There is no particular route to becoming wealthy, if there was then everyone would do it. You can do a lot of the things you mention to optimise your chances but in the end that's all it is; chance. The right industries to work in varies depending on where and when you are. Sometimes having a niche works, sometimes you have better luck if you diversify.

Wealth in this sense comes from earning money from means other than your own labour.

Either from returns on your 'investment' i.e. money working for you, or the labour of someone else with your cut sliced off the top. Once you work out a model you turn it into a 'meme' and replicate it, the real question then becomes one of how fast the meme will replicate.

The best investment in the UK probably is being a landlord, people give you more money than the mortgage and at the end you own a house which has gone up faster than the rate of inflation. I think that is an awfu, but that is probably the best model in our society.

>>8632

Agreed, and yet I think if you were to treat the section of the population I'm describing (people from ordinary backgrounds that become moderately to very wealthy) as its own subgroup and study them, you would surely notice certain trends and commonalities between them?

Since this is .gs, you could also limit the subgroup to the UK or Western Europe. Do studies like this exist?

>>8634
>I think if you were to treat the section of the population I'm describing (people from ordinary backgrounds that become moderately to very wealthy) as its own subgroup and study them, you would surely notice certain trends and commonalities between them?
Yes, that would be the chance-optimising. But I bet that while there are plenty of successful people who spent time studying successful people before they became a success themselves, there are far, far more people who studied the successful and never got there.

>>8635

Again, I agree, but this still tells us nothing about the characteristics of the group I'm describing.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm getting from you is that you think the characteristics of the group that "make it" are so similar to a near-identical, much larger group that doesn't "make it" that it means the characteristics themselves aren't worth looking at.

I disagree with this, as there may be there are some important differences that aren't immediately apparent -- receiving a loan or a windfall at a particular time, or getting into a certain industry at an opportune moment, delaying having children. It's not hard to imagine that there may be subtle and really interesting differences that appear to us as "chance", but this "chance" occurrence just happens to be a lot more common among people in the "made it" group.

Taking things a step back from economics and statistics, though, I'm not even sure I've ever really found solid advice on what the "chance-optimising" characteristics are. What are they, in your view?

>How do people become wealthy?

You accumulate capital and then continue to accumulate capital without an expectation of becoming rich overnight. What you seem to have forgotten to ask though is what wealthy is. The 'conservative' works you've found all provide you with financial stability - that's wealthy in my book. It's reasonably possible to get into the top 10% of earners if you don't have shit for brains and don't mind the workload or alternatively you could win the lottery but all for nought if you're bad with money because you lack a concept of delayed gratification.

Beyond that there's two strategies I'd consider:

1. There are clearly set paths you can follow to acquire money if you're young and competent - the financial and advanced technical careers (nuclear and cyber/AI seem winners atm). Moving to the city is advisable so long as you appreciate costs and what you can get from it career-wise. You also want to continue to build up a toolbox over time particularly in accounting, management and tech.

2. If you're older then you take a step back as you've already done and realise that it's still a legacy game where you must provide your children with better opportunities. Old money thinking of clawing the way up over generations. That's currently the route I'm going but realise that I'm one little shit with a drug habit away from ruin.

For the record I'm highly sceptical of the great class survey methodology. Going to the opera doesn't make you wealthy ffs.

>Where are the economic studies of how people from ordinary backgrounds make their wealth?

They won't exist because the sample size is too small so you'll be right back at looking into the habits of successful people out of some self-help book.

>>8636
>Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm getting from you is that you think the characteristics of the group that "make it" are so similar to a near-identical, much larger group that doesn't "make it" that it means the characteristics themselves aren't worth looking at.
I think the risk-reward ratio makes it not really worthwhile and you'd be better off re-examining your priorities.
>some important differences that aren't immediately apparent -- receiving a loan or a windfall at a particular time, or getting into a certain industry at an opportune moment,
I'm sure those things help but given that you can't control them, or even if you could, can't predict when they'd be most useful, what are you studying other than luck?

>What are they, in your view?
Overworking and behaving somewhat ruthlessly in emerging fields while living a threadbare existence in order to invest all your income into other emerging fields, which you would also be putting a great deal of effort into researching to get the best return on investment. Business acumen is presumably more important than any technical skill; you could be the best coder in the world but unless you're also a good business person then you're going to tend towards working for someone rather than being in charge.

The answer is to marry someone rich and much older than you, proclaim your newfound wealth to be self-made and then call everyone else lazy for not being able to follow your path.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/todays-children-cant-look-after-themselves-says-tv-shepherdess-amanda-owen-xmrrpxx3l

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/06/parents-blame-snowflake-generation-says-social-media-star-mother/

>>8636
>receiving a loan or a windfall at a particular time, or getting into a certain industry at an opportune moment, delaying having children
Trying to replicate this is called timing the market, and there are very good reasons why people say you shouldn't do it.

>>8637
>They won't exist because the sample size is too small so you'll be right back at looking into the habits of successful people out of some self-help book.

I appreciate what you're saying, but we must be able to do slightly better than this. There's quite a range between a "handful of successful people" and a small sample of successful people; many scientific studies are written on the basis of just a few hundred cases, with statistically significant correlations. They require careful reading and interpretation, but they're certainly more useful than anecdote.

>>8638
>I'm sure those things help but given that you can't control them, or even if you could, can't predict when they'd be most useful, what are you studying other than luck?
>>8640
>Trying to replicate this is called timing the market, and there are very good reasons why people say you shouldn't do it.

These were just examples. The poster >>8637 brings up better examples of getting into specific industries and moving to the city. These are both good suggestions and are well within the power of many people.

It's also worth pointing out that while I'm obviously interested mainly in the factors which people can control, hence why I rule out big inheritances, even trends can be informative.

>>8638
>I think the risk-reward ratio makes it not really worthwhile and you'd be better off re-examining your priorities.

Then we're getting into a conversation about personal values and why I'm interested in this, which is a valid but very different question. I can reply to this if you like, but I just want to stress it's a really different conversation to have. For the moment, let's just assume that I'm an ambitious and (relatively) young person that's used to statistical thinking and making strategic choices, for whom this line of inquiry is worthwhile.

I'm curious how you'd account for factors that involve a risk-reward trade off.
For a quick example: Buying lottery tickets. if you win, you win big. So that's a choice you could make which would make you wealthy. But the odds are that you won't win, and with each ticket you buy you lose some money you could've invested more sensibly elsewhere.
Now any statistician can tell you a lottery ticket is a bad investment, but the same principle applies to a lot of things: Moving to the city could be good for your career progression which would give you a better base to build off, but if you're unlucky it could just bump up your cost of living while your career stagnates in a way that leaves you no better off than if you'd worked a poorer paying job in a rural area. None of us has a crystal ball that can predict those factors though.

It would be interesting to separate out the unambiguously helpful stuff (for example, there's not really any downside to saving money that I'm aware of.) that "everyone" should do regardless of whether they want to avoid worrying about their phone bills or become the next Bill Gates from the riskier moves that people take which usually backfire but which pay big when they succeed.

>>8642

You're right that accounting for risk-reward across every decision across every life would be impossible, but that's why I suspect a population-level study of a highly socially mobile group might be able to pick out things worth considering. It wouldn't be anything more than a series of correlations, but the strength and statistical significance of the association might be pretty informative.

Moving the question into the realm of personal choice, though, I suppose a big part of whether you as an individual would take that risk would be down to how much the reward is worth to you, and how much you could mitigate the risk. In your example, there's no way to mitigate the risk of losing when playing the lottery. But there are certainly steps to ensure that your career would not stagnate if you move to the city; e.g. are there multiple attractive companies within your industry that you could move between? Do you have enough savings to cover you, so that you could take further risks?

>>8639
I imagine there's something to be said about finding a wealthy partner however cynical that sounds. Obviously you have to make it work but it's a huge plus with there being plenty of single women in their 30s who put off settling down for their careers. I mean, objectively, if you must have a joint bank account with someone then that someone bringing in more is a plus - it's what your mother would advise and why you went to all those high-society balls in your prettiest ribbons and bows.

Something I've noticed anecdotally is couples who have irreparable splits and whole marriages destroyed when there's a sudden windfall or investment returns for one. Even when the money is ostensibly for saving. I can only theorise 1k (something I witnessed trigger the destruction of a marriage) is oh so much more funny or you at least have someone who has a good credit rating. Getting divorced being a rather ruinous exercise even if you're Jeff Bezos at any rate.

Sage because horrible advice. "Yeah, I'll just not put my dick in the fire. That's a lesson people are capable of learning."

>>8644
I used to work with someone, public school chap, and he used to have a scorecard that girls would have to meet for him to consider dating them.

From what I can remember they had to have a reasonable career (doctor, solicitor, accountant, etc.), have a certain level of education, like skiing holidays, be a certain dress size, be on the property ladder and not have any children. I think there were also questions about how much money their parents had.

>>8645
I now wonder if it's weird that I do something vaguely similar before I commit to a relationship. Not to that ridiculous degree but I'll consider what I like and dislike about a person using notepad, trying to think with a clear head rather than some scientific weighting.

I've assumed people in practice do the same when they discuss potential matches with friends. I don't think I'd be comfortable doing that as a bloke.

>>8647
Mate, ultimately you're just collating your thoughts. It's not weird at all. Might be weird if someone finds it, but then that's because of their issues and not yours.

>>8645
Most of those things are requirements for everybody with something going for them.

>>8649

Liking skiing is pretty much a deal-breaker for me. Bloody snow nonces.

>>8651
I feel like this with jigsaw puzzle enthusiasts. The entire concept of jigsaw puzzles makes me belligerent.

>I just spent £40 on cardboard
>You don't have to help me but I'll be quietly angry with you if you don't
>Just lose yourself in the pointless and tiresome task

Fuck off.

How did he find their dress size and why was it so important?

Work in sales. That's the job that pays 100 grand a year with very little effort, if you're good at it. If you're not, then that's a shame because I honestly don't think it's possible to get good at it if you aren't naturally that sort of person.

Alternatively, you need to be a do-er. Make big decisions. Live your life actively, not passively. The only way my job will pay me more is if I get lots of fancy IT certifications, and I could pick such a certification and study for it right now, but I'm not doing, and I never do that. At some point, you will have half a chance, and some people will take it and fail horribly, but every person who made themselves rich also took that half-chance, whatever it was, when it came to them. The bad news is: if you're posting here, it's unlikely that you are one to seize opportunities.

Option #3 is to just have a really firm passion, something you would happily do for free, but which people will pay you to do. If you really, really enjoy learning what blockchain is, you will probably find a job that pays a lot for all that knowledge you've gained. You can't fake this one either; if it feels like work, it's not the calling that will make you rich, because one day you'll stop working because you hate it, and the people who love it will overtake you.

>>8655

Salesmen are bad enough, but ones who believe their own bullshit are by far the worst. Do be careful not to go over that line mate. The people making the real money in life do it off the back of gullible twats who believe this sort of spiel.

I've never seen anything as depressing in my life as the time I had to take a sales job and everyone there was one of these bizarre Del Boy pricks who thought they were going to climb the ladder and be top dog one day, and of course they all had their little side hustle selling a bit of coke or shite re-print t-shirts on Instagram... It was actually tragic.

>>8665

They have a poor person's view of what rich is. It is all based around earning off your own labour and your boss paying you that much.

>>8666

That's a harsh reality, yes. Maybe I should have done more to clarify what I mean by "wealthy" in the OP. What I was getting at is not just making a good living and earning a lot of money through your labour, but accumulating wealth, up to the point where you no longer have to work (in the traditional sense) and beyond.

That's maybe another reason why this gap in my knowledge exists. The social mobility research I've read tends to take income or professional categories as markers. As far as I know, there's not much written about the means by which people accumulate wealth.

Maybe >>8637 has a point in saying that it can be multigenerational. But how much of it is accumulated that way, and how? Business? Property? Technology? Belonging to a family of middle class savers?

This is still a really interesting gap for me and I've no idea where to read about it. I'd love to get my hands on some hard data about this kind of wealth accumulation.

>>8667

The short answer is "inherit a shitload of land, or start a business and grow it".

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/sunday-times-rich-list

>>8666
Like this?

>>8667
My dad (the absolute pinnacle of "Established middle class" in your OP picture) told me something amazing recently which really blew my mind: "You can't get rich from wages." His income would have been over £100,000 a year for the majority of his life, and due to the absolute king of pensions, he gets a pension of like 90 grand. He grew up poorish, went to university, and then scored magically in such a way that neither of my parents have even the faintest clue of how they did it and they can't pass anything on to me at all (except a whopping inheritance one day, I guess). But the insight that you can't get rich from wages really impressed me, because it's true. Like I say, my parents are rich as shit (my mum probably made about 60 grand too, while I'm here in the high 20s several years after both parents retired), but they couldn't just quit and live off the interest. They're not millionaires. They're more or less the absolute apex of "employees", but if your definition of rich is someone who is so rich they never have to work, then that's not them. They could probably support me for my own whole life if necessary, because I am tight, but then my kids would be skint, so I don't think that counts. If they can't get rich from wages, nobody can get rich from wages.

>>8665
Pretty much every company I have ever worked for, the top boss in the whole company used to do sales. I have never worked anywhere where someone says, "I'm the Managing Director, and I built this company up from back when I was just the Head of Human Resources."

>>8679

I think you can get rich from wages, you've just got to A) have very good wages from the start and B) live as if you don't have good wages for a couple of decades. You also need to know how investing works or pay someone who does to do it for you.

The point you're making is still right, though, really. The sad truth is the only reliable way to retire early is on the backs of other people.

>>8677
Those photos give me the fear.

>>8679
>They're not millionaires.

They absolutely should be. This is where a little bit of financial planning can go a long way, the likes of budgeting rather than spending all of your income and investing your money rather than leaving it sitting in cash doing fuck all.

Exsctly. Putting £150 a month into a fund that makes on average 15% a year for 30 years and you're at a million no bother.

Obviously those numbers I'm using for effect, but a couple making the amount otherlad mentions should be hammering away a lot more than that, even if 15% gain per year is very unrealistic, it's not really when you think about your 40k worth of pension tax relief etc etc.

>>8679

>Pretty much every company I have ever worked for, the top boss in the whole company used to do sales. I have never worked anywhere where someone says, "I'm the Managing Director, and I built this company up from back when I was just the Head of Human Resources."

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest the proportion of companies you have worked for is pretty slim compared to the total number of companies out there.

Musk, Bezos, Gates et al never worked in sales.

>>8686
How do you think they got their early businesses off the ground?

>>8687

By working in sales?

>>8687

This is just from the top of my head, so maybe others can verify, but I think >>8686 is broadly correct.

My somewhat crude narrative from memory is: I believe Gates was a software developer, and the early years of Microsoft were essentially focused on making word processor, spreadsheet, and database software until the infrastructure of the ARPANET was essentially gifted over to private industry. When the internet was getting more traffic in the early 1990s, it still took Gates a few years act on this important development (supposedly he wasn't even attending early conferences regarding the internet and its transition over from a public/military-funded network until very late in the game). Windows 3 was really widely distributed, and this positioning finally allowed them to consolidate their success by developing and bundling in a web browser with later versions of Windows 1995, but they certainly weren't jumping on sales opportunities early. If I remember right, Netscape beat them to it and still died.

I think Musk similarly benefitted by latching onto an existing technology and popularising it with PayPal, which I believe was his first big success. I'm not clear on the details here, but it's not hard to see how a company like SpaceX is essentially capitalising on decades of Cold War research by bringing in former employees of a largely defunded NASA, and therefore privatising something which benefitted from years of public funding.

Not sure about Bezos, but I believe he himself describes his success as mostly down to logistics and overwhelming presence in the market rather than sales acumen. Amazon doesn't so much find a niche or customer base as brute force themselves as the omnipresent first vendor of choice in terms of pricing, delivery time, and search engine results.

There are also social factors that are common to Musk and Gates, in that they went to (and dropped out of?) elite U.S. universities and probably had the chance to rub shoulders with a lot of connected people with expertise and money. The idea of that lean, scrappy tech startup is a bit of a myth, in my opinion; you may be starting out with a few servers in a basement but you're probably getting your capital and prospects for growth from somewhere not available to the majority of other companies.

>>8689
>bringing in former employees of a largely defunded NASA

Musk is open that SpaceX wouldn't exist without NASA but let's not get silly. The US government is more than capable of wasting billions of dollars. You're also missing that his success was in joining Tesla which nearly drove him to bankruptcy and that he is fundamentally an engineer who takes things out to cut costs.

>>8690

I'm more than happy to be challenged on my ideas about Gates, Musk, and Bezos. These are more general impressions and things I've picked up from reading around various subjects, so I suspect other posters like yourself can chime in with specifics.

Your point about the budget is well taken, it seems "largely defunded" was an overstatement. As you say, though, whether this money is directed toward highly publicised missions or other objectives (or simply wasted) isn't clear from your figure. An overall loss of around 1/3 of a budget from its initial big push is also not insignificant.

I'm still not completely convinced that SpaceX is much more than a sly privatisation of certain ambitious sections of NASA -- a largely ideological message to the public that things are no longer achieved through collective effort but by entrepreneurial spirit. I won't say Musk or SpaceX's contribution is nil, they've achieved a remarkable amount in a short time, but even that remarkable amount is built on foundations which were set decades earlier.

Tesla seems like Musk's most "marketing" based role.

>>8691

>not completely convinced that SpaceX is much more than a sly privatisation of certain ambitious sections of NASA

SpaceX are just better at putting stuff in space than anyone else.

NASA didn't have any launch capability of their own after the shuttle was retired in 2011. The shuttle program went grotesquely over-budget, costing $211bn for a total of 133 successful launches. Musk charges NASA about $60m for a Falcon 9 launch, which is about half what they were paying the Russians for an R-7 launch and less than 10% of the cost of a shuttle launch. He's also drastically undercutting the competition from ULA (Lockheed/Boeing) and Ariane.

NASA invested a lot in SpaceX, but they got a fantastic return on their investment. They probably could have developed their own launch capability, but they'll freely admit that it would have cost more and taken longer.

>>8691
>As you say, though, whether this money is directed toward highly publicised missions or other objectives (or simply wasted) isn't clear from your figure.

It's fairly easy to extrapolate as space projects have high-upfront. You can visibly see dates such as Hubble and the aftermath of the challenger disaster.
https://history.nasa.gov/40thann/define.htm

Overall budget can be misleading but you're reading it backwards from that, NASA moved to a policy of all multinational missions in the 1980s which are cheaper as you have ESA and JAXA share cost. The real problem it faces are that politicians are children so NASA ends up legally tied to the ruinous SLS even for a mission to Europa because it sounded cool at the time:
https://www.space.com/nasa-sls-megarocket-shortage-artemis-europa-mission-delays

>An overall loss of around 1/3 of a budget from its initial big push is also not insignificant.

Unless SpaceX is recruiting from hospices I doubt the figures from the creation of NASA and space race are especially relevant for employees. NASA also retains its brightest and most innovative which live in the unmanned programmes - this is why exploration of Mars is getting so nuts with helicopters etc.

No NASA would not have developed reusable launch, the space shuttle was its closest attempt and it was a disaster. It was not on the cards and in nobodies minds which is why SLS exists and why ESA has a similar white elephant with Ariane 6. You can certainly blame corruption as part of that calculation but had any NASA rocket been attempted it would almost definitely go the route of the F-35 to end up overbudget, underperforming and delayed. Keep in mind I'm not saying the government has no role to play in space but public procurement is what it is.

>>8694
>this is why exploration of Mars is getting so nuts with helicopters etc.
It's basically one of these launched from a rover

don't get too excited about it.

>>8695
Exactly. It's everything we've come to expect from years of government training.

>>8696
I suppose that's... technically a technological advancement.

>>8689
>I think Musk similarly benefitted by latching onto an existing technology and popularising it with PayPal, which I believe was his first big success.
There was a fair amount of competition in the early days of paypal, but what they did was secure a load of investment which they spent on giving every new user a free $10 credit and it's this that completely trounced the rest of their competition.
>but it's not hard to see how a company like SpaceX is essentially capitalising on decades of Cold War research by bringing in former employees of a largely defunded NASA
I think he does deserve a lot of credit for spacex though, as all his achievements in that area have been down to an insane drive towards goals that everyone else thought were too difficult and willingness to take huge risks. The rest of the space industry is risk-averse to the core.
NASA is incredibly inefficient and burns through billions on single projects because perfection is demanded of them, any sort of high-profile failures result in politicians getting edgy and withdrawing their funding. Boeing, lockheed et.al. have a bit more freedom but have the same sort of threat from their shareholders.

>I'm still not completely convinced that SpaceX is much more than a sly privatisation of certain ambitious sections of NASA
You can accuse ULA of this thanks in part to decades of lucrative cost+ contracts and slow takeover of a lot of NASAs capability, Elon leap-frogged over ULA from a standing start basically.

>>8698

>There was a fair amount of competition in the early days of paypal, but what they did was secure a load of investment which they spent on giving every new user a free $10 credit and it's this that completely trounced the rest of their competition.

Also some really ingenious fraud-detection algorithms that stopped them from being blocked by the credit card companies. Most of their competitors ended up in a death spiral where fraud and chargebacks pushed up their credit card transaction costs, which increased their transaction fees, pushed legit customers to PayPal and increased their proportion of fraudulent customers. PayPal often get slated for being too eager to block accounts and freeze customer funds, but it's the only way to make the business work.

Peter Thiel went on to found Palantir, which applied the lessons learned at PayPal to wider security and intelligence issues.

OP here. I just spent a good bit of my morning searching for this using key phrases like "social mobility without inheritance", "social mobility of the nouveau riche", "sociological studies of wealth accumulation", "wealth accumulation among poor households", etc. in academic and non-academic search engines.

Maybe the only semi-useful thing I've found is this LSE paper looking at 1995 to 2005 (not even published?) about how household net worth is underpinned by housing prices in the UK, something which really shouldn't surprise anyone: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/16379905.pdf

>This paper has shown that wealth is very unevenly distributed in Great Britain, with its inequality, measured by the Gini coefficient and using BHPS data, at 0.59 in 2005. Moreover, the analysis has highlighted the widening absolute gap between households with some wealth and those with none or negative wealth. Between 1995 and 2005 financial wealth became even more highly concentrated. Although housing wealth is less unequally distributed than financial wealth and became less concentrated over this period, it continues to be unevenly spread, its Gini coefficient equal to 0.56 in 2005. Over this period, it is particularly the gap between home owners and non-home owners which has increased. While some households in the middle of the wealth distribution increased their share of wealth by becoming home owners over the period, those without housing wealth at the beginning of the period fell further behind.

>[...] Most of the changes in the period were ‘paper gains’ caused by the house price boom. In one sense, this could be taken as meaning that little really has changed: for the most part, owner-occupiers were in the same houses in 2005 and 1995, enjoying the same way of life and the increase in their wealth only happened on paper. However, in the long term the house price boom – unless reversed (which does not look likely at time of writing) – will have effects. First, some of those who own what are now more valuable properties in cash terms will trade down and convert their paper gains into much larger financial assets than they could otherwise have done. Secondly, it means that inheritance flows will be much larger. In that sense, a lot will have changed, particularly for the next generation.

It's still not very informative my original question, as I assume there must also be people that "break through" in terms of financial wealth, as well. But it confirms what the majority of .gs observes in terms of housing and inherited wealth, and it's a place to start.

>>8700
I know for a fact that LSE published a big report on inequality in spring/summer 2019 because I attended the event. Although finding it now bedevils me which is annoying as its findings challenge many assumptions on matter such as what the rich study.

Something I should also bring up is geospatial inequality. London has already been mentioned but in general the South-East of England or Central Belt of Scotland are good places to get on the up and stay that way thanks to infrastructure, contacts and in general things simply being around. You don't have that when you're living in rural Wales or Birmingham, you'll only end up spending all your money on takeaways and hosting an obesity fetish website.

>>8631
Who's the artist for that image? Something about the two with their eyes open is giving me deja vu of something I can't quite place.

>>8702

The illustrator is named Andy Watt, I took it from an Independent article: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/britain-now-has-7-social-classes-and-working-class-dwindling-breed-8557894.html

>>8703

Thanks. I think I'm mixing up some children's book that I can't recall and Dr Katz.

>>8704
Are you thinking of the Molesworth books, by any chance?

Have you answered to yourself where being rich turns into wealth? Because the latter has some connotations that matter.

As far as I am concerned, being "rich" means an income that affords you a surplus such that you can invest, while not being concerned day to day expenses with the expectation that erverything will be fine.

Being wealthy means you could take a sabbatical, work yourself out, try your hand and a couple of businesses and if they don't work out then no harm done, daddy (more accurately grand-daddy, wealth is generational).

Can you clarify?

>>8706

I'm talking mainly about the latter, essentially owning enough capital to make a living from that alone.

I was looking into this topic again today and recalled a powerfully honest article written by someone that earned what they call a "private basic income", i.e. they'll never have to work again. He seems to want to communicate the absurdity of his situation:

>We have a basic income – a permanently growing basic income – not just for life, but forever. Because we own stuff we don’t need, our society rewards us with more and more stuff every year.

>The amount of 'entrepreneurship' in my story was miniscule. It amounts to this. I lucked into money. My brother knew what to do with it. I gave it to him. For nothing more than that, I never need to work again. Neither will my successors. And unless they’re spendthrifts or exceedingly incompetent investors, they’ll have more than me, and their successors will have more than them.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/my-own-private-basic-income/

I broadly agree with what the author's sentiments here -- you can probably nitpick the finer points, but he has been put in a position of privilege based on circumstances largely beyond his control.

I fully grasp the inherent unfairness of what he's saying as a reflection of our economic system, but I also want to succeed within it. Whether you agree or not, it is provocative.

>>8852
I'm not sure I would call becoming a Harvard professor willing to sell his soul and then risking enormous sums of money on their brother 'lucking into money'.

It's not just talk of privilege. I work in a highly technical position that I could do in some Gulf dictatorship for much, possibly insanely, more and provide for my family to the degree they never feel the sting of poverty again. But I don't despite all the grasping that forms my adult personality and interests, living like a slob while slaves serve me drinks just isn't for me - nor is becoming a landlord or giving a rimjob to murderous royalty like I'm some Instagram whore.

He's tried to justify it by talking about modern supply chains but what he's done is quite different to passively being part of a system where truly stamping out slavery appears impossible. "I'll give it away later in life" is a joke a drug addict makes. He's a bad man.

>I fully grasp the inherent unfairness of what he's saying as a reflection of our economic system, but I also want to succeed within it. Whether you agree or not, it is provocative.

I know the feeling to an extent but at the same time I think there's some middle ground here. Investing money can make money for you and benefit society at large if you operate on some moral level. I'm not entirely sure taking Bill Gates' money away and hanging from a lamp post is the most efficient take.

>>8853
>I'm not sure I would call becoming a Harvard professor willing to sell his soul and then risking enormous sums of money on their brother 'lucking into money'.
You don't think those initial 'enormous sums of money' can be factored into lucking into money too, do you?

>"I'll give it away later in life" is a joke a drug addict makes.
It's not though. I live it, when I'm not living month to month I offer a lot to people. It results in interesting experiences too. But I'm stingy as fuck when I'm close to the old overdraft.

>>8852

At least he admits how much of it is sheer luck. This is one piece of self reflection many people seem completely incapable of, as though it's a fundamental defense mechanism in the human psyche itself. Anyone who becomes successful, for whatever reason, immediately starts to rationalise their success in terms of meritocracy- Even things that can't be explained any other way than good fortune are justified with a thought process that goes something like "Ah, yes, but I had the guts to actually do it, where others wouldn't!" which is not difficult to see the fallacy at play in.


There's a lot of talk of privilege these days and sure a lot of it is completely valid, but privilege is just another facet of cold, hard chance and how it affects your life. Just imagine if the cosmic dice had landed on a different face, and instead of reading this from your two bedroom flat in Croydon, you were reading it from a two decade old laptop in a shanty town tin hut in a Brazillian favela. What allowed you the good fortune to be born in th late 20th century, in this able, healthy human form you have? What if you'd been born in 1351? What if you'd instead been born a quadriplegic? What if you'd been born as a badger instead of a human at all?

It's easy to get very pretentious and philosophical about all this but really, everything in life comes down to luck. We don't like to think of it that way because we like to think we are in control, but in reality it would only take one tiny change for all of it to be thrown out of whack. One late bus and you might never have bumped into the bloke who set you up in your career. One cup of tea might have meant the difference between your job application being shortlisted, or missing the cut off. One accidental swipe left might have meant you missed out on the love of your life.

It's all too scary and absurd to think about. So instead we tell ourselves the comforting fairy tale that we are in control of our lives, not merely making the best of the hand we're dealt.

>>8854
>It's not though. I live it, when I'm not living month to month I offer a lot to people. It results in interesting experiences too. But I'm stingy as fuck when I'm close to the old overdraft.

Give'us some moolah then ya' tight git. 10k will do.

>>8855
>[...] instead of reading this from your two bedroom flat in Croydon, you were reading it from a two decade old laptop in a shanty town tin hut in a Brazillian favela. What allowed you the good fortune to be born in th late 20th century, in this able, healthy human form you have?

Maybe not as pretentious as you think. This is similar to John Rawls' "veil of ignorance", and it led him to believe that if all policy were made without knowing the kind of life you'd be born into, this would be favourable to equality.

>>8853
>He's tried to justify it by talking about modern supply chains but what he's done is quite different to passively being part of a system where truly stamping out slavery appears impossible.

As you point out, there is a middle ground; a spectrum of compromise between taking a moral stand and complying with systems you disagree with to have the kind of life you want. I would probably at least consider an opportunity to earn a lot of money teaching at a university, even if it reinforced the privilege of a certain group. I might draw the line at being a landlord, but owning property seems to be one of the more common routes to getting off salaried work as a means to survive (based on the non-systematically collected information I have).

I was trying not to personalise this thread too much or turn it into a moral question, because I'm still not even clear on what means people use to get to this state at all. The article I shared is just one example, and I have no idea how representative it is. I can't morally judge everyone that reaches this state, because I literally do not know how most of them do it.

So I've come back around to the original thread question: how do the majority of them do it?

>>8855
>>8857
>Maybe not as pretentious as you think. This is similar to John Rawls' "veil of ignorance", and it led him to believe that if all policy were made without knowing the kind of life you'd be born into, this would be favourable to equality.

I normally try to avoid getting into these debates because it quickly descends into asinine circles on what is and isn't 'just' that is subject to supernatural jiggery-pokery. It's a shame Sarah Perry doesn't blog anymore but she did a rundown on why we're just playing cosmic scales:
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/02/08/justice-fantasies/

Anyway, veil of ignorance is a thought experiment rather than anything concrete. The problem in my mind is not only that it posits supernatural beings but that it assumes intent with obvious a complete lack of evidence for why would they choose equality other than 'it would be nice'. It might make sense if we're in a social game but what if the magical fairy-people are just rolling dice or hold a different conception (as they no doubt would as we can't even agree on it) of what equality means. The thing falls apart once you ask whether I'm entitled to the same amount of sex as handsomelad, not in my book but there's a tolerance for an inequality which fairy-people might object to - similar if I look like a Thimble instead of a Racecar - won't this be part of who I am.

>So I've come back around to the original thread question: how do the majority of them do it?

They have something the market values, it gets easier the richer you are because your wealth has a value all of its own. Are you looking for a get-rich-quick scheme?

>>8860
>The thing falls apart once you ask whether I'm entitled to the same amount of sex as handsomelad

Rawls was a political philosopher. You're right that the veil of ignorance was a thought experiment, but insofar as it had any application it was intended for government and economic policy, not to direct all human social affairs down to this level of detail. Or to give an equally blunt example, you may not be entitled to success in finding sexual partners, but you shouldn't be forced to live an isolated life due to disability.

>They have something the market values, it gets easier the richer you are because your wealth has a value all of its own.

As I've mentioned earlier in the thread, I think we must be able to do better than this. I'm normally fairly good at researching topics that take my interest, but I'm becoming convinced that this isn't a particularly attractive area of research, as it might reveal some ugly anti-meritocratic tendencies in our society. Or, maybe it simply isn't of interest?

>Are you looking for a get-rich-quick scheme?

No. I wanted to put personal motivations aside in this thread, because I think the topic is interesting in and of itself. We live in a time when entrepreneurs, hard workers, the "self-made" are championed, but seem to have precious little quantitative research on accumulation of wealth and how it's really done.

Right now I just want the information, and couldn't tell you whether it would impact my life individually. The closest analogy I can draw is that I read plenty of health related research. Biology is complex, yet we can identify plenty of useful associations that we can apply to our behaviour in order to avoid certain diseases or improve our health -- sometimes these don't even require randomised controlled trials or even fancy study designs. I follow plenty of advice on this basis.

Doll and Hill showed a statistically significant association between smoking and lung cancer by following people around and seeing who died or got sick after 10 years (the study went on longer, but results were already very apparent by then). Before you go setting up cohort studies, even a simple case series can give an indication of what we might look at on a bigger scale.

So to put it in maybe overly-medicalised terms, I feel like I'm struggling to even find anything beyond single case studies of people who end up owning enough capital to survive off. Just the case studies are hard enough to come by.

>>8861

Rent-seeking is to some extent zero-sum; what works for one person by definition cannot work for everyone. The market is constantly seeking equilibrium, so what works today is unlikely to work tomorrow. You're thinking about the problem like it's engineering, but it's much more like poker.

There's certainly a large amount of luck involved, because whatever guide you wind up with, there will be thousands of people who did everything on it and aren't millionaires. One thing that I think hasn't been mentioned yet is passion: people say you need to work hard, but you need to enjoy it too. Stephen Hendry spent his whole life on a snooker table and was world champion seven times. Sergio Aguero stayed late at football training every day until he was better at football than Bojan Krkic is, or you are. But what if they had swapped places? Would Sergio Aguero be a snooker champion and Stephen Hendry lifting the World Cup for Scotland? I doubt it enormously. They had the drive to succeed at what they wanted, but they also had the passion to enjoy it in the first place. I'm willing to guess that most of us, in our jobs, have bosses who love what we do more than we do. They'd do it at home for free if they could, and that's why they're good enough at it to get paid more than we do. But their drive to do our jobs does not translate into drive to be the world's best Cubist painter or Love Island contestant. In the end, it's just a question of personality.

>>8863
Don't fall for the working man's tricks; I have a dream job and I still can't be arsed. It's all terribly interesting but you soon become desensitised when you're working 40+ hours a week with too few hands.

There's a video somewhere on the internet of cosmonauts ready to go into space and one of them is moaning because he just fucking sick of it and his mates are reminding him that we all have to work. Over the long run it's more about discipline and intelligence if you ask me.

>>8863
>They'd do it at home for free if they could, and that's why they're good enough at it to get paid more than we do.
You've got a rosy worldview. How are you managing to avoid working, or even hearing people whinge about jobs with cronyism or lazy and incompetent management?

I distinctly remember watching some video of some quality control people on an assembly line in the 70s or 80s testing electronics and thinking that if they had the radio on it would be my ideal job: boring, predictable, rote actions (plug it in, if it loads then box it, if it doesn't then chuck it) that you could do while daydreaming away to yourself. Unfortunately jobs like that no longer seem to exist (insofar as they ever did), so you're stuck with stuff that demands a much higher level of engagement and awareness, making it much more difficult to just compartmentalise away work and then come home to live your life.

Something like that seems much preferable to me (as a would be "creative" type) than the very popular idea of making your job your hobby. I've never liked that, since it would seem to logically follow that the opposite is also true: your hobby is now work. You can't take a break from it for a while and do something else, you can't pursue your own interests on a whim, you can't compartmentalise it as an escape from the bills and boredom of daily life. When you can't be bothered anymore, you're not just sick of work, you're sick of something you once loved.
Especially in the internet age, where you can make a living by streaming, or doing art, or whatever. You wind up piling on extra problems: You have to create for an audience and for an algorithm, rather than purely for yourself, and people who make a full time job out of their hobby can wind up crowding out those who're only in it for fun since they can afford higher production values, pushing everything in a more homogeneous direction as a result, discouraging people from taking a go at things themselves when they could just get a job and then pay someone else to do it on their behalf.
I suppose what I'm saying is: bring back the work-life balance and tedious manufacturing jobs. A very original and no-doubt unpopular proposal, but not one that's likely to make anybody rich.

>>8866

I'm a very important highly educated science person at the forefront of the covid response but the reality of my job is very much like that. Pipette this here, pipette that there, put that tube in that rack and that one in that rack. And that's hands on as far as lab work is concerned these days.

Re: the broader gist of the thread, or at least, the direction the OP wants it to go in:

I think you are missing the wood for the trees a bit here. You are asking how exactly people go about acheiving their fortune, but the point is when so many people are telling you it's all pretty much up to the cold, unfeeling personified concept of entirely random chance (or quantum determinism or whatever hair splitting rationale you subscribe to) is that there is no single, reliable way. A lot of different people just got extremely lucky because of the way entropy as a concept affects economic systems and game theory and all that high level wank.

The point is there's really no way to intentionally break into the realms of the Elon Musks or the Jeff Benzos. You can do pretty well for yourself if you put your head down and study and you know the right places to go to do it and you know the right places to go after that. But you're not going to make your genetic line into aristocracy by concious effort, and that's basically the end of it.

>>8865
They don't like the office politics, but they like the actual job responsibilities. If they were doing the job for free at home, like I mentioned, there would be far less politics. Checkmate, atheists.

>>8866

>Unfortunately jobs like that no longer seem to exist

Search Universal Jobmatch for "production operative" or "manufacturing operative". Everyone's desperate for staff because the Bulgmanians have gone home and the natives would rather sign on.

I'm still on the lookout for research on this subject and chanced (heh) upon this article from a bunch of MIT maths wonks: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068

It's an extremely simply model (albeit presented in a complex way), but it corroborates what some other literature on income distribution, and also seems to add some weight to what you lads have said abotu the importance of pure chance as a factor in success.

I have my own criticisms of the paper, of course, and don't think you can read too much into a "toy model", as they call it. The model very deliberately does not try to model more complicated things like monopolisation of resources, class dynamics, intergenerational transfer of wealth like inheritance, and so on. That being said, I can only imagine that the main effect of the things I've listed would be to reinforce the effects of luck as an explanatory factor for the variance.

I'd welcome thoughts on this, as maybe some of you are better at imagining how an abstract model might be of relevance to the complexities of the real world.