% who say people are rich because

dozu888 said:
kids will lean left while on daddy's credit cards, until the shit gets real and they have to pay their own bills.
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I am doing exceedingly well for myself. I would consider myself both above average in income and in ability.

The people I am around who are wealthier than me fall into two categories:

1. Older/better savers (rare in tech)
2. Come from money

(2) Is by far the most common. The wealth injection you get by being able to have school paid for and your first apartment covered until you're on your feet by mommy and daddy cannot be understated. Going to a top ivy for your degree generally requires mommy and daddy to give you welfare. Getting a good job because mommy and daddy know someone helps. I could've saved approximately 35,000 more than I have now if I didnt have to take student loans and bad jobs. I make many multiples of that cost now - but imagine if I didn't have to pay that.

The average rich person is a welfare queen. Just not off the state. Read The Millionaire Next Door. It's not hard to have a few million in the bank for retirement if you're smart with your money. What is hard is getting past that. According to the book and experience - the answer is generational wealth. You generally will never exceed around a 50% improvement to where your parents were. Those are the breaks.
 
gaussian said:
I am doing exceedingly well for myself. I would consider myself both above average in income and in ability.
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Also modest :-)

globalarbtrader said:
Should be an option for dumb luck. My own success is down to:

40% Advantages
60% Dumb luck
0% hard work

GAT
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I think a combination of advantages and dumb luck are enough to be rich, where it's my personal definition of rich: not needing to work ever again (so probably low to mid 7 figure net worth in liquid assets). I'm basing this on the fact that I've never worked harder than I have to, I've frequently found myself working in jobs with plenty of time for dossing around, and if I've ever found myself working too hard (investment banking) I've changed careers.

But what if you want to be properly rich, like 8, 9 or 10 figures they're probably not enough. *

For that I'd add something to that list which I don't possess: single-minded ambition, or to be more brutal: greed. Not quite the same as hard work. But basically once I'd earned enough money that I didn't have to work anymore (due to advantages and luck), and I stopped enjoying my job, I stopped working. To be properly rich you need to keep going in that situation.

GAT

* Okay if you win the lottery you can be properly rich just through dumb luck. But that's a corner case. Ditto if you become a billionaire purely through inheritance.
 
globalarbtrader said:
Should be an option for dumb luck. My own success is down to:

40% Advantages
60% Dumb luck
0% hard work

GAT
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complete nonsense. numbers are in the wrong place. it is 0% advantages 40%dumb luck . 60% hard work, grit etc. o% advantages. This is particularly true in America.
 
zdreg said:
complete nonsense. numbers are in the wrong place. it is 0% advantages 40%dumb luck . 60% hard work, grit etc. o% advantages. This is particularly true in America.
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This is my personal experience of my own life, so with respect, you have absolutely no idea whether it's complete nonsense or not. I don't think we've ever met.

And more generally, the rate of social mobility in the US is lower than in nearly every other developed country and has been falling for the last 40 years or so (in lockstep with wealth inequality as you would expect). Advantage counts for a hell of a lot in a country in the US, much more so than in more equal societies like Scandanavia. And luck also plays a much bigger part than people acknowledge (Advantage of course is a form of luck - it's the luck you get before you're born).

Successful people find it hard to believe that their success isn't down to their own brilliance and / or hard work. But it mostly isn't.

At least one of the richest people in the US understands this:

Just imagine that it is 24 hours before you are born. A genie comes and says to you in the womb, “You look like an extraordinarily responsible, intelligent, potential human being. Going to emerge in 24 hours and it is an enormous responsibility I am going to assign to you – determination of the political, economic and social system into which you are going to emerge. You set the rules, any political system, democracy, parliamentary, anything you wish, can set the economic structure, communistic, capitalistic, set anything in motion and I guarantee you that when you emerge this world will exist for you, your children and grandchildren. What’s the catch? One catch – just before you emerge you have to go through a huge bucket with 7 billion slips, one for each human. Dip your hand in and that is what you get – you could be born intelligent or not intelligent, born healthy or disabled, born black or white, born in the US or in Bangladesh, etc. You have no idea which slip you will get. Not knowing which slip you are going to get, how would you design the world? Do you want men to push around females? It’s a 50/50 chance you get female. If you think about the political world, you want a system that gets what people want. You want more and more output because you’ll have more wealth to share around. The US is a great system, turns out $50,000 GDP per capita, 6 times the amount when I was born in just one lifetime. But not knowing what slip you get, you want a system that once it produces output, you don’t want anyone to be left behind. You want to incentivize the top performers, don’t want equality in results, but do want something that those who get the bad tickets still have a decent life. You also don’t want fear in people’s minds – fear of lack of money in old age, fear of cost of health care. I call this the “Ovarian Lottery”. My sisters didn’t get the same ticket. Expectations for them were that they would marry well, or if they work, would work as a nurse, teacher, etc. If you are designing the world knowing 50/50 male or female, you don’t want this type of world for women – you could get female. Design your world this way; this should be your philosophy. I look at Forbes 400, look at their figures and see how it’s gone up in the last 30 years. Americans at the bottom are also improving, and that is great, but we don’t want that degree of inequality. Only governments can correct that. Right way to look at it is the standpoint of how you would view the world if you didn’t know who you would be. If you’re not willing to gamble with your slip out of 100 random slips, you are lucky! The top 1% of 7 billion people. Everyone is wired differently. You can’t say you do everything yourself. We all have teachers, and people before us who led us to where we are. We can’t let people fall too far behind. You all definitely got good slips.
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GAT
 
tommcginnis said:
I appreciate the spirit of your post -- but somehow, I doubt its accuracy re "0% hard work"...:cool:
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Define hard work.

Honestly, the only time in my life we're I've worked harder than I've had to is since I 'retired'. I could just sit around watching TV, but instead I'm doing stuff that from the outside looks like work (although a lot of it doesn't produce any income) but which I happen to weirdly enjoy, so for me at least it isn't work (plus I rarely do more than about 6 hours a day).

GAT
 
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