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Comment by aorloff | Hacker News Reader

What about wealth you build for yourself ?

Many of the duplexes in town were built by small builders who passed them on to family.

Now they are treated like rich landowners but in reality grandpa built the wealth.

Do you not see how this was luck? Certainly, actions were taken to encourage an outcome (holding an asset of potential future value), but luck as a component of a favorable outcome cannot be overstated.

They were builders, they had businesses building for other people and invested their own money and time into these buildings for their own family.

Luck in exactly what sense ?

Yes, they did not die of dysentery on the trail, so evidently some luck was involved, but the wealth building seems very intentional and causal.

Luck that their grandpa built the duplex. I am unlucky that my grandpa did not build a duplex. Luck that their parents held the assets and did not sell it.

This is not luck.

Your grandfather chose your grandmother and so too did your parents.

Your parents deciding to do something is not luck either.

I want my children to have an inheritance, the actions I take to ensure that are ongoing deliberate choices to build wealth over having fun.

Yes, so it’s completely out of your children’s control whether or not you chose those decisions. Therefore, they are lucky you are doing that. They have zero impact on whether or not the actions of their grandparents resulted in generational wealth.

Nonsense.

You posted this comment 7 hours ago. Current you has zero impact on whether you posted it.

Time flows forwards, not backwards.

Please edit swipes out of your HN posts. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

What action did you take that caused your grandpa to invest in real estate? If none, it is lucky for you that your grandpa took one action over another, as you had no impact on the event.

You can call it luck as many times as you like, I simply disagree.

If my dad builds me a shed it is no more lucky than if I build a shed.

We should leave this here, I feel that we just have different relationships with our parents :)

See, you’ve caught yourself in the trap. Lots of builders fail, look at the YC startup failure rate.

Even investing in broad equity index funds is luck (sequence risk).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40378138

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011...

You’ve caught yourself in the trap of thinking that passing something with a high failure rate means luck.

This is a tired argument.

Success in life will always be a combination of luck, and hard work to set yourself up to take advantage of the luck when it arrives.

For some, the luck will never arrive. And for many, the luck will arrive, but they won't be ready for it. The only practical advice to give people is to prepare the best they can for when and if it does.

I’m not arguing the advice, I’m arguing the religion and belief system.

I meant construction developers as a trade for others.

In the context of a discussion about wealth, its true that the financialization of real estate and runaway values of the greater Silicon Valley were a stroke of luck, but when talking about building wealth, housing has intrinsic value that I think takes a lot of that kind of SV luck out of the picture.

Housing value is land value. Did you buy or build in the right location? Luck!

Did commercial real estate know WFH post Covid was going to obliterate CRE values? Again, bad luck.

This is true, many people got hung out to dry who happened to hold office properties when COVID hit.

But the housing could have just housed the family members if times were tight. For at least the first generation, it did. That's intrinsic value, not valuation according to a market.

Of course it can be overstated. That’s basically the entire mantra of progressives in the US right now and it’s used as an excuse for incompetent people to attack people who successfully do things and (even worse) absolve themselves of responsibility for doing unproductive things.

Punishing people for not having something bad derail their business is tall poppy syndrome.

Luck is a part of why everyone continues breathing everyday rather than having sudden heart failure. We don’t need to constantly diminish people for living because they were lucky enough to not have a fatal condition.

We should be encouraging the people who were successful, even if part of it may have been luck. Any other approach punishes people doing the rest of the work that isn’t luck.

"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more of it I seem to have." --Coleman Cox

But if they are receiving free houses from their grandpa, they didn't build the wealth themselves.

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