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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!
This is mostly public sector and utilities
Of course reality hits hard so I’m now good with people. Not my taste but I can fake it easily.
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.
Has it? I was under the impression we could hardly define, much less measure that.
> 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
It can't possibly be intelligence (would be inconvenient if it were) but there's something there. Maybe we can call it "shminshmellishence".
(Hard work doesn’t hurt, either, but that goes without saying.)
If someone does exact opposite of what you've did, than it's not unfair he's doing worse than you do.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
Correlation != Causation
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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!
Still interesting train of thought that I might need, but the article is exaggerating the evidence and not adding the right disclaimers.
It’s some combination of all the above plus some additional dimensions like decision making, etc.
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
It also glosses over the fact that who you know is often a result of some combination of hard work and luck.
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
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.)
This is not something to be celebrated - the one good thing about capitalism and open competition generally is that you can challenge this.
I don't see how capitalism help this at all, in fact it seems to make it much worse.
Let's not let some billionaires who enjoyed friends with benefits skew the results of millions of successful people.
I'm sorry it didn't work out for you, but I attribute my success with my hard work.
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
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).
In other words: the side effect of making more money is that you have more money to spend on your children’s education.
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"?
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.
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.
There's maybe like one exception to this rule every century.
Isn't that what everyone wants?
This other comment reflects the same understanding in different words: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49277355