I agree fully, but I do want to know what the original image said before "birth lottery" was edited in
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Luck is the most generically accurate, but ultimately it does come down to birth lottery, as someone can just be born poor and disabled and no amount of post-birth luck is going to fix that.
Post birth luck can fix it. Wouldn't call Eminem a winner of the birth lottery but he was definitely pretty lucky with dr dre
Being lucky depends on being in the right situation and being able to grab the opportunity. Turns out that having rich connected parents means you get in more and better situations. Also, having money means a lot more chance to grab opportunities by easily moving for a job or go without income to take a chance without being evicted for not paying rent.
I mean, yeah, he was lucky in one sense but that luck wouldn’t have mattered without the skills underneath the he spent time developing. He didn’t just wake up one day excellent at rapping .
I've seen this discrepancy explained by being or putting yourself in the right situations to get lucky in the first place. You can't get lucky in the way a lot of successful people do if you never put yourself out there. I guess the very first example of this is getting conceived lol. You could have gotten lucky and been conceived to wealthy parents, or unlucky and conceived to poor parents, or really unlucky and not conceived at all, but you would certainly have perished if you chose not to even participate in the race.
I'm not rich. But I was born poor and am no longer poor. The Birth Lottery blessed me with a brain, and with that as my only asset, I learned esoteric skills which I can parley into a niche career.
But more importantly, the social safety net in my country allowed me to get an education without becoming a wage slave for the rest of my life. Without that, I couldn't have pulled this escape from poverty off.
I now run my own business. We have no employees -- only owners who have self-invested. Our business is growing and I anticipate a comfortable retirement. Haven't got rich off the working class either.
So, thank you Canada for the opportunities. I've tried to make the most of them.
How do you run a business without employees? What kind of business is that? Just because you call someone a self-invested owner doesn't mean they aren't an employee. The only types of businesses I've heard of like this are Mary Kay and AmWay (there may be others I don't know). Basically a sales ponzi scheme where you are the wholesaler for a distributor and the "self-invested owner" bought their products from you instead of directly from the wholesaler.
I do agree with your stance on the state of education today but not in the same way. Some people party all through school and live off loans while others work during school to avoid loans. For every 1 person that takes the opportunity seriously and busts their ass to make something of themselves, there are 9 people who don't deserve the free pass. Making it free for everyone costs too much for those who have to pay for those 9.
It's a specialized scientific equipment business. I build some equipment, do some customization and repairs on their party equipment, loan other equipment, train users... A high capital business where I wagered everything on my own success. It was six months between my first two customers, and now I average about six hours.
No Mary Kay ponzi shit.
E: should add, I started it because my previous employer owned the intellectual property on my prior device. I wanted to own my future work. Seizing the means of production (by quitting and going solo).
Capitalism just has a feedback loop bug. In capitalism, resources are distributed based on capital. But capital is a resource. So you get more capital for having more capital. In any business, who gets the most money that business generates? Whoever had the most money to buy into it. No work, no expertise is involved in the equation.
See: Monopoly the game.
The winner is declared in the first 10 turns and it's all downhill from there.
You might or might not be referring to the fact that Monopoly was originally made to showcase exactly that; the impossibility of living under such a system.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord's_Game
That's the original title.
You can literally just make the entire second pie chart "exploiting the working class", because "birth lottery" is dependant on that.
Or Luck/right place right time.
Ground floor entry on Bitcoin, Tesla, Amazon, whatever gave mad returns
To be completely fair that's not pure luck. Those people took risks, why don't you invest in new startups? Because it's risky.
But yes out of the people brave enough to invest, it's mostly luck they picked the right startup
They took a risk and millions took risks in millions of other stocks and failed. So yea it's luck.
Billions didn't take any risks by not investing in startups. That's a zero chance, everyone else is a non zero chance.
Billions weren't lucky enough to be born in a class where they COULD afford to save / set aside enough money to invest in startups. The people who struck gold by happening to invest money into startups had to have had capital to begin with (or had to be in a family with capital), and compared to the billions on this planet, those people are in the 10%~1%.
They had no option to "take the risk" in the first place, they had to worry about basic necessities. Meanwhile the people who "get rich" off of start-up investments had a significant amount of wealth to spare after necessities. It's pretty hard for people who aren't relatively well-off to even have access to the means to invest, for example most brokerages require you to make a minimum deposit of multiple thousands of dollars to use them, and it's not even close to the amount that you actually need to realistically make meaningful money unless you're unbelievably lucky and get the next Tesla or something.
I know, my point still stands.
It's not lucky that they decided to gamble.
They bought the lottery ticket and won, not everyone buys tickets.
Even aside from the obvious point that the outcome of this gamble is luck, there's another more subtle point that I think is more important: For people will significant wealth and resources, it is very cheap to take gambles like this. For some people, dropping $10k into some high-risk gamble is just a bit of fun, but for other people that's their entire savings; and for other other people - they'd never be able to afford to do that even if they were starving themselves to save money.
How do people get into that kind of position of privilege and power in the first place? ... the luck of where they were born.
You're right, one thing I didn't consider is the vast majority of people investing are probably already significantly wealthy. Birth lottery is by far the largest contributor to chance of future wealth.
Makes you realise how many moving parts there are to this conversation. It's undeniable that those ones who were born lucky were not all gamblers though. I was born into a western family which isn't in poverty and I've never invested in a nothing company.
This is a silly distinction you are trying to make and it serves no purpose. And I don't even agree it is a real distinction... The act of deciding to gamble doesn't in any way mean the payoff or losses are anything but luck.
You think the choice of deciding to play the lottery doesnt change your chances at winning it?
If you truly think that you're even more lost than I thought you were, not worth my time
"than I thought you were"? I'm not the person you were talking to before.
What is your actual point? Why do you think it is important for you to argue that "actually gambling isn't pure luck"? And what, in your estimation, is "pure luck"?
The way I see it people are talking about specific phenomenon, and how they have entirely luck based outcomes (ex like the lottery), and you are trying to increase the scope of the context of the discussion to, in this example, include people who do not participate in the lottery, to try and argue that phenomenon does not have entirely luck based outcomes. But you haven't proven your point, you've been socially obtuse and attempted to derail the conversation from where it was because you have a bizarre point you want to make.
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I like that downvoted comments are no longer hidden but Pareto would like to tell you the ratio is 80:20.
4 in 5 people pick the wrong start-up and lose everything.
The remainder are busy rationalizing their luck as skill.
You're right. They also had to have had the resources to blow on a pipe dream that blew up by chance.
So it's luck, privilege, and thrn more luck on top of if.
Or they could be employed at those places and get stock as a benefit. My current job is that way. It is still risky to keep a lot of eggs in one basket, but it can pay off if your employer is a newer publicly traded company.
- Have enough resources available in your social network to keep making bets until you hit a 10x/100x
Slightly more accurate may be combining both birth lottery and merciless exploitation.
Since winning that lottery let's them be the people who can mercilessly exploit people, who then have children who won that lottery, etc.
Tbf I feel like a lot of them work pretty hard at mercilessly exploiting the working class. Like, Space Karen has sent over 20,000 tweets? That's a lot of work tweets!
Own something valuable and then borrow against that thing. Easiest example would be to own stock worth say a thousand dollars and borrow a hundred dollars from that stock value you get to keep the stock worth nine hundred dollars growing in value while you pay the one hundred dollar "debt" off. If you ever get to where you could not pay it for some reason, you could always take $100 and pay it off immediately. I've heard this referred to as the buy borrow strategy and some people to avoid taxes will use this perpetually and they call it the buy borrow die strategy. Selling an asset often involves extremely heavy extortion from gangs that we call governments, where borrowing from the value of that asset does not incur such an extortion penalty.
Edit: The most important part though is just to make more than you spend from whatever you do.
Tbf, most tax authorities haven't been completely captured by billionaires and they recognise what your just described as a disguised remuneration package.
It works even in the United States. If you sell a stock within a year of owning it, you get charged like 30% extortion. If you sell it after a year, you get charged your normal extortion rate. And if you borrow from it, you get charged zero extortion.
Thats what taxes are though. Its men with guns telling you to give them some of what you worked for or else... Sounds like extortion to me.
Yes, that's the Iam14andThisIsDeep perspective of taxes. It's what libertarians, aka diet-republicans say.
Blaming taxes being too high as the reason for why the wealthy are wealthy is them performing mind control on you.
And if that's what not what you're saying, check the thread you're in.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Other countries haven't had their tax authorities completely captured by billionaires.
Its funny, wage thieves are happy to charge a levy on other peoples labour, for using their things to make money, but as soon as a country comes along and says "yeah, so, about that whole charging people for using our things to making money thing...." they act like you just asked to fuck thier mum.
And they'll look you dead in eye and claim its a moral issue too, without a hint of shame.
I hate to be that guy, but not always exactly this. I have relatives that were born dirt poor but are now rich. You can definitely say they exploited people to get that way but the birth lottery gave them nothing financially
For every example like this there are a million examples of poor people staying poor.
Social mobility is much less than we like to pretend it is.
Not sure your point. Yes you can get rich ONLY exploiting the poor and don't need to be born rich.
I guess the op should have made it more of a venn diagram.
There are no innocent billionaires. They all trade human lives for profit every day.
The chart says that 50% get rich by exploitation and the other 50% by inheritance.
Edit: NVM, Im dumb and misread the meme. Still I doubt they were litterally "dirt poor" so birth lottery still applies.
For sure, never ever trust a wealthy person's origin story. Even trump and Musk claim to be self made.
Much better to go with the evidence of our eyes and ears.
Except I wasn't glorifying them. I actually think they aren't great people but go ahead and jerk yourself some more
You know nothing. I'm describing my great uncle, so I would have no reason to lie. No one else in the family is what you would call rich. I'm simply providing a factual counterexample because generalizing is the surest way to not understand nuance
Speaking of lacking nuance, claiming people "know nothing" isn't exactly the smartest thing you've ever said.
We have two things here:
A: I'm describing my great uncle
And
B: so I have no reason to lie.
How does one relate to the other? Is it unusual for people to lie about great uncles where you're from? Does this rule apply to, say, regular uncles? How about a great aunt? Does it apply to them too?
More seriously, the factual real world examples that can be proven and aren't just "trust me bro" all point to never being able to trust a wealthy persons origin story, even if it is someone's great uncle. However, that doesn't mean its literally untrue in every instance or yours.
The point is, even if 100% true in every capacity, it's so ultra rare and against such a rigged game that it might as well not be true. That is, if we plan on appreciating the true nuance of the situation.
Idiot, the person I referenced claimed you can't trust a rich person's origin story. It's not my story
You're just mad the simple narrative was threatened. I couldn't give a shit less what you believe
What a childish and hilariously ironic reply. I'm the person who said you can't trust a wealthy persons origin story. I said it because its true.
You challenged nothing. All you didn't was tell a baseless story that anyone could have made up. You give yourself too much credit if you think you either challenged anything anyone said or made me mad by it. It's pretty pathetic to have to pretend you've upset people.
Even if it was true, its like me saying "don't jump out of a 10 storey building, you'll probably die." and you replying "yeah, well, my great uncle jumped out of a 10 storey building and he didn't die." Like, cool story bro but you still shouldn't jump out of one and, also, no one cares about your tales.
How about second cousins, would you lie about them?
You are dumb I agree. Because that's what it takes to make up stories about other people's lives to make yourself feel better.
These were people that literally grew up without indoor plumbing or electricity for years, in a community where owning a car meant you were rich. They were sharecroppers so they owned nothing and slaved away to make rich people money.
But sure they weren't dirt poor because some dickhead on the Internet wanted it to not be true so they could keep generalizing people different than them as all the same.
From your other comments I gather that these people were born about 2 generations ago. In a time of economic growth and prosperity, I count that as luck. Also, I said "I doubted it" mr. nuance.
Yeah it's a bit derivative. Everyone already knows this and agrees with it. It's self evidently true. Nobody ever needs this explained to them, everyone already knows and agrees!