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Comment by Entwickler | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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