Bullshit. How the fuck have you lived this long and not learned anything about Bill Gates?
There were hundreds of other kids at his school, born to the same wealth with the same luck, but only Gates and a couple of his friends were determined enough to put in 10,000 hours learning to program.
You so callously dismiss anyone well off as being given everything they have and it’s sickening. Then when called on it you fall back to your tired little rants about Republicans and Libertarians.
Bullshit, how many times can you drag this out before you realize how utterly fucking wrong you are? You’ve twisted this garbage in your head so many times you can’t see past your own ridiculous ideology, so you assume everyone else must have some bullshit ideology that they cling to.
The very point here is that there is no moral superiority. Some people make the most of the opportunities they are given, others don’t. Lots of rich little brats have daddy pay their way through college, a few of them get worthwhile degrees and earn their grades, others take bullshit courses and scratch by with C’s.
Wow, you really don’t get it. You’ve had hours now to learn what the caste system is, but you can’t be bothered. So you fall back to your fear of libertarianism. I guess you really weren’t lucky enough, must suck.
Who works harder? A guy who busted his ass in college (and school before that to get to college) to get good grades and then works 15 hour days in an air conditioned office or the guy who works in a dangerous coal mine slinging a pick axe since he was 15 years old and will likely die young?
Honestly I am not meaning to belittle the guy (or gal) who works to apply themself in school and make a better life for themself. Nor am I belittling that same person working like a maniac doing 16 hour days to get ahead.
My point is do not belittle the guy who works in the fields in rain or heat or what have you from dusk till dawn.
The difference between the two is not who works “harder” but who is more easily replaceable. Anyone can pick an apple so their labor is valued cheaply. Not everyone can parse a balance sheet and make an intelligent investment decision. This latter person’s labor is valued highly because fewer people can do it.
The difference between the two people is more about opportunity. I would bet there have been some laborers who would beat the pants off Lloyd Blankfein if they had the opportunity of a good education.
As I mentioned before…imagine a world populated entirely by Warren Buffet clones. The point being they all have the brains and smarts that made Buffet a billionaire.
Nevertheless in such a world most Buffet clones would be poor and starving. It does not matter they are exactly as smart as rich Buffet. Someone still has to muck out septic tanks.
That’s the point I’ve been trying to make. It doesn’t matter if you hand a kid a chance to go to Harvard, he still has to go to class and earn grades.
Except what happens when he doesn’t go to class or get good grades? Well, we come up with something else, we blame it on institutional bias, and we figure out yet another way to help him through.
Great, so now he’s got a degree, but can’t get a job. We can’t blame him, we have to say it’s an institutional bias, we need equal opportunity hiring, he just needs a chance to get his foot in the door.
Then he turns out not to be a good worker. Just like in university, and just like in high school, we realize he wants to sleep in and show up late. Doesn’t want to do his work. But you can’t fire him, too much paper work. And you can’t pass him over for promotions or it will look like a bias.
Luck hands everyone opportunities, some make the best of it, some squander it, others let it pass by while bitching that they aren’t lucky.
Has anyone denied that this is the case? The point I think you (and others) seem to be missing is that there are far, far more hard workers than there are good opportunities. It’s not a contest between a coal miner and an investment banker for who is the hardest worker. The question is if that coal miner were given the i-banker’s opportunities, could he have had a similar outcome? By and large, I think that is true. Assuming you agree with that, the question becomes why we reward that guy in the fashion that we do considering his success is not due to his intrinsic characteristics?
Yes, some who are afforded some early breaks may squander them, but the cost of failure for some people is far higher than it needs to be, and the opportunities to rectify mistakes are few and far between. The point is that if you want to create a system that makes the most of our collective human potential, you need to focus largely on creating a society that creates opportunities rather than one that presents them to individuals deemed worthy. If we imagine the visionaries we see today as geniuses standing on the shoulders of giants, our collective goal should be to create bigger giants, not taller geniuses.
Or maybe he was attacked by a straw man? Seriously, do you see people clamoring to make people who fail out of Harvard the poster children for institutional bias? If you are seriously trying to contend we (collectively) excuse failure in this country, where we lock up more of our citizens than nearly anywhere else in the world, and allow far more people to live in poverty than most other developed nations, I think you have some explaining to do. Regardless of how many people point out institutional biases that are put there, it doesn’t prevent us of punishing bad decision making in a harsh and overly punitive way.
Again, I would give this more weight if there wasn’t clear and compelling evidence that these programs are needed. More importantly, nobody is forced to hire an unqualified worker.
In what fantasy world do you live in where this routinely happens?
As you move up the “success” spectrum, the more luck is involved, IMHO.
Take Bill Gates again. Work ethic aside, he was fortunate that he had a parental safety net after he dropped out of college which allowed him to go forth and prosper on his own innovative spirit. If he had been a first-generation college student carrying the burden of all familial hopes and dreams, or if his dropping out meant being going to Vietnam, or dropping out meant he’d have to jump right into the workforce, taking whatever lame job came his way, we might not be using Microsoft products today. Like I said, only someone who has a mental block cannot see this.
People who keep giving just a crumb’s worth of credit to luck (or, if you will, the roll of the dice with respect to birth time/place and subsequent series of events) don’t have a deep enough imagination. Of course Bill Gates is smart and hard-working. I don’t think anyone would say everything just rolled into his lap by accident. But we all know smart and hard-working people who do not become billionaires. And I also think Gates realizes how fortunate he was and that’s what motivates his philanthropy in the area of education.
Charles Darwin’s another example. Born into the leisure class, married to a woman even more well-off than he was, he had beaucoups of time to think, explore, travel, and synthesize. He also wasn’t the first to come up with his hypothesis. He just happened to receive a manuscript to review that pitched the very same idea as his, then conveniently “forgot” about it, and equally conveniently pushed out his own work before that guy could get credit for it. No one remembers that other guy. If we can concede that THAT was unlucky for him, then the reverse is that we have to admit that Darwin was lucky. But stating this does not mean that Darwin was not a smart guy or that he didn’t put in all those hours of hard work. It just means that you can’t attribute his success solely to those things.
A couple of years ago I moved into a management and began noticing some very strange and consistent behaviour from low income employees. Without getting into too much detail, some people are willing to accept that their lot in life is to be a miner. Their dad was a miner, their granddad was a miner, and his dad was a miner. They believe that they are unlucky, that the world is against them, and that the best they can ever achieve is to be a miner. Showing up on time and doing a good job makes you a patsy, aiming to rising to the level of management is selling out. Taking an interest in the upper workings of the mine, talking to the engineers, going to some classes on the weekend are simply out of the question.
If you wan to call it luck, that’s your choice. But both the miner and the banker were given opportunities. The banker was not content to be a teller on the ground floor, as Kanya said it best,
*
“He gon’ make it to a Benz out of that Datsun
He got that ambition, baby look in his eyes
This week he’s moppin’ floors, next week it’s the fries”*
And this was a point made in Outliers, that for some reason the genius born to a rich family wasn’t content to be poor. Meanwhile the genius born to a poor family accepted his lot in life. Both were given exactly the same opportunity with the same intelligence. One squandered it, the other didn’t.
That’s the caste system. People simply accept that they are born into a class and that’s the class they’ll be.
No, what he says is that there are points of what seems like luck (being born in December) but that after given that luck, you still have to put in 10,000 hours. And to get those hours you have to work harder than everyone around you that also wants those hours. Being in the NHL isn’t as simple as simply being born in Dec. You are lined up against thousands of other people born in Dec, that all way ice time. Those that are willing to get up early and stay late get more ice time than those who don’t, and it accelerates from there. A professional athlete spent a lot of his life dirt poor before being signed.
Success = luck + 10,000 hours of hard work.
Focusing on luck diminishes the 10,000 hours put in which don’t have anything to do with luck. And in the end lots of people all have access to the same luck, very few are willing to devote the 10,000 hours. Getting 10,000 hours is 5 years working full time, which oddly enough coincides with most professional designations. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, all spend those years working long hours for very little money before their “luck” pays off.
This is what is sort of irritating about the usage of the term “luck” to explain circumstance. Every single time you used the word “luck” you seemed to find several useful explanatory factors. Luck implies some unseen dungeonmaster is rolling a d20 and throwing shit our way, but if you actually analyze it you learn how these things work to give people the upper hand in either staying out of or getting out of poverty.
Although there are several facts in this account of Darwin’s formulation and reporting of Natural Selection, it couldn’t be more incorrect and I wonder where you got this account from - I would appreciate it if you could point it out.
Fact #1: Darwin wasn’t some house husband letting his wife’s money finance adventures and thought. He worked and impressed others to get himself on that ship. He then worked hard on that ship and established himself as a scientist during and after the voyage. The main point here is that he took his advantages and ran with them. There must have been thousands just like him who weren’t willing to risk their lives on a ship for years in order to follow their passion.
Fact#2: He wasn’t the first? He was certainly the first, but was influenced by those who had similar ideas that predated him. Wallace was not one of these. Between roughly 1840 and 1859 Darwin was working hard, collecting data, and keeping a roof over his head. I remember two specific things from reading The Origin of Species: (1) The sheer amount of data Darwin had collected in order to support his theory; you can definitely tell the guy was working hard that whole time; (2) the thoroughness with which he described the implications of his theory and the number of successful, still-studied-to-this-day, predictions made from it - I bet that took some work.
Fact#3: He did not conveniently forget anything. The account you are relating sounds like Mendel, Darwin and the genetics manuscript. Wallace got fair credit at the time and they were supposed to present their ideas together. Wallace is eclipsed by Darwin because he may have got the mechanism right but did not synthesize the theory to the extent that Darwin had. Each worked hard in their own separate ways and each got credit for it. Nobody nefariously forgot anything.
Fact#4: Wallace is in most textbooks right along with Darwin. Wallace should get credit because he was one factor that finally helped Darwin to push his ideas out the door. Take a look at the differences in their theories under Wallace’s Wikipedia entry. They weren’t forgetting each other and shared ideas long after 1859.
The “luck” of his socioeconomic status and familial interest in scientific study is only the start; the hard work is what he did with that luck. A huge majority of his peer contemporaries came nowhere close to Darwin and the same could be said for Bill Gates.
So…twin babies, one the stork drops on the doorstep of a professional family, the other the stork drops on the doorstep of a working class family. The professional twin uses his abilities to get ahead in life and becomes a millionaire. The working class twin accepts his lot in life and becomes shop foreman at the plant, taking orders from his twin.
How is that not the result of luck? Maybe calling it “luck” focuses on the wrong thing. But successful people universally had a long string of good luck in their lives. I know plenty of businesspeople who went bankrupt because they weren’t in the right market at the right time. I know plenty of people with limited horizons because they grew up in a working class environment. It’s not that they’re dumb or lazy, it’s just that they couldn’t see themselves in an office job.
And of course, we don’t choose our talents and abilities. I’m pretty smart, but I didn’t earn my intelligence. I was just born that way. So am I lucky to be smart, or not? Or the famous examples of professional sports, where you have naturally talented people, and then you have the guy who doesn’t have those talents but has hustle, and the coach says to the talented lazy guy, “If you had half the heart of Timmy over there, you’d be a star!”. And then you’ve got the naturally talented guys who have twice the heart of Timmy, and there’s your Michael Jordans and Wayne Gretzkys. But where does the heart come from? Where does the talent come from?
Intelligence is what dropped me into poverty. I outperformed my peers in school, I got the best grades and the best scholarship.
Sadly, I was railroaded into attending a university whose mission seems to be religious harassment by Evangelicals. Because I wasn’t stupid enough to doubt moronic premises like the falsehood of evolution or the youth of the Earth in favor of shallow religious bromides, because I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my integrity to use my talents to lead these half-wits and lend them credibility, I found myself made a pariah with a mountain of obstacles in my path that others never had to face. It was really quite destructive to my educational path. I couldn’t turn my opportunity into a career under those conditions.
I shook it off and am now doing quite well regardless. I hope those people are ready to get their asses kicked.
While I agree with the idea of social and cultural inertia I rarely find someone in chronic poverty who isn’t somewhat dense. I do occasionally meet someone who lacks an education but for the most part it’s a combination of intelligence and social/cultural inertia.
It’s great to discover someone who is obviously bright and needs a nudge in the right direction. I’ve steered a couple of people (directly) in my life toward higher earnings and it’s fun to watch them blossom.
Perhaps you should prior to commenting on what I said.
Which is understandable given their background. That they came up in those circumstances is often a matter of luck. I don’t say that as an excuse for people to not work hard, just that it makes sense that someone from a poor background may not fully apprecaite the effects of directed, and focused work.
Perhaps the individual people in your anecdote were given the same opportunities, but on a macro level, bankers and miners generally come from very different circumstances.
I think you misunderstood the book to be honest with you. First, they weren’t given the same opportunities, they were given roughly similar gifts of intelligence. Second, the story of success is largely due to the availability of unique resources and opportunities rather than individual attributes. Those opportunities, if abundant and exploitable, can be used by individual to put in the dedicated practice necessary to become great at something. Later, he speaks about how we fail to exploit human capital to its fullest. The primary reason for this is a dearth of opportunities, NOT a lack of people willing to out in the 10k hours of dedicated practice.
You are also misrepresenting the idea of 10k hours. It doesn’t mean that if you do something enough, you will become great. It less about the number of hours, than they ways in which someone goes about practicing. It’s deliberate and dedicated practice that yields mastery. That’s why it’s important that a guy like Gates can even find computers to work on as a kid, or that a hockey player born in December can have access to all-star team coaches. He is basically undermining the idea of innate genius. Accordingly, he argues that a society that wants to make the best of its human capital will create more opportunities, and provide more resources to those who are underachieving. Will some people never live up to their theoretical potential? Of course, but the results we get are largely due to societal rules, culture, and socioeconomic factors; not a lack of people willing to work hard.
Let’s take try a different approach. For the purposes of this discussion define “intelligence” as the natural ability to solve novel problem salient to success in society, however you want to define “success”.
Hypothetical #1. 100 individuals 1 S.D. above the mean for intelligence so defined and 100 individuals at the mean. All placed into matched environments and opportunities, not all the same, but such that those factors that can be called “luck” are equally distributed. Odds are great that a great many more of the above average individuals will be successful.
Hypothetical #2. Two groups of 100 individuals each, matched for intelligence so defined, one group all placed in an American lower SES environment, and the other group all placed in an American upper SES environment. The first with poor schools and a parent or parents who is either working an extra job so is not available to help with homework, or who does not know how to help; the second with better schools and parents who not only help with homework but who provide supplemental experiences, like trips to plays and museums, and who have the opportunity to read to the kids every night. No doubt the kids in group one are much more likely to succeed.
So far so easy to agree, yes?
Is our real world completely like either hypothetical? No.
The more our country really is the land of equal opportunity, the more the successful will gradually consist more of the more intelligent (as so defined) and the unsuccessful will be more the less intelligent (as so defined). The more we have systemic inequalities the less so. Given that we exist at some point in between those two poles (despite some wanting to posit that we are at one pole completely or the other) there is some amount of above average intelligence that someone born in poverty will need in order to have the same chance at success as the average intelligence person born to a higher SES family.
Alright. Let’s hear where I’m wrong. <dropping head down>
Um…I clearly remember saying something to the effect that luck does not preclude reaping the benefits of hard work. I clearly remember posting this.
But while Darwin shook his money-maker to get on the ship and it was own work ethic that carried him through the hard journey and his own brain that made the intellectual synthesis of all his discoveries, he was still damn lucky. Do you think, if he had been born the illegitimate child of a scullery maid, that he’d even be in the position to charm his way onto the Beagle? If he’d been born black (ooh, she brought race into the discussion!) If he had been born a woman (ooh, she went there!) And what if, for all his craftiness and his wit, the guy had a crippling speech impediment that made him sound like a doofus? Would he have been able to get on Beagle then? I don’t think so. Maybe you think brains and hard work conquers all, but I don’t.
I did not say Wallace influenced Darwin’s theory. Again, you might want to read what I wrote instead of letting that knee bop you in the face. I said that Darwin was lucky that he got his ideas published first. Wallace indeed had Darwin look over his ideas, which lit the fire under Darwin to get to the presses on time. But no, I never said his theory was influenced by Wallace.
Daresay, your post only solidifies in my mind how lucky Darwin was. He did not steal ideas from anyone–let me make myself clear–but if he had preceded Lamarck and other natural historians, he may not have experienced that drawn-out eureka moment. Even though Lamarckian evolution is an idea covered in thick layers of dust now, it was an essential theory leading up to the Darwin’s treatise.
We’ve talked about the secrets of success before on the board, and someone (can’t remember who) brought up the Beatles as exemplary “geniuses”. I like me some Beatles and think they were masterful songwriters and performers, but if it hadn’t been for the sloughs of people preceding them, getting the stage warmed up for rock and roll that the kiddies weren’t TOO scared to listen to in front of their parents, Paul, John, George, and poor Ringo would have just been four regular blokes from around the way (or whatever they say in the UK). Saying that their timing was fortunate does not detract at all from their genius. It just means that their timing was fortunate. Just as fortunate as their race and gender. If they’d been a bunch of colored kids…well, we don’t know. Maybe they would have taken off just as much. But I have a hard time thinking they’d be “bigger than Jesus”. Same as if they’d been born with vaginas.
From reading about what happened, that doesn’t sound quite right. It sounds like Wallace was not as hooked into the community as Darwin was–being halfway across the world, out in the sticks.
And Darwin DID have Wallace’s manuscript and it DID motivate him to finish his work already and publish. You are right that he did not “conveniently forget” Wallace. My bad. But my point was that Darwin was not The Magical One. He was the smart, hard-working one (same as Wallace), but he was also the FORTUNATE one. If Wallace hadn’t been beaten to the punch, he may have had enough time to rework his theory to include intraspecific competition into his model. But once Darwin said, “I’m ret’ to go with this”, it was too late. I guess there’s a blurry line there between luck and “having all your shit together, at the opportune moment”. Darwin had it but Wallace didn’t. At that moment, it was a foot race and Darwin was in better position to make it to the finish line. But it wasn’t like Wallace wasn’t right at his heels.
You are right that the people “in the know” at the time knew about Wallace. But it was not until I got to graduate school that I had ever heard of him. That was what I meant by “a guy no one knows.” Maybe I shouldn’t have extrapolated my familiarity with him to “everyone”, admittedly.
We didn’t cover evolution in high school. We did not cover Wallace in undergrad. I did not learn about him until I took an evolution course in grad school. Maybe my education isn’t up to snuff, but I would not say the guy is well known or that he has gotten proper credit for his contribution to evolutionary biology.
That said, I’m still about giving big ups to Darwin.
I still say that both Darwin and Gates are exceptional not only because of their intellect, but because they used their intellect to take advantage of opportunities in their environment that were within arm’s reach NOT because of their own will or determination, but “just cuz”. To argue against this is to say that Darwin would have published “On the Origin of the Species” regardless of where he was born, who he was born to, when he was born, and all the stochastic events that happened thereafter.
Why this is so controversial to some people, I will never figure out. I mean, didn’t the whole point of “Trading Places” make this abundantly clear?
The first group says “success takes luck and hard work. So let’s encourage people to work hard so they can take advantage of any luck they get.”
The second group says “success takes luck and hard work. Since a person can’t have sucess without luck, those without success are justified in taking every penny they can from the successful.”
Sure seems easy to pick which group has the better principle for a society to build policies around.
[QUOTE=Rand Rover]
The second group says “success takes luck and hard work. Since a person can’t have sucess without luck, those without success are justified in taking every penny they can from the successful.”
[/QUOTE]
DINGDINGDING…We have a WINNAH! If you can successfully portray becoming wealthy as mostly/mainly a whim of luck it’s a lot easier to tell the folks who have benefited from lucks munificent hand to fork it over baby, since they didn’t deserve/earn what they got. It was all luck…well, except the part that wasn’t luck was society providing those lucky rich bastards with the engine to make that wealth. Hard work? That’s for the poor! If the world was populated solely by Warren Buffet clones, clearly there would only be a few rich Warren’s and the majority would be poor drug dealers and pimps, pimping Warren man-whores. Or something. Because Warren is Warren simply because he was born on the right date, and the fates brought him his vast wealth like a gift on a silver platter, and his wealth is a gift from the gods of luck…and society, that built all the stuff he needed to make his wealth. So, he should be thankful and give back that gift to those less fortunate. Oh…he’s doing that already? Well, he’s not digging deep enough to give back to society…even he says so!
At any rate, I note that the thread has moved away from the original OP about poverty and intelligence into a discussion of those lucky rich bastards. Shocking development.
The account you gave was factually wrong in places and in others the wording (perhaps the emphasis on the vague term luck) created a very different impression from what Darwin’s life was actually like. That’s what I was objecting to. I understand that your post was about the role “luck” was playing in his experiences, but claiming luck without further analysis doesn’t get anyone anywhere: the emphasis on being part of the leisure class and having time ignores the fact that he still had to support himself, he still had chronic, severe panic attacks (sounds like), and still had several of his children die and/or be severely ill.
I guess I could be simplistic and say he was also unlucky then. Yet that is completely dissatisfying as an analysis. The OP asked a question about one of several likely factors that may help someone to get out of poverty. Attributions of good and bad luck, or hard work actually do not tell us anything at all and leave the argument at a superficial level.
If there had never been a Big Bang where would Darwin be then!? If no Earth formed? If all natural resources were mind bogglingly abundant? If Alfred Russell Wallace had been a woman? If Charles Lyell had been a scullery maid with a speech impediment? If Malthus was a black man with a sex addiction (sex addiction is so risque!)? If Darwin’s Mom drank whiskey all day everyday? If, if, if, if, if. Imagination is fun! What purpose does it serve other than to instruct us on being aware of how various social and biological barriers prevent any given individual from writing On the Origin of Species? They do not explain Darwin’s accomplishments at all. Pointing out stuff that can go wrong doesn’t even offer a useful hypothesis.
I don’t think brains and hard work conquers all. Look at my first post (#18). I’d rather talk about how brainy hard-working people can be in poverty indefinitely. Why people do not magically shoot up the social hierarchy with these two traits alone.
You said: “He also wasn’t the first to come up with his hypothesis. He just happened to receive a manuscript to review that pitched the very same idea as his, then conveniently “forgot” about it, and equally conveniently pushed out his own work before that guy could get credit for it.”
I think the way these words were strung together strongly implies that Wallace influenced the theory and that Darwin suppressed it. Seeing your explanation I am able to better parse the sentences.
And he was not “lucky” he got his ideas published first. It’s not the fact. Wallace’s and Darwin’s ideas were presented at the same time. Darwin’s book is what cemented it. The one he busted his ass for over 30 years at great cost to himself.
Yes, I can list many "if"s, all fantastical, that would preclude Darwin from writing the book. What if Darwin had a shitty work ethic?
Wouldn’t argue, and there were millions of people with demographic characteristics just like them who never even wrote down a single note or strummed a guitar.
Doesn’t change the fact that their ideas were presented at the same time. Wallace was hooked in via Darwin and probably Lyell among others.
I think you got it with “having all your shit together at the opportune moment”. More what-if’s: If Wallace had never existed, Darwin still would have put that book together (he might not have had Wallace’s observations) eventually. He published his findings; he had a history of it. What-if #2) If Wallace had just published his essay/letter without Darwin involved - it would not have reshaped the world’s thinking. It’s the book that did it.
Darwin was the only one in the world collecting his facts and formulating a theory with application to every single living phenomenon on the planet, and writing a book about it. The extent to which he applied it was beyond Wallace.
I had a biology undergraduate and all the textbooks included Wallace. Only Lamarck and Darwin in high school. Goes to show everybody is different.
They took advantage of their opportunities, why go farther into all the what-if’s? In addressing the overall topic, isn’t more interesting to get an understanding of how the recognized opportunities, how they were able to use their will and determination to accomplish anything from reshaping the world to beating the odds of getting out of poverty and into a comfortable life as an MD or something? Lucks and what-ifs prevent people from understanding these things.
If I had thought of Trading Places I would never have posted in the first place.
When we take an individual’s accomplishments and emphasize the external factors that brought about their success, we tend to say “luck”. I think such an analysis diminishes that individual; if we knew about what that individual went through to gain their accomplishments we would empathize more readily and it would be “luck” that diminishes. We would explain their success through internal factors like hard work. Even as lame an explanation as “hard work” is, this kind of information allows people to formulate a strategy to accomplish their goals. It’s better than “I’m screwed, it’s luck” while still being realistic.
The OP asks whether intelligence can be a cause of poverty. I don’t think anyone in this thread has said that it can’t be (I know I posted how it very well can be a cause). But I think people are also acknowledging the very obvious fact that this isn’t the case for all poor people. Nor that the reverse is true. There are many dumb people who are not poor, but because they were lucky (fortunate, or whatever word you want to use), their lack of intelligence is (was) not apparent or a detriment to their success.
Likewise, there are plenty of successful people who are that way not because of a silver spoon and not [just because of their terrific brains or great work ethic, but because of the combination of these things PLUS environmental factors beyond their control. Lots of people focus on the brains and the work ethic, but give short shrift to the opportunities that these “geniuses” had at their disposable that most people did not have. Pointing this out does not distract from these guys’ achievements. It just means that if you’re going to tell their story, you have to tell the FULL story and not just the parts that makes them seem like minor deities.
We are stuck on rich people because for some reason, this society loves to hold onto the Horatio Algers, pull-yerself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps, Renaissance-Super-Men stories. Because if Bill Gates can make it big, by golly, so can I! When really, that’s not true and deep down we all know it. Personally, I know I can be amazing in other ways, but I cannot be Bill Gates because of a series of events that has nothing to do with either my abilities or Bill Gate’s. I can acknowledge this fact without disparaging Gates or myself.
I admit; I’m not into hero-worshipping nor finding out the “secrets” of success. I can’t believe that one particular individual ever reaches the pinnacle of success all by his or her lonesome. So when the conversation turns to failure and poverty, I can’t help but see the same thing. A person rarely gets into that situation all by his or her lonesome. We can talk about “poor choices” all day long, but what is it if not luck that determines why one person can make poor choices and one day become president of the US and another can make the same poor choices and spend the rest of us his life in jail? Why should this be excluded from the conversation when analyzing someone’s life? It’s not a navel-gazing exercise in “what-ifs” as much as it is a recognition that human beings only have so much control over what happens to them, ultimately. (Just listened to a “Fresh Air” interview of a woman who had researched the life Barack Obama’s father. She makes a really strong case that if his dad had been in active in his life, we probably would not even know the name “Barack Obama.” I find that kind of stuff fascinating. Is that such a bad thing?)
Again, how you can argue against this basic point by nitpicking my brief post about Darwin–none of which was really that far from the mark–I don’t understand.