You must log in or # to comment.
I agree fully, but I do want to know what the original image said before “birth lottery” was edited in
Looks like inherited is the original, but I also seen another one with “Luck”
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.
Right nation and not disabled (or even just hideous looking). Sounds pretty lucky to me
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 think luck implies random chance. Which is completely inaccurate.
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.
So can you answer his question or did you just see an opportunity to brag about yourself.
No. I was pumping socialism as an alternative to birth lottery. Enjoy your day :)
What’s that got to do with the question?
So the birth lottery of being born in Canada rather than Syria, then?
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).
Good for you and glad to hear from a real entrepreneur.
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.
“Yeah, we got a 10-94 here, an Internet user has gotten too wise, send in the economics squad”
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.
You’re assuming you can only invest if you’re born into money. This is not a binary
That’s like the actual definition of gambling
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.
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.
Could be
- 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.
Isn’t that what it says already? 50/50 bit of both?
Oh, I read it as half the people won the birth lottery, the other half exploited people.
As a 50/50 split for the person yeah that’s what it would be
Just how I read the images sorry :)
Be in the political system and trade on stocks you have insider information on.
Good charts comparing why the “just world fallacy” is indeed a fallacy.
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
worktweets!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.
Calling it taxes extortion makes you a temporarily embarrassed billionaire.
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 would also suggest “Daddy’s credit card”.
So, birth lottery
How rich people get rich: Assets.
brownie points for people in the intersection
I agree for the most part. I do know people who got rich by working hard, treating employees fairly and with empathy, and providing a useful service.
Them they overcharged for the service
Spot on!
