Hacker News Reader

Comment by mosseater | Hacker News Reader

The notion that over 80% of millionaires in the world are self made is completely ridiculous. Just because you didn't receive large swathes of money doesn't make you self made. Growing up in a secure environment, where you don't have to worry about having a job while you finish high school, where you don't have to worry about not being able to go to college. Where you don't have to worry much at all about anything aside from your future. With a good education brought by your parents. Hell, just being taught financial literacy.

Unless someone was born into poverty and fought their way out, I don't count them as self made. No doubt these people exist, but it would never be 80%.

View on HN

That sounds like a classic "no true Scotsman". By poverty, do you mean under the United State poverty threshold over ~$12k/year? Because that's an average middle-class income in much of Eastern Europe. There the poverty threshold is much lower, but would also be considered middle-class in India.

There's also a stronger social safety net in many countries that are poorer than the US, where you certainly don't have to worry about not getting to college (if you have good enough grades) due to family income.

Binary categories such as "self-made" vs "not-self made" fit poorly in the real world and suffer due to each individual having a different threshold of self-madeness. For some people it means not having directly inherited a lump sum, for others it means having made every single cent without outside help.

You're defining "self made" to fit a very narrow definition. All the things you say are true to an extent, but it's not black-and-white. Would you consider Bill Gates self made, considering the magnitude of his achievements, etc?

Not only did he have the advantages that access to a computer in the 70s had, his dad's lawyer helped him with a good contract, and his mom set him up with the chairman of IBM

But the key thing is if he'd failed, he had a cushion to fall back on. Had Microsoft gone the same way as many other computer companies, he could be confident he wouldn't end up on the streets.

But he succeeded... and created something worth many orders of magnitude in value compared to what he started with... I think that still counts as self made.

Being middle class is not a crime and never was.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com