Study says being rich is determined by chance rather than intelligence or talent

[wozzek23]

It is a combination of many factors. You can't say that 100% of the rich people are intelligent and hardworking, while 100% of the poor people are retarded and lazy. But it is true that the vast majority of the rich people are intelligent and hardworking, and most of the poor are lazy and uneducated.

In getting richer and that having an opportunity to change your life, there are number of things which carry significance importance and that it is just not the luck which matters entirely. Luck too plays a vital role in deciding your future bit you can’t rely on luck only to change your life. You need to put in lot of efforts as well as you need to keep on working harder as well to get a chance of changing your life.

[Requim]

I actually agree to this. No matter how intelligent, skilled or talented a person is, if they don’t get the opportunity that could make them rich, then it would be useless. Still, I do believe that it is a plus factor having those qualities because it serves as an advantage or an edge, but then again without the chance or opportunity nothing good can come out of those good qualities.

[Tosin12]

If working hard or being intelligent make one rich then Almost everybody else will be rich so I strongly agree to it that being rich is determined by opportunity and being at the right place at the right so also having the right information.

[Allura74]

It is a combination of many factors. You can't say that 100% of the rich people are intelligent and hardworking, while 100% of the poor people are retarded and lazy. But it is true that the vast majority of the rich people are intelligent and hardworking, and most of the poor are lazy and uneducated.

In getting richer and that having an opportunity to change your life, there are number of things which carry significance importance and that it is just not the luck which matters entirely. Luck too plays a vital role in deciding your future bit you can’t rely on luck only to change your life. You need to put in lot of efforts as well as you need to keep on working harder as well to get a chance of changing your life.

Yes, chances is a factors in getting rich but i think the most ideal reason of getting reach is when a person is an opportunity grabber and have the ability to determine what is the most suitable chance for him to be rich and the determination to be rich that drive us to strive in gaining more extra income for the benefits of our dream is the key to success.

[iMark]

It is true that luck plays a big role in our lives. For example you gotta be lucky if you invested in Bitcoin and it goes up but it won't be that much the luck's role if you are the one manipulating its price to go up

Not everyone gets good luck right ? if luck gets an important position to get rich, of course only a few people who want to study and college? because deciding to be rich is have good luck? lol
very wrong logic i think, the most important is your talents, your intelligence, and your efforts, if you can combine the whole, I'm sure you can get rich

[Tigerw]

If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance

The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms. Taking that into account can maximize return on many kinds of investment.

The distribution of wealth follows a well-known pattern sometimes called an 80:20 rule: 80 percent of the wealth is owned by 20 percent of the people. Indeed, a report last year concluded that just eight men had a total wealth equivalent to that of the world’s poorest 3.8 billion people.

This seems to occur in all societies at all scales. It is a well-studied pattern called a power law that crops up in a wide range of social phenomena. But the distribution of wealth is among the most controversial because of the issues it raises about fairness and merit. Why should so few people have so much wealth?

The conventional answer is that we live in a meritocracy in which people are rewarded for their talent, intelligence, effort, and so on. Over time, many people think, this translates into the wealth distribution that we observe, although a healthy dose of luck can play a role.

But there is a problem with this idea: while wealth distribution follows a power law, the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal distribution that is symmetric about an average value. For example, intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000.

The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some people work more hours than average and some work less, but nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else.

And yet when it comes to the rewards for this work, some people do have billions of times more wealth than other people. What’s more, numerous studies have shown that the wealthiest people are generally not the most talented by other measures.

What factors, then, determine how individuals become wealthy? Could it be that chance plays a bigger role than anybody expected? And how can these factors, whatever they are, be exploited to make the world a better and fairer place?

Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Alessandro Pluchino at the University of Catania in Italy and a couple of colleagues. These guys have created a computer model of human talent and the way people use it to exploit opportunities in life. The model allows the team to study the role of chance in this process.

The results are something of an eye-opener. Their simulations accurately reproduce the wealth distribution in the real world. But the wealthiest individuals are not the most talented (although they must have a certain level of talent). They are the luckiest. And this has significant implications for the way societies can optimize the returns they get for investments in everything from business to science.

Pluchino and co’s model is straightforward. It consists of N people, each with a certain level of talent (skill, intelligence, ability, and so on). This talent is distributed normally around some average level, with some standard deviation. So some people are more talented than average and some are less so, but nobody is orders of magnitude more talented than anybody else.

This is the same kind of distribution seen for various human skills, or even characteristics like height or weight. Some people are taller or smaller than average, but nobody is the size of an ant or a skyscraper. Indeed, we are all quite similar.

The computer model charts each individual through a working life of 40 years. During this time, the individuals experience lucky events that they can exploit to increase their wealth if they are talented enough.

However, they also experience unlucky events that reduce their wealth. These events occur at random.

At the end of the 40 years, Pluchino and co rank the individuals by wealth and study the characteristics of the most successful. They also calculate the wealth distribution. They then repeat the simulation many times to check the robustness of the outcome.

When the team rank individuals by wealth, the distribution is exactly like that seen in real-world societies. “The ‘80-20’ rule is respected, since 80 percent of the population owns only 20 percent of the total capital, while the remaining 20 percent owns 80 percent of the same capital,” report Pluchino and co.

That may not be surprising or unfair if the wealthiest 20 percent turn out to be the most talented. But that isn’t what happens. The wealthiest individuals are typically not the most talented or anywhere near it. “The maximum success never coincides with the maximum talent, and vice-versa,” say the researchers.

So if not talent, what other factor causes this skewed wealth distribution? “Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck,” say Pluchino and co.

The team shows this by ranking individuals according to the number of lucky and unlucky events they experience throughout their 40-year careers. “It is evident that the most successful individuals are also the luckiest ones,” they say. “And the less successful individuals are also the unluckiest ones.”

That has significant implications for society. What is the most effective strategy for exploiting the role luck plays in success?

Pluchino and co study this from the point of view of science research funding, an issue clearly close to their hearts. Funding agencies the world over are interested in maximizing their return on investment in the scientific world. Indeed, the European Research Council recently invested $1.7 million in a program to study serendipity—the role of luck in scientific discovery—and how it can be exploited to improve funding outcomes.

It turns out that Pluchino and co are well set to answer this question. They use their model to explore different kinds of funding models to see which produce the best returns when luck is taken into account.

The team studied three models, in which research funding is distributed equally to all scientists; distributed randomly to a subset of scientists; or given preferentially to those who have been most successful in the past. Which of these is the best strategy?

The strategy that delivers the best returns, it turns out, is to divide the funding equally among all researchers. And the second- and third-best strategies involve distributing it at random to 10 or 20 percent of scientists.

In these cases, the researchers are best able to take advantage of the serendipitous discoveries they make from time to time. In hindsight, it is obvious that the fact a scientist has made an important chance discovery in the past does not mean he or she is more likely to make one in the future.

A similar approach could also be applied to investment in other kinds of enterprises, such as small or large businesses, tech startups, education that increases talent, or even the creation of random lucky events.

Clearly, more work is needed here. What are we waiting for?

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068 : Talent vs. Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610395/if-youre-so-smart-why-arent-you-rich-turns-out-its-just-chance/

A very interesting spin on anything that has ever been said about money, success or wealth!

I don't know what to think about this. The scaling argument which says 1% of the human population shouldn't own 40% of the world's wealth due to them not having IQ's of 200,000 or talent proportional to the highly disproportionate stake of wealth they control is something that will take time for me to digest and think about. Its certainly a novel concept.

Its also very interesting that they attempted to model along lines of standard deviation and wound up with a historical 20/80 wealth distribution. I think this is something which could use more exposure and media coverage. Its not often relatively original or new perspectives like this come along and the paradigm shift which can accompany them can often take decades to be fully appreciated within a pop culture vein.

  Perhaps to some extent the mind is also needed to become rich, but I can not disagree with the fact that if fortune loves you, then you are rich. I have many acquaintances who do not shine with a special mind and wit, but here they are lucky and that's it. So if you are a favorite of fortune then you are very lucky

[guoyu78]

I actually agree to this. No matter how intelligent, skilled or talented a person is, if they don’t get the opportunity that could make them rich, then it would be useless. Still, I do believe that it is a plus factor having those qualities because it serves as an advantage or an edge, but then again without the chance or opportunity nothing good can come out of those good qualities.

There is nothing to doubt this statement. You need a chance to express what actually you are, what talents you got and all that jazz. Even if you are not very much hardworking or skilled, but if you are provided with a job, obviously you are going to make money or might start working hard to pursue a better life. But on the other hand, a person working hard all day and night is not when given value, he is zero.

[gabmen]

I actually agree to this. No matter how intelligent, skilled or talented a person is, if they don’t get the opportunity that could make them rich, then it would be useless. Still, I do believe that it is a plus factor having those qualities because it serves as an advantage or an edge, but then again without the chance or opportunity nothing good can come out of those good qualities.

There is nothing to doubt this statement. You need a chance to express what actually you are, what talents you got and all that jazz. Even if you are not very much hardworking or skilled, but if you are provided with a job, obviously you are going to make money or might start working hard to pursue a better life. But on the other hand, a person working hard all day and night is not when given value, he is zero.

Opportunities are always coming there one way or another though. Intelligent people spot these opportunities and know how to make the most out of them. You can't leave it simply to chance though there are a few instances where a person is lucky enough to have his life change solely on luck

[Hell-raiser]

It is true that luck plays a big role in our lives. For example you gotta be lucky if you invested in Bitcoin and it goes up but it won't be that much the luck's role if you are the one manipulating its price to go up

Not everyone gets good luck right ? if luck gets an important position to get rich, of course only a few people who want to study and college? because deciding to be rich is have good luck? lol
very wrong logic i think, the most important is your talents, your intelligence, and your efforts, if you can combine the whole, I'm sure you can get rich

I massively disagree with your point. It is luck that often if not at all times makes the difference unless you are already wealthy and just have to stick to what your family are doing. There are many very talented and highly intelligent people in the world but only a chosen few make it to the top, chosen by Lady Luck. You can be dead sure that luck played its role in their promotion to the highest ranks. There is just too much competition in the world these days that you could solely rely on your talent, intelligence, and effort. There will always someone, or rather quite a few of them, who is more talented, intelligent, and industrious than yourself.

[jaysabi]

You obviously fail to see my point. You don't see the forest for the trees. Microsoft's products were not shitty, they were so-so at best (in fact they quite were). There were more than enough competing products likely much better than Microsoft's but their developers didn't have their mothers on friendly terms with CEO's of biggest corporations. This is where luck comes to matter a lot, actually enough to make all the difference.

Market utility isn't superficial because it's the actual root cause of wealth. You couldn't turn that example around because simply reversing the words wouldn't make it true. Money isn't actual wealth, it's a representation of wealth you've accumulated through the efforts of what you offer the market, either through the products you make or the services you offer. The more utility those goods and services have, the more money you ultimately will acquire. But you don't get the money without the utility, that's how you know it's the cause of it.

If so, why don't you address the point which I made? How are you going to create that market utility in the first place when you have to compete with or rather against corporations which have literally thousands of personnel in R&D departments? In most cases, your only chance is pure luck, end of story.

This has essentially devolved into a chicken and egg discussion. Because you couldn't win the point against the notion that market utility is what causes wealth (as opposed to some of your earlier assertions, like it's caused by luck or caused by money, which failed to recognize that money is just a representation of wealth and not the actual cause of wealth), you're now trying to undermine the market utility argument by claiming that the only way you can create market utility is through luck. It's a ridiculous argument to make. It completely ignores ingenuity as any kind of force in the market. You might as well be saying that there's no point in trying to do anything in the marketplace because it's completely random and winners and losers are determined by chance. When you take that argument to its logical conclusion, you realize what a ridiculous point it is.

Now you are trying to deliberately distort and twist my point. I don't say that luck is the only way you can create market utility, yet it pretty quickly comes down to that in any saturated market which is divided by corporations with their huge budgets. To keep things real, can you name, for example, a startup which came up with a new processor recently? There is none. The only one that I can think of is Transmeta. But it still failed in the end by offering a subpar "market utility". Your realistic chances (besides some really impossible turn of luck) lie in new fields which haven't yet been taken over by the same big guns.

No matter how many times you end a paragraph with "end of story," it doesn't make your points any stronger. It looks like an attempt to claim an authority your points are completely failing to establish.

Now that you don't want to talk about Microsoft success and Bill Gates being a genius any more, I safely conclude that we can finally call it a genuine end of story.

How am I trying to deliberately distort your point when I repeat back to you what you say? Did you or did you not write exactly: "How are you going to create that market utility in the first place when you have to compete with or rather against corporations which have literally thousands of personnel in R&D departments? In most cases, your only chance is pure luck, end of story." If you don't like arguing against yourself, be more careful in what you write.

The answer to your question by the way is that you create products, not market utility. Market utility is an attribute of successful products, not something you create. And it's not luck. Market utility is what every product tries to capture, whether they do or not is not a function of luck but a function of how useful they are to the people buying in that particular market. The reason Transmeta failed - I'm assuming because I've never heard of it - is because it didn't do anything more useful than anything already on the market, either from a performance perspective or a price perspective. The market didn't want it apparently. You cite the fact that nobody has produced a better processor recently but don't recognize that makes my case. Nobody can create a more useful processor than what is already on the market (i.e. one with more market utility), so why would you expect consumers to buy a worse offering? Lower market utility, expected failure confirmed.

[Hell-raiser]

You obviously fail to see my point. You don't see the forest for the trees. Microsoft's products were not shitty, they were so-so at best (in fact they quite were). There were more than enough competing products likely much better than Microsoft's but their developers didn't have their mothers on friendly terms with CEO's of biggest corporations. This is where luck comes to matter a lot, actually enough to make all the difference.

Market utility isn't superficial because it's the actual root cause of wealth. You couldn't turn that example around because simply reversing the words wouldn't make it true. Money isn't actual wealth, it's a representation of wealth you've accumulated through the efforts of what you offer the market, either through the products you make or the services you offer. The more utility those goods and services have, the more money you ultimately will acquire. But you don't get the money without the utility, that's how you know it's the cause of it.

If so, why don't you address the point which I made? How are you going to create that market utility in the first place when you have to compete with or rather against corporations which have literally thousands of personnel in R&D departments? In most cases, your only chance is pure luck, end of story.

This has essentially devolved into a chicken and egg discussion. Because you couldn't win the point against the notion that market utility is what causes wealth (as opposed to some of your earlier assertions, like it's caused by luck or caused by money, which failed to recognize that money is just a representation of wealth and not the actual cause of wealth), you're now trying to undermine the market utility argument by claiming that the only way you can create market utility is through luck. It's a ridiculous argument to make. It completely ignores ingenuity as any kind of force in the market. You might as well be saying that there's no point in trying to do anything in the marketplace because it's completely random and winners and losers are determined by chance. When you take that argument to its logical conclusion, you realize what a ridiculous point it is.

Now you are trying to deliberately distort and twist my point. I don't say that luck is the only way you can create market utility, yet it pretty quickly comes down to that in any saturated market which is divided by corporations with their huge budgets. To keep things real, can you name, for example, a startup which came up with a new processor recently? There is none. The only one that I can think of is Transmeta. But it still failed in the end by offering a subpar "market utility". Your realistic chances (besides some really impossible turn of luck) lie in new fields which haven't yet been taken over by the same big guns.

No matter how many times you end a paragraph with "end of story," it doesn't make your points any stronger. It looks like an attempt to claim an authority your points are completely failing to establish.

Now that you don't want to talk about Microsoft success and Bill Gates being a genius any more, I safely conclude that we can finally call it a genuine end of story.

How am I trying to deliberately distort your point when I repeat back to you what you say? Did you or did you not write exactly: "How are you going to create that market utility in the first place when you have to compete with or rather against corporations which have literally thousands of personnel in R&D departments? In most cases, your only chance is pure luck, end of story." If you don't like arguing against yourself, be more careful in what you write.

Yes, this is what I wrote, specifically to show that in today's world you can't create a successful product which enjoys a lot of market utility (I'm using your parlance here) unless you are a multibillion-dollar corporation, which is not guaranteed either, or have an incredible amount of luck on your side. And yes, Transmeta failed because they didn't build anything more useful than what had already been present on the market because they 1) didn't have billions of dollars to invest in R&D and 2) didn't have the luck to come up with something useful without having to invest billions of dollars in R&D. In simple terms, luck was their only chance to success, but they didn't make it and expectedly went bust in the end.

[qiwoman2]

I agree with this to a point. I think though you need to be more shewed than smart. I was above average intelligence when I went to school and was two years above average in IQ and general intelligence than my peers, but I wasn't shrewd enough to become rich and was always unlucky. My luck has never shone on me, yet I see fraudsters and cheaters becoming rich around me daily. So you need to be more alert than intelligent. There are many talented and intelligent people dying poor every day and left with nothing. I hope all of us here at least end up a little comfortable and not in the poor house or on the streets.

[Spain2000]

It is fact that luck can make you happy and relax more than your intelligence and bitcoin is the digital currency which more than luck than intelligence so for us the bitcoin can make us successful if our luck is stronger and many people are ready to buy bitcoin and they are waiting for the chance to become double their value.

[Razick]

This is true. There are a lot of people who have worked hard their whole life and have nothing to show for it and I have met very intelligent people, some with incredible talent but they never made it and they never turned out rich, then you see people who are just starting out with no talent or brians, a slight turn of events and they end up rich with more money than they can use.

[loveslfc]

Being rich is by fate, it's what God has written, it's not by being smart or intelligent.

[Hell-raiser]

This is true. There are a lot of people who have worked hard their whole life and have nothing to show for it and I have met very intelligent people, some with incredible talent but they never made it and they never turned out rich, then you see people who are just starting out with no talent or brians, a slight turn of events and they end up rich with more money than they can use.

That's the nature of things, the nature of luck, and ultimately the nature of true randomness. Some people, well, in fact many people erroneously think or assume that random is synonymous with uniform but it is not so. And just because random is not uniform, some people turn out more lucky than others, and that has nothing to do with their intelligence, talent, or whatever. But it doesn't mean either that you can't work deliberately toward increasing your chances of encountering luck sooner or later. A simple example, if you don't buy lottery tickets, you can't win a lottery, as simple as it gets. Of course, it doesn't mean that you should run and buy a bunch of tickets right now because your chances are still pretty bleak but you get the idea.

[Dainye_dyep]

This is true. There are a lot of people who have worked hard their whole life and have nothing to show for it and I have met very intelligent people, some with incredible talent but they never made it and they never turned out rich, then you see people who are just starting out with no talent or brians, a slight turn of events and they end up rich with more money than they can use.

Indeed. Those people who ran out of school during their days of studying was proven to be the most successful people that you can see nowadays. This has proven that grades are just numerical values because true experience in life can never be learned and taught inside school because we individuals have our own strategy in surviving the challenges of life which was beyond those what we can only learn inside the classroom. It is just that those unfortunate people meaning to say those who are not given the chance to be so intelligent thinks the most complicated ideas on how he can survive life even he was not coined as the brilliant one inside the school so I guess it is a by chance situation that an intelligent man can be rich or it is just the not so intelligent one can stand above those with degree in a way that he have his own thinking of surpassing the challenges of life.

[gurang]

If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance

The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms. Taking that into account can maximize return on many kinds of investment.

The distribution of wealth follows a well-known pattern sometimes called an 80:20 rule: 80 percent of the wealth is owned by 20 percent of the people. Indeed, a report last year concluded that just eight men had a total wealth equivalent to that of the world’s poorest 3.8 billion people.

This seems to occur in all societies at all scales. It is a well-studied pattern called a power law that crops up in a wide range of social phenomena. But the distribution of wealth is among the most controversial because of the issues it raises about fairness and merit. Why should so few people have so much wealth?

The conventional answer is that we live in a meritocracy in which people are rewarded for their talent, intelligence, effort, and so on. Over time, many people think, this translates into the wealth distribution that we observe, although a healthy dose of luck can play a role.

But there is a problem with this idea: while wealth distribution follows a power law, the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal distribution that is symmetric about an average value. For example, intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000.

The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some people work more hours than average and some work less, but nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else.

And yet when it comes to the rewards for this work, some people do have billions of times more wealth than other people. What’s more, numerous studies have shown that the wealthiest people are generally not the most talented by other measures.

What factors, then, determine how individuals become wealthy? Could it be that chance plays a bigger role than anybody expected? And how can these factors, whatever they are, be exploited to make the world a better and fairer place?

Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Alessandro Pluchino at the University of Catania in Italy and a couple of colleagues. These guys have created a computer model of human talent and the way people use it to exploit opportunities in life. The model allows the team to study the role of chance in this process.

The results are something of an eye-opener. Their simulations accurately reproduce the wealth distribution in the real world. But the wealthiest individuals are not the most talented (although they must have a certain level of talent). They are the luckiest. And this has significant implications for the way societies can optimize the returns they get for investments in everything from business to science.

Pluchino and co’s model is straightforward. It consists of N people, each with a certain level of talent (skill, intelligence, ability, and so on). This talent is distributed normally around some average level, with some standard deviation. So some people are more talented than average and some are less so, but nobody is orders of magnitude more talented than anybody else.

This is the same kind of distribution seen for various human skills, or even characteristics like height or weight. Some people are taller or smaller than average, but nobody is the size of an ant or a skyscraper. Indeed, we are all quite similar.

The computer model charts each individual through a working life of 40 years. During this time, the individuals experience lucky events that they can exploit to increase their wealth if they are talented enough.

However, they also experience unlucky events that reduce their wealth. These events occur at random.

At the end of the 40 years, Pluchino and co rank the individuals by wealth and study the characteristics of the most successful. They also calculate the wealth distribution. They then repeat the simulation many times to check the robustness of the outcome.

When the team rank individuals by wealth, the distribution is exactly like that seen in real-world societies. “The ‘80-20’ rule is respected, since 80 percent of the population owns only 20 percent of the total capital, while the remaining 20 percent owns 80 percent of the same capital,” report Pluchino and co.

That may not be surprising or unfair if the wealthiest 20 percent turn out to be the most talented. But that isn’t what happens. The wealthiest individuals are typically not the most talented or anywhere near it. “The maximum success never coincides with the maximum talent, and vice-versa,” say the researchers.

So if not talent, what other factor causes this skewed wealth distribution? “Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck,” say Pluchino and co.

The team shows this by ranking individuals according to the number of lucky and unlucky events they experience throughout their 40-year careers. “It is evident that the most successful individuals are also the luckiest ones,” they say. “And the less successful individuals are also the unluckiest ones.”

That has significant implications for society. What is the most effective strategy for exploiting the role luck plays in success?

Pluchino and co study this from the point of view of science research funding, an issue clearly close to their hearts. Funding agencies the world over are interested in maximizing their return on investment in the scientific world. Indeed, the European Research Council recently invested $1.7 million in a program to study serendipity—the role of luck in scientific discovery—and how it can be exploited to improve funding outcomes.

It turns out that Pluchino and co are well set to answer this question. They use their model to explore different kinds of funding models to see which produce the best returns when luck is taken into account.

The team studied three models, in which research funding is distributed equally to all scientists; distributed randomly to a subset of scientists; or given preferentially to those who have been most successful in the past. Which of these is the best strategy?

The strategy that delivers the best returns, it turns out, is to divide the funding equally among all researchers. And the second- and third-best strategies involve distributing it at random to 10 or 20 percent of scientists.

In these cases, the researchers are best able to take advantage of the serendipitous discoveries they make from time to time. In hindsight, it is obvious that the fact a scientist has made an important chance discovery in the past does not mean he or she is more likely to make one in the future.

A similar approach could also be applied to investment in other kinds of enterprises, such as small or large businesses, tech startups, education that increases talent, or even the creation of random lucky events.

Clearly, more work is needed here. What are we waiting for?

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068 : Talent vs. Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610395/if-youre-so-smart-why-arent-you-rich-turns-out-its-just-chance/

A very interesting spin on anything that has ever been said about money, success or wealth!

I don't know what to think about this. The scaling argument which says 1% of the human population shouldn't own 40% of the world's wealth due to them not having IQ's of 200,000 or talent proportional to the highly disproportionate stake of wealth they control is something that will take time for me to digest and think about. Its certainly a novel concept.

Its also very interesting that they attempted to model along lines of standard deviation and wound up with a historical 20/80 wealth distribution. I think this is something which could use more exposure and media coverage. Its not often relatively original or new perspectives like this come along and the paradigm shift which can accompany them can often take decades to be fully appreciated within a pop culture vein.

Does the study say that being rich is determined by chance rather than intelligence or talent? we have his way of getting rich, they say that the way now to wealth is being referred to at the opportunity, and also having a wealth of talent and intelligence, we do not have a priest who has his way to get rich what you choose or whatever you can to lift you

[Hell-raiser]

Indeed. Those people who ran out of school during their days of studying was proven to be the most successful people that you can see nowadays. This has proven that grades are just numerical values because true experience in life can never be learned and taught inside school because we individuals have our own strategy in surviving the challenges of life which was beyond those what we can only learn inside the classroom. It is just that those unfortunate people meaning to say those who are not given the chance to be so intelligent thinks the most complicated ideas on how he can survive life even he was not coined as the brilliant one inside the school so I guess it is a by chance situation that an intelligent man can be rich or it is just the not so intelligent one can stand above those with degree in a way that he have his own thinking of surpassing the challenges of life.

I agree and disagree with you on the bolded part. On the one hand, I definitely agree with you that in most cases given the level of public education at large and the expertise of the teachers themselves, it is highly unlikely that if you or your children will get in the classroom what is called real life experience. On the other hand, I disagree since I don't see it as a conceptually impossible thing because it all depends on who is teaching, what is being taught and how exactly. For example, in the wild prey animals teach their young how to evade hungry predators, and if they weren't successful at that (to an appreciable degree), they would be quickly eaten to extinction.

[slyfox]

This is true. There are a lot of people who have worked hard their whole life and have nothing to show for it and I have met very intelligent people, some with incredible talent but they never made it and they never turned out rich, then you see people who are just starting out with no talent or brians, a slight turn of events and they end up rich with more money than they can use.

There is no way to deny that luck plays a factor when it comes to be rich, after all if it was just about working harder or to have the talent then all the people that work hard or that have talent will become rich and that is impossible, but at the same time those that were able to become rich have something else going on for them they have some kind of natural intelligence when it comes to money.