<story><title>The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners</title><url>https://academic.oup.com/esr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/esr/jcac076/7008955</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jandrewrogers</author><text>Many people with your net worth grind it out without any windfalls, the product of consistent hard work and reasonable choices over decades. It was always a possibility. Most people don&amp;#x27;t require an IPO to achieve that. Luck can accelerate that outcome but it is not necessary in any meaningful sense.&lt;p&gt;It requires significantly greater extremes of wealth before luck plays a more frequent role. I know people well into 8-figures who were never anything more than blue-collar grinders. They worked hard and smart for decades with nothing that you could identify as being particularly lucky.</text></item><item><author>sidlls</author><text>Because few people are objective enough to put aside their deep emotional attachment to the notion that their particular bit of hard work and skill meant nothing without that luck.&lt;p&gt;I’m wealthy now: very wealthy by any standard (mid 7-figure net worth). I came from humble beginnings (nearly homeless frequently as a youth with a single mom), but I am quite intelligent (PhD in physics) and I worked hard. I would have retired with the same 401k any other white collar worker would have but for the sheer luck of choosing the right company at the right time to win an IPO lottery. I wouldn’t have got hired without the work I put in: but there’s no doubt in my mind that my wealth is the product of luck more than that work. Literally billions of people worked harder than I have in that same period of time and have nothing but poverty to show for it. But to hear my engineer peers talk you’d think luck was negligible. They simply don’t want to discount their hard work and bias toward putting much more weight on it than is merited</text></item><item><author>angarg12</author><text>Not accounting for luck as a factor of success is one of my pet peeves.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m reading &amp;quot;So good they can&amp;#x27;t ignore you&amp;quot; and although I&amp;#x27;m loving it, it&amp;#x27;s also guilty of that.&lt;p&gt;Cal Newport tells the story of a Clean Tech VC and how he got the job using a personal connection to VC. But then he dismisses it by saying that &amp;quot;such small breaks are relatively common&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Why is it so hard to admit that someone success is partially due to luck?</text></item><item><author>epistemer</author><text>It also disregards the type of lottery game that is a part of wealth accumulation.&lt;p&gt;Of course, it is not all luck but to believe wealth accumulation is a type of purely deterministic meritocratic game without a giant stochastic factor is ridiculous.&lt;p&gt;That might even be the dumbest aspect of our society. Believing the powerball lottery winner is a genius for picking the numbers they picked is obviously stupid. Yet we basically have that view with everything else besides the actual lottery.</text></item><item><author>solatic</author><text>Implicit is the presumption that the smartest people optimize for wealth, or that the smartest people are &lt;i&gt;good&lt;/i&gt; at optimizing for wealth. Outside of Wall Street, &amp;quot;smart&amp;quot; people - academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. - are just as likely to make bad personal finance decisions and&amp;#x2F;or to stay in labor (rather than management) positions for most of their careers (leave aside the dual-track IC&amp;#x2F;management ladder at a relatively small handful of companies). People don&amp;#x27;t bother to max out their earning potential because, after you earn enough to meet your needs, it quite frankly doesn&amp;#x27;t matter anymore compared to other means of personal fulfillment.&lt;p&gt;This is besides the point that the ranks of upper management are typically filled with people who are socially&amp;#x2F;politically smart, and not necessarily STEM-style smart; the cognitive ability of whom may or may not be adequately captured by this study.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ramphastidae</author><text>&amp;gt; I know people well into 8-figures who were never anything more than blue-collar grinders.&lt;p&gt;Can you elaborate? I don’t see how that’s possible unless they started work in their early 20s, have been maxing their retirement, never had an accident or have been unemployed, made incredible investment decisions, and are now 60+? Even then I dont see how it’s possible for blue collar folks. Well into 8 figures is like … at least 30 million.</text></comment>
<story><title>The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners</title><url>https://academic.oup.com/esr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/esr/jcac076/7008955</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jandrewrogers</author><text>Many people with your net worth grind it out without any windfalls, the product of consistent hard work and reasonable choices over decades. It was always a possibility. Most people don&amp;#x27;t require an IPO to achieve that. Luck can accelerate that outcome but it is not necessary in any meaningful sense.&lt;p&gt;It requires significantly greater extremes of wealth before luck plays a more frequent role. I know people well into 8-figures who were never anything more than blue-collar grinders. They worked hard and smart for decades with nothing that you could identify as being particularly lucky.</text></item><item><author>sidlls</author><text>Because few people are objective enough to put aside their deep emotional attachment to the notion that their particular bit of hard work and skill meant nothing without that luck.&lt;p&gt;I’m wealthy now: very wealthy by any standard (mid 7-figure net worth). I came from humble beginnings (nearly homeless frequently as a youth with a single mom), but I am quite intelligent (PhD in physics) and I worked hard. I would have retired with the same 401k any other white collar worker would have but for the sheer luck of choosing the right company at the right time to win an IPO lottery. I wouldn’t have got hired without the work I put in: but there’s no doubt in my mind that my wealth is the product of luck more than that work. Literally billions of people worked harder than I have in that same period of time and have nothing but poverty to show for it. But to hear my engineer peers talk you’d think luck was negligible. They simply don’t want to discount their hard work and bias toward putting much more weight on it than is merited</text></item><item><author>angarg12</author><text>Not accounting for luck as a factor of success is one of my pet peeves.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m reading &amp;quot;So good they can&amp;#x27;t ignore you&amp;quot; and although I&amp;#x27;m loving it, it&amp;#x27;s also guilty of that.&lt;p&gt;Cal Newport tells the story of a Clean Tech VC and how he got the job using a personal connection to VC. But then he dismisses it by saying that &amp;quot;such small breaks are relatively common&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Why is it so hard to admit that someone success is partially due to luck?</text></item><item><author>epistemer</author><text>It also disregards the type of lottery game that is a part of wealth accumulation.&lt;p&gt;Of course, it is not all luck but to believe wealth accumulation is a type of purely deterministic meritocratic game without a giant stochastic factor is ridiculous.&lt;p&gt;That might even be the dumbest aspect of our society. Believing the powerball lottery winner is a genius for picking the numbers they picked is obviously stupid. Yet we basically have that view with everything else besides the actual lottery.</text></item><item><author>solatic</author><text>Implicit is the presumption that the smartest people optimize for wealth, or that the smartest people are &lt;i&gt;good&lt;/i&gt; at optimizing for wealth. Outside of Wall Street, &amp;quot;smart&amp;quot; people - academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. - are just as likely to make bad personal finance decisions and&amp;#x2F;or to stay in labor (rather than management) positions for most of their careers (leave aside the dual-track IC&amp;#x2F;management ladder at a relatively small handful of companies). People don&amp;#x27;t bother to max out their earning potential because, after you earn enough to meet your needs, it quite frankly doesn&amp;#x27;t matter anymore compared to other means of personal fulfillment.&lt;p&gt;This is besides the point that the ranks of upper management are typically filled with people who are socially&amp;#x2F;politically smart, and not necessarily STEM-style smart; the cognitive ability of whom may or may not be adequately captured by this study.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SamoyedFurFluff</author><text>It is lucky they didn’t have a calamity that affected their personal finances, particularly in blue collar where injuries are relatively common. I’ve heard it takes 7 years of no unexpected expenses to grind oneself out of poverty. That means no healthcare scares, no dependents, no victim of crime, not even a car breaking down randomly.</text></comment>