
What's behind rich people pretending to be self-made? - wilsonfiifi
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/29/rich-people-wealth-america
======
dawhizkid
I was maybe a little too excited to read "When to Jump"
([https://www.amazon.com/When-Jump-Have-Isnt-
Life/dp/125012421...](https://www.amazon.com/When-Jump-Have-Isnt-
Life/dp/1250124212)) about taking a big risk in making a major career/life
change against perhaps the wishes and/or expectations of your family, friends,
colleagues, society, etc from an author I hadn't heard of before (but somehow
got Sheryl Sandberg to write the forward for and Reid Hoffman to endorse) who
left a cushy VC/finance job to travel around the world to play squash for 2
years.

After doing a little more research, I found that the author grew up in a
wealthy east coast family, is a close blood relative to Sheryl Sandberg, went
to an Ivy League school (likely aided by privileged upbringing and family
connections), landed at a prestigious finance/VC firm straight from college
(probably made possible again by an Ivy league pedigree/family connection),
and could easily make the "jump" to doing something that paid nil for 2 years
due to this enormous safety net of family wealth that most people simply don't
have.

If there's one thing about the Travis Kalanick saga I wish the media would've
told is that he is a rare successful founder who legitimately grew up in a
middle class family and struggled for many years post-college trying to get to
ramen-profitability on a series of failing startups before hitting it big.
This is strictly in contract to the Zucks and Spiegels of the world who grew
up very wealthy and went to the best schools and could take on the big risks
associated with entrepreneurship because if everything failed they still had
that big safety net to fall back on.

~~~
paul7986
I participated in at the time a no name incubator on the east coast(decade
ago). Only one of the ten companies got funding and its founder had offers
already going into the incubator. Offers all from his rich VC father’s other
wealthy friends.

I’d love to see a list of all the successful founders who came from extreme
poverty. Middle class startuppers have one or two shots at it if they live at
home with a relative. The rich kids can keep trying and learning from their
mistakes until well they become richer.

Such is life.

~~~
dawhizkid
Makes you wonder how different the world might be if society provided a
similar safety net for aspiring entrepreneurs (at least psychologically) as
coming from a wealthy family.

~~~
JBlue42
Well, this exists in most of Western Europe right? They do have entrepreneurs
(and I'm not talking solely VC-funded startups here) but I've read that at
times there's some cultural issues with 'going above your station' (thinking
maybe Scandinavia). Maybe some of our European founders could detail that a
bit more.

~~~
henrikeh
Dane here, but I have literally no idea what you mean by 'going above your
station'.

~~~
JBlue42
Tall poppy syndrome, being moderate (lagom in Sweden?). Basically, things
people have said on here or I've heard elsewhere that the cultural psyche is a
bit different than the more individualistic American one, at least in terms of
business. That sort of thing is what I was getting at.

------
ryandrake
I've met my share of "self made" people who when self-classifying as such,
ignore things like:

* Well-off parents who funded their education, allowing them to start off without the huge debt ball-and-chain most of us start off with.

* Well-off family who can act as a safety net / backstop for failed risk-taking. Baseball is easy if you can keep swinging until you hit the ball.

* Well-connected family or friends who helped with that critical first job, which often can set an entire career's trajectory.

* Pre-populated contact list of well-off or well-connected people, drawn from family or Ivy league classmates.

I don't think you can honestly call yourself self-made with these advantages.

~~~
joshontheweb
I get your point but where do you draw the line? It seems pretty subjective.
Who truly starts off with nothing?

EDIT: spelling

~~~
dragonwriter
> Who truly starts off with nothing?

No one; everyone starts off in a particular social context with a particular
set of assets and opportunities and limitations.

There's no need to draw a line; there's no valid binary classification here.

------
jzymbaluk
My experience, having dealt with successful people who were also born rich, is
that they often legitimately feel that they are self-made. Because the truth
is that no matter how privileged you are, you do still have to put the work in
if you want to be successful. It is true that rich people have much better
safety nets, but being successful will always take at least some level of hard
work.

It's difficult to have the perspective it takes to admit that your success may
be more due to a privileged starting position and luck than solely the hard
work, especially when it's so easy to claim all your success is self-made and
the hero worship of self made people in the United States

~~~
jdtang13
I attended a talk hosted by a wealthy founder who was born into privilege, and
he said something like this: "Startups are really hard. You need to use every
card that you've been dealt in order to succeed."

~~~
hkmurakami
That's what meritocracy is, really. It's a system that rewards the most
physically fit, the most genetically endowed, the people with the most
resource rich support system, etc.

It's not necessarily a bad thing, but the fact that we're conditioned to think
that a non level playing field is bad no matter what (vs a societal
expectation that those with the most must give back the most), asking with a
fetishistic of monetary success, really warps our outward facing behavior.

~~~
BoiledCabbage
> the people with the most resource rich support system, etc.

I'm not sure you even realize, but that's the exact opposite of the definition
of meritocracy.

~~~
hkmurakami
No that is what a meritocracy is as we have it, and it is broken.

Meritocracy rewards those who do the most. But those who can do the most are
those who are the most well endowed.

This is separate from an even more perverse system where those who don't do
the most are rewarded the most.

~~~
BoiledCabbage
I'm not gonna go ahead and paste a dictionary definition here, but a
meritocracy is structured on talent and ability __as opposed __to class
privilege or wealth.

I believe you are misunderstanding the definition of a meritocracy.

------
Swizec
My favorite quote on the topic comes from Arnold Schwarzenegger, arguably one
of the most self-made people you can find. He said:

"I am not a self-made man.

Every time I give a speech at a business conference, or speak to college
students, or do a Reddit AMA, someone says it.

“Governor/Governator/Arnold/Arnie/Schwarzie/Schnitzel (depending on where I
am), as a self-made man, what’s your blueprint for success?”

They’re always shocked when I thank them for the compliment but say, “I am not
a self-made man. I got a lot of help.”

~~~
okonomiyaki3000
In Japan, we call him Shuwa-chan.

~~~
yread
where do they have the best okonomiyaki? :)

~~~
okonomiyaki3000
Off topic.

------
jim-jim-jim
"When a man tells you he got rich through hard work, ask him 'whose?'"

------
stmfreak
I've come to realize that hard work is not what we get paid to do from 9-5
each working day, but what we choose to do with our spare time that either
improves or degrades our position in life.

And it is the thousands of choices from early years through middle age that
separate those with rarified skills and high wages from those with common
skills and envy for their higher paid, lesser working (now) friends.

It does not matter where you start. When you spend most of your life studying
or smoking dope, the end is predictable.

~~~
uyholes
The problems we face today are not explained by the difference between
studying or smoking dope. There's something more pernicious involved.

Yes, if you smoke dope all the time your outcomes in life will probably be
worse than if you study some "rarified" skill, to borrow your phrase.

But studying takes resources, and time, and those are bought through money and
social connections and luck. And increasingly, despite what we read about
MOOCs and the new educational order, it doesn't matter if we study and learn,
what matters is that we have a certificate of studying, a placeholder. And
those placeholders are not the same as our knowledge, or one's ability to
learn, and are subject to corruption and greasing like every other
placeholder.

And in the end, what does this say about how much value we should place on
that rarified skill? Does our society really allocate financial reward
according to _actual_ value? Does Amazon really improve my life _that_ much
compared to the plumber or electrician who fixed my house? Is Facebook a net
benefit to society? If it disappeared tomorrow, would nothing replace it?
Could our healthcare be delivered under a different provider structure? Do I
pay my ISP because it's the best of many choices, or because it's acceptable
enough to not go without internet access? Is Amazon successful _because of
Bezos in particular_? If Bezos was going around spouting all the ideas in his
head, marshaling an army of imaginary workers, without any actual labor, would
we still have Amazon?

The point of this article is it's trivial to point out that hard work should
and often is compensated. The problem is that the compensation structures in
many fields are completely absurd in many cases relative to the actual value
created.

~~~
jinushaun
I grew up in the ghetto. While my friends smoked dope, I studied with free
resources from the local library. All the books were old and outdated, but I
didn't care. The drive to learn and improve is still with me today.

~~~
BoiledCabbage
>I grew up in the ghetto. While my friends smoked dope, I studied with free
resources from the local library. All the books were old and outdated, but I
didn't care. The drive to learn and improve is still with me today.

And thousands of others did the exact same but didn't make it out. That's the
entire point of this conversation. Hard work isn't a sufficient condition. If
it were tons of people would easily make it out. But instead it's a lot of
luck along with it.

------
everdev
If my skill is common, it doesn't matter how much physical energy I expend, I
probably won't make much because the supply of labor is high.

If it was easy to be a hedge fund manager, more people would do it. It's easy
to cherry pick these professions that seem overpaid, but in a free market,
people tend to make what the market values them at.

You could say that teachers are so important that they should be paid more and
in a free market education system they might be paid differently than they are
now.

~~~
tetron
Or maybe certain professions have a limited number of openings, which tend to
go to people with connections, and cooincidentally these professions deal with
large amounts of money, so taking 1% commission on a hundred million dollar
deal for very little work seems reasonable.

~~~
ghufran_syed
So why assume hedge fund managers get their jobs through “connections” but
professional basketball players don’t?

~~~
joncrane
Because there are more people who have the technical skills to run hedge funds
than there are hedge funds. You fill the manager role with someone you're
comfortable with on many levels.

OTOH, professional sports leagues are about winning intense competition, and
skill is much more important. Even then, coaches and owners play favorites.

It's not a binary system, it's a spectrum, and professional sports are towards
one end of the spectrum and hedge fund management and VC founding are towards
the other end.

~~~
everdev
Exactly. We're social creatures and relationships matter.

~~~
AstralStorm
The part people miss is that relationships rarely expand at random. They're
local and koinophilia (liking alike) plays a huge role.

Even if J. Random put all their training into building and managing
relationships it would likely not amount to anything of note. (They will have
fewer resources and be excluded from some social circles.)

There are many necessary components of huge success.

------
mrep
> Does anyone really think that a CEO, whose pay is on average 271 times
> greater than that of his typical worker, works 271 times harder than his
> employees, who might actually be doing strenuous physical labor?

I'm not against the general mindset the author is telling, but this garbage
thought process needs to stop. This isn't about working harder, but smarter
and you can easily provide 271 times more value through decisions that higher
ups are tasked with than a bottom level individual contributor.

    
    
                 ***Anecdotal***
    

The top level people at my company are making decisions daily that govern
multi-million dollar investments which can be vastly beneficial or detrimental
to our profitability. When working on investments that large in size, marginal
improvements on decision making provide huge sums of value which somewhat
justify the pay.

Now, are these people self made? That's more open to debate but every C*O and
SVP has been with the company for at least 10 years and most VPs also have
also been here for that long/have an amazing track record. You generally don't
get 10+ years of promotions providing nothing.

~~~
knightofmars
There have been many studies surrounding CEOs.[1] A large portion of them keep
showing that a bad CEO is worse than no CEO, an average CEO likely isn't
actually doing anything, and a good CEO is probably just lucky. This topic has
been researched and had the data poured over to the ends of the earth to find
that "special CEO sauce". The reality? There is likely a tiny subset of all
CEOs that are actually worth 271 times what the typical worker is making
(Steve Jobs comes to mind). That subset of actual talented visionary CEOs is
probably a ridiculously small number (eg 1% of CEOs in a global pool). The
rest of the time it's just a good ol' boys club for the already rich. [1] an
example [https://hbr.org/2015/11/are-successful-ceos-just-
lucky](https://hbr.org/2015/11/are-successful-ceos-just-lucky)

------
HumanDrivenDev
IME, most people want to craft a narrative that lets them feel OK about
themselves without too much introspection. If their lives are good, they'll
take credit for their fortune like the people in the article. If their lives
are bad, they'll blame everyone but themselves.

I've made a small jump in socio-economic class, and I try and keep it in
perspective. I try and remember the bits of help I got a long the way. And at
the same time I'm trying to let go of my resentment about people whose parents
set them up with cars, tuition and house deposits - because one day I hope to
be that parent.

~~~
fjsolwmv
Why not be a better parent and citizen than that, instead if spoiling your
children?

~~~
HumanDrivenDev
Biology I suppose

------
hkmurakami
Shame.

Especially now that social responsibility has decoupled from privilege.

Such duty and stewardship helped justify and bring balance to their privilege
in days past. No longer.

~~~
Clubber
Well, we don't know if they are philanthropic or not, but they seem to be
conflicted about their wealth. It's not so much them, but how much value our
society puts on money.

------
Balgair
In reading the reactions to the article, it seems like most of HN is onto the
game: Feign poverty.

That said, whom are some people that really did 'make it' from rags to riches?
What can we learn from them? I'll start:

Andrew Carnegie

Jack London

George Soros

Larry Ellison

Ursula Burns

Ingvar Kamprad

JK Rowling

Sam Walton

Oprah

The only thing that I can think of that all of them had in common was that
they were really hard workers that got lucky. That hard work was the price of
the lotto ticket. What am I missing here?

------
jarsin
It's not just pretending to be self made most of them run sham charities and
universally lie about their own charity giving too.

I'll never give to a rich pricks charity knowing what I know now.

~~~
hkmurakami
Do they just raise funds but not disburse effectively?

~~~
jessaustin
It seems common for "personal" charities to have really high overhead. A
typical cause would be that highly paid executives are actually family members
with little commitment to the stated purposes of the charities.

~~~
candiodari
Or they deliver services directly to those executives. Particularly egregious
example:

[https://nypost.com/2016/10/02/bill-clintons-executive-
suite-...](https://nypost.com/2016/10/02/bill-clintons-executive-suite-is-a-
private-pad-above-165m-library/)

(the story goes that back when executive compensation was highly taxed in the
first part of the 20th century, many companies took out services for their
executives which were tax free advantages. Things like yachts. Walt Disney is
famous for building out a business for exactly that sort of thing :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_33](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_33)
)

~~~
zimpenfish
Not that egregious considering

> Clinton isn’t the only former president to include a residence in his
> library. George H.W. Bush’s library at Texas A&M University in College
> Station and Jimmy Carter’s in Atlanta both have them.

------
TheFullStack
To be fair, people are not born with a built-in frame of reference. I used to
think I was good at math due to hard work/dedication but I have since met
people who worked far harder than me and still were not nearly as good at
math. It works the same way with money and pretty much everything. Good-
looking people think they are charming, naturally athletic people think they
train harder, etc. It's just what it is.

------
darepublic
This article implicitly assumes that intensity/amount of labour should
translate directly into income. Dunno why it should, but it would be
interesting to think of what the world would be like if that were truly
manifested in reality. I wish upon all these socialist academics that they
could live in such a world as they thoughtlessly describe/claim to desire.

~~~
okonomiyaki3000
The article doesn't implicitly assume that at all. You seem to have missed the
entire point.

~~~
airstrike
From the article:

> Meanwhile, few who make the “I did it all myself” argument question the
> absurdity of seeing earnings as a measure of grit and moral worth. Does
> anyone really think that a CEO, whose pay is on average 271 times greater
> than that of his typical worker, works 271 times harder than his employees,
> who might actually be doing strenuous physical labor?

~~~
okonomiyaki3000
Exactly. Rather than "implicitly assuming" one thing, it quite explicitly
states the opposite.

------
RhysU
Where is the line between transferring property and transferring advantage?

------
suff
What's with clueless authors and confirmation bias?

------
airstrike
One's (monetary) value isn't defined by one's amount or intensity of labor,
but rather by the value _lost_ should one be removed from the equation.
Factory workers can be replaced by virtually anyone else (and often by
machines) while Hedge Fund traders / managers often cannot.

While algorithms are increasingly prevalent in Wall Street, at the end of the
day there's a human who either writes them or reads their output before making
a decision, and that person is not easily replaceable.

Beyond that, for every successful Hedge Fund there are countless that failed
catastrophically, so any analysis of "how much a Hedge Fund manager makes" is
subject to severe survivorship bias. [0]

The disparity between the CEO of a public company and its hordes of workers is
even clearer. Very few people possess the combination of skills that make a
high-caliber CEO successful, which is why very few people are rewarded like
them. LeBron James also doesn't work 1,000 times harder than a factory worker.

Finally, it's worth remembering that 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth
by the second generation, and a stunning 90% by the third. [1] I wouldn't lose
any sleep over rich kids who feel troubled about their "entitlement".

[0] [https://xkcd.com/1827/](https://xkcd.com/1827/)

[1] [http://time.com/money/3925308/rich-families-lose-
wealth/](http://time.com/money/3925308/rich-families-lose-wealth/)

~~~
lovich
I'd have to disagree with your point about CEO's having rare skills. CEOs
appear to not be rated against anything. you have giant failures like Yahoo
under Mayer or the executives at Toys R Us giving themselves bonuses as they
are going through bankruptcy. Instead of not getting compensated for their
failure they are getting amounts of money that most Americans could retire in.

When the business does well people say it's due to the CEO, but when they fail
people argue about how bad it might have been. There's no way to know. It
seems more like a scam vs investors or employees than some measurements skill
that actually merits compensation

~~~
Banthum
We don't know how Yahoo would've done under someone else. It could've been
much worse.

It's perfectly possible Mayer did unique work that paid her compensation and
much more in savings. Without the counterfactual, we cannot judge her.

~~~
lovich
This is exactly the argument I am talking about. It's fine that we can't judge
CEOs, but then why are they taking home millions of dollars?

If we can't judge them for failures then we shouldn't be able to judge them
for successes as well and they shouldn't be able to pull out the "rare skills"
argument

~~~
airstrike
They are taking home millions of dollars because the owners of those companies
want to pay them as much, and they have the final say over how much to pay.

------
jnordwick
Oh please HN, stop posting articles that are 100% political theory without a
single link to tech.

At the least, please create a category for naked politics. No, hide doesnt
work very well (multiple devices, times out, etc).

One time a mod told me that articles with no link to tech got deleted. That
really doesn't appear to be the. This is yet another capitalist vs communist
(literally, the labor theory of value was a Marx thing) diatribe that has no
relation to the tech oriented stuff many came here for. There are plenty of
other political sites for stuff like this.

I often wonder, if you could vote down stories, these would probably have a
severe split and maybe not make the front page or stay there. Only being able
to upvote let's a small contingent push something up (just ask the bitcoin
people).

~~~
dragonwriter
If you think it's off-topic, then click “flag” and move on.

~~~
jnordwick
I did. And hid it. Now I'll just have to hide it everywhere else, and ignore
when it comes up looking through through old articles and search results.

Just because you can flag isn't carte blanche to post anything. I like the
site much better (and I'm sure many others too) when it stays in its technical
oriented wheelhouse.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Just because you can flag isn't carte blanche to post anything

Just because you have certain preferences isn't carte blanche to launch off-
topic diatribes in threads on articles that don't adhere to them about how you
prefer HN should be focussed.

> I like the site much better (and I'm sure many others too) when it stays in
> its technical oriented wheelhouse.

That is neither the official focus [0] nor, evidently—from what the community
submits and keeps on the front page—the consensus of the community.

[0] From the guidelines: “On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find
interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to
reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's
intellectual curiosity.” Obviously, whether any particular article meets they
standard is subjective, which is why we have upvotes and flags and algorithms
taking them and other factors (e.g., the flamewsr detector) into account.

