- If you don't have to work two jobs to survive, you have the time to pursue other things, and you're more "lucky".
- If you have the ability to not work and can spend a year/two/five working out of a "garage", you're more "lucky" than those who can't.
- If you have the ability to send your kids to an expensive college without you or them going into life-long debt, then those kids can create lasting connections (a.k.a. networking) and be significantly more "lucky" than those who can't.
- If you have the money for good food, leisure, home, travel, medicine, etc., you're significantly more "lucky" than those who have to balance those things, and may not even have access to those things with all the consequences: chronic illnesses, stress etc.
This is quite a huge spectrum of "rich" and "lucky". From absolutely basic things to expensive college.
I cannot afford a vacation in Macchu Picchu, but it does not detract from my feeling of being lucky/unlucky. Local vacations in Europe or even in my own country are fine. If anything, Covid era was a good teacher in what really matters.
And the college and networking is begging the question (IDK if I use the expression correctly). I do not doubt that Harvard graduates have it easier in general, but they are probably less prepared for a possible black swan event after which their degree won't have the weight it currently has. Shelling out enormous money for getting connections is a conformist (expensive and lazy) way of building career. I do not find much luck in that.
> does not detract from my feeling of being lucky/unlucky
The question isn't about feeling lucky/unlucky.
It doesn't matter if you can't take a vacation in Macchu Picchu.
- Can you take a vacation any time you want?
- Can you take a vacation for as long as you can?
- Can you afford to take a full year (or more) to work on a passion project? Or on any project? On a startup idea?
See, the more money you have, the more readily your answer will be yes to all the questions above.
> Shelling out enormous money for getting connections is a conformist (expensive and lazy) way of building career. I do not find much luck in that.
You can spend enormous money and have all the connections you need in four years. Or you can work your entire life and still never get those connections.
> but they are probably less prepared for a possible black swan event
Something tells me that Harvard graduates "survive" any and all black swan events significantly better than many others.
Luck is, IMHO, a subjective feeling per se. Alice and Bob may feel very lucky meeting each other while Carol is pissed off at meeting both of them.
Out of your questions: "Can you take a vacation any time you want?" is an interesting case. This depends on your career a lot, not just on net income. Some well-paid careers are notorious for being time-intensive and competitive to the threshold of burning out. You can take a long vacation, but your job might not be there when you return. I opted out of this rat race a long time ago.
"Something tells me that Harvard graduates "survive" any and all black swan events significantly better than many others."
Where I live, the Holocaust and the Communist coup were two notable exceptions. People who had a lot of property to lose often hesitated too long before GTFOut and found the way shut after rationalizing the first warning signs away.
It is possible that the USA is protected enough that something like this will never happen there.
This might be some of the actual disagreement in this thread.
Feeling lucky and being lucky is not always related. You can feel lucky for having met "the one" in your life or for finding $100 on the street, and none think that luck comes from hard work. The part where many underestimate luck regarding success in business is how much luck is needed on top of hard work, and having the right knowledge, and being at the right place at the right time for any business to be a huge success.
The success stories from business always are about the hard work that was done and not about the incredible amount of luck that also was involved (Thinking fast and slow have a chapter about this)
"If my memory serves me right, most rich folks successfully escaped both the Holocaust and the Communist coup."
Black swans are by definition uncommon. Being a Loyalist in America of the 1770s was a huge black swan, for example. While their counterparts a little bit to the north in Canada did just fine.
Prague is full of big villas and other real property whose original owners perished with their entire family. There was literally no one left to claim them after the war. Same in Poland or Germany.
People back then did not want to believe that something as barbaric will be done to them, until it was.
I do not think that exact stats exist how many rich and poor survived the Holocaust, but considering the vast amount of abandoned valuable property after the war, including the infamous sleeping accounts of Switzerland, I do not believe that most rich folks escaped successfully.
Surely they had better chances to act in time, yes. If they had the foresight to do so. One of my points is that once you are a part of the conventional elite, you are motivated to try to weather the problems in place, because uprooting yourself and your family is a huge loss.
I am partly influenced by my own personal history. I grew up with a single mother and no child support from a father that lived abroad. We were somewhere in the lowest fourth of the income distribution.
Yet it helped me to be an independent person, paradoxically. I never had to take into account what my neighbors or rich, soon-to-die relatives think about me, what are "suitable" careers for a young man of X years and Y parents, what kind of real property binds my feet from moving anywhere. No one was interested in me and it felt very liberating.
Knowing my colleagues from school who were restrained by all those concerns and had to play a "role" instead of being themselves, I did not envy them the least.
I'm also a single child of a single mother from a country which has long been battling for the title of "the poorest country in Europe", Moldova.
And yes, everything, from having a computer at 10, not at 18 to unconstrained ability to travel would've helped me significantly more than the proverbial "having to pull myself up by bootstraps".
And this has nothing to do with "being independent" or "feeling lucky".
The CEO of a company I worked for came up with the idea for his company while having a year-long sabbatical from the university while traveling around (literally around) the world with his friends.
At university I was often chosing between buying a new T-shirt or (exclusive or) cheap bread.
So no. Luck has very little to do with where you are now. Money does.
University was a pretty tough time for me as well. The kind of trade-offs (t-shirt vs. food) is not exactly unknown to me. I had a first old PC XT at 17, too.
And yet I do not believe that if my single parent was richer, I would have been a better programmer or writer. I made some money teaching well-off, but pretty dim youngsters whose parents, even though rich by my standards (which meant middle class, probably), were concerned about their future. Even private tuition only gets you so far.
That said, the fact that I was born with a fairly good brain that could soak up both English and mathematics/programming easily, is by no means my own work. It is precisely random luck, together with the fact that I was born precisely at that period of history when such skills are considered useful and marketable.
> And yet I do not believe that if my single parent was richer, I would have been a better programmer or writer.
This has nothing to do with your belief.
The level you're at now? You could've reached it a decade earlier, had you had money. As could I.
Poor people fail significantly more than rich people. For every one of you or me there will be 100 others who couldn't make it. At a certain level of wealth, however, it does't matter if you're a "better programmer". You will still be able to enjoy life and achieve fulfilment, but at a vastly reduced timescale.
> It is precisely random luck
Yes. There are random chances, such as where you're born. Apart from that the chances of misfortune decrease exponentially with money.
- You're Einstein but born in poverty? Hello, malnourishment, no access to good education, menial jobs until the end of your life.
- You're a regular Joe, but born into well-to-do family? Hello, happy childhood, good education, necessary connections, largely stress-free life of your chosing.
There's 150 000 shades in bteween, of course, but luck has little to do with chance, and has a lot of to do with money.
You sound like someone, who does not want to be wrong on the Internet, so he brings up the ultimate argument.
It does not make any sense, too. Harvard graduates are globalists, who are more likely to allocate their assets globally, which is what saves you from such events.
It is. But in the context of the discussion, the question is mostly around access to opportunities. And this access increases with the money you have.
> This depends on your career a lot, not just on net income. Some well-paid careers are notorious for being time-intensive and competitive to the threshold of burning out.
Once again, it means that you may not have enough money to afford having a vacation at any time.
> Where I live, the Holocaust and the Communist coup were two notable exceptions.
Ah, yes. Because these events are so common that Harvard graduates are uniquely unprepared for them. Unlike, you know, common folk.
If my memory serves me right, most rich folks successfully escaped both the Holocaust and the Communist coup. Unlike those who couldn't afford it.
- If you don't have to work two jobs to survive, you have the time to pursue other things, and you're more "lucky".
- If you have the ability to not work and can spend a year/two/five working out of a "garage", you're more "lucky" than those who can't.
- If you have the ability to send your kids to an expensive college without you or them going into life-long debt, then those kids can create lasting connections (a.k.a. networking) and be significantly more "lucky" than those who can't.
- If you have the money for good food, leisure, home, travel, medicine, etc., you're significantly more "lucky" than those who have to balance those things, and may not even have access to those things with all the consequences: chronic illnesses, stress etc.