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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

The point made in the article is that there are different contributions to success made by personal effort (meritocracy) and by external circumstances. The problem is that people intuitively assign weights to these two parts incorrectly. Personal effort, although useful, is in fact a relatively small part of success in a complex society like ours. If you put a lot effort you can maybe move 1% in the scale of success. But external factors, like the industry you are, your family connections, the neighborhood where you live, personal characteristics that you can't change such as having special needs, your country of origin, your skin color, and other factor of blind luck, can easily contribute 99% or more of what is perceived as success in our society.

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> can easily contribute 99% or more of what is perceived as success in our society.

This is false in two ways:

- Luck is not sufficient.

- Luck plays a larger part the larger the success is.

A moderately successful upper middle class person has achieved their position more through merit than Bill Gates has. As we go up the success hierarchy, luck plays more and more of a part.

If you don't keep these facts in mind, you will draw morally incorrect conclusions.

Are you taking into account the luck of genetics and what income level you're born into?

As someone born into a middle class family in a certain area, with certain genetics, I have been able to easily obtain middle class, with very little effort. If it's this easy for everyone why isn't everyone middle class? I don't feel like I've worked any harder then people who are worse off then me. If anything, I think I work far less hard.

I am not prepared to discuss or generalize from your specific situation. I have seen very wealthy people lose it all due to laziness and worldliness and I have seen very poor people become successful despite many roadblocks. Broadly, in the upper class environments I have been in, luck and connections appear to play a larger role in major success.

If you feel guilty about your relatively easy success, I do think that focusing on both gratitude and charity is an effective moral approach.

> I have seen very wealthy people lose it all due to laziness and worldliness and I have seen very poor people become successful despite many roadblocks

Everyone knows about anecdotes like this. The real question is: how many rich people lose everything (especially the ones born into wealth)? How many extremely poor people move up a lot? You'll see that these are exceptions rather than a common event.

I do not have any hard numbers on this information, although my general understanding is that social mobility has decreased lately. Unfortunately, that may be due to a number of reasons. Excluded from this conversation (luck vs. merit) is nepotism, for example, which is neither.

I am suspicious that this is not unintentional.

> If you put a lot effort you can maybe move 1% in the scale of success.

Let‘s put it this way: work hard and you might have a chance at becoming successful; don‘t work hard, and your chances of making it sharply plunge to zero (unless your family is already extremely wealthy, which is the case for a very small percentage of the population.)

This doesn't disprove anything of what I said. Effort is a component, but it is a small component compared to other external reasons.

I agree with your overall point, but putting in effort accounts for much more than 1% of success in pretty much any domain I can think of.

there's a sizable chunk of middle and upper-middle class families that can afford to send their children to good schools but not to support them indefinitely. it's a big advantage to start out as one of those children, but it can fall apart at pretty much any point if the child isn't willing to put in the bare minimum effort to advance through the pipeline.

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