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How the .0001% Made Its Money

priceonomics.com

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Re: How the .0001% Made Its Money

#111

Post by walid »

amitutk wrote: post #98
walid wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do some math. According to Wikipedia the population of the USA is 316,856,000. The 0.0001% of the population is 31685 after removing partial human beings caused by mathematical division. If the Forbes 400 list is used as a sample space for the rest of the 0.0001% then the numbers seem plausible. Note that I'm just playing "mathematician" and I haven't analyzed the 400 people in the list or did anything deeply scienti…

0.0001% of 316,856,000 is 317 (after rounding partial human beings caused by mathematical division), close enough to 400.

Yup my bad, I just multiplied 316,856,000 by 0.0001 without dividing by 100.

Re: How the .0001% Made Its Money

#112

Post by walid »

gadders wrote: post #108
walid wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last sentence is the most important point of the article and probably should have been a separate article on its own: > America’s .0001% is becoming more meritocratic, but the means of a middle class background remain a necessary launching board. So in other words the most important aspect is to be from the middle class to be successful otherwise your chances are much less. Makes sense on many levels such as chan…

Do you not think that a lower IQ would tend you to have lower earning power?

You're not proving cause and effect here. IQ and earning power are correlated but the relation has been proven to run both ways. Low IQ may or may not lead to low income but low income has been shown to lead to low IQ scoring.

Re: How the .0001% Made Its Money

#113

Post by thwarted »

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #105
alnis wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > Kaplan and Rauh find that America’s wealthiest are no longer a collection of Rockefellers and Carnegies. During the period the researchers investigated, the number of individuals on the Forbes 400 who were the first in their family to run a business rose from 40% to 69%. Sixty percent of individuals on the list grew up wealthy in 1982 while only 32% did in 2011. > Although being born into wealth i…

Thanks for your input, but the comment I was responding to was: > The top 0.0001% gained their wealth not by inheriting it Your contribution does not cover that.

That's the assertion from the priceonomics.com article, covered by the paragraphs from the article quoted by alnis.

Re: How the .0001% Made Its Money

#114

Post by walid »

humanrebar wrote: post #106
nitrogen wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > being poor impacts IQ simply because it becomes the mind's obsession of finding means to survive. > While that's poetic, I'm very skeptical that you could even prove that empirically. A study which claims to show exactly this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6298326 Anecdotally, I consider this plausible based on my own experiences during lean months as a startup founder.

I read that article. While those studies are interesting, they are definitely limited and far from conclusive. For example, they didn't control for genetics as far as I can tell. It's entirely plausible that "rich" people are rich in the first place because, statistically speaking, innate intelligence lets them make better financial decisions even under duress. While it's possible and interesting, I certainly wouldn'…

I don't think you can control for genetics, at least not directly. There is no intelligence genetic marker as far as I know which only leaves testing the IQ/intelligence of the whole family tree as the only option. However getting access to ancestors might not be feasible. On the other hand having a large pool of people is good enough since the distribution of intelligence is usually uniform and not restricted to things like class or parental income.

Re: How the .0001% Made Its Money

#115

Post by foobarqux »

r00fus wrote: post #103
adventured wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of that trust fund - which Gates never asked for and had nothing to do with - did Bill Gates invest into starting Microsoft? All I'm seeing here is Bill Gates bashing with no actual substance. If Gates didn't have the trust fund, and didn't invest it into Microsoft, then why are you referring to it as somehow indicting his success? In fact, the IBM exec is not how Microsoft got the contract for DOS. Microsof…

> How much of that trust fund - which Gates never asked for and had nothing to do with - did Bill Gates invest into starting Microsoft? All I'm seeing here is Bill Gates bashing with no actual substance. This is specious reasoning. The safety net provided by a trust fund (even if you didn't ask for it), is quite significant and allows you to take significant risks. Let's take the analogy of FU money. The whole point…

It's more than the money, it's elite socialization: Rich kids learn to believe that they are pre-ordained to be leaders/rulers. That outlook helps them get there.

Re: How the .0001% Made Its Money

#116

Post by bedhead »

programminggeek wrote: post #32

> The economic story of the past decades is supposed to be the death of the American Dream. Income inequality has risen, the wealth of the middle class stagnated, and stories of the poor working their way to prosperity became just stories. I think the article doesn't really do a good job to change that view. The inequality has risen and the wealth of the middle class has stagnated. This is absolutely true. Things lik…

The widening wealth inequality as it relates to inheritance can be explained mostly by one simple concept, something Buffett himself call the most powerful force in the universe: compounding. Wise people with money, given enough time, will rocket to become insanely wealthy. Compounding does nothing for the middle class who generally spend most of their income, and it works the opposite way for the poor who are debtors. Over time this force will make the wealth gap worse and worse, which is exactly what's happened.

Re: How the .0001% Made Its Money

#117

Post by sgloutnikov »

programminggeek wrote: post #32

> The economic story of the past decades is supposed to be the death of the American Dream. Income inequality has risen, the wealth of the middle class stagnated, and stories of the poor working their way to prosperity became just stories. I think the article doesn't really do a good job to change that view. The inequality has risen and the wealth of the middle class has stagnated. This is absolutely true. Things lik…

Inequality for All is a movie worth checking out - http://inequalityforall.com

Re: How the .0001% Made Its Money

#120

Post by chc »

quinnchr wrote: post #107
humanrebar wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read that article. While those studies are interesting, they are definitely limited and far from conclusive. For example, they didn't control for genetics as far as I can tell. It's entirely plausible that "rich" people are rich in the first place because, statistically speaking, innate intelligence lets them make better financial decisions even under duress. While it's possible and interesting, I certainly wouldn'…

Are you seriously asserting poverty is not a known vector for stunted childhood development? Do you realize there are millions of impoverished people in this country who can't afford to eat healthily? You are aware of the effect nutrition has on childhood development right? Do you realize there exist impoverished parts of this country which simply don't have access to fresh healthy food? There's literally hundreds of…

If you actually read the thread, he's asserting the same thing you are asserting. What he's disputing is the idea that one of the chief reasons poverty is hard to get out of is that, once there, the mind is too fixated on survival for higher intellectual achievements.
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