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

[hdueueiw432]

But that is only partially true. Wealth must be gathered from many factors like Intelligence, Talent, Opportunity. Without one of the three, man cannot become rich. A few examples for that. If you are smart, but you invest in projects without luck, you probably will not get it. If you are lucky, but you are not smart about using the money you earn, you will spend it in a wasteful way.

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[embargo]

It may well be that a person's wealth can be due to accidents. In any case, wealth is assets that are inherently limited, and only distribution occurs among those who own them. Accident can also be born in a family of Rothschilds and inherit one of the greatest states of the world.

[JPage]

Being Rich can be determined by chance but staying rich is a Talent and wisdom because to winning the lottery is not to become rich it's just to have more money, temporally. Usually those people are getting more poor with time.

[banks38]

I completely agree with this.  It's the luck of the draw.  Take crypto for instance.  It's mostly luck when you pick something correctly.  You may have studied the whitepaper and project and had a great feeling about it but in the end a million things need to line up for that project to succeed. Most of which we have nothing to do with. 

[pletmen]

When each hour you work can create income for a lifetime, you realize that every hour not planned is a lifetime of wasted riches. Plan each day to do something that will continue to make money forever. Automated businesses systems are the key.

[seramela]

Luck is an important factor in my opinion. One has to be at the right place at right time.

[Wendigo]

I think the recipe for success is 50% chance and 50% talent & education. You can have all the chance in the world, but if you don't have what it takes to do your job people won't hold you in high regard and you won't be able to climb the corporate ladder and negotiate a higher salary. The opposite is also true - you might be super qualified for the job, however someone else with less skills but better connections might come in and take your place. Nowadays you have to work smarter, not harder to be wealthy.

[Altf4]

The chances are the oppurtunity for everyone to be rich, being talented and intelligent is good enough but it will not bolster to be rich ,it is only part of being rich, the good chances that comes are the best oppurtunity to be being rich and wealthy plus the intelligent to manage your wealth, if you have chance and you do not have enough knowledge it is also useless chances to get rich.

[alebextor]

Some people say they have no free time, they usually say this as they sit on the couch watching TV. At work when asked if they phoned back a client, the answer is no as you talk to them on the way back from the smoking area.  Such people never be rich even with luck.
 

[Fatanut]

Some people say they have no free time, they usually say this as they sit on the couch watching TV. At work when asked if they phoned back a client, the answer is no as you talk to them on the way back from the smoking area.  Such people never be rich even with luck.

And I swear it's the same people that want to give you advise in life and even financially. It says so much that they know what to do but they just don't do it because they are lazy. When you approach them about their TV series addiction, they say that it's their stress reliever but you can see them even on weekends watching. These days, you really have to learn how to ignore people. Next time they tell you what to do financially, ask them where there is fortune or if they have a degree in business or economics. That should shut them up.

Becoming rich is a combination of luck, intelligence (knowledge), talent, and connection. You would never get somewhrre far if you don't have all of it.

[zubrr51]

Virtually in all life's affairs, luck and a dropping chance play a big role. This applies to passing the exam and earning money.

[johnalyn]

I agree with that study of being is determine by chance rather than intellegence or talent because most people are always selfish like here in my country most of the rich people in the government is a curropt one except for the other people that I know they don't like them. And even your a graduated person with a honor here in my country the most required people who always passed the interview of a company should have a backer I mean the person like congressman or mayor kinda cool right.?

[sheryl26]

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.

I somehow believe in that because not all intelligent people have given a chance to stabd our because there are a lot of people in the world. Even those most talented ones cannot be rich if thet will not be discovered. So yes i believe in that statement. But of ciurse you also beed intelligence and talent because if you dont have any of that then you cannot excel into anything.

[setialovers]

I'm not an expert in that area but I feel like it is the equal things, but to be rich upon the chance is so much easier than to try hard and work hard having your intelligence and education, lol. I'm looking for my chance.

In my own opinion, most of the people are getting rich because of their hard work and that is the reason why you should always make your self knowledgeable about cryptocurrency since it was one of the easiest way to get wealthy.

Indeed, we should rely on luck when we want to make success. If we want to success, we should work hard and work smart and good knowledge. We can use an opportunity for our success only we have knowledge and working hard for our goal

[jack wira]

Smart can bring us to different situations, for example from the poor can bring the rich first to the second factor of the third legacy You can do business with a good business partner

[dobladonadouble]

Metamorphically speaking, life is really unfair. And if I would base with the information given. Some were practically born rich, some were sadly born poor. But the thing here is, how to live our life? Some rich people, they have all the thing they want in just a snap of their fingers but at the end of the day, they feel incomplete. While some poor people, having companions to get the days go by is simply a happiness for them. I think it's not merely the money itself that makes us rich, but the amount of appreciation we have in our lives. We all differs with talents and intelligence. But we all have opportunities that knocks a lot of times --- it's just a matter of choosing what door you will open; we all have a perfect timing for everything --- it's just a matter of realizing what is what. We are all rich by all means. Let's just don't forget to add spices like hardwork and efforts.

[Lady Coquet]

Smart can bring us to different situations, for example from the poor can bring the rich first to the second factor of the third legacy You can do business with a good business partner

Being smart is the biggest advantage that you can have when it comes in business because if you are smart you can think many things and strategies that will help you to become successful and rich. There are people who are not that smart but they are rich it is because they are talented and good in other ways.

[nambunamba]

yes its trues sometimes talent and inteligence is not something that determine your successful or will make you rich. Sometimes luck is the main factor that make people rich. I do believe everyone got a chance to do something different and this chance make them got a different results.

Smart can bring us to different situations, for example from the poor can bring the rich first to the second factor of the third legacy You can do business with a good business partner

Being smart is the biggest advantage that you can have when it comes in business because if you are smart you can think many things and strategies that will help you to become successful and rich. There are people who are not that smart but they are rich it is because they are talented and good in other ways.

yes i do believe we do still need experience and keep learning for something new. It would increase our chance to be rich and i believe doing live the best as you can do is the thing that make you think you are success and the best thing in live is when you could enjoy every moment and every seconds of your live.

[jaysabi]

Metamorphically speaking, life is really unfair. And if I would base with the information given. Some were practically born rich, some were sadly born poor. But the thing here is, how to live our life? Some rich people, they have all the thing they want in just a snap of their fingers but at the end of the day, they feel incomplete. While some poor people, having companions to get the days go by is simply a happiness for them. I think it's not merely the money itself that makes us rich, but the amount of appreciation we have in our lives. We all differs with talents and intelligence. But we all have opportunities that knocks a lot of times --- it's just a matter of choosing what door you will open; we all have a perfect timing for everything --- it's just a matter of realizing what is what. We are all rich by all means. Let's just don't forget to add spices like hardwork and efforts.

Life is just a random series of events. Whatever meaning you ascribe to it is arbitrary. Life isn't fair or unfair, it just is what it is. Things happen, and if you ascribe negative values to this events, you say they are bad events. If you ascribe positive values to them you say they are good events. But life isn't fair or unfair because the things that happen are all completely neutral. The universe doesn't have intent or purpose, so you can't assign meaning to the things that happen. It's only on reflection that you make a judgement about what anything means, but that's always an arbitrary assessment. You may associate being "rich" with positive outcomes, but that's your value, not life's.

[Stuart_Shook]

Metamorphically speaking, life is really unfair. And if I would base with the information given. Some were practically born rich, some were sadly born poor. But the thing here is, how to live our life? Some rich people, they have all the thing they want in just a snap of their fingers but at the end of the day, they feel incomplete. While some poor people, having companions to get the days go by is simply a happiness for them. I think it's not merely the money itself that makes us rich, but the amount of appreciation we have in our lives. We all differs with talents and intelligence. But we all have opportunities that knocks a lot of times --- it's just a matter of choosing what door you will open; we all have a perfect timing for everything --- it's just a matter of realizing what is what. We are all rich by all means. Let's just don't forget to add spices like hardwork and efforts.

Life is just a random series of events. Whatever meaning you ascribe to it is arbitrary. Life isn't fair or unfair, it just is what it is. Things happen, and if you ascribe negative values to this events, you say they are bad events. If you ascribe positive values to them you say they are good events. But life isn't fair or unfair because the things that happen are all completely neutral. The universe doesn't have intent or purpose, so you can't assign meaning to the things that happen. It's only on reflection that you make a judgement about what anything means, but that's always an arbitrary assessment. You may associate being "rich" with positive outcomes, but that's your value, not life's.

The purpose is simply to experience as many things as possible. That's it. Don't try to read deeper than that or you might get confused.

Being rich is not necessarily a good thing, but I think that nearly everyone has the opportunity at least once in their lives. The problem is most are not aware of it at that time and let it pass them by. Such opportunities are only recognized in hindsight. If we want to become rich, we have to expose ourselves to good opportunities and take them when they come by.