Surely almost everyone realises by adulthood that the real answer is that most people just aren't trying to be rich? It's not the actual goal of the vast majority of people.
If everyone were trying to maximise their own wealth, we would have no nurses, no-one would be a firefighter, no-one would be police, no-one would work in the military, etc etc. Vast swathes of jobs would have unfillable vacancies because everyone would work them for at most a couple of years whilst living out of their car or similar in order to save, then they'd be hustling and trying to start their own business or get a job in finance or whatever.
I have a fairly solid academic background, and of my cohort, less than half, maybe even under 25%, went into traditionally well paying fields.
Most are more interested in driving academia/science forward or generally on other social goals as long as they have enough to pay for the house and car.
You could equally ask why doesn't everyone lift at the gym 10+ hours a week, or run 50 miles, or aim to learn a new recipe every week, or whatever else. Different people have different goals and that's wonderful. Money is just one of many balls that people try to juggle.
> Most are more interested in driving academia/science forward or generally on other social goals as long as they have enough to pay for the house and car.
I don't know about you, but my impression is that people who ended up in academia are mostly there because it seemed like the path of least resistance. They were indeed not optimizing for wealth, but optimizing for comfort by not making the scary decision of quitting the track they've been on their whole life.
Given how hard it is to stay in academia nowadays, I wouldn't say it's the 'path of least resistance.'
People tend to cling to what is familiar even if it causes hardship/suffering. Switching into a new and unfamiliar area often looks harder than doing something you've been already doing.
I'm only a single data point, but I always wanted to teach at a university. I just didn't for the first 50 years of my life because the pay outside was so much better.
But then I finally made the scary decision to quit the track I'd been on my whole life and started teaching at a university full time. And I've never been happier. What a great, fulfilling job, to see my students run off and start careers in high spirits.
I'm not rich, but I have enough money for my modest lifestyle, and you'd have to pay me a VERY large salary (say $2 million per year) to trade my remaining life for some lousy product du jour.
> are mostly there because it seemed like the path of least resistance
This is true of pretty much every profession. Academics get a lot of heat because there is some silly feud around elitism and common people but the reality is most people in every career are there because it's easy. I'm a software developer by trade, not because I went through hardship to become one but because I happen to really enjoy writing software. I'm just lucky it happens to be lucrative.
For the vast majority of human history the obvious answer was “some people are born into money”, not “99.99999999% of the population just don’t care as much about getting rich as those few incredibly wealthy lords who will kill anyone who gets in their way”. :)
So many of these answers seem to presume that wealth and success are things that pretty much anyone can just reach out and take if they really wanted to.
There’s also the embedded presumption that being rich is a superior state. I think there’s plenty of evidence that being poor is physically, emotionally, and spiritually exhausting, but that doesn’t mean that being rich is renewing.
I know some proper who have become quite wealthy and have seen the ways money changes them. It’s hard for the mind to justify overabundance in a world of need, so we must rationalize our fortunes as ‘deserved’ for being ‘smart.’
Another way to live is to strive for enough. Enough to help others, to take care of most any emergency, enough to take breaks now and then and be with people you love.
Yes, but it is not currently the "vast majority of human history".
The main issue I think though with discussing things like this on an Internet site is that the world is not homogeneous. In order to have a reasonable discussion we have to exclude obvious edge cases like how there is luck involved in not being born in North Korea.
Do you genuinely believe that we have equality of opportunity even in “first-world” nations when nearly all of the institutional operational access is monopolized by families and other private social networks? The exceptions to the rule seem smaller than the odds of being born in North Korea. Most people do not have equal access to wealth opportunities. So no, it’s not at all “random chance”, unless your idea of “random chance” is “born into the Trump family”. :)
Equality? No, of course not. I don't believe that at all, with equal application of effort/skill it is far easier to "make it" if, for example, you are born in San Francisco to well connected, wealthy parents. I consider this to be self evident and I wouldn't take seriously the opinion of anyone who would claim otherwise.
There are also effects _on the individual themselves_ like e.g. it's more likely that a person will be more intelligent if they have good nutrition throughout pregnancy and early childhood.
However, not withstanding that, I also don't believe that luck is a barrier to success apart from at the absolute top levels.
The analogy I would give is with athletics. You won't take Olympic gold without top tier genetics. But without training you won't even be able to run 10km. And to be "rich" in this world you don't need to be in the Olympics. You just need to be competitive.
It really depends on what we are talking about. I can point to many, many examples of people both in my personal life and famous people who I do not know personally who have been successful by any reasonable standard, both groups of which it is trivial to see to those close to them have not merely been lucky.
Yeah, I think it probably comes down to different definitions of “rich”. I mean like “USD 50+ million net worth”. A lot of people can be quite successful if they play their cards right and have a good bit of luck. Hardly anyone will be among “the rich” without access to private networks.
It's true that most people are optimizing for a range of possible outcomes and not actually laser-focused on getting rich.
For example, I always had a dual goal of:
1. Gain wealth. 2. Gain knowledge and critical thinking skills.
I was trying to get rich, but only in ways which would result in me gaining more knowledge and critical thinking ability on the way. So I was going about it in a very specific way and missing out on many possible paths as a result. It's why:
- I completed my university degree instead of dropping out early and becoming a founder.
- I chose to get involved in complex open source distributed systems projects instead of building social media apps and add-ons.
- I changed companies multiple times, even when I found ones which paid a high salary for little work. There's only so much you can learn at one company in one industry. I wanted to see how software works across different industries.
- I avoided cutting corners.
In retrospect, I can only speculate that maybe I would have been successful in gaining wealth if I had been laser-focused on that and disregarded self-improvement.
Still, I think the article makes a critically important point; it's mostly about luck. In other words; the vast majority of people who were 100% laser-focused on getting rich and couldn't care less about self-improvement also failed to get rich... And these people, those who survived the ordeal, have literally nothing to show for it.
They probably blame themselves for their failures and engage in self-loathing because they're not intelligent enough to realize that it's not their fault; it's just probability.
Anyway, when it comes to social and sexual relationships; knowledge and critical thinking ability can often get you the same things which money can get you, but better quality.
The best people are naturally attracted to knowledge and intellect.
> The best people are naturally attracted to knowledge and intellect
That is a pretty narrow-minded way of evaluating other people's worth...
To me curiosity is the most important trait. People who aren't curious seem empty, superficial and over-socialized. They lack a real identity. They seem almost unconscious to me.
I know they can grow out of it, I have seen it, but I don't have the time or energy for people at that stage of development.
Perhaps some meaning is getting lost in translation here...
If you mean curiosity as in academic achievement, then I think this is a deeply disrespectful way of thinking of other people.
If you mean curiosity as in having empathy for the people and world around you, and not being a narcissistic sociopath, then I probably agree with you.
But from what you wrote earlier, I get the impression you're talking about the former rather than the latter...
Not necessarily academic curiosity but curious to learn things and capable of critical thinking. I also think there are many 'educated idiots' so education isn't everything. There are a lot of educated people who are good at repeating complex-sounding catchphrases like parrots when promoted with the right questions; that's not intelligence.
But the knowledgeable intellectuals seem to like it.
> If everyone were trying to maximise their own wealth, we would have no nurses, no-one would be a firefighter, no-one would be police, no-one would work in the military, etc etc.
In a vacuum maybe, but presumably market conditions would adjust to increase pay for these positions until demand was met (or some other innovation would take their place). That's the whole point of markets, is it not? If there is legitimately enough demand for something, it will be supplied if possible.
The phrase "vast majority" to me is shorthand for "I have no data but a strong gut feeling about this". As someone who grew up not poor but close enough to it to have a healthy fear of it, focusing on driving science or social goals is admirable, but a bit of a luxury thing.
The things that are 'socially acceptable' (big houses? boats? art? no multiple spouses) to spend millions of dollars on as an individual are just not appealing to everyone.
I think the minority of people who do have the goal of "getting rich" don't understand this. Generally, people tend to assume that their own goals and worldview are roughly shared by most other people.
“Some people are so poor, all they have is money.”
a fool and his time are easily parted...
> The most successful people
For some value of "success" that doesn't include whatever Findus and Pettson are doing here: https://littlefinland.de/8487-large_default/pettson-and-find...
A Findus and Pettson reference here is awesome
I am rich enough (I could retire at 25 or so which is 25 years ago after I sold my first company), but I never had any drive to make much more as that type of work needs all kinds of boring stuff I don't want. I like to build stuff and sell it and move on, not suck up to VCs, have 1000s of employees, make business plans or any of that. So I build stuff and exit once done and making money.
Even with smarter investment choices, I could've had a lot more, but I don't find that interesting either. Building stuff; only thing I care about.
I don’t understand how this relates to the article. Are you saying you got rich enough to retire by 25 on pure talent? Or are you saying that for anyone to achieve that kind of wealth by 25 it is obvious luck (or generational wealth) had to be involved? Are you agreeing, disagreeing, is this just a humble brag?
I truly am having trouble making sense of the purpose of your comment. Would you mind clarifying?
He is saying that he could be much wealthier but chooses not to be because he has other priorities.
This is evidence that other factors than luck play a role.
> This is evidence that other factors than luck play a role.
How is that evidence? That is like playing the lottery once and winning, then saying you could be much richer if you continued playing the lottery but choose not to because you have other priorities.
Even in the thought experiment you give, which obviously has very little to do with someone working without putting significant capital at risk - if the lottery is EV negative, then although the first win may be luck, the choice to stop playing after the first win is not luck but skill :)
> the choice to stop playing after the first win is not luck but skill
That would only be true if you said you chose to stop playing because you knew you were going to lose. But in the example (which was based on your point) the person is claiming they would continue winning if they continued to play.
Respectfully, I’m waiting for an answer from the author of the post. They wrote it, they’re the ones who can explain what they meant. This speculative conversation we’re having isn’t going to get us closer to the truth of someone else’s intention.
The person posting is not speaking about gambling, but about working and building businesses. I'm not sure why you are using a lottery as a comparison.
The reasonable worst case with any application of skill (e.g. don't put your entire net worth into a risky business) is that they end up roughly where they started.
It’s called an analogy, and it was made specifically to address a point you made (which is why I quoted you, not them).
Sure, but it's not analogous, because your scenario has significant downside.
A person with the correct skills can choose to work at a charity or at say, a well paying software job. One choice gives them more money than the other and there is no luck involved.
This is self evident really, I assume that you also do know this, but then it's confusing when people focus on luck as if most people are even playing the game at all.
edit: Actually, that's probably a better way of framing it. The upper bound on wealth for a person is very much luck based, but almost no-one is operating remotely close to their skill cap, so in practice it doesn't matter that much.
You might need luck to make a billion, but to make a few million just needs dedication barring some obvious handicaps such as e.g. being born in North Korea.
> So I build stuff and exit once done and making money.
Sounds nice. Any recommendations on how to get into this game? E.g. how / where do you find your exits?
Were you lucky?
The paper: [1]
(While it's nice to have a model, "fortune" has been synonymous with "luck" and "wealth" since Roman times [2], so it's not exactly a new concept)
Realistically?
Because I'm too risk averse to try high risk and high reward pursuits like starting my own company, or doing moonshot projects. Imagine the aversion people have to starting projects from scratch in a stack that they don't know and apply that to bookkeeping, laws and regulations, billing, marketing and other aspects that aren't focused purely on code.
I'm also the kind of person that doesn't want to sell snake oil by being a charming salesman, in contrast to the droves of borderline-scammers out there making projects to extract money from people who don't know any better (also applies even to many early access games, many of the crypto projects, the various lifestyle gurus etc.), in addition to knowing that many of the things I could built have already been built by others and built well.
At the same time, I'm not brilliant enough (e.g. an outlier) to have breakthrough successes and not focused enough to achieve greater success through sheer effort, which would make me sacrifice my health, time and relationships. Having a stable 9-5 where I still do good work might be better in that way rather than working 80 hour weeks for a company that might still go under in the end, survivorship bias in regards to success stories should probably be kept in memory.
In other words, I wasn't lucky enough to born with great inheritance or to be at the right place in the right time and other forms of success do somewhat elude me for now. Not that having employment, health, quality of life and good relationships isn't success in of itself, just not the kind that people glorify and chase.
That said, in regards to most things, people who are good at a craft have failed more times than others have even tried. Unless they're in a regulated sector, then they might just be in jail.
I will say that it's still immensely cool to see when the stars align and people who are smart and hard working enough end up in the right place at the right time and we get awesome stuff like entire industries starting up (e.g. how VR is getting more mainstream, to some degree the whole LLM thing, the rise of ARM processors etc., advances in graphics with the likes of Unreal Engine, programming languages like Go filling in all sorts of niches, people getting up and making engines like Godot; not that all of it is focused on money, but it's still cool). Neither someone's innate abilities, nor hard work, nor luck should be discounted.
It isn't fair (sic) calling it risk aversity when the odds of walking away with a not bad outcome are against you. For everyday people risky business means potentially losing everything including sanity and peace of mind.
“Funding agencies the world over are interested in maximizing their return on investment in the scientific world. Indeed, the European Research Council recently invested $1.7 million in a program to study serendipity—the role of luck in scientific discovery—and how it can be exploited to improve funding outcomes.”
What came out of this study? The article left me hanging.
> The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some people work more hours than average and some work less, but nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else.
If we instead look at the effectiveness of the output then there can be massive disparities.
Einstein thinking about relativity vs me digging a hole to China.
Einstein is working the same hours but the output is 9999999x more valuable.
If we were all Einsteins doing research, we wouldn't improve our lives 9999999x, instead we'd all die of hunger in a few days.
Einstein's work was very important, and benefitted us all greatly, but it was only enabled by countless others doing less glamorous, less rewarding work.
You never know what you will find in that hole.
terracotta army?
Depends on how long it's gonna take you and what you're going to smuggle through that hole.
What freaking garbage is this, it’s all about equity.
If a company hires 10 people and pays them 100/hour then all the value created by these people will belong to the company - 10x100 hour that the company paid.
If the value happens to be 3 million then the shareholders just made 3 million - (10x100).
Also this scales for the shareholders pretty much forever, capital is a limitless resource when compared to hours in a day.
There is no need to make a freaking model out of something so obvious.
If you want to get rich you need to get in on the equity game somehow (invest, start a company, FAANG RSU-s, does not matter)
Working more hours or getting paid more per hour does not scale to rich levels
> There is no need to make a freaking model out of something so obvious.
But consider that almost the entire first half of the Das Kapital's first volume is precisely a (very tedious) formulation of precisely this: "workers produce more than they get to consume, that's how non-workers can be sustained". And you can find there the criticism of other contemporary economic theorists who apparently disagreed with that ("nah, the workers spend, like, 8 hours of work just to make up for the materials that's consumed in the manufacturing process, so the actual profit is made only when they work the 9th and later hours so if the work day would be restricted to 8 hours then all the factories will go bust; would someone please think of the entrepreneurs!").
Your missing the point of the article. It acknowledges that the ratios are absurd. The question is why and how did the people that have this capital that you describe as belonging to investors get the capital in the first place.
Maybe somewhat about this concrete article, but not in the general life I see around me, people are working way too hard for that 100/hr piece of cake, maybe even hoping they can get a raise and get 110/hr piece of cake. Meanwhile shareholders get 3 million cake :)
The game is rigged worse than a casino :)
I think it should be interesting to you that this article caused you an emotional reaction. Your language is emotionally charged and it's made you miss the point that @cudgy has given you
Nothing wrong woth adding some spice but yeah bit emotionally charged in any case I would like to point out that both the article and parent miss the point, while it is interesting to model who wins the lottery, the real problem is that 99% of the people are not even playing or trying to :)
This study seems to hide everything behind the magical "luck" while not actually explaining anything. The way I understand it, some randomness is added to the model, which I assume was calibrated until the model yielded the result that is similar to the modern-day wealth distribution. So all it proves is that other factors alone (IQ, etc.) are not defining of the outcome, but it still doesn't explain what factors are.
"Luck" exists, I believe, but saying that person's wealth depends mostly on luck alone, is dismissive of all other human individual and collective qualities that are actually at play.
--
P.S. I also agree with other comments here, correctly observing that being rich is by far not an objective for everyone. On the other hand, hopefully, wealth is a mean to achieve some other life objectives. Otherwise it's just sad indeed.
As many have noted, not everyone aspires to wealth; a lot of people are happy with having just enough to live comfortably and go on vacation a couple times a year.
The way I see it, (though I could be mistaken), wealth empowers individuals to engage in pursuits they value without external concerns.
Exceptionally talented professionals (e.g., nurses, doctors, scientists, lawyers) are quite frequently rendered incapable of addressing issues they are passionate about due to financial constraints or bureaucratic indifference. Essentially, financial resources enable one to transition from being merely aspirational to being influential (contingent, of course, on the specific situation). Consider activism: many people strive to support their communities, but often, funding for such initiatives is lacking.
That website had three popups before I could read the article and another one that appeared across the bottom. Two cookie-related popups, and two others. I almost lost patience and just closed the tab. And MIT Technology review is kind of something you'd expect to be just a little bit more ... serious?
How can this be good design? No, forget that: how is this even acceptable design? Now I will remember the experience for at least a few weeks and avoid clicking on anything that points to that site since I already know it is probably going to be a hassle.
Can someone explain the design decisions to me?
Oh, and if this comment seems irrelevant to the subject: see what I mean how annoying it is to have to wade through a bunch of nonsense before you get to the bits you actually care about?
`technologyreview.com` is one of the many sources of my HN submissions.
Recently, after I upgraded to macOS Sequoia 15.0, I realized that my current AdBlocker was not working in Safari. This was due to a conflict between AdGuard and Apple iCloud Private Relay.
In that short window of a few hours, I realized that the Internet is an unforgiving place to browse without an AdBlocker. As I was on my usual chore of collecting and sharing interesting, weird, and strange finds for Hacker News, I was stunned to see how unusable the browsing experience had become.
Of course, I don’t hate ads. It is a legitimate business model. I’m just not too keen with the over-done ads that is everywhere, and in everything.
So, I Block Ads. And recently, I wrote an article to remind myself of how life on the Internet is today.
> This was due to a conflict between AdGuard and Apple iCloud Private Relay.
Following your post I arrived at this:
https://github.com/AdguardTeam/CoreLibs/issues/1914#issuecom...
You might want to let the developer know that posting on the forums is absolutely not “reporting the problem to Apple”. They need to file a proper bug with Feedback Assistant, and ideally spend one of their two yearly Technical Support Incident (TSI) to get priority, seeing as it’s a paid app.
I think they are in talks. This had happened with earlier releases of macOS.
I did lose patience. This site has the most abusive “consent” form available. And they aren't even satisfied with that, they have to use multiple ones.
> Can someone explain the design decisions to me?
They are trying to be smart to get rich?
Then I don't get it.
Just the same way that I don't get Temu. I buy a lot of stuff on Aliexpress. Mostly electronics, odd tools, materials for hobby projects etc. I would think Temu would be interested in my business. But every time I've clicked on a product link there I get this stilly spin-the-wheel nonsense. Which just represents a hurdle I have to get past to order something. After you get that a few times you grow tired of it. So now I never click on Temu links. I go on Aliexpress instead because they'll sell it to me without this whole nonsense.
Again, how does this help them make money? Is it a kind of filter that is supposed to repulse people like me and attract people who find this kind of interface attractive? Presumably because they can get more money out of people with certain traits?
I don't get it how interposing a lot of nonsense between me and the things I am trying to access or buy is supposed to boost revenue. Can someone explain this to me?
Maybe because they make so much money from the ads and unsuspecting users that subscribe to a trial and forget to cancel? Maybe because many websites are developed using similar toolsets, permeating antipatterns, and horrible UI models?
> The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms. Taking that into account can maximize return on many kinds of investment.
What's the opposite of a tautology? Because this headline is it.
If wealth creation is purely luck based, as the headline implies, then maximising wealth creation is purely about getting luckier... and taking this information into account will likely do you no good whatsoever
Sure it will. It even provided a concrete example with the random vs targeted funding experiment. Basically, the idea is to spread out capital to more participants to take advantage of the phenomena. So, for example, do you hire the superstar prima donna developer or hire 5+ good developer prospects with hopes one or more may become exceptional for the company? Do you invest in one shiny startup with a superstar group of founders (a “sure bet”) or invest in 5+ startups with goood potential?
> What's the opposite of a tautology? Because this headline is it.
I think "oxymoron"? Close, at least.
This analysis (it’s not talent, it’s pure random chance) seems like it’s failing to account for an enormous host of variables that have a significant impact on outcome. Probably the most obvious one is whether you are a child of wealthy and well-connected parents. These can be interpreted as “pure random chance haha!” but they really aren’t if they can’t “randomly” happen post-hoc to some “random” person actually picked at random.
1. It isn't at all the direction the article is going, but there is an argument that the smartest among us do things like swear vows of poverty. Optimising for wealth isn't all that obvious, especially given that the difference between 10 million and 10 billion is mostly about how you influence society than what outcomes are personally experienced.
2. More on the subject of the article, the simulation is probably good but the conclusions being drawn are not as robust as they might appear. For the sake of argument, lets say that this simulation outcomes align perfectly with reality. That doesn't conclusively demonstrate that wealth is random with respect to people's decisions and abilities. The random events in the simulation might be driven by people's preferences, abilities and habits (hereafter, "skills") which are themselves randomly distributed.
For example, lets say that everyone encounters an opportunity to become a billionaire at a perfectly constant rate of 1 opportunity/year [0] and the probability we can capitalise on it with our skills is normally distributed (ditto for ruinous events). That would be indistinguishable in outcomes from random lucky events that are normally distributed, even though in reality our skills are actually playing a huge role. That is to say: reality can be perfectly aligned with the simulation even if the assumptions of the simulation are different from the realities of reality.
In the real world it is probably a mix of both. There is certainly luck involved in becoming absurdly wealthy, but there is a also an element of skill that shines through in some people who seem to have a miraculous ability to make their own luck. I've met a few of the inverse who it would take much more than luck for them to get wealthy, there are people who fumble their chances.
[0] Picking an absurdly high rate for the sake of argument.
>For example, lets say that everyone encounters an opportunity to become a billionaire at a perfectly constant rate of 1 opportunity/year [0] and the probability we can capitalise on it with our skills is normally distributed (ditto for ruinous events)
I think your assumption is wrong. The key idea is that the outcome of random lucky events depends on the amount of capital one already has. A lucky event doesn't add to capital, but multiplies it, so consecutive lucky events accumulate creating a long tail.
If you believed in Bitcoin in 2012 you probably wouldn't be rich today, if you were living paycheck to paycheck at the time. If by 2012 you already had some spare capital from getting lucky in the dotcom years, on the other hand...
I'm using a different type of lucky event to the study, but my argument is a statistical one so that difference doesn't worry me. You can substitute different types of events in if you prefer.
Not sure this actually tells us anything useful as it's all based on an inherently simplified simulation. You get what you simulate for. You could just as easily replace "luck" with nepotism and fraud and conclude those factors must be very important.
Nepotism and getting away with fraud are luck.
Indeed - the luck of being born in the right family and not getting caught, respectively.
Sure, but luck isn't necessarily either.
> This talent is distributed normally around some average level,
There are also a bunch of game-theory models which show things converging on massive wealth disparities, even when every actor has equal stats.
