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The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

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Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#161

Post by cduzz »

ramphastidae wrote: post #128
jandrewrogers wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I know people well into 8-figures who were never anything more than blue-collar grinders. Can you elaborate? I don’t see how that’s possible unless they started work in their early 20s, have been maxing their retirement, never had an accident or have been unemployed, made incredible investment decisions, and are now 60+? Even then I dont see how it’s possible for blue collar folks. Well into 8 figures is like … at…

This sounds like a classic "small business owner" success story. One can imagine a scenario where a person owning a landscaping, construction, vehicle repair, or similar business starts out with "can do a thing" and also is good at "get other people to do thing" and "operate / scale business without accidentally going out of business" and so they scale from doing to overseeing to organizing and eventually end up with a business that's got some substantial value.

Having been involved in small businesses, it's exhausting and often times it's simply impossible to transition from "doing" to "overseeing" (hiring people to do things is much harder than you'd imagine) and there are plenty of easy ways to accidentally blow the whole thing up. But if it works out, it can work out really well.

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#162

Post by Qem »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #153
ss2003 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have it completely reversed. Hard work for the poor most likely means they will still be poor and therefore have very little to gain from it.

This is just not true, at least in Australia (and I suspect most other first-world countries, including the US). If anything, it's easier to go from having nothing to a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle than it is to go from middle-class to wealthy.

First-world is not most world. And even those places face welfare state dismantlement since at least the 80s.

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#163

Post by bawolff »

beefield wrote: post #125
onos wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re saying the poor have much more to gain through hard work and shouldn’t be discouraged?

So you’re saying the rich have much less to gain through hard work and shouldn’t be incentivized?

Isn't that a given? The idle rich as a class has been a thing for a long time. Rich people do not generally work shitty dead end jobs, as a general rule.

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#164

Post by bawolff »

onos wrote: post #94
Qem wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Whether or not they should be discouraged is a very different question from what they have to gain.

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#165

Post by AdrianB1 »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #74
mizzao wrote: post #5

The idea that salary is a measure of self-worth is an unfortunate lie that our modern society perpetuates.

No one thinks it is a measure of self-worth, but an approximation of the value the work creates for others. Some people do feel having the marketplace value their labor and effort provides a sense of self-worth. Wanting to feel valued by family, friends, and the marketplace is normal.

No. With D&I, in many corporations wages are heavily correlated with gender and race more than the value of the work. In the opposite direction, with the equality part pf DIE the brilliant engineer and the mediocre-at-best HR paper-pusher are paid the same. Wage correlation with worth assumes strong, measurable meritocracy, it is not the case for most of the times, but very visible in the past decade.

Anecdotal evidence, see the recent TikTok and related Youtube videos about people "working" in Big Tech doing mostly eating, some leisure work, some meaningless meetings and then team parties. You will struggle to find the work value of that, but the salaries are way above US median wage.

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#166

Post by bawolff »

amelius wrote: post #111
friedman23 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This seems unlikely to me, do you have any stats to back it up.

Also immigrants usually don't come to literak nothing. While its certainly difficult for them, usually there are cultural or religious groups that help them out or they have family that immigrated before them to help them get on their feet.

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#167

Post by paulclinger »

angarg12 wrote: post #86
epistemer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with the role of luck and yet it can't be the only explanation. After all, winning the lottery is pure luck, but buying the ticket isn't. People are taking risks (monetary, reputational, personal, opportunity, etc.) putting ourselves out there, increasing their "luck surface", so when the luck strikes they are the one that can benefit from it.

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#168

Post by bawolff »

dane-pgp wrote: post #146
manimino wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds right. Around 2.2 million, your money starts to generate more income than your labor can, unless you have an exceptionally high paying job.

So maybe people with a net worth above 2.2 million should be paying a wealth tax instead of an income tax.

Well they do have to pay taxes on dividends and capital gains, so its not like its totally tax free.

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#169

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

dang wrote: post #159
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

" Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. " It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (The GP comment was heavily upvoted btw, which doesn't seem surprising at all.)

My apologies.

(To be fair it was downvoted when I replied to it)

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#170

Post by AdrianB1 »

distantsounds wrote: post #2

oddly this doesn't take into account my extremely low IQ friends who mined a bunch of bitcoin early on

They could won the lottery, it does not tell anything about their intelligence. Actually, it tells something, very smart people don't play the lottery and I guess they did not invest in the crypto scam.
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