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Comment by lazypenguin | Hacker News Reader

Rich parents means you eat better, have access to higher quality resources, have more time for fitness, more time to go to the doctor for preventative issues.

Rich parents means you don’t have to work two jobs or work while studying. Means you have free “consulting” on life decisions from the perspective of the upper class. Means you access to new things like computers, phones, cars, etc.

It’s a huge advantage to come from a successful family. It means you don’t have to spend the majority of your time in survival mode but can instead invest in growth opportunities.

I would say there’s an enormous advantage coming from a rich family but it’s not the only requirement.

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I would agree with a lot of this. On the flip side, there's the sayings "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times." and "Wealth does not last beyond three generations".

I've anecdotally seen this where kids from rich parents take a lot of their wealth for granted and don't understand fully what it takes to build-up and retain wealth for the long-term. They usually get high-end jobs in society - CFO of company a dad started, doctor, lawyer, etc however it feels some depth to that wealth may have been lost...

Wealth doesn't last beyond three generations?

Wasn't that debunked?

Outside of external cataclysm or far bell curve "bad luck" I don't think most born into wealth (defined lets say as the investor class that commands "decent" capital holdings) pass poverty on to their kids.

I've always had a gripe with the "Hard times..." saying, because in reality, hard times just crush people. The few people that survive hard times are of course exceptionally strong or lucky, but they are exceptions.

I can say through my personal experience since I've worked in Switzerland and India: Just because India is having a harder time, doesn't mean we are stronger people, quite the contrary. I don't think good times are anywhere near for India and I don't think hard times are anywhere near for Switzerland.

(Switch Switzerland with any developed country.)

Agree. The hard times thing is about survivor bias. In reality - hard times create many broken men who never escape the shackles they were born into. I know this because of where I grew up - very few who encountered difficulty ever truly escape or become strong. Most that I know are weak and in a bad cycle. Even the ones who were crowned as the smartest end up working the front counter at a pizza shop. It’s only the ones who had some wealth behind them (anomalies in the town) that were able to truly get out.

There are also a lot of dumb sayings. There is a large amount of scientific evidence demonstrating large and lasting impacts of things like nutrition and parental involvement in education (both early education and ordinary primary education). Hard times might create some hard men. They also just kill a lot of people.

I've anecdotally seen people from impoverished backgrounds struggle to work in a healthy manner for long term success because of trauma dealing with short term needs on a consistent basis.

You talk to a professional if you want to retain wealth for the long term. Would you roll your own auth? Rich -pepper have better access to talented professionals.

There’s obviously a balance between wealth and stress that is useful for happiness/success. But I believe it’s very easy to accidentally traumatize with unbridled stress on a developing person. For example I’m still healing a year from a shoulder overuse injury. Would have been wiser to focus on backing away from the stressors at that point. From what I have seen, rich environments have plenty of bridled stressors, and these rich kids are developing plenty thick skin, just with adequate supervision.

Maybe this generation is different from past ones due to our access to the internet and it’s human refining nature.

Pretty much skewed towards many countries with exorbitant tuition fees though.

I don't think I remember any students here in Germany working 2 jobs. Sure, there's some inherent privilege in getting there to be able to study in the first place, but it has not a lot to do with 'wealth', being middle class and living at home (which kinda used to be the default until you were finished anyway) because we don't have so many campus universities and the majority would study at the closest uni anyway.

But I think I misread your comment as too generic, in the narrow sense of starting a company, yes, but my point is that your 'safety net' doesn't have to be your parents millions in the bank - just keep living at home would be fine.

Not to mention the safety net you always know you can fall back on. I would do everything in my power to avoid asking my parents for help but at the end of the day if I lost my job, couldn't find a new one, and fell on hard times I know I could go to them. I have not lived my life in a way where I might need that (aka taking big risks) but it's in the back of my head and that's a huge peace of mind that many people don't have. In the same vein I could join my parents in their profession (I don't think I'd enjoy it but it's good money and I'd be a shoo-in), that has to affect me on a low level that I don't even realize.

I consider myself to have been fairly successful in my career and while I've worked hard for it, I know at the same time I was born with massive advantages. One of the most depressing things is when I see people who I know have relied on their parents a ton who are completely against any type of social programs. It's frustrating that they can't see that they had "free healthcare" (on parent's plan) till they were 26, that they have UBI in the form of weekly/monthly allowance deep into their adult years, or that they have guaranteed housing when they had to move back in for a few years.

Successful is not the same as rich though if it's run for a few generations it likely will be. The difference is important.

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