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Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

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Re: Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

#191

Post by prostoalex »

heurist wrote: post #178
natalyarostova wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First of all, Bill Gates had a TON of opportunity and privilege funneled to him from his parents. He absolutely did. And yet even conditional on that category, the probability of becoming a billionaire is extremely low. Therefore, according to the parent comment, that counts as self-made. > You cannot POSSIBLY believe that there is no wealth disparity in the US? That there is not a disparity in opportunity between…

You'd have to be precise in targeting the social network in which the subject individual wields influence. Networks are more important than money in many ways. An individual who is friends or whose family has friends in VC or PE has a better starting position in an entrepreneurial career than someone who has no connections, even if they have money. You also need to consider the social implications of your category ch…

> The millionaire doubles their wealth by doing nothing and the small business owner fights tooth and nail to bring home a modest income.

If a large group of millionaires reads your comment, sees the light and shamefully decides to do something by pulling their investable assets out, the small business owner will likely face high capital costs and in many cases be simply unable to raise any money at interest rates attractive to him/her.

Re: Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

#192

Post by dragonwriter »

heurist wrote: post #178
natalyarostova wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First of all, Bill Gates had a TON of opportunity and privilege funneled to him from his parents. He absolutely did. And yet even conditional on that category, the probability of becoming a billionaire is extremely low. Therefore, according to the parent comment, that counts as self-made. > You cannot POSSIBLY believe that there is no wealth disparity in the US? That there is not a disparity in opportunity between…

You'd have to be precise in targeting the social network in which the subject individual wields influence. Networks are more important than money in many ways. An individual who is friends or whose family has friends in VC or PE has a better starting position in an entrepreneurial career than someone who has no connections, even if they have money. You also need to consider the social implications of your category ch…

> The millionaire doubles their wealth by doing nothing and the small business owner fights tooth and nail to bring home a modest income.

Small business owners often are millionaires; the distinction you are making is more accurately between the haut bourgeoisie (the upper class in capitalism) and the petit bourgeoisie (the middle class in capitalism) than between “millionaires” (or any other description of aggregate worth) and some other group.

Re: Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

#193

Post by anthony_romeo »

darawk wrote: post #26

This is such nonsense. First of all, there are absolutely people who come from dirt poverty and become wildly successful. Second of all, plenty of people receive lots of help from their parents and amount to precisely nothing. IMO it's fair to refer to your success as "self made" if you exceed the median success level of your class peer group by a substantial margin. If you immigrate from Africa with nothing, and you…

Perhaps the real message ought to be that we all live as part of a broader continuum wherein we are all recipients of the privileges and hardships of the past, and as a consequence of that reality we ought to have better empathy for all of our brothers, sisters, and otherwise.

IMO arguing whether people are 'truly' self-made is a discussion of semantics. Calling people self-made or not doesn't change the actual timeline of actions and events of an individual’s life.

Re: Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

#194

Post by gamblor956 »

darawk wrote: post #26

This is such nonsense. First of all, there are absolutely people who come from dirt poverty and become wildly successful. Second of all, plenty of people receive lots of help from their parents and amount to precisely nothing. IMO it's fair to refer to your success as "self made" if you exceed the median success level of your class peer group by a substantial margin. If you immigrate from Africa with nothing, and you…

If you immigrate from Africa with nothing, and you get yourself a law degree and an upper middle class income - that's self made success.

Ah. The law professors did absolutely nothing, I suppose? Or the law firm that hired an immigrant that may not have had an understanding of US professional norms? Or the US, which let the immigrant into the country to pursue their dreams of success while relying on taxpayer-funded social services?

This trope of the "self made success" conveniently ignores that people are reliant in many ways on the efforts of others for their success. All those peple who rose from dirt poverty to become successful? Read their stories. At some point, they all relied on someone taking a chance on them--and without that chance, they'd be no different from the thousands of others of dirt poor people who never made it.

Re: Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

#195

Post by [deleted] »

prostoalex wrote: post #191
heurist wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd have to be precise in targeting the social network in which the subject individual wields influence. Networks are more important than money in many ways. An individual who is friends or whose family has friends in VC or PE has a better starting position in an entrepreneurial career than someone who has no connections, even if they have money. You also need to consider the social implications of your category ch…

> The millionaire doubles their wealth by doing nothing and the small business owner fights tooth and nail to bring home a modest income. If a large group of millionaires reads your comment, sees the light and shamefully decides to do something by pulling their investable assets out, the small business owner will likely face high capital costs and in many cases be simply unable to raise any money at interest rates at…

[deleted]

Re: Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

#196

Post by [deleted] »

CodeMage wrote: post #161
darawk wrote: post #26

This is such nonsense. First of all, there are absolutely people who come from dirt poverty and become wildly successful. Second of all, plenty of people receive lots of help from their parents and amount to precisely nothing. IMO it's fair to refer to your success as "self made" if you exceed the median success level of your class peer group by a substantial margin. If you immigrate from Africa with nothing, and you…

> I feel like this trope that self-made success is a myth comes almost entirely from people like the author of this article. People who were born with lots of advantages, who still couldn't hack it. They want to justify their own failure to live up to their family's expectations by tearing other people down. And there we go. That kind of attitude is why this trope was created initially. The problem people have with "…

[deleted]

Re: Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

#197

Post by heurist »

dragonwriter wrote: post #192
heurist wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd have to be precise in targeting the social network in which the subject individual wields influence. Networks are more important than money in many ways. An individual who is friends or whose family has friends in VC or PE has a better starting position in an entrepreneurial career than someone who has no connections, even if they have money. You also need to consider the social implications of your category ch…

> The millionaire doubles their wealth by doing nothing and the small business owner fights tooth and nail to bring home a modest income. Small business owners often are millionaires; the distinction you are making is more accurately between the haut bourgeoisie (the upper class in capitalism) and the petit bourgeoisie (the middle class in capitalism) than between “millionaires” (or any other description of aggregate…

Kind of proves my point that there are no easy categories. I used millionaire as a catch-all term but you can substitute hundred-millionaire, billionaire, trillionaire, or any subset of each and the point still stands.

Re: Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

#198

Post by gamblor956 »

stcredzero wrote: post #92
Isamu wrote: post #2

>She told me, “I was curious, but I don't know how a single person in America who doesn't have family money could buy anything, I really don’t, if they're not working in finance or they're not a doctor. ” Easy, there are vast areas of America where housing is more affordable. I certainly got zero cash from family when I bought a home. My family put money into giving me food and shelter growing up though. This is kind…

>She told me, “I was curious, but I don't know how a single person in America who doesn't have family money could buy anything, I really don’t, if they're not working in finance or they're not a doctor. ” This is kind of like that cartoon of a New Yorker's view of the US, where Manhattan looms large, then there's New Jersey, and at the fringes there is the rest of the nation. I met this veteran taxi driver in South C…

The big irony is that this happened much more in liberal California than it did in conservative Ohio and South Carolina.

Not sure where you've come up with this bizarre and selective understanding of US history. Ohio is notorious for racially-based restrictive covenants on housing. There were entire neighborhoods where deeds had restrictions preventing their sale to blacks. They got the idea from southern states like South Carolina. These restrictions are still on many of the deeds in Ohio and South Carolina, though they are no longer legally enforceable.

Re: Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

#199

Post by darawk »

foldr wrote: post #182
darawk wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course it does, because non-successful people by definition can't be "self-made"! (In order to be a self-made millionaire, you have to at least be a millionaire.) What it doesn't do is tell us anything about how much of any given person's success is down to luck. Yes it does. There is a certain base rate of people lucking into vast fortunes. There is a certain base rate of people making those vast fortunes under…

>because it gets harder and harder to luck into that kind of money. But it also gets harder and harder to get that kind of money by skill and hard work. Large amounts of money are more difficult to obtain by any means than small amounts of money. That tells us nothing about the role of luck. And again, if you are just going to assert that obtaining vast wealth by hard work and skill is more likely than obtaining it b…

> But it also gets harder and harder to get that kind of money by skill and hard work. Large amounts of money are more difficult to obtain by any means than small amounts of money.

You don't seem to be understanding the point. Let's take an example. Do you think that it is more common, in general, for the wealthiest person in the world to be the result of skill or luck? I think empirically, and simply reasoning a priori we should conclude that the wealthiest person in the world will most commonly be skill-based, in all possible worlds.

Why is that? Well, because the dynamical process that produces wealthy people through luck has a squashed distribution relative to the one that produces them through skill. Skill allows you to create new things that have never existed before (tech billionaires) or understand the world in some new way that is statistically outlying (e.g. the very wealthiest investors, Buffet, Simons, etc.). The dynamical process that produces luck-based wealth is related to knowing people, gambling, and/or inheritance. That process is inherently more constrained by practical dynamics. Nobody is going to be your counterparty to multi-billion dollar gambles, inheritances tend to get split among many heirs, lotteries don't generally mint deca-billionaires, etc..

> And again, if you are just going to assert that obtaining vast wealth by hard work and skill is more likely than obtaining it by luck, then you are begging the question.

I am not asserting that, at least, not exactly. I am asserting that the distribution of wealth produced by each is different, and that has consequences for the base rates of either in the general population. The skill-based wealth distribution has a longer tail than the luck-based one. Which means, that at the very edges of the distribution, the ratio of luck to skill should favor skill.

Re: Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth

#200

Post by darawk »

CodeMage wrote: post #186
darawk wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem people have with "self-made success" trope is that the self-made success story of someone with severe disadvantages is being equated, on an astoundingly regular basis, with the success of people with substantial advantages. That's how Bill Gates and Arnold Schwarzenegger are both dubbed "self-made" successes, despite their rather different histories. They are both self-made success stories. Schwarzenegg…

> They are both self-made success stories. Schwarzenegger even moreso than Gates. That second part is precisely my point. They're both self-made success stories, but they are in no way equal. They're both self-made success stories in the sense that a dolphin and a cat are both mammals. > If you come from nothing, i'd say getting into any of those professions more than qualifies for "making it". I would like you to cl…

> That second part is precisely my point. They're both self-made success stories, but they are in no way equal. They're both self-made success stories in the sense that a dolphin and a cat are both mammals.

I would argue they're fairly close to equal, since Gates's success is many orders of magnitude greater than Schwarzeneggers in absolute terms. Gates started higher and ended up higher. The amount each moved seems comparable to me.

> The inequality in United States is very, very pronounced and it's getting worse with time. The "self-made success" trope, which involves treating different self-made success stories as equal, is a way of defending and perpetuating that inequality.

I agree, it is. But the question i'm interested in is not what it is used to 'defend and perpetuate', but rather, whether or not it is true.

> People who are getting more and more oppressed by that inequality are rallying against the use of that trope.

Totally, though i'd also add that I think the focus on 'inequality' per se is fairly misguided. I think a much better thing to focus on would be the absolute wellbeing of the bottom. But I don't get to set the cultural agenda.

> Which brings me back to what you said about "making it": if you come from nothing, then just having a well-compensated profession is qualifies as "making it". Is that self-made success? Because that's the topic of our discussion here, remember?

Ya, I would absolutely call that success. If someone immigrates here from Africa with nothing and becomes a lawyer or other professional, that's success. That is making it. Their kids will then have the opportunity to make it on a global scale, just like Gates, et al.

> The truth is that the discussions about the "self-made success as a trope" are not really about the clear cut definitions. It's turtles all the way down, in the sense that almost everyone relies on other people in some ways, so arguing about the precise definition of "self-made success" is a bit pointless. The discourse is really about the role of the trope in the growing inequality in this society and, to that purpose, arguing about some of the most common abuses of the trope -- like this article does -- is much more useful.

My point is simply this: The notion of 'self made success' is not, in any meaningful sense, a myth. It is a real thing that real people do.

Is the story used to justify the status quo? Yes. But lots of stories are used to justify lots of things. The question we should be asking is: is the story true? And if it's true, is it harmful? I don't think it is, but many people seem to.

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