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How rich kids already won the career game

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Re: How rich kids already won the career game

#72
tl;dr: people with FU Money perform better in their jobs

I suppose on the other hand you have to consider that rich kids have less motivation to succeed than middle/lower class people, if they already have all the material things they can realistically desire

(the article also didn't site any studies to back up its statistics or claims, so you have to take it at face value)

Re: How rich kids already won the career game

#74
post #59

This was an whiny and awful post about "life isn't fair". The socially outgoing and confident worker will always outperform his socially awkward counterpart of equal intelligence. It doesn't matter that he came from a wealthy family, what matters is he has MORE skills. It isn't discrimination until you start hiring the less wealthy (with less skills) because of the fact that they're less wealthy.

"This was an whiny and awful post about 'life isn't fair'."

It wasn't whiny at all.

"The socially outgoing and confident worker will always outperform his socially awkward counterpart of equal intelligence. It doesn't matter that he came from a wealthy family, what matters is he has MORE skills."

This was the author's point.

Re: How rich kids already won the career game

#75
post #13

I think this article is preaching to the wrong crowd here on HN. A entrepreneur is by definition an upstart, an usurper who is out to break the conventions. You can't do this by being a quite yes man. That said what percentage of entrepreneurs, successful or not come from rich backgrounds? This article's ideas would apply two fold to the startup arena where you cannot get anywhere simply by running on the hamster whe…

Relatedly, 60% of NBA Stars are bankrupt within 5 years after retirement: http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?id=3469271 Filing for bankruptcy is a long-standing tradition for NBA players, 60% of whom, according to the Toronto Star, are broke five years after they retire. So it's not completely true that wealth is an advantage that cannot be squandered. And in the US there was a saying that used to be more popula…

I have a friend who worked for a "wealth management" firm here in Europe, and they had code names for all of their clients for privacy.

One of his clients asked for the code name "962" because that was the year the family had made their fortume. (!)

But as my friend told me, one of the main reasons they were able to keep the money in the family is that the vast majority of it passed to the eldest son, with other children getting only very little. It'd be interesting to know the relative entrepreneurial nature of kids that grow up wealthy, but don't get any real money.

Re: How rich kids already won the career game

#76

"I believe my generation will overthrow the arbitrary and brutal authority of corporate capitalism and bigoted conservatism in favor of rationalistic, libertarian socialism driven by a scientific approach and a concern for universal social justice." so, did you just take poli-sci to learn buzzwords and impress dumb chicks? I'm guessing you failed to comprehend any of the material. Before you call a fortune 500 compan…

Naz, I agree with you that he's taking a position that's pretty uninformed based on history and I'm a big admirer of your comments and thinking, but I even thought "read a fucking book" wasn't the best way to present a counterargument. People here are smart, if you show them cohesive analysis and can avoid emotionally loaded words, they respond to it. The Western commerce structures have produced more wealth than any…

The author presumably went to college and in addition lives in the era of the internet. He thus has access to the most powerful educational sources in the history of human civilization. Many people simply will not be educated. Especially if they are rewarded for ignorance. There comes a certain threshold of incoherence where a person should be simply ignored. They are being disrespectful of their listeners. Of course then I see them upvoted on hacker news, where the average IQ is probably a standard deviation above the norm. In situations like this ridicule is the correct response if it alerts people who might not know any better from paying attention. I am over correcting for the lack of ridicule of stupid ideas that is the norm.

Fox News should be insulted and ridiculed, and so should similarly formatted ignorance from the left. There is no reason why simple fact checking and logical coherence shouldn't be the cultural standard in the age of wikipedia at our fingertips.

Re: How rich kids already won the career game

#77
post #59

This was an whiny and awful post about "life isn't fair". The socially outgoing and confident worker will always outperform his socially awkward counterpart of equal intelligence. It doesn't matter that he came from a wealthy family, what matters is he has MORE skills. It isn't discrimination until you start hiring the less wealthy (with less skills) because of the fact that they're less wealthy.

"The socially outgoing and confident worker will always outperform his socially awkward counterpart of equal intelligence."

I think you missed the point of the article.

Re: How rich kids already won the career game

#78
post #47

Maybe it's different in the US, but in the UK there's no statistical difference between earnings 3.5 years after university graduation due to parental background once you adjust for university/degree subject. (children from poorer backgrounds are less likely to go into good universities or study high-earning subjects, but if they do then they'll earn as much as their better off peers)

That's quite an interesting observation I don't seem to have seen trumpeted (enough) during the battles over tuition fee increases. Do you have a citation for it?

I don't have the citation to hand, but I'm pretty sure the research came from the Sutton Trust who specialize in this area.

Re: How rich kids already won the career game

#80
"The difference is that children of wealth traverse it at a height of one meter over a mattress, while the middle-class and poor traverse it at a height of 20 meters over a lava pit."

I notice no one is commenting on this part. Namely, that for children of financial privilege, the risk/reward ratio for a career is markedly skewed compared to their middle class peers.

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