The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

If Bill Gates didn't exist we could all easily be using Osbournes instead of PCs, or something equivalent would have occurred.

Unless you were the first to market in a completely new field, it's very possible that some of a firm's worth comes from gaining market share from existing players. That's the whole 'disruption' effect. This might be more economically efficient from one perspective, but that's not necessarily better - both because perfectly efficient systems lack slack, and because people are bad at valuing things.

So take Amazon back when it specialized in selling books. Good part - Amazon has pretty much any book you want, yay. Bad part - it kills brick-and-mortar bookstores. even today, while I'll go to Amazon for a specific book I want, I'll usually wait until I've looked around some other bookstores first. Not only do I like the chance discovery of books I might not otherwise have picked up in bookstores, I like bookstores themselves, especially used bookstores. And I don't like the fact that there are not as many bookstores as there used to be.

And saying the employees could have just worked somewhere else is shuffling the truth - to have somewhere to work, someone has to start a company, which often takes significant money and risk to begin with

So what? Make co-op financing better, figure out a tired grant system for allocating startup capital from a public pool. You're just underlining the article's hypothesis - rich people often get that way because they start out with or have access to more capital than others of equal or greater ability, rather than through any inherent virtue.

In a previous life where I worked at a boutique computer supplier, I got a client who was running a small stock market research/analysis business with only a few employees, and needed high power workstations. I'm not a big people person, and I was looking at his operation and thinking that I'd prefer it to what I was doing, and (from seeing his work product and helping him get going technically) that it was well within my capabilities. So I put in a bit of extra effort to get friendly with him and to figure out how he got his operation off the ground. Turned out his dad was an investment banker and had given him a million $ to set up (at a time when that was a much more significant investment than it is now). I also learned that his biggest obstacle was not his competitors but the chip he had on his shoulder about how his brother was the favorite son and had been given $10 million.

That was the day I realized that wealth isn't a meritocracy.

My life mostly worked when I was a military wife, but a lot of the values I was raised with only really work if you are in a position that involves a. Responsibility for a larger community and b. Somehow provides for you so you can look out for other people.

Looking out for other people is a real skill, but it doesn't automatically come back to you. Many people feel zero obligation to do anything in return for you when you do something for them and this seems compounded by being a woman. "Social contract" seems like an alien concept for far too many people.

I think I could do good things in an urban planning or economic development type role. That would sort of be the modern equivalent of what European nobility did.

Historically, merchants had a terrible reputation because they just wanted money and felt no obligation to the community. So it was socially problematic for wealth to be controlled by rich merchants rather than nobility. The nobility were beholden to the lower classes and held responsible for using their privilege to serve society by filling roles that required a certain level of privilege and education.

This is why our legal system uses the term "court," which is the same word used for audiences held by the nobility. Originally, nobility heard and settled complaints amongst the townspeople "at court."