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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

How does one define rich though? This is always the rub. I mean, if you look at the performance of the stock market over the past decade and also all the ppl getting rich with GME and Tesla options on WallStreetBets, it's hardly only the 1% who are benefiting. Maybe the top 20% or more. I think it is more like high-IQ people who are getting rich, and it is people who have low/average IQs, who have low-paying jobs and without nice tech jobs or stock portfolios, who are falling behind .So that is probably 60-70% of the country.

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>I mean, if you look at the performance of the stock market over the past decade and also all the ppl getting rich with GME and Tesla options on WallStreetBets, it's hardly only the 1% who are benefiting. Maybe the top 20% or more.

Technically if you own any stock you're benefiting. If we go by that metric that's almost 50% of people. However, the better question is how the ownership is distributed. One source says the top 1% own 56% of stocks, which paints a less rosy picture that what you're suggesting (that the gains are distributed among the top 20%).

https://financialpost.com/investing/how-americas-1-came-to-d...

The people making currently making money off meme stocks doesn't equate to 20% of the country. And there's no direct evidence that those people are getting 'rich.' Outside of the few whales that are profiting off the (somehow?) legal pump and dump scheme that is WallStreetBets.

Rich is having a high networth. It's a lot more dependent on what social class in which you were raised (and therefore what networks you can access, and what role models you have) than your IQ.*

My IQ puts me easily in the 95th precentile of tested individuals, but I grew up poor to two alcoholic high-school dropouts.

On the other hand, I have a friend who grew up with CEO father who sits on boards of major public companies. This friend spent college (at a lower-to-mid tier school) as a D1 athlete pounding beers while dealing and using massive amounts of cocaine. This friend will tell you I'm the smartest person he's ever met. He's said it to multiple of his contacts while in my presence.

He pulls in hundreds of thousands of dollars a month due to his daddy's connections, while I scratched and clawed my way to rise above my station and get hired by a FAANG.

*This is completely ignoring that IQ is based off an extremely biased, standardized test and a horrible proxy for intelligence.

do you think you would have gotten the fang job if your IQ were only 100. IQ, although far from prefect, is highly predictive of ability. Sure, not all high IQ people become coders, almost all coders are high IQ.

Yes, I could've with enough persistence. 100 IQ is average. With enough work, someone with an average intelligence can be a successful coder.

I know plenty of people benefiting from the stock market with average and less than average IQs. This is a matter of classism not intelligence. If you have enough money to invest your benefiting, and the more money you have to invest the more you are benefiting.

Of course, there are a few outlier founders, CEOs, and stock traders that are benefiting much more then average. What separates these outliers from others isn’t IQ, because there are plenty of people with very high IQs that are doing about average economically.

My definition is you are rich if you don't have to work to live. If your continued survival depends on selling your labor for money, you're not rich. If you survive based on the ownership of assets rather than selling your labor, you are rich.

Which is, of course, itself a relative measure. There are probably many on this site with 1 million in assets. With that in the bank, you could live in comfort indefinitely in my part of the Midwest.

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