most people can be reared, prodded and milked like cattle under an obviously false pretext that they are the ones creating all the value.

Not trying to pick your response out in particular,but when we talk about growing up in a rich family, what type of rich family are we talking about? It feels like a lot of time with topics like this, we're using Bill Gates as the example of being rich. Isn't that a little off the mark? I had a bunch of friends from "rich" families growing up through high school. Most are lazy pieces of shit that haven't gotten anywhere close to achieving what their parents have. There are a few exceptions, but it is definitely below 50%. I see this all the time at work. Want to guess who the laziest employees are? The people who didn't have a job till after graduating college and came from families that didn't have much of a want for money. They stagnate. The kids who grew up struggling have largely continued to out work the others and their career progress has showed as much. The same goes for people I know who have inherited enough money to where inheritance tax comes in. When we talk about inheritance, are we talking about someone like this, or one of the few legitimate dynasties that still exist? If the former, a large percent will burn through their money within a short amount of time. There is a reason that generational wealth typically doesn't last that many generations. Again, if we're talking about someone like the Rothschild, then yeah, it is a bit different.

I think it's pretty typical for schools like CMU. Look at their post graduation survey: https://www.cmu.edu/career/documents/2018_one_pagers/scs/1-P...

Out of 170 graduates, 27 went to facebook, 21 went to google, 13 went to microsoft, 6 went to amazon, 2 went to apple, etc. That's basically half the class including a lot of people from the bottom half of the class (the best people I knew usually didn't choose FAAMG and their outcomes were a crapshoot).

I think I watched a few episodes of that with my father-in-law and all I remember is that several of the contestants spent the first 8 hours or so building shelter (and if I recall correctly is was summer, so freezing was not an issue) and only then started to think about finding food. If they had any trouble at all finding food (which basically everyone did), then pretty soon they were too weak to continue searching for food because all of the physical activity had caused them to burn far too many calories for their meager food intake.

The people who had a lot of experience hunting and fishing tended to know how long it would take them to find food and went about it with much more urgency.

I do remember bad luck striking as well for sure, but it seemed like strategy was at least as big of a factor as luck for many of the contestants.

I agree that no matter how hard your will, you can't make it past certain things, but a lot of contestants hamstrung themselves right off the bat by badly underestimating how many calories they would need or not accurately predicting which sorts of problems would instantly end their bid.

I chased the dollar and lost my wife and Pomeranian in a divorce :( I was rich, but never realized that love and companionship is worth more in the long term than money. I would give a billion dollars to wake up with my wife in my arms and that little dude licking my face.