No, luck is the most important factor. Connections are the second, but even those are dependent upon the luck of being born into the right family.
Maintaining and growing wealth mostly requires that you avoid doing anything atrociously stupid, not that you be smart or even of average intelligence. The smart people are the ones you employ and are making wealth off of.
So I guess I wasn’t born lucky enough. Should I just give up? Is there any point to carrying on? If I’m really good in this life is it possible I’ll be reborn to a better class? Is this life punishment for actions in my previous life?
If you had any idea what India’s caste system was/is like you might realize how stupid what you said was.
The OP seems to presuppose that financial success is the universal measure of worth and “poverty” is indicative of an undesirable state. This is not always true. Therefore, for some people, taking action to move in the direction of financial “success” is simply not a priority. This can be a completely rational decision and is reflective of a functioning intelligence.
:rolleyes: India? What does India have to do with anything?
Luck is similar to God’s favour in that sense. After all theists usually believe God determines when and to whom people are born,.
It’s been awhile since I’ve read the book, but doesn’t Gladwell spend a lot of time talking about the role of month-of-birth on success?
Kindergartners with birthdays falling early in the school year (the fall and winter months) are substantially older–developmentally-wise–from kids with birthdays later in the year (like those poor schmoes with summer birthdays, like yours truly :)). Consequently, they tend to be more “school-ready” than their peers–being more attentive, learning faster, having better motor skills, etc. Teachers notice their quickness and label them as smart and bright, which then causes a multiplier effect. They started off being slightly better than their peers, but because of all the extra encouragement and positive reinforcement they received, they become even better over time. And it accumulates as they grow older. (I think age 10 is when things start to even out, according to Gladwell).
Gladwell points out that a disproportionate number of valedictorians, supreme court justices, senators, and professional hockey players have birthdays clustered around the same three months.
If that isn’t an argument for the role of luck, I don’t know what is!
He also demystifies geniuses like Bill Gates. He doesn’t detract the awesomeness of the guy’s achievement, and he does say the guy worked very very hard. But he also makes the hard-to-dispute argument that luck enabled the guy to work very very hard. So the two things are interwoven. You can be a brilliant person, with brains basically busting out of your ears, but if you live in the middle of nowhere where no one has ever seen a computer, let alone owns one, then there’s an almost certain likelihood that you will not turn into Bill Gates. And if you’re deprived in other ways, you’re probably not going to be anyone. Brains and hard work can only get you so far even in the most meritocratic universes.
We have to remember that “nature” doesn’t only include genes, but also what happens in utero, AS WELL AS the interaction of this environment and the “outside” environment with the baby’s AND mother’s genes (aka epigenetics). If a mother has a poor diet and is under stress and has a genetic tendency to secrete unhealthy levels of certain hormones when stressed out, malnourished, and pregnant, there’s a high probability her child will have a difficult birth (which is a risk factor in itself) and be born with brain and other physical abnormalities if that child is especially vulnerable to those less than ideal circumstances they were hatched under. Not necessarily major problems, but subtle ones that may take years to unfurl. Perhaps these abnormalities can be accommodated and eventually alleviated with a loving, healthy upbringing, but can also be magnified if the nurturing isn’t ideal. This can result in an adult who may be not so smart, though still functional, but not enough to NOT avoid poverty when trying to make it on their own. This can happen even if they grew up in a middle-class, well-educated home.
How often this happens, I don’t know.
I wasn’t trying to say that luck was the be-all,end-all of success determinants, but that it’s a significant factor that seems to be overlooked or ignored in many cases.
For example, when I was in college, we called an automated phone system to register for our classes.
If two people were otherwise equal in ability, socio-economic background, starting GPA, aptitude, etc… then the luck of being able to not get a busy signal and getting into a particular section of a particular class could really be a life changing thing- because of a better instructor, or one who grades easier, or even just being able to network with a particular classmate whose dad is some sort of business magnate.
That’s what I’m talking about. Not so much accidents of birth, but just plain, everyday luck.
I don’t think it’s as important as say… your behavior, attitudes and background, but I think it’s also disingenuous to say that the reason one guy is more successful than another is due only to factors within his control. You can set yourself up for success, but ultimately, you have to be a little lucky.
Yes, he noted that for elite hockey players, something like 45% were born in Dec, 35% born in Feb, and then decreasingly fewer born later.
So there tends to be some “luck” to when you’re born if you want to be a professional hockey player.
Except that after being born, the top players had to put in 10,000 hours of ice time. They were lined up against all the other kids born in Dec/Feb and had to subsequently out skate them to get that ice time.
Luck is only enough to get you on the team, you actually have to work harder than everyone else to be a great hockey player. There isn’t a lottery that randomly picks university students and hands them an NHL career.
As I said in a previous thread, even if a I was lucky enough to win a lottery that gave me a university scholarship, I still had to go to class for four years. The luck doesn’t get me a degree, merely an opportunity I can either work at or squander.
He focuses on Gates, and a handful of other programers (Sun Micro Systems, Oracle etc) that were lucky enough to be born when computer programing was new, and were also lucky enough to have access to a computer. But there were hundreds of other kids at Gate’s school that could have spent time on that computer and instead choose to do other things. Gate’s and his four friends had to put in 10,000 hours before they were ready to write Dos and start Microsoft.
Sure, where I grew up there wasn’t a track, football, basketball, or baseball program. There weren’t sports scholarships. Was I unlucky not to be born black and athletic?
Der Trihs applies luck to diminish the work people put in. To him a hockey player is simply lucky enough to be born in Dec, end of story. And by diminishing the work a person puts in he can easily claim their money isn’t theirs. It was won as if by lottery, certainly not earned, and therefor should be taken and given to the unlucky. Where unlucky is defined as anyone that’s poor.
It’s also very easy to go the other way and look for ways in which a person is unlucky. When I went through engineering we took thermodynamics and heat transfer at the same time. One was insanely hard, the other insanely easy. The year I took them the heat transfer prof went on sabbatical, so the thermodynamics prof taught both and made them both insanely hard. The year after he went on sabbatical so the easy prof taught both. One day I mentioned this to some older students and they pointed out how I was lucky enough to miss a hard course by another prof.
It managed to all even out. But if I wanted to ignore all the good luck, and focus on the bad, I could make a real heart breaking story. If I instead focused on the good luck instead of bad you’d think I was King Midas.
So one other story: I grew up with a friend that was poor, really poor, and not very bright. He had neither the finances nor the aptitude for university, so in high school was went on different tracks. While I spent 4 years studying and another 2 in grad school, he went to community college for mechanics training. After completing it he spent time working with one of the few import auto shops in the area, earned his Red Seal, starting making boat loads of money and met his wife. We bumped into each other after 6 years and he was doing great, despite what would have been seen as “bad luck.”
Exactly. Read up on the caste system and maybe you’ll understand what it means to be born into a class.
Translation: they weren’t lucky enough to be born to rich parents who could subsidize them. Unlike Gates.
Ah, of course. Good old libertarianism again. The well off are morally superior, the poor are vermin, and the wealthy don’t owe a thing to the subhumans who work for them. If you aren’t rich it’s because you are just stupid, lazy and evil.
Again, what has that to do with anything? Except that as a libertarian, that’s the direction you want to push America.
Being the right place at the right time and making the right decision is what matters. Luck and opportunity is what counts. A very intelligent person born to migrant farm workers will not have much of a chance. An average guy born in the Rockerfeller family will have many opportunities to succeed.
The Bell Curve cites tons of studies indicating that intelligent people become wealthy, even if they start poor. The book argues (and cites studies showing) that intelligence is the biggest determiner of a person’s income level. On the other hand, here’s a cite to a 2007 study saying the opposite: http://www.news.com.au/top-stories/intelligence-not-linked-to-wealth-study-shows/story-e6frfkp9-1111113408539
On the luck issue, I’ll never understand why liberals are so jazzed on pointing out the role luck plays in people’s outcomes. Of course luck is involved–but why focus on it? Can someone decide to be more lucky? Can they do anything to increase their luck? Of course they can’t. So why not focus on things people can change–getting an education, working hard, not making bad life-changing decisions, etc?
Well, I’m pretty sure I know the answer to that, and it’s the one emacknight gave above. Liberals are all jazzed on “fairness” and “social justice” and other such nonsense. So, they believe that wealth is due to luck, which means its unfair that some people are wealthier than others, which means that it’s perfectly OK to undo what luck done did.
Instead of focusing on irrelevancies when deciding how to run a society, I think it’s better to at least try to make rules that achieve the best result. Liberals fail right out of the starting gate on that score because they don’t even try to make arguments based on how to set up society to achieve the best result because they’re too busy wanking on about “fairness” and “social justice.”
You still have to be a hard worker, but you’re ultimately right. All else being equal, luck is where it’s at.
For example, a good friend of mine is marketing director of a major bus line. She’s extremely competent, extraordinarily hard working, and pretty good looking to boot.
On paper, she’s qualified for the position.
However, I still have to wonder how much influence the fact that her father was a former American Airlines exec and Pan-Am senior exec has to do with her success, vs. my father who was a civil-servant middle manager in Houston.
it’s as simple as running tests on people from different income groups. your test should be well-structured to filter out unwanted factors such as quality of education and upbringing. just try to determine intelligence.
Oh, please; The Bell Curve? :rolleyes:
Because of course the Right tries real hard to pretend that it doesn’t exist so they can bask in their imagined superiority and demonize the poor and powerless as morally and genetically inferior.
Poor people work a hell of a lot harder than the bosses.The bosses just have the stage. That crappy program about under cover bosses show how amazed the bosses are because the people they underpay so badly, work hard and care about their jobs. The bosses were like you, thought poor people are trying to game the system because they are lazy. it is actually the bosses who could not keep up.
Yes, the Bell curve cites lots of studies. It doesn’t matter for this purpose what you think about anything else the book has to say.
Nope. That’s as wrong as can be. The right does nothing of the sort.
The right emphasizes hard work etc. because people can work hard–they can’t choose to get luckier.
The right speaks to everyone and talks about what they can do to better themselves. The left speaks to those who have failed and talks to them about what they can do to get even.
The right is looking forward and making arguments based on the best way to organize a society. The left is looking backwards and making arguments based on satisfying their own nations of “fairness” and “social justice.”
Poor people do not work hard?
Have you ever worked dawn till dusk for slave wages picking fruit or assembling sneakers? Do you think Jamie Dimon has ever held three jobs simultaneously so he could feed his family?
People like you seem to think the poor are sponges gathering money from your hard work. The reverse is true. You benefit from the hard work they do for miserable wages. Your shoes are cheaper, your food is cheaper, your jewelry is cheaper and so on.
Walk a mile in one of those guy’s/gal’s shoes. You go work assembling Nike shoes for a month for peasant wages and get back to us about those who have failed.
Poor people only work hard if they are lucky…
(You are basically using the same strawman, ironically…i.e. that only the poor work hard, that rich people don’t know what it’s like to work, etc etc. Both are false…some people work hard, whether they are rich, poor or somewhere in between, and some people don’t, regardless of their economic or social grouping. I know a lot of rich people who work their asses off…and a few who don’t. I know a lot of poor people who work their asses off…and a few who don’t. And I know a lot of middle class people who work their asses off…and a few who don’t. Me, I’m a lazy bastard, so I work exactly as hard as I need to in order to get the job done…but I know plenty of IT people who work like demons)
-XT
Because what we commonly refer to as “luck” is something we can pontentially control. It’s not just random chance. That’s partly why calling it “luck” without understanding the underlying concept does everyone a disservice. We only call it luck as a short hand for saying that its not due to something intrinsic to a particular individual; it’s something beyond our individual conscious control or guidance. That said, the collective decisions we make often shape other people lives in a way that makes them “lucky” or “unlucky”.
It’s the circumstances and situations one finds themselves in. It’s meeting the right person at the right time, having the right book put in your hand, or being exposed to a new idea or way of doing things. You can’t necessarily have all parents who aspire to raise future hockey players give birth in December, but you can let a Latino kid with slightly lower grades into Harvard with the hope that he is roommates with the next Mark Zuckerberg. Or you can zone low income areas so that there are fewer fast food restaurants and check cashing places. Or you can reform drug laws that are largely responsible for nearly 1 of every 100 adults being involved in the system. Or you can make sure every poor kid knows there are careers and opportunities beyond what they see in their neighborhoods.
People are generally bound by their perceptions of what is possible. You can only expand into what experts call the adjacent possible. It’s the notion that the next step you can take is dependent upon your current position. We forget that the possibilities for poor people more often revolve around where there next meal is coming from, how to pay their bills, and praying there isn’t a costly repair or accident on the horizon then around long term pursuits and wealth accumilation. Their horizon, quite understandably, only extends that far. Their adjacent possible doesn’t involve creating the next great cancer drug, or social network because those things are not even in their field of vision. Even for poor people who do become successful, its often in fields they are aware of (eg. Clothing, sports, music, etc.). The point is that expanding the idea of what is possible for people who have a myopic idea of what is truly out there is what will bring a lot of people put of poverty. It’s not that they don’t have the intelligence, it’s that they don’t have the vision.
What bothers some liberals is that we have a system that rewards individuals for results that largely stem from society’s collective decisions. It’s the disease of too many people being born on third base, thinking they hit a triple, then demanding they get to bat more often because they’re great hitters.