111–120 of 245 posts
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No, the game is Monopoly. And those who entered the game late are out of luck.
Ah yeah, you should have told that to my immigrant parents who came here with nothing.
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Fun fact: The average American perceives “wealthy” as having just over $2.2million in net worth. https://www.kiplinger.com/personal-finance/605075/are-you-ri... This is very achievable to most HN types. Maybe not in our 30’s, but easily by retirement. Just maxing out your 401k for an entire tech career will get you there.
Interesting. 2.2 million seems to be around the top 10% in the US, and around 20x the median (Federal Reserve data from 2016). It also places one in the global top 1%.
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Ah yeah, you should have told that to my immigrant parents who came here with nothing.
The game features a set of dice, so anecdotes such as this one are not impossible, it's just that you need to be extremely lucky.
You have a finite number of bets you can make in your life, if you waste them by partying, gambling and being high on drugs then yeah, I can see how it can feel like it's impossible to succeed.
And life is a lot easier than these board games, there isn't one winner in life.
I thought this sounded pretty good compared to my $140k as a software engineer but then I realised he was putting in a lot more hours.
It makes me think, how many hours could you sustain developing software vs doing consultant work?
I know for me personally the amount of actual hours coding per day isn't all that much - my brain simply gets tired (depending on the type of coding).
Perhaps if you're doing really brain intensive work you simply can't work as much as someone that does less intensive work, and if we accounted for the hours worked by each perhaps the difference wouldn't even be that much (especially if we price in say 1.5x pay for overtime)?
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Society pays CEO/music/football stars much better than Stephen Hawking and other good researchers. People like Stephen Hawking likely considers working as a CEO as a really boring job: just a lot of obvious decisions and tons of boring meetings. This kind of people will rather work as a badly paid researcher instead.
hawking probably made a lot of money from his books. As for research I think the fact is that 99% of research is useless and doesn’t matter in the long term. So it makes sense that it’s not rewarded that highly. Meanwhile every LeBron James entertains millions.
and, while I don't want to make assumption about your preferences, for me the value in sports is exactly that "being there in the moment" aspect. watching it through a screen? nah.
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It also disregards the type of lottery game that is a part of wealth accumulation. Of course, it is not all luck but to believe wealth accumulation is a type of purely deterministic meritocratic game without a giant stochastic factor is ridiculous. That might even be the dumbest aspect of our society. Believing the powerball lottery winner is a genius for picking the numbers they picked is obviously stupid. Yet we ba…
Not accounting for luck as a factor of success is one of my pet peeves. I'm reading "So good they can't ignore you" and although I'm loving it, it's also guilty of that. Cal Newport tells the story of a Clean Tech VC and how he got the job using a personal connection to VC. But then he dismisses it by saying that "such small breaks are relatively common". Why is it so hard to admit that someone success is partially d…
Why do you model life as a single bet where you have a 1 or 2% chance of winning? In reality you are making bets every day, each with a range of odds of succeeding and each success can produce a range of outcomes.
Look at poker, a game that has a massive "luck" component, people still consistently win.
In Sweden, the marginal tax rate for work has hovered around 70% for the past decades. Taxes on capital around 30%.
https://www.ekonomifakta.se/Fakta/Skatter/Skatt-pa-arbete/ma...
Anyone who isn't stupid (and study considers IQ, after all) would move their income from work to capital.
There are several ways, for example starting a company. Even stuff that's basically a job, like high-paid people finance and law, would have a setup that have them earn their primarily as income from capital.
Unless this study has considered this, I'd say that they are missing a lot of people at the far end of the income spectrum.
https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/artiklar/2018/stor-del-av...
https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/artiklar/2022/svenskarnas...
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Because few people are objective enough to put aside their deep emotional attachment to the notion that their particular bit of hard work and skill meant nothing without that luck. I’m wealthy now: very wealthy by any standard (mid 7-figure net worth). I came from humble beginnings (nearly homeless frequently as a youth with a single mom), but I am quite intelligent (PhD in physics) and I worked hard. I would have re…
Many people with your net worth grind it out without any windfalls, the product of consistent hard work and reasonable choices over decades. It was always a possibility. Most people don't require an IPO to achieve that. Luck can accelerate that outcome but it is not necessary in any meaningful sense. It requires significantly greater extremes of wealth before luck plays a more frequent role. I know people well into 8…
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Nailed it. If you're Elon Musk, do some dumb mistake and lose 200 billion, your life barely changes. If you live on minimum wage, and loses half of it, starvation ensues for your family. The impact of losses is disproportional between rich and poor.
So you’re saying the poor have much more to gain through hard work and shouldn’t be discouraged?
An old flatmate of mine was a Mckinsey consultant and in Aus was on something like $240k per year salary. I thought this sounded pretty good compared to my $140k as a software engineer but then I realised he was putting in a lot more hours. It makes me think, how many hours could you sustain developing software vs doing consultant work? I know for me personally the amount of actual hours coding per day isn't all that…