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!
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.
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.
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.
I would recommend reconsidering that strategy; it’s not sustainable for your entire working lifetime. There WILL come a point where you cannot maintain the pace of being “so good” that the works speaks for itself. When you reach that point, the relationships you build NOW, will become very important to that future you.
It doesn’t mean you need to stop being technical now, but at least start allocating a few hours a month to relationships in a meaningful, intentional way.
> Many places I've worked didn't promote hard workers at all.
There's a type of hard worker who puts in a lot of effort and hopes it's noticed, but gets stuck being loyal to jobs like this.
If you work at one of those jobs, they're going to collect around you. You might be getting pulled into that type of work without knowing it.
The successful ones know that getting promoted is just 1 out of many potential career moves for them to consider at a given point. If they're not getting promoted, they get up and leave for another company where their hard work will be appreciated.
Some people get stuck at those companies, watch people working hard and getting nowhere, and go in the opposite direction: They stay put and stop trying hard. That can be fine for people whose goal is to have a stable job that isn't too demanding. However it gives a very wrong impression of the relationship between hard work and success when extrapolate over an entire career.
There are a lot of things about dysfunctional and broken companies that shouldn't be generalized. It's too easy to get trapped in cycles of cynicism and defeatism in a place like those.
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.
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.
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".
Those were some of the leading candidates until twin studies and controls for familial wealth invalidated them and left us only with shminshmellishence :/
> > 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.
All of these things are strong covariates, which is something the online hive-mind struggles with. It's not intelligence OR wealth OR hard work OR $thing, it's all of the above, with some weighting function that spits out high values for all factors.
And since IQ is just a proxy for intelligence (however good), it also correlates to some greater or lesser degree with the other factors.
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.
Tell that to the generation of autistics roaming America that were never properly diagnosed in their youth. High intelligence, often even high paying jobs, but all the other 'success' metrics will probably end up looking very wavy.
I'd argue that mildly autistic people had much better outcomes decades ago before we started thinking it was something to diagnose. My grandfather was probably autistic, but there was no internet to sink into so he had to interact with people and build some basic social skills. Out of high school he joined the Navy as a radar technician and lived in a structured environment that taught a lot of life skills. Then he went to college for engineering and was set up on dates with my grandmother (as a bit of a matchmaking thing). Suburban house, 4 children, married for decades, church. Generally a very normal and happy life, even if he was considered eccentric and sensitive to noises. I don't think anybody ever thought to diagnose him with it.
My brother is mildly autistic, too, but he has always had the option to skip out of socialization in favor of the computer, and we've lost the societal structure that helped my grandfather thrive.
> Hard working people tend to know other hard working people. ... Hard working people get more done.
Getting promoted at a FAANG is like a micro-effect. One percent of one percent of one percent. Generalizing our experience to 72 million Americans ain't it boss.
And our experience is subject to dozens of selection bias. For example, most of the best people I know at my current job are that way in part because I trained them at my last job at a university. And then they referred me into their employer networks. Beyond the hurdles of getting into a flagship state school, having those connections matter. Nobody I know from undergrad had any employment at FAANG when I was laid off a decade ago, I just got lucky enough to have a second cohort contacts in the form of student employees at a different flagship state university doing internships, landing jobs and looking for referral bonuses. Last I checked LinkedIn I'm the only engineer from my alma mater at my employer.
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.)
~99% of my success is that I happened to make friends with the right coworker at my first job, who happened to be a genius, and happened to refer me to better places. Otherwise, I'd still probably be making 1/4th of what I'm making now - simply because I didn't go to the right schools or be born to the right family, etc.
I think Thinking Fast and Slow talks a lot about maximizing your surface area for luck.
Nothing beats luck.
Sorry to all the unlucky people. I wish you could all be lucky, too!
"For social reasons, it is highly uncommon for people to fail the oral defense of their thesis. Some people are just terrible at it, naturally. They cannot think well on their feet. They get confused and answer the wrong question."
The fraction of your 1% that sits to listen just hands them out regardless as a consolation prize.
Who is gonna be able to challenge them. Except on the whole being 1 of billions like everyone else.
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.
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.
> 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.
I'd be surprised if more than a tiny minority of people actually believe that. It has more to do with believing that ideally, everyone should have access to the same opportunities.
It seems rather straightforward and non-controversial that providing more people opportunities to succeed will inevitably lead to more people succeeding, even if only a small minority of people are capable of seizing upon the opportunities they are provided.
I would add that, while “giving every under-privileged kid opportunity” wouldn’t make them all successful, for just the reasons you said, I’m not sure that’s even the bottleneck! It’s like… how do you “give someone opportunity?” It’s a very subtle problem. It’s not easy. I doubt there’s any straightforward intervention where you can give everyone 10 units of opportunity, use them wisely please. School funding and clean streets and EBT and whatnot are sort of proxies for this, but it’s just really not that simple.
(This isn’t a disagreement with anything, by the way.)
>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?
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
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?
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.
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.
> This is probably the biggest value from going to college ...
It's a popular argument that doesn't make it's point very explicitly nor offer any support for it, but the main point is that college education itself has no value. That mode of expression is an old technique that people unintentionally use when they repeat the argument: By not being explicit about the thesis or any support for it, it's impossible to address - the thesis is invisible to many. (In college, you learn you have to explicitly write your thesis and your support for it.)
Necessary to it is the argument, again implicit, that the only value in the world is income. Once you see that explicitly written out, you know it's obviously absurd. (It's absurd for another reason too: knowledge and intellectual skill are great aids to income.)
People on HN highly value knowledge and cognitive skill. They spend significant time on gaining it, including right here. How much would they value years to dedicate to the very best of those things, learning from each of the very best humans and ideas from any time or place, guided and advised by other people who have spent their lifetime studying each person or idea, and who can introduce you to the best of it and to the most powerful counter-arguments, flaws, and alternatives. It sounds like a fantasy, but it's real.
There are powerful people who don't like those thinkers and ideas, because they undermine power. So they devalue them, ostracize them, defund them, ban them - all to stop you from reading them. Those must be powerful ideas.
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.
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.
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.
This article feels like a "wet streets cause rain" kind of thing.
I think there are two factors at play beneath this:
1. Your expectations of yourself. If you grow up with studious and career oriented friends and family, you expect that of yourself. Same when you grow up around enrepreners. On the other than there are social groups that have the attitude roughly "I work a random job until I get fired" - if that's the subculture you are brought up with, that can steer your own life too.
2. You self select your friends. My highschool had a mix of poor but motivated immigrant kids, and just like "bad" kids. The two groups didn't mingle, one ended up in the 1% by and large and the other group is in jail or on welfare. So you could say we did better because we had friends who ended up better off but I think it's the other way - we associated with people who are on our trajectory.
"Who you know" is important - but the first job I got through a connection was at age 45. Everything before that came from who I am not who I knew, but who know is shaped by who I am (ie I wouldn't have had the connection that got me this job if the guy hadn't known he as a high performer to begin with)
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
Parents define a person. Yes genetically-of-course, but equally by being their primary and formative influences in almost everything. And obviously, functional parenting quality ranges from great to traumatic to non-existent.
Therefore there is no greater variable in nominal differences between youth peers. How could there possibly be?? It is near all-encompassing, and sustains for the first quarter of a persons life.
This concept is true going back through the ages, with the main difference being less social and economic mobility in the past. That does not = 100% social or economic mobility now, by any means.
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.
I am in the circle of richer friends and there are few children. My anecdotal theory is harder drive in their families on career, education, etc resulted in this. And their families probably provided for that high economic connectedness, which enabled them for success. Genetic oblivion is a terrible reward for all that work.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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).
Based on what? There is positive correlation between educational attainment and lifetime earnings, but that does not imply that education is an influencer. One reasonable explanation for that correlation is that one who has qualities and habits that allow them to do well in the education system are also qualities and habits that do well in the economy. Certainly, those with crippling disabilities or other life challenges that sees them do poorly in school are also understood to have no economic future due to those same disabilities/life challenges, so it seems we have an intuitive understanding of that to some degree.
To find influence we can't just pick a top economic performer at random and compare him to a poor economic performer. We need to find the same person with and without an education. Luckily we can essentially do that, to a close enough approximation, by looking at an average person in the past when people didn't seek education and an average person after seeking education became commonplace. Unluckily, primary school rose in prominence before we had good record keeping.
But, luckily, post-secondary education rose during the time where we started having great record keeping. Here's the thing: Incomes held stagnant during that time. Lifetime earnings did not increase for the individual after gaining a (post secondary) education. They made just as much when they didn't go to college. Those with high earnings were more likely to go to college by this time, sure, but that's not the same thing.
Despite the record keeping being poor, we do know that incomes did rise during the rise of primary and secondary education. So while a post-secondary education clearly has no impact on lifetime earnings, even if someone destined to have high lifetime earnings is likely to attend a post-secondary school, the effects of primary and secondary education remains less clear. However, during that time incomes continued to rise even when there was no meaningful change in the education received, so the correlation in that case is most likely just coincidence. There was a lot of economic change happening at that time that provides a much more reasonable explanation for why incomes were rising.
You're making the mistake I called out but on a grander scale. Virtually everything about the cohorts you're comparing are different! Labor markets, demographics, taxes, unionization, labor force participation, even technology; you name it.
I have no idea whether there's an innate structure in people that's causally determinative of lifetime income. I don't think this kind of faux-axiomatic reasoning can get you to the kind of certainty you have here. I think this argument feels intuitively true to you, and maybe it could be, but maybe any argument is true.
> Virtually everything about the cohorts you're comparing are different!
Not meaningfully so. Life doesn't move that fast. There is only one year between when the average person didn't go to college and when the average person did go to college. More ideal would be to put the exact same person into parallel universes on those different tracks, but let me know when you figure out how to do that. In the real world, that is the closest approximation we can get. And what we were able to plainly observe is that there was no change in earnings.
Which is interesting as it pertains to your point as it is unlikely in a vacuum that two random average people would ever have the same earnings, so the fact that they landed in the very same spot does suggest that our approximation is much closer than it seems you want to believe.
> I have no idea whether there's an innate structure in people that's causally determinative of lifetime income.
Nobody does. There are plausible explanations, but we have no scientific evidence of what the "secret sauce" is. Which, with your recognizing that, makes your earlier claim of education influencing lifetime earnings even more ridiculous.
> I don't think this kind of faux-axiomatic reasoning can get you to the kind of certainty you have here.
You must have misread something as the only certainty I offered was that college hasn't lead to higher lifetime earnings for individuals, which we know is the case as we have comprehensive income data to prove it. You cannot both earn more and earn the same. Someone with high lifetime earnings, statistically, also having a college education is not the same thing.
There is one caveat here. We can see in the data around the top 1% of earners that the majority of them have access to a restricted market (think doctor, lawyer, etc.) which most people legally are not allowed to participate in. As you know from Econ 101, an artificially restricted supply artificially increases prices, so that offers a pretty good explanation for how they are able to earn so much more than everyone else.
Here's where things get messy: Access to those markets is often granted through the colleges. That might be where you got the idea that education influences lifetime earnings, but we find the same economic benefits where access to restricted markets is given outside of colleges as well. There is little evidence that college is signifiant there—only the access part. But I can understand your confusion if that is what you had in mind, conflating it because colleges also try to offer education.
We're probably talking past each other then because I read you the other way. Either way: in 2026 there is still a striking college income premium, statistically (it's over 50%). It's presumably much lower than it was before (more people go to college and also the labor market changed; it will change even more sharply in the coming years due to automation).
If we're both arguing that economic outcomes are messily related to lots of different causes, we're saying the same thing.
> in 2026 there is still a striking college income premium, statistically (it's over 50%).
We can make this real simple: 64% of the population have a degree. The median income is unchanged since before <50% of the population had a degree. If individuals gained a premium, we'd have to have seen an increase in the median income after >50% of the population attained a degree. That is a mathematical necessity. But it didn't happen... There is no college premium, plain and simple.
While incomes are stagnant for nearly all individuals, college degree or not, I suspect what you are trying to point out is that the so-called top 1% has seen a dramatic rise in income and that most in the top 1% have a degree. Therefore, the combined income of all degree holders has risen at a rate faster than the remainder of the population, even if most degree holders have seen no change. That is definitely true, but a long way from your claim that education influences lifetime earnings. Given that only a small subset of all degree holders have found what could be called a premium, it is unlikely that the premium is influenced by college; at least not in a consistent or reproducible way to make it a useful claim.
Wait, what? I don't want to get pulled into an argument about college that I'm not invested in, but how is this even arithmetically true? I can bestow a lifetime increase on two people in the bottom half cohort without changing the median at all. Like, I'd need us to share premises about what the term "median" means before talking about anything else in this argument.
It's curious that you find it necessary for us to share what "median" means, but then not share, but I guess you must have accidentally pressed the "Reply" button before you were finished?
We can do a simple thought experiment here. If 0% of the population have a degree, do you agree that the median income holder does not have a degree? If 100% of the population have a degree, do you agree that the median income holder does have a degree?
So when the degree attainment rate crosses the 50% mark, do you agree that the median income holder must have a degree? My definition says yes. And since the degree brings a premium, how do you explain the median income not rising? Maybe the premium you are imagining is just hugs and kisses?
I know, you think the median income has somehow always been filled by a degree holder, even when only a small segment of the population had a degree. But how is that possible when education influences lifetime earnings? Shouldn't those with education be making more than the median when those with education are a small segment of the population?
I don't question anyone in particular. This is a discussion forum, not a private one-on-one conversation.
> there may well be a hundred, sixty with a degree and 40 without.
So what you are suggesting is that attaining a degree lowers your earnings and then gives you back a commensurate premium, thus restoring you back to the same level as those without a degree? That's a take, I guess, but premium usually comes with certain connotations that isn't that.
> Also possible that in a hypothetical population with 1,001 people that 1,000 people have a degree but the sole median income earner does not.
Again, where is the premium? If the only person without a degree isn't the lowest earner then we know that the person with the least earnings has a degree, but it was asserted that the person with the least earnings is given a premium over those without a degree, so... Are your numbers omitting a space alien or fairy without a degree where we earlier considered them to be people? It's not clear how to resolve this discrepancy.
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.)
> You write as if there is only one smoothly homogeneous "Capitalism" and that it's actually practiced.
You'd be mistaken, as that better describes OP. All I mentioned is that the push for open competition began in capitalism (or, more appropriately, liberal capitalism) undermining the prior more nepotism-based system of dominance.
Of course, there are more intricacies but, given that OP's comment was shallow, I didn't feel the need of going deep into the many forms of what people may call "capitalism". We can get into it if you'd like.
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.
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.
> 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"?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
If you want the solution, it is closer to what some government agencies use for hiring. They use guaranteed placement setup whereby if one gets high scores on a test, they're guaranteed placement. The salary is lower, and the work is boring, but they get pension and good healthcare. I passed on it twice because they were high-security places and I don't like emptying my pockets each morning.
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!
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
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.
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.
I would recommend reconsidering that strategy; it’s not sustainable for your entire working lifetime. There WILL come a point where you cannot maintain the pace of being “so good” that the works speaks for itself. When you reach that point, the relationships you build NOW, will become very important to that future you.
It doesn’t mean you need to stop being technical now, but at least start allocating a few hours a month to relationships in a meaningful, intentional way.
Thanks. Actually I already reconsidered due to my difficulties to hop into the next more technical job.
> Many places I've worked didn't promote hard workers at all.
There's a type of hard worker who puts in a lot of effort and hopes it's noticed, but gets stuck being loyal to jobs like this.
If you work at one of those jobs, they're going to collect around you. You might be getting pulled into that type of work without knowing it.
The successful ones know that getting promoted is just 1 out of many potential career moves for them to consider at a given point. If they're not getting promoted, they get up and leave for another company where their hard work will be appreciated.
Some people get stuck at those companies, watch people working hard and getting nowhere, and go in the opposite direction: They stay put and stop trying hard. That can be fine for people whose goal is to have a stable job that isn't too demanding. However it gives a very wrong impression of the relationship between hard work and success when extrapolate over an entire career.
There are a lot of things about dysfunctional and broken companies that shouldn't be generalized. It's too easy to get trapped in cycles of cynicism and defeatism in a place like those.
I'm in this position! I chose to stay in the lackluster mobility because the money was too good. Now it's running dry and I'm ready for my next thing
Your thesis is that companies pay more (by promoting) to people they could easily backfill instead of just letting them go and replacing them?
I'm not American. It's hard to fire people. You have to recycle them into new positions. The author seems to be French so I imagine it's similar there
I do wish it were easier to fire people for poor performance though. Nothing kills morale like tolerating incompetence
If the unemployment benefits are strong then I have no problem with easier dismissal rules
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.
Hard work and productivity are table stakes. Connections are the next step.
Did the same work dynamic play out after you started working there?
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.
> 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.
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".
Could it also be called wealth-mellishence or perhaps familialValuationOfWorkEthic-melloshence?
Those were some of the leading candidates until twin studies and controls for familial wealth invalidated them and left us only with shminshmellishence :/
> > 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
All of these things are strong covariates, which is something the online hive-mind struggles with. It's not intelligence OR wealth OR hard work OR $thing, it's all of the above, with some weighting function that spits out high values for all factors.
And since IQ is just a proxy for intelligence (however good), it also correlates to some greater or lesser degree with the other factors.
> All of these things are strong covariates
Yeah it turns out having positive multipliers on your inputs leads to better outcomes. Who knew!
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.
Tell that to the generation of autistics roaming America that were never properly diagnosed in their youth. High intelligence, often even high paying jobs, but all the other 'success' metrics will probably end up looking very wavy.
I'd argue that mildly autistic people had much better outcomes decades ago before we started thinking it was something to diagnose. My grandfather was probably autistic, but there was no internet to sink into so he had to interact with people and build some basic social skills. Out of high school he joined the Navy as a radar technician and lived in a structured environment that taught a lot of life skills. Then he went to college for engineering and was set up on dates with my grandmother (as a bit of a matchmaking thing). Suburban house, 4 children, married for decades, church. Generally a very normal and happy life, even if he was considered eccentric and sensitive to noises. I don't think anybody ever thought to diagnose him with it.
My brother is mildly autistic, too, but he has always had the option to skip out of socialization in favor of the computer, and we've lost the societal structure that helped my grandfather thrive.
I don't think it's diagnosis that helps people.
There are intelligent people who may not be necessarily be on the same scale socially and they do get burned by it.
Impulse control issues, like ADHD, can factor in too.
> Hard working people tend to know other hard working people. ... Hard working people get more done.
Getting promoted at a FAANG is like a micro-effect. One percent of one percent of one percent. Generalizing our experience to 72 million Americans ain't it boss.
And our experience is subject to dozens of selection bias. For example, most of the best people I know at my current job are that way in part because I trained them at my last job at a university. And then they referred me into their employer networks. Beyond the hurdles of getting into a flagship state school, having those connections matter. Nobody I know from undergrad had any employment at FAANG when I was laid off a decade ago, I just got lucky enough to have a second cohort contacts in the form of student employees at a different flagship state university doing internships, landing jobs and looking for referral bonuses. Last I checked LinkedIn I'm the only engineer from my alma mater at my employer.
I think it’s right if it’s corrected for one thing:
It’s not about working hard but about creating the perception that you’re working hard for the company!
The meritocracy fiction.
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.)
~99% of my success is that I happened to make friends with the right coworker at my first job, who happened to be a genius, and happened to refer me to better places. Otherwise, I'd still probably be making 1/4th of what I'm making now - simply because I didn't go to the right schools or be born to the right family, etc.
I think Thinking Fast and Slow talks a lot about maximizing your surface area for luck.
Nothing beats luck.
Sorry to all the unlucky people. I wish you could all be lucky, too!
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.
Luck is mathematical variance. Not random.
Wealth distribution is a policy issue so it's not random. It's coupled to intentional politics.
Given only like 1% of people hold PhDs i feel like you're massively underestimating your own effort in your success.
PhDs are valued by idiot politicians, low bar
Here's Daniel Lemire dunking on PhDs: https://x.com/lemire/status/2082851447499088173
Lemire in part claims:
"For social reasons, it is highly uncommon for people to fail the oral defense of their thesis. Some people are just terrible at it, naturally. They cannot think well on their feet. They get confused and answer the wrong question."
The fraction of your 1% that sits to listen just hands them out regardless as a consolation prize.
Who is gonna be able to challenge them. Except on the whole being 1 of billions like everyone else.
It's social status moat chasing.
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.
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.
> 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.
I'd be surprised if more than a tiny minority of people actually believe that. It has more to do with believing that ideally, everyone should have access to the same opportunities.
It seems rather straightforward and non-controversial that providing more people opportunities to succeed will inevitably lead to more people succeeding, even if only a small minority of people are capable of seizing upon the opportunities they are provided.
All well said.
I would add that, while “giving every under-privileged kid opportunity” wouldn’t make them all successful, for just the reasons you said, I’m not sure that’s even the bottleneck! It’s like… how do you “give someone opportunity?” It’s a very subtle problem. It’s not easy. I doubt there’s any straightforward intervention where you can give everyone 10 units of opportunity, use them wisely please. School funding and clean streets and EBT and whatnot are sort of proxies for this, but it’s just really not that simple.
(This isn’t a disagreement with anything, by the way.)
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.
>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?
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
In order to make life fair, it is necessary to hammer everyone down to the lowest common denominator.
Whatever strawman you’re fighting here, it ain’t me.
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?
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.
Because (taking the blog at face value) that would require future events causing past events, and that's relatively uncommon.
That's the question that popped up into my head shortly after starting to read the article.
Correlation != Causation
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.
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.
> This is probably the biggest value from going to college ...
It's a popular argument that doesn't make it's point very explicitly nor offer any support for it, but the main point is that college education itself has no value. That mode of expression is an old technique that people unintentionally use when they repeat the argument: By not being explicit about the thesis or any support for it, it's impossible to address - the thesis is invisible to many. (In college, you learn you have to explicitly write your thesis and your support for it.)
Necessary to it is the argument, again implicit, that the only value in the world is income. Once you see that explicitly written out, you know it's obviously absurd. (It's absurd for another reason too: knowledge and intellectual skill are great aids to income.)
People on HN highly value knowledge and cognitive skill. They spend significant time on gaining it, including right here. How much would they value years to dedicate to the very best of those things, learning from each of the very best humans and ideas from any time or place, guided and advised by other people who have spent their lifetime studying each person or idea, and who can introduce you to the best of it and to the most powerful counter-arguments, flaws, and alternatives. It sounds like a fantasy, but it's real.
There are powerful people who don't like those thinkers and ideas, because they undermine power. So they devalue them, ostracize them, defund them, ban them - all to stop you from reading them. Those must be powerful ideas.
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.
what kind of civic volunteering did you find most rewarding?
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.
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).
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.
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.
This article feels like a "wet streets cause rain" kind of thing.
I think there are two factors at play beneath this:
1. Your expectations of yourself. If you grow up with studious and career oriented friends and family, you expect that of yourself. Same when you grow up around enrepreners. On the other than there are social groups that have the attitude roughly "I work a random job until I get fired" - if that's the subculture you are brought up with, that can steer your own life too.
2. You self select your friends. My highschool had a mix of poor but motivated immigrant kids, and just like "bad" kids. The two groups didn't mingle, one ended up in the 1% by and large and the other group is in jail or on welfare. So you could say we did better because we had friends who ended up better off but I think it's the other way - we associated with people who are on our trajectory.
"Who you know" is important - but the first job I got through a connection was at age 45. Everything before that came from who I am not who I knew, but who know is shaped by who I am (ie I wouldn't have had the connection that got me this job if the guy hadn't known he as a high performer to begin with)
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
Parents define a person. Yes genetically-of-course, but equally by being their primary and formative influences in almost everything. And obviously, functional parenting quality ranges from great to traumatic to non-existent.
Therefore there is no greater variable in nominal differences between youth peers. How could there possibly be?? It is near all-encompassing, and sustains for the first quarter of a persons life.
This concept is true going back through the ages, with the main difference being less social and economic mobility in the past. That does not = 100% social or economic mobility now, by any means.
Studies show tall people also earn more. https://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug04/standing
Also, physically attractive people earn more. https://wol.iza.org/press-releases/does-it-pay-to-be-beautif...
The key to your success are the connections of your dad.
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.
I am in the circle of richer friends and there are few children. My anecdotal theory is harder drive in their families on career, education, etc resulted in this. And their families probably provided for that high economic connectedness, which enabled them for success. Genetic oblivion is a terrible reward for all that work.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
It’s more reasonable to conclude that your success is linked to your birth these days than not. Especially in the USA.
I wonder if this is true in continental Europe.
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.
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
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
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).
Got it, so if we just do multi-factorial analysis, and define a manifold within an n-space ... then we can do policy based on that?!
> Education powerfully influences lifetime earnings
Based on what? There is positive correlation between educational attainment and lifetime earnings, but that does not imply that education is an influencer. One reasonable explanation for that correlation is that one who has qualities and habits that allow them to do well in the education system are also qualities and habits that do well in the economy. Certainly, those with crippling disabilities or other life challenges that sees them do poorly in school are also understood to have no economic future due to those same disabilities/life challenges, so it seems we have an intuitive understanding of that to some degree.
To find influence we can't just pick a top economic performer at random and compare him to a poor economic performer. We need to find the same person with and without an education. Luckily we can essentially do that, to a close enough approximation, by looking at an average person in the past when people didn't seek education and an average person after seeking education became commonplace. Unluckily, primary school rose in prominence before we had good record keeping.
But, luckily, post-secondary education rose during the time where we started having great record keeping. Here's the thing: Incomes held stagnant during that time. Lifetime earnings did not increase for the individual after gaining a (post secondary) education. They made just as much when they didn't go to college. Those with high earnings were more likely to go to college by this time, sure, but that's not the same thing.
Despite the record keeping being poor, we do know that incomes did rise during the rise of primary and secondary education. So while a post-secondary education clearly has no impact on lifetime earnings, even if someone destined to have high lifetime earnings is likely to attend a post-secondary school, the effects of primary and secondary education remains less clear. However, during that time incomes continued to rise even when there was no meaningful change in the education received, so the correlation in that case is most likely just coincidence. There was a lot of economic change happening at that time that provides a much more reasonable explanation for why incomes were rising.
You're making the mistake I called out but on a grander scale. Virtually everything about the cohorts you're comparing are different! Labor markets, demographics, taxes, unionization, labor force participation, even technology; you name it.
I have no idea whether there's an innate structure in people that's causally determinative of lifetime income. I don't think this kind of faux-axiomatic reasoning can get you to the kind of certainty you have here. I think this argument feels intuitively true to you, and maybe it could be, but maybe any argument is true.
> Virtually everything about the cohorts you're comparing are different!
Not meaningfully so. Life doesn't move that fast. There is only one year between when the average person didn't go to college and when the average person did go to college. More ideal would be to put the exact same person into parallel universes on those different tracks, but let me know when you figure out how to do that. In the real world, that is the closest approximation we can get. And what we were able to plainly observe is that there was no change in earnings.
Which is interesting as it pertains to your point as it is unlikely in a vacuum that two random average people would ever have the same earnings, so the fact that they landed in the very same spot does suggest that our approximation is much closer than it seems you want to believe.
> I have no idea whether there's an innate structure in people that's causally determinative of lifetime income.
Nobody does. There are plausible explanations, but we have no scientific evidence of what the "secret sauce" is. Which, with your recognizing that, makes your earlier claim of education influencing lifetime earnings even more ridiculous.
> I don't think this kind of faux-axiomatic reasoning can get you to the kind of certainty you have here.
You must have misread something as the only certainty I offered was that college hasn't lead to higher lifetime earnings for individuals, which we know is the case as we have comprehensive income data to prove it. You cannot both earn more and earn the same. Someone with high lifetime earnings, statistically, also having a college education is not the same thing.
There is one caveat here. We can see in the data around the top 1% of earners that the majority of them have access to a restricted market (think doctor, lawyer, etc.) which most people legally are not allowed to participate in. As you know from Econ 101, an artificially restricted supply artificially increases prices, so that offers a pretty good explanation for how they are able to earn so much more than everyone else.
Here's where things get messy: Access to those markets is often granted through the colleges. That might be where you got the idea that education influences lifetime earnings, but we find the same economic benefits where access to restricted markets is given outside of colleges as well. There is little evidence that college is signifiant there—only the access part. But I can understand your confusion if that is what you had in mind, conflating it because colleges also try to offer education.
We're probably talking past each other then because I read you the other way. Either way: in 2026 there is still a striking college income premium, statistically (it's over 50%). It's presumably much lower than it was before (more people go to college and also the labor market changed; it will change even more sharply in the coming years due to automation).
If we're both arguing that economic outcomes are messily related to lots of different causes, we're saying the same thing.
> in 2026 there is still a striking college income premium, statistically (it's over 50%).
We can make this real simple: 64% of the population have a degree. The median income is unchanged since before <50% of the population had a degree. If individuals gained a premium, we'd have to have seen an increase in the median income after >50% of the population attained a degree. That is a mathematical necessity. But it didn't happen... There is no college premium, plain and simple.
While incomes are stagnant for nearly all individuals, college degree or not, I suspect what you are trying to point out is that the so-called top 1% has seen a dramatic rise in income and that most in the top 1% have a degree. Therefore, the combined income of all degree holders has risen at a rate faster than the remainder of the population, even if most degree holders have seen no change. That is definitely true, but a long way from your claim that education influences lifetime earnings. Given that only a small subset of all degree holders have found what could be called a premium, it is unlikely that the premium is influenced by college; at least not in a consistent or reproducible way to make it a useful claim.
Wait, what? I don't want to get pulled into an argument about college that I'm not invested in, but how is this even arithmetically true? I can bestow a lifetime increase on two people in the bottom half cohort without changing the median at all. Like, I'd need us to share premises about what the term "median" means before talking about anything else in this argument.
It's curious that you find it necessary for us to share what "median" means, but then not share, but I guess you must have accidentally pressed the "Reply" button before you were finished?
We can do a simple thought experiment here. If 0% of the population have a degree, do you agree that the median income holder does not have a degree? If 100% of the population have a degree, do you agree that the median income holder does have a degree?
So when the degree attainment rate crosses the 50% mark, do you agree that the median income holder must have a degree? My definition says yes. And since the degree brings a premium, how do you explain the median income not rising? Maybe the premium you are imagining is just hugs and kisses?
I know, you think the median income has somehow always been filled by a degree holder, even when only a small segment of the population had a degree. But how is that possible when education influences lifetime earnings? Shouldn't those with education be making more than the median when those with education are a small segment of the population?
Not whom you questioned, but ...
> We can do a simple thought experiment here.
Yes, and Yes.
> when the degree attainment rate crosses the 50% mark, do you agree that the median income holder must have a degree?
No. I don't even agree that there is necessarily a single median income holder - there may well be a hundred, sixty with a degree and 40 without.
Also possible that in a hypothetical population with 1,001 people that 1,000 people have a degree but the sole median income earner does not.
I don't question anyone in particular. This is a discussion forum, not a private one-on-one conversation.
> there may well be a hundred, sixty with a degree and 40 without.
So what you are suggesting is that attaining a degree lowers your earnings and then gives you back a commensurate premium, thus restoring you back to the same level as those without a degree? That's a take, I guess, but premium usually comes with certain connotations that isn't that.
> Also possible that in a hypothetical population with 1,001 people that 1,000 people have a degree but the sole median income earner does not.
Again, where is the premium? If the only person without a degree isn't the lowest earner then we know that the person with the least earnings has a degree, but it was asserted that the person with the least earnings is given a premium over those without a degree, so... Are your numbers omitting a space alien or fairy without a degree where we earlier considered them to be people? It's not clear how to resolve this discrepancy.
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.)
What do you mean by "go" ? Talk ?
I kind of mean if you're in "spaces where people appear to be fancy" or similar? Like physically go in. Though I think talk works too, actually.
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.
When will capitalism introduce open competition instead of nepotism and "more money = better than"?
Comparing with the alternatives, capitalism did already enable open competition and undermined nepotism.
Also, "more money = better than" is not a capitalist thing. It's just the nature of money being a physical replacement for social credits.
and US cronyism, did that enable competition and undermine Don Jr ?
You write as if there is only one smoothly homogeneous "Capitalism" and that it's actually practiced.
> You write as if there is only one smoothly homogeneous "Capitalism" and that it's actually practiced.
You'd be mistaken, as that better describes OP. All I mentioned is that the push for open competition began in capitalism (or, more appropriately, liberal capitalism) undermining the prior more nepotism-based system of dominance.
Of course, there are more intricacies but, given that OP's comment was shallow, I didn't feel the need of going deep into the many forms of what people may call "capitalism". We can get into it if you'd like.
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.
Hocking a product here huh, so, you rich dad poor dad too?
key to success is stealth marketing.
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.
I should have worked harder to be sure I was not born to a single mother in poverty.
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.
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.
Having the network that can lift you up IS the luck
> 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"?
In other news: People who grew up locked away neglected by their parents earn less
But first, we must talk about the wetness of water
Sorry but what is this even trying to say? 1=1 ?
Clickbait title
yup. i concede. but it's also true
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.
Up next, water is wet...
Same intuition here — until my own path disagreed. Roles via acquaintances were mostly meh; the best ones found me without networking.
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.
Another ad disguised as an article - nice.
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.
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.
Pointing out that cronyism/nepotism is giving the largest boost for one's success instead of "meritocracy" is pretty depressing...
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?
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?
Nepotism destroys organizations and institutions to favor a few for a short while. The people who depend on the organizations then suffer.
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
If you want the solution, it is closer to what some government agencies use for hiring. They use guaranteed placement setup whereby if one gets high scores on a test, they're guaranteed placement. The salary is lower, and the work is boring, but they get pension and good healthcare. I passed on it twice because they were high-security places and I don't like emptying my pockets each morning.