People who grew up with high economic connectedness earn more

jjulienreszka about 3 hours ago 78 commentsRead Article on julienreszka.com

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asdfasgasdgasdg•about 1 hour ago

Surprised to be the first person to point this out. The entire premise of the article is dependent on a single study that definitely cannot demonstrate causation. The results of the study could equally well be explained by a third variable that causes both better financial outcomes and a higher likelihood to have more relationships with people who are wealthier.

Beyond that, I just have a lot of trouble accepting the conclusion because of everything I have seen in my career. Hard working people tend to know other hard working people. Hard working people get more done. Getting more done seemed to get you promoted, at least where I worked. Getting promoted had a meaningful, positive effect on income. People who weren’t very productive languished, conversely.

Possible this experience does not generalize to all workplaces!

over_bridge•43 minutes ago

Many places I've worked didn't promote hard workers at all. Hard workers were hard to replace so they were kept where they were and even blocked from promotions at times. People floating about with few duties were easy to backfill so could move to new positions, including up.

This is mostly public sector and utilities

orev•38 minutes ago

Those people “floating about” were doing something: building relationships with others who could promote them. Something that’s very difficult for hard workers to do, because they’re busy actually…working.

markus_zhang•12 minutes ago

Or something they are not willing to do. Genuinely, my career development plan is to be so good at a certain technical niche that people are still going to hire me even if I spit before them.

Of course reality hits hard so I’m now good with people. Not my taste but I can fake it easily.

genghisjahn•9 minutes ago

Your thesis is that companies pay more (by promoting) to people they could easily backfill instead of just letting them go and replacing them?

newhotelowner•26 minutes ago

Hard working helps but not enough. Connection helps more. At least in my career.

I couldn't get a job after graduation (post dot com bust). I started master, and in one of the class, I did the group project myself. One of the member of the group project was manager who got me the interview at her company and hired me.

matwood•3 minutes ago

Hard work and productivity are table stakes. Connections are the next step.

HPsquared•14 minutes ago

Did the same work dynamic play out after you started working there?

juliangoldsmith•about 1 hour ago

A possible "third variable" could be intelligence. It's been shown to be strongly correlated with success in general, and it seems likely people of similar intelligence would find it easier to relate to each other.

LPisGood•34 minutes ago

> It's been shown to be strongly correlated with success in general

Has it? I was under the impression we could hardly define, much less measure that.

Swizec•20 minutes ago

> > It's been shown to be strongly correlated with success in general

> Has it? I was under the impression we could hardly define, much less measure that.

IQ has a strong positive correlation with life outcomes. Economic and otherwise. Whether IQ is a good measure of "intelligence" remains debated but there's no question that high scores in that measure correlate with high scores in life outcome measures: Life expectancy, economic success, relationship success, etc. Every single thing you can measure about a person's life trends upwards with IQ.

Some (maybe much) of the effect can be attributed to privilege and other covariants, so we don't know if IQ is causal for life outcomes but we have strong evidence that it's correlated.

one study of many: https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=74943

asdfasgasdgasdg•30 minutes ago

I think we have many very decent measures of intellect. It’s true that none of them are perfect but I think it’s basically propaganda to say we can’t define or measure it at all.

estearum•19 minutes ago

There is "something" that seems to correlate strongly with wealth, education, test scores across every subject/dimension, seems highly heritable from parents to offspring, and fits with both SAT and IQ test results.

It can't possibly be intelligence (would be inconvenient if it were) but there's something there. Maybe we can call it "shminshmellishence".

tartoran•18 minutes ago

There are intelligent people who may not be necessarily be on the same scale socially and they do get burned by it.

juliangoldsmith•2 minutes ago

Impulse control issues, like ADHD, can factor in too.

throwaway_7274•about 2 hours ago

I attribute 90% of my success in life to the fact that I happened to make the right childhood best friend. One thing led to another and I got a PhD and earn [unreasonable salary]/year now. Life is insanely unfair. On some level it is luck. I don’t know what the “skill issue” twitterites don’t get about it.

(Hard work doesn’t hurt, either, but that goes without saying.)

shuwix•31 minutes ago

Life it not unfair. You've picked that right friend and you've earned that one friend, and you've kept that one friend for ages.

If someone does exact opposite of what you've did, than it's not unfair he's doing worse than you do.

nater5000•10 minutes ago

>You've picked that right friend and you've earned that one friend, and you've kept that one friend for ages.

Well I never had the opportunity to meet that friend. I would have been a good friend to them and kept them for ages, but because of circumstances beyond my control, I never even had the opportunity to do so. Kind of seems like a good way to sum up that notion would be to say that the OP was lucky to have been in the right place at the right time, no?

>If someone does exact opposite of what you've did, than it's not unfair he's doing worse than you do.

But why would they do the exact opposite of what the OP did? If it turned out so well for the OP, why wouldn't others also want to do the same thing to end up with the same results?

serial_dev•about 1 hour ago

My whole life would have been different if I didn’t get a new physics teacher when I was 16?

Before him, I found math and physics unintuitive, but he explained it in a way that (to me) made the whole high school physics trivial.

I studied physics at the university where I learned programming, and switched to software engineering.

WalterBright•20 minutes ago

In order to make life fair, it is necessary to hammer everyone down to the lowest common denominator.

throwaway_7274•14 minutes ago

Whatever strawman you’re fighting here, it ain’t me.

wordpad•about 1 hour ago

Given only like 1% of people hold PhDs i feel like you're massively underestimating your own effort in your success.

xenadu02•17 minutes ago

Success is almost always a combination of both. No one is self-made but that tends to irk people who believe they are because they've spent years doing a lot of hard work. Without that hard work they'd have failed! Yet hard work alone is not sufficient.

Where you grow up, what schools you attend, who your childhood friend group is, luckily not getting hit by a bus and put in the hospital, etc. A whole host of factors conspire to grant or deny you opportunities.

However once the opportunity arises you have to seize it. Many people have lots of opportunity yet accomplish nothing because they lack the skills, will, or both to do so. Conversely many people with the drive and skills never hit the right opportunity and end up nowhere.

For whatever reason the broader culture seems to bounce back and forth between both extremes. The whole "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and "get a job you lazy bum" crowd acting as if you can get rich purely with hard work. Then on the other side there seems to be this well-intentioned idea on the left that if we simply give every under-privileged kid opportunity they'll be successful.

Real humans and real lives are far more complex than such simple notions.

throwaway_7274•about 1 hour ago

I’m correctly estimating my own effort in my success. I know just how hard I worked. Making the right childhood best friend causally set me on the path to do it.

michaelfm1211•about 2 hours ago

I don't disagree with the result but the argument may be flawed. How do you know it's not the other way around, that richness causes having rich friends, rather than rich friends causing richness?

bko•about 1 hour ago

This whole thing is silly as are many of these studies. They arbitrarily treat things as random. Consider this:

> Children who grow up with high economic connectedness earn 20 percent more as adults on average than otherwise similar children who do not.

"otherwise similar children" is doing a lot of work here.

You have high economic connectedness, which may mean you grew up in a rich neighborhood to parents that are smart and value education.

Or maybe you're connected to your Harvard classmates who are successful, which means you're likely smart and work hard.

Or you're a successful networker, so you're socially adept.

But it's almost certainly not a random characteristic like having hazel eyes. No matter how hard they try to control for other things.

ghurtado•about 1 hour ago

That's the question that popped up into my head shortly after starting to read the article.

Correlation != Causation

pavel_lishin•about 3 hours ago

This is probably the biggest value from going to college, or at least it was - making those connections. I got my first job from a college connection, and my second one as well. I'm not sure how useful the actual classes were, or the degree - my first job certainly didn't require one, and the second one would have likely waived the requirement for one since I was already employed as a software engineer.

AnimalMuppet•about 1 hour ago

To some degree (no pun intended), it depends on which college you attend. I went to Random Public University; my university contacts were the kind of people who go to that kind of university. If you went to Harvard/MIT/Caltech, your contacts are the kind of people who go to those places. Those are not equivalent groups.

anticorporate•about 3 hours ago

Meeting people and making friends outside my income class through civic volunteering probably had a bigger impact on my lifetime earnings to date than either of my degrees or my work history itself.

kian•about 2 hours ago

what kind of civic volunteering did you find most rewarding?

anticorporate•about 2 hours ago

Great question! For me, I met a lot of people through more traditional "serve on a board or commission"-type activity in my twenties. But what I found most enjoyable was hands-on volunteering: stream cleanups, teaching kids bicycle safety, composting demos, that kind of thing. Those more hands-on activities were often more inconsistent, though, with the folks showing up every week or month rotating quite a bit.

The sweet spot for me was somewhere in the middle, taking on more of an organizer role with civic meetups and that kind of thing. I still got to do some of the hands-on stuff by teaching the rotating cast of volunteers, but formed closer relationships with other organizers.

Supermancho•about 3 hours ago

I think it's how you appear to other people you work around.

Over a period of time, when the right person thinks you are useful/attractive/interesting, you get more opportunity/promotion.

This happens to explain the networking effect implied by the post (and related analyses).

rizzom5000•about 2 hours ago

This is a game played at the level of primate politics.

If you care about epistemic accuracy more than tribal politics, you'll quickly find yourself in the outgroup.

Logical from a 'within the game' perspective, but those who believe that humans are legitimately trying to transcend their irrational nature will be very disappointed.

xenadu02•12 minutes ago

A difficult lesson to learn but one that led to a 10x increase in income for me.

You can fight the system all you like. You might make a difference but you won't be rewarded for it.

Or you can accept the game and play it. If you don't like the current game switch companies and play a different one.

glaslong•about 3 hours ago

The key to success is the same as it ever was: you buying my Product! Or even better, my Course about how you too can achieve success with your own Product.

tbrownaw•about 2 hours ago

27000 + 20% is 32400 not 47000, so not sure what's up with that sentence.

Also, define "success". Even if it's just about being exceptional in economic terms, AIUI a bog-standard swdev salary is enough to be in the top 10% with no favoritism needed. And if it's about being able to retire and have grandkids come visit sometimes, I think that might be more common than not.

David•about 2 hours ago

That sentence confused me, too, but it's clarified in the next paragraph:

> Children who grow up with high economic connectedness earn 20 percent more as adults on average than otherwise similar children who do not, a gap equal to growing up in a family making 47,000 dollars a year instead of 27,000.

ie: knowing wealthier people has as much impact on your income as growing up in a family making $47k/year instead of $27k/year

RickJWagner•40 minutes ago

I did the same math and had the same question.

But wait, something was learned! I typed in the start of the equation and after hitting space after the equal sign it yielded the answer! The Hacker News comment box can do the math for you!

julienreszka•about 2 hours ago

The 20 percent is the effect on the child's own adult income from growing up with more economically diverse friends. The 27,000 versus 47,000 comparison is a separate number: it's roughly the same size effect you'd see from that same child's own parents earning 47,000 instead of 27,000 while raising them, a different mechanism entirely, used only to give the 20 percent some intuitive scale. They're not the same number expressed two ways, so multiplying one by 1.2 to check the other won't line up.

jwpapi•about 2 hours ago

First of all that could be a causality ≠ correlation, but more importantly. Even if it might be the biggest predictor, it might not be the biggest lever.

Still interesting train of thought that I might need, but the article is exaggerating the evidence and not adding the right disclaimers.

whatever1•about 2 hours ago

The key to your success are the connections of your dad.

foxyv•about 1 hour ago

I think a huge part of success comes from stopping and spending some time in self reflection occasionally. It's really easy to get stuck on autopilot and not re-evaluate things. Especially when you are young. Stopping for a bit and spending time actually thinking instead of bashing my head against a wall has been my best strategy to date.

freetime2•about 1 hour ago

The title is “Your Key to Success Isn't More Luck or Hard Work”, but I would hardly consider a 20% increase the “key” to anything.

It’s some combination of all the above plus some additional dimensions like decision making, etc.

gopalv•about 3 hours ago

Your success eV is opportunities x success-rate.

Out of the gate, hard work improves success rates, but not the count of opportunities.

Connections improve opportunities, it doesn't do shit for success-rate.

Luck does for both sides of the mix.

As a startup founder in my 40s, the entire VP/SVP level in silicon valley is people one or two hops away for an intro, though admittedly a lot of the first hop there is through the other founders.

The original paper about importance of weak ties is under appreciated, because people you work with tend to go on to better & bigger things - especially in the beginning of your career, if you are a nice person.

Veritasium put out a very nice video[1] about knowing which sort of game we're playing. It is a power law game.

There are only two takeaways I had, "show up" and "get lucky". There is no winning without showing up.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBluLfX2F_k

zahlman•about 2 hours ago

This appears to be trying to sell a system for meeting the right people, rather than giving any actionable advice about how to do so.

It also glosses over the fact that who you know is often a result of some combination of hard work and luck.

grebc•about 1 hour ago

It’s more reasonable to conclude that your success is linked to your birth these days than not. Especially in the USA.

lennxa•about 1 hour ago

i get the narrative the author is going for, but it's stupid. you can put in effort to get to know people and make friends. like it's a game you can play. yes in the extreme cases it can be hard or impossible, but for the audience this is written for, certainly not the case

subygan•about 2 hours ago

a lot of life is transactional and businesslike (even if at times it doesn't feel that way.)

and just like in business, a lot of opportunities and outcomes are depended on being in the right place right time & knowing the right person.

hard work tips the balance a little bit. not much

ItsYan•about 3 hours ago

I wonder if this is true in continental Europe.

f6v•about 2 hours ago

It's definitely the case based on my anecdotal evidence. Friendships are formed very early in life in Northern Europe and your circle has a tremendous impact on everything. The same is true for Western Europe, but maybe to a lesser extent.

bmiekre•about 2 hours ago

Hocking a product here huh, so, you rich dad poor dad too?

dominotw•about 2 hours ago

key to success is stealth marketing.

jrm4•about 2 hours ago

This is absolutely it, and it's something I try to impart to college students. What programming language you learn, or what you put on your resume, or even how you dress and speak at e.g. job fairs all pale in comparison to. "Who do you know, who is in your 'network?'"

And note, this can be done without being sleazy. Try to be interested in other people, try to make random friends. That will "pay off" -- both in richness of life and in just money -- more than just about anything.

(One of my personal corollaries here is "go until they stop you." This works for nightclubs, conferences, etc. etc. And even if you are stopped, hit them with a HUGE mea culpa, and back away. Which will be rarer than you expect.)

(and one more. The other thing I do in every class: Each and every one of you knows something about something WAY MORE AND BETTER than literally everyone else in this room. No promises, but that might be your good avenue.)

vinaigrette•about 2 hours ago

What do you mean by "go" ? Talk ?

senorcrab•about 2 hours ago

Ultimately this kind of mechanism is what creates a society of hereditary classes.

This is not something to be celebrated - the one good thing about capitalism and open competition generally is that you can challenge this.

mrhottakes•about 2 hours ago

When will capitalism introduce open competition instead of nepotism and "more money = better than"?

QuercusMax•about 2 hours ago

Private education for the wealthy is a cancer on society - having even rich kids go to the same schools as everyone else is an equalizing effect.

I don't see how capitalism help this at all, in fact it seems to make it much worse.

CrzyLngPwd•about 2 hours ago

Since luck can be defined as the crossroads of opportunity and preparedness, and since it takes work to be prepared for opportunity, and since it takes effort and a trained eye to spot opportunity...then ultimately it takes hard work to be successful.

Let's not let some billionaires who enjoyed friends with benefits skew the results of millions of successful people.

0cf8612b2e1e•about 1 hour ago

I should have worked harder to be sure I was not born to a single mother in poverty.

CrzyLngPwd•about 1 hour ago

I was born into poverty, with a single mother who worked 3 jobs and died younger than she should have.

I'm sorry it didn't work out for you, but I attribute my success with my hard work.

jaybrendansmith•about 2 hours ago

Yes. The definition of 'luck' stated in the article is just ... wrong. Luck as random, sure, but you become more 'lucky' by knowing more people but mostly being open to new opportunities, ideas, friendships. So yes, it is luck, but luck is (opportunity + preparedness + hard work + social skills) X iteration.

bloqs•about 1 hour ago

Peterson before he went nuts covered the research on this quite bluntly:

Lifetime earnings is most strongly predicted by IQ, then conscientiousness. So those with both are considerably more likely. Social connectedness is entirely dependent on personality as well - extraversion predicts this, and extraversion also predicts ones interest in financial incentives rather curiously

tptacek•40 minutes ago

Super uncertain causality. "Earnings is most strongly predicted by IQ" suggests mechanistic and innate causality, but SES acts on IQ and on outcomes (as IQ does on SES). Education powerfully influences lifetime earnings, but education is obviously and potently impacted by the SES of your family.

This is like that hoary chestnut about the Pentagon and pizza delivery orders. Military strikes, to hear the story go, are most powerfully predicted by pizza orders. But pizza itself does not cause wars (except in Chicago and New York City).

A nit, but the point is you can't distill these problems down to a single statistic and then do policy based on them (not that you were proposing policy).

awesome_dude•about 2 hours ago

Having the network that can lift you up IS the luck

mproud•33 minutes ago

Correlation is not causation.

In other words: the side effect of making more money is that you have more money to spend on your children’s education.

sublinear•about 3 hours ago

> 20% Higher adult income for children with economically diverse friends, the gap between a family earning 27,000 and one earning 47,000 a year

So we're comparing poor people to even poorer people?

I have never had an "economically diverse" group of friends. I grew up even more broke than the groups being compared. My friends were mostly lowlifes back then. I still don't know anybody filthy rich right now. I work from home in the suburbs making 6 figures and so do all my new friends.

I'm not saying there isn't some nepotism in high places, but if we're just talking about the middle class... I mean what do you want me to say other than "stay in school"?

diego_moita•about 1 hour ago

Hardly news.

There are a lot of industries based on the "people I know" principle. From selling Tupperware and Herbalife to the whole Lobbying industry and politics, everything is about the right connections.

The world has been like that even before homo sapiens appeared on earth; higher primates also do a lot of making the right connections.

terminalbraid•about 2 hours ago

Clickbait title

julienreszka•about 2 hours ago

yup. i concede. but it's also true

SalaevAl•about 2 hours ago

Same intuition here — until my own path disagreed. Roles via acquaintances were mostly meh; the best ones found me without networking.

bluerooibos•about 2 hours ago

Another ad disguised as an article - nice.

pessimizer•about 3 hours ago

Always been true. Physical proximity to wealthy people is the key to success. The reason to send your kid to a good college (or to a terrible "small private liberal arts college on the East Coast") is to get them to be near wealthy people. Sleep with them and compliment them. If you're black, or can pretend to be convincingly, give them a tacit "N-word pass." They probably won't use it, but it will give them a glow like they just voted for Obama again.

Tell them about the things you're working on and your business ideas, and praise every observation they make. Praise those observations so extensively that you abandon talking about your project entirely, and just talk about the implications of their astute observation. At the end, express gratitude for the universe giving you the opportunity to meet someone so much on the same page as you as they are. Ask them "why can't other people see it?" Try to develop a private joke from the conversations. Tell them about the difficulties your mother is going through.

Repeat until wealthy.

My favorite recent example is Carlos Watson. Got pulled up the greasy pole by Steve Jobs' wife, and after he slipped and fell into prison, got out through Trump circle ass-kissing. Even though I suspect owner of The Atlantic paid that bill, too, no matter the keyfabe.

moralestapia•about 3 hours ago

Agree, but this "study" is trash. But indeed is its "who you know" and "who knows you", the way to the top i always through nepo. Al-ways.

There's maybe like one exception to this rule every century.

storus•about 3 hours ago

Pointing out that cronyism/nepotism is giving the largest boost for one's success instead of "meritocracy" is pretty depressing...

elevation•23 minutes ago

The contempt for nepotism saddens me. My family's financial fortunes (and social standing) were completely reset a few decades back (my dad was near penniless when he immigrated in midlife) but after decades of frugal living I can now look forward to making opportunities for my children that my parents couldn't make for me.

Isn't that what everyone wants?

storus•11 minutes ago

Did your dad immigate from a country where nepotism/cronyism was the norm? Wasn't America unique in the ability to give this frugal person a chance to pull himself up by the bootstraps by giving him and his children the opportunity to earn a good living without knowing anyone in power? Do you want America that would look like your dad's original country, being a permanent underclass there?

OutOfHere•about 2 hours ago

I think calling it cryonyism/neptotism is the problem, as these words don't always capture what is happening. In many cases, the person receiving the opportunity isn't a crony or a relative; it is just someone who is known. There is some comfort that is felt in granting the opportunity to someone who is known or relatable. Perhaps it comes with a belief that one won't get screwed over after such a favor is granted, that the receiving person will remain grateful forever, and sometimes even reciprocate in the future. I am not justifying it.

This other comment reflects the same understanding in different words: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49277355