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Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent

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Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent

#271

Post by WalterBright »

quanticle wrote: post #218
WalterBright wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

85% of American millionaires are self-made. Source: "The Millionaire Next Door" book.

That's exactly what OP is trying to point out. It's easy to be "self-made" when you can get a million dollar loan from your dad to get your real-estate business off the ground. It's easy to be self-made when your dad works at Seattle's most prestigious law firm and can arrange an introduction with IBM's PC hardware division. It's significantly more difficult to be self-made when you have no connections and no capital…

Gates was already a multimillionaire from Microsoft before the DOS deal. IBM also went to Gary Kildall first.

Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent

#272

Post by refurb »

softawre wrote: post #179
wehadfun wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say Parents gave you money is when most would consider your success tied to your parents.

Is that because the majority of us happen to fall just below that rung and want to consider our success "real"?

Exactly. It's like the old saying "An alcoholic is someone who has one more drink than I do."

One could make the argument that everyone in the US has more priviledge than someone stuck in Syria in the midst of a civil war.

Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent

#273

Post by yoha »

wang_li wrote: post #209
nugget wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Going from $0 to $1M is almost impossible--going from $1M to $2M is almost inevitable. I know plenty of people who inherited money and blew it all. Very, very few people, even children from ''rich'' families, have an ''infinite money cushion''. People who come from poverty or communities rampant with discrimination often times have to work harder for opportunities. But hard work is hard work, and there is fierce co…

(0% of families dissipate their wealth within three generations. This suggests that there is a constant up welling of people who accumulate wealth. The proposition that there is some fixed group of rich people sitting at the top is absurd. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873246624045783346...

Edit: the actual figure is 90%

For other people struggling to read this comment: "(" is on the same key as "5" on Azerty keyboards.

Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent

#274

Post by wang_li »

yoha wrote: post #273
wang_li wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(0% of families dissipate their wealth within three generations. This suggests that there is a constant up welling of people who accumulate wealth. The proposition that there is some fixed group of rich people sitting at the top is absurd. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873246624045783346...

Edit: the actual figure is 90% For other people struggling to read this comment: "(" is on the same key as "5" on Azerty keyboards.

It's also a capital 9. I'm so ashamed. The number is supposedly 90%.

Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent

#275

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

hueving wrote: post #130
cmdrfred wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People who come from poverty or communities rampant with discrimination often times have to work harder for opportunities. But hard work is hard work, and there is fierce competition at every level, no matter who you are. I hesitate to take anything away from anyone's success. Tell that to the kid making iPhones in the Foxconn facility. Success isn't where you are, it's how far you've come. By that metric the most s…

Hard work is requisite, not satisfactory. You can dig ditches in your own yard for 14 hours a day and you aren't going to be successful. Similarly, you can start a business with your $1 million inherited wealth, but it has an extremely high probability of failing without hard work. >Tell that to the kid making iPhones in the Foxconn facility. I'm not even sure what your point is. GP was pointing out that competition…

>Hard work is requisite, not satisfactory.

If you're one of the Rich Kids of Instagram, hard work doesn't seem to play much of a role in their lives.

The point about Foxconn is obvious. How many Foxconn employees have a realistic chance of topping the rich list?

Hard work, like the idea of being a self-made person, is largely a self-serving mythology.

Real hard work is doing the same shitty job for 10-12 hours a day six or seven days a week and earning barely enough to pay the rent.

That's the reality of hard work for much of the population. Fetishising the hard work of the already-rich discounts that ground truth.

Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent

#276

Post by yoha »

wang_li wrote: post #274
yoha wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: the actual figure is 90% For other people struggling to read this comment: "(" is on the same key as "5" on Azerty keyboards.

It's also a capital 9. I'm so ashamed. The number is supposedly 90%.

Oh, my bad, I got confused with the brackets (which are not on a digit key). I really should have checked. See, we all make mistakes!

Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent

#277

Post by [deleted] »

lsc wrote: post #152
nugget wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Going from $0 to $1M is almost impossible--going from $1M to $2M is almost inevitable. I know plenty of people who inherited money and blew it all. Very, very few people, even children from ''rich'' families, have an ''infinite money cushion''. People who come from poverty or communities rampant with discrimination often times have to work harder for opportunities. But hard work is hard work, and there is fierce co…

Most of the successful immigrants I personally know who have made it in silicon valley came from families with money or power back home. I mean, there are other stories to, of course, but the student visa and then technical visa course is one mostly reserved for people who come from well off families. (I am not trying to knock anyone or diminish their achievements, some of these people have worked hard and achieved a…

[deleted]

Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent

#278

Post by bobjordan »

wang_li wrote: post #209
nugget wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Going from $0 to $1M is almost impossible--going from $1M to $2M is almost inevitable. I know plenty of people who inherited money and blew it all. Very, very few people, even children from ''rich'' families, have an ''infinite money cushion''. People who come from poverty or communities rampant with discrimination often times have to work harder for opportunities. But hard work is hard work, and there is fierce co…

(0% of families dissipate their wealth within three generations. This suggests that there is a constant up welling of people who accumulate wealth. The proposition that there is some fixed group of rich people sitting at the top is absurd. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873246624045783346...

There is a force not unlike gravity, constantly pulling on all outliers, reverting them to the mean over time. However, that does not imply the outliers do not "sit at the top" and heavily impact whatever group in which they are the outliers.

Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent

#279

Post by nathanasmith »

sn9 wrote: post #268
nathanasmith wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Unfortunately, the prevailing social zeitgeist in the US is that not everyone deserves to be saved- you have to earn the right to be deemed worthy enough to be saved, and really if you find yourself in a position where you need to be saved then it's probably your own fault and you should bootstrap your way out of it. The puritanical mindset is very, very strong and all-prevailing in the US. I wasn't sure how to par…

How you frame the question can produce vastly different responses. That said, I'd say the perception of Americans being selfish has more to do with our terrible electoral system in which the incentives are such that we elect politicians that, in aggregate, portray a more selfish representation of our populace than really is there. This is how you get polls saying large majorities of Americans believe in Issue X, but…

>>How you frame the question can produce vastly different responses.

Here are some of the questions on the GSS:

In our society everyone must look out for himself. It is of little use to unite with others and fight for one's goals in politics or in unions. 67.7 percent disagreed

It is the responsibility of government to meet everyone's needs, even in case of sickness, poverty, unemployment, and old age. 57.3 percent agreed

If social welfare benefits such as disability, unemployment compensation, and early retirement pensions are as high as they are now, it only makes people not want to work anymore. 54 percent disagreed

Note that the GSS is cited more often academically than any other survey other than the US census so it carries some weight.

Re: Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent

#280

Post by int_19h »

googletazer wrote: post #136
bduerst wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>wouldn't you want your kids to have it easier and give them any advantage you possibly can? You're missing the point. It isn't that the wealthy are being incriminating for "wanting their kids to have it easier". They're pointing out that the success for kids born into wealth is typically attributable to family money.

>They're pointing out that the success for kids born into wealth is typically attributable to family money. That's pretty obvious to me, it wasn't obvious to you? I don't think any of the newly rich, such as say - Zuck were hiding these facts. Zuck went to Harvard, an elite school, and got 100k from the bank of mom and dad to work on his own thing. The issue is that this data doesn't filter to the masses. Since it do…

>> That's pretty obvious to me, it wasn't obvious to you?

There are literally dozens of "how to get rich" books, that are actually "why it's your fault that you aren't rich" books in disguise, which try to explicitly disprove that statement.

So yes, apparently, to a lot of people, it's not actually obviously true.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis - one of the biggest sources of suffering in the world.

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