The self-made man
92 points by dkoch 10 years ago | 86 comments- calinet6 10 years agoAside from the political discussion bound to happen here, I was surprised and happy to see the story of Hilltop highlighted. I used to buy filet mignon there for $7 a pound back in 2009 when I was living in Chelsea, as a recent migrant from California. I was very sad when it closed, and never knew the story.
It highlights a more general point: we, as humans, have a profound attribution bias. It's psychological. We tend to attribute success to our own individual characteristics, actions, and free will. Americans significantly more so.[http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2786780?uid=2&uid=4&si...]
This would be fine, if it were true; however this attribution bias causes a significant departure from reality. When people succeed, we tend to focus on their personal attributes and actions, instead of looking at the situation surrounding them. When we do that, we tend to think of them as "rising above their situation," or "using their advantages well." We like to think we can do the same, but it is truly a kind of collective delusion.
We have to recognize that this is simply fantasy. It's not backed up by truth. Statistics says much the opposite: that most people who try will fail, and that people will be significantly burdened by failure, and that people who have failed or succeeded are extremely affected by external effects; that most successes are the result of both individual and significant historical and contextual factors. Externalities are more important than we want to believe. They're not everything, but they deserve much, much more attention than they get, which is often nil.
We would be a different kind of society were we to match our perception of success and failure with the reality of that success or failure. We don't have to give up our sense of individualism and the respect for personal growth and contribution; we just need to back it up with a recognition of the surrounding factors that are extremely real and highly influential on all our lives. I know we would be a better society if we did.
- hcarvalhoalves 10 years agoI think you're right, but it's equal parts being prepared to when the opportunity arise and purposefully putting yourself in situations that increase your odds.
E.g., nobody ever got laid staying at home, no matter how pretty, nice, rich or lucky.
- calinet6 10 years agoI'll repeat this again even though I posted it below, because the analogy is so applicable, and I like having thought of it so well:
A wire is connected to the electricity, which powers the bulb. The bulb cannot light without the electricity, and it cannot light without the wire. Is the success of the bulb attributable to the wire, or the outlet?
- ghostwriter 10 years agoThe success of the bulb is the result of (and to the extend of) its internal design. Change the bulb to a cork and you'll never see the light, whatever wires and outlets you have for it.
- foolrush 10 years agoA pleasant side effect of this analogy is that it calls into question the notion of “success”.
Framed ideology.
- hcarvalhoalves 10 years agoThe success is attributed to synergy :)
- ghostwriter 10 years ago
- calinet6 10 years ago
- jeffreyrogers 10 years ago> We would be a different kind of society were we to match our perception of success and failure with the reality of that success or failure. We don't have to give up our sense of individualism and the respect for personal growth and contribution; we just need to back it up with a recognition of the surrounding factors that are extremely real and highly influential on all our lives. I know we would be a better society if we did.
This is a really good point, and it's something I've been thinking about lately too. Fortunately, I've seen a growing appreciation for the role luck and circumstance has in people's success, particularly with regard to educational opportunities and social class, so hopefully this is starting to change.
- calinet6 10 years agoI agree, I too have seen signs of respect for externalities more and more. I think it's getting very difficult to ignore in light of the increasingly obvious wealth and opportunity gap in this country.
- briandear 10 years agoThe opportunity gap is a myth. The real problem is cultural. Too many people believe themselves victims and act accordingly. There is certainly a very low probability of a poor person becoming a millionaire, but there are plenty of people who could go from poor to middle class if they made better decisions. For example, the poor too often gets caught up in the bread and circuses aspects to their own detriment. Do a survey of public housing projects and find out how many people have cable TV. It isn't about the monetary cost of that cable TV but it's a question of the opportunity cost. If someone were to spend two hours watching TV each day (actually a very low number) or if that person were to spend two hours at the public library learning something (for example learning basic coding) then in perhaps a year they might be able to find an entry level tech job. And, with the $30-60 per month they're saving from giving up TV, they could buy a cheap Linux box to start doing some coding on ODesk or eLancr, etc. in fact, most TVs cost as much as a low cost computer. Yet, time and time again you have poor people who can tell you everything about the Kardashians and nothing about HTML. I am not suggesting everyone should be a coder, but as an example it demonstrates a problem of priorities. Barely 8 years ago, I was dead broke, even living in my car for several months. My parents didn't go to college -- we weren't in poverty, however if would have been easy to just follow the path of the lower middle class. Instead, I'm now a software engineer and sometimes entrepreneur making over $200k per year. I make more in a year than my dad made in almost 6 years! I am not special -- anyone who is motivated can do it. The problem is that there is a culture of dependency among much of the poor. Effectively, our society has turned the poor into a bunch of children. Contrast that to the poor in China where entrepreneurism rather than dependency is the norm. American society enables the poor. Our War on Poverty has resulted in no change to poverty rates. Perhaps it's time to stop blaming the rich and start blaming leftist politicians who gain their power from a dependent underclass.
- briandear 10 years ago
- calinet6 10 years ago
- dkokelley 10 years agoWould you say this is true for most cases of success, or primarily for extreme cases of success? I can imagine that winning the "startup lottery" has much to do with fortunate market timing and circumstances, but can the same be said of a small business owner, CPA partner, doctor, etc.?
- calinet6 10 years agoI'd say it is true for most success in this complex market.
It's not a matter of whether success is attributed to the individual or to the situation; it's both.
A wire is connected to the electricity, which powers the bulb. The bulb cannot light without the electricity, and it cannot light without the wire. Is the success of the bulb attributable to the wire, or the outlet?
- calinet6 10 years ago
- hcarvalhoalves 10 years ago
- lukifer 10 years agoHumans have a problem with complexity and compound causality in general; any person who succeeds does so by some combination of both individual grit, and support from society and loved ones (even if indirectly), regardless of what the proportions happen to be (if one could even measure such a thing). Thinking that success must derive exclusively from either society or the individual is sheer absurdity, driven by a need to impose an idealized narrative upon messy reality.
- spindritf 10 years agoany person who succeeds does so by some combination of both individual grit, and support from society and loved ones
And genetics, and the general culture, and luck, which is just a word we use for many factors we can't even name yet mixed with true randomness. And then there's a fair bit of interplay between all the factors.
Why do some people work 60 hours a week when others barely crack 10? That "grit" doesn't come from nowhere.
And surely there are more fundamental reasons for why some societies at some times are more supportive, or more successful, or richer, or saner, than others.
- rayiner 10 years agoI work 60 hours a week because I was fortunate enough to be born with aptitudes that cause employers to want to pay me a lot of money for those hours. If my employers were fighting to keep me under 30 hours so they wouldn't have to pay benefits, and to pay $7.50 for each incremental hour, with zero upward mobility, my incentive to work those hours would vanish.
Moreover, you shouldn't get credit for genetics. That's not a product of your exercise of free will.
- spindritf 10 years agoyou shouldn't get credit for genetics
Why not? Seems like a completely arbitrary standard. And pretty hard on everyone else. Are you not viscerally impressed by beautiful women, high IQ speakers, and so on?
Even if you somehow get people to agree, and at least partially implement it, how can you credit anything then? Is there a human quality we care about not heavily influenced by genetics?
How do you disentangle von Neumann's ability from his achievements? How do you discount Brigitte Bardot's beauty or Michael Jordan's height?
- spindritf 10 years ago
- rokhayakebe 10 years agoWhy do some people work 60 hours a week when others barely crack 10? That "grit" doesn't come from nowhere.
Are you suggesting the people "cracking" only 10 lack the ability to work 60 hours weekly?
- danielweber 10 years agoI'm not sure what you are asking, but I directly observe that, when presented with the choice between doing something hard that pays off a lot, or doing something easy that pays off little or not at all, that there are a bunch of people in the first camp and a bunch in the second camp.
This doesn't strictly break down by SES, either, although there are certainly trends.
You can come up with all sorts of reasons for the second camp's behavior, and many of those reasons are likely true for some subset of that camp. But at some point you have to recognize people's agency in their own behavior, or else they are just children in your eyes.
- danielweber 10 years ago
- rayiner 10 years ago
- foolrush 10 years ago“Thinking that success must derive exclusively from either society or the individual is sheer absurdity, driven by a need to impose an idealized narrative upon messy reality.”
Very astute postmodern summation.
The only thing missing in this is the possibility that the myths of narrative (male hero), constancy (see genetics and scientism), etc. are all driven by ideology. In particular, capitalist ideology; the value of capital is predicated on foundational ideology. “Made man” for example, reinforces individual capital ownership as opposed to cultural byproduct.
A counterpoint might be other cultures with an Eastern religion based view chance / fortune as having a greater and more culturally secured role in the lives of an individual.
- ap22213 10 years agoIt's pretty easy to see the effects of this if we compare the number of successful people from rich countries to the number of successful people from the other several billion people in the world. Where one is born and in which family is hugely (if not primarily) important.
I'm from the US, and I've seen quite a few highly intelligent and hard-working (but poor) people end up as heroin dealers or working odd jobs, with no steady employment. Conversely, I've seen relatively mediocre people, born to wealthy families, succeed wildly. And, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's seen this.
It's something to think about in a world where around 2400 billionaires (~0.000033% of the population) own ~7% of the world's wealth.
- calinet6 10 years agoHowever, the public discourse and political narrative is decidedly in the individualistic camp, aligning more on the side of what people want to believe, rather than what is true.
This allows those with power to take advantage of the situation to a large degree.
It is there that the wishy-washy reductionist argument of 'the world is complex' ceases to be useful (not saying you're making that argument, but it often comes up). We need to push the world a little more to one side; a little more toward the balance point of this messy reality, with full recognition and respect for that complexity.
- 300bps 10 years agoYet there are some people that work 60 hours per week and some that choose to not work at all. The people in the first camp are typically more successful than people in the second camp. Articles like the OP discount their efforts and accomplishments completely.
- seren 10 years agoI certainly does not work as hard as the cleaning lady getting up at 5 am to clean my desk. I just sit there typing lightly on my ergonomic keyboard, in my air-conditioned office and in the end, I will probably end better off, even though she might have crossed a deadly desert to come here and won't see her relatives for a long time. I just have the chance of being born around.
Hard work == success, is probably a variation of the just world bias [0]. It provides a reassuring and motivating narrative, but in the end, it is quite simplistic. I am not saying that hard work is not a necessary condition, but it is far from being sufficient.
Another example : with all the discussions about European debt, it has been reported multiple times that on average Greeks were working much longer that Germans. It does not do them much good.
- rayiner 10 years ago> I certainly does not work as hard as the cleaning lady getting up at 5 am to clean my desk
No kidding. I was in the office at 10 pm the other night, and the cleaning guy came around to empty the trash cans. He's like "man, still here at 10?" And I'm thinking "well so are you."
- rayiner 10 years ago
- jmclean 10 years agoI think part of the reason this conversation is valuable, though, is that the inverse omission is far more dominant in the cultural conversation right now. It's certainly mostly true that hard work plays an important part in fantastic success. But it's equally true that even in those cases, the majority enjoyed advantages that are often invisible even to them.
So to be sure, the opposite extreme is just as ridiculous as suggesting that every person exists in a bubble where their effort correlates exactly with outcome. But when the awareness of systemic advantage is absent (as it certainly is), I see staking out a far extreme opinion like this as a challenge to find a more reasonable center.
- TheOtherHobbes 10 years agoThe work ethic narrative is immensely useful to employers, but in too many situations it's almost totally disconnected from real opportunity and reward.
Ultimately it's a political problem - but not necessarily in the obvious sense.
The most successful and fun cultures reward inventiveness and positive social contributions, and include some element of challenge and competition.
But using money and markets to make decisions about the kinds of activities that are rewarded turns out to be an inefficient, short-sighted and often surreal way to manage what does and doesn't get valued.
- TheOtherHobbes 10 years ago
- 10 years ago
- seren 10 years ago
- spindritf 10 years ago
- twoodfin 10 years agoI'm pretty skeptical of the study on which this essay bases its premise that economic mobility in the U.S. is limited compared to, say, France. The most detailed information I can find online is the executive summary[1], which has to handwave that it found Italy with a strongly negative correlation between parents' and children's economic outcomes! That suggests to me that their methodology is not particularly robust.
I've found similar attempts to establish parent/child economic correlation equally suspicious when, for example, they measure income correlation with percentiles rather than in adjusted dollars (it's much easier to be "mobile" if there's only $10K in income separating the 40th and 60th percentiles!)
[1] http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_as...
- TheOtherHobbes 10 years agoThe same results have been reported by many other studies. The facts are clear - for the poor the US is a land of economic handicap, not a land of opportunity.
There will always be individual exceptions to this, but they'll be single data points. Put crudely, for every heart-warming success you see interviewed in Forbes, there will be millions of failures no one hears about.
The most useful picture is broad-based and statistical, and studies like this one:
http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/
show that mobility depends as much on where you were born as to whom you were born.
Broadly, inequality has exploded since the 1980s and in areas with limited social capital - including good free education - it's now more difficult than ever to work your way up from the bottom.
But this is balanced by increased opportunities in other areas - mostly affluent, mostly urban - which have created a halo effect for the poorer communities around them.
So average mobility has remained approximately constant, but only because bad areas have been balanced by good areas.
Meanwhile average mobility in the US continues to be worse than mobility in other countries.
- twoodfin 10 years agoMeanwhile average mobility in the US continues to be worse than mobility in other countries.
What's the best study you can find that demonstrates this? I haven't seen any that don't appear to succumb to the flaws I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, such as measuring relative mobility instead of absolute mobility.
- TheOtherHobbes 10 years agoWe should probably define terms first.
Which definitions of absolute and relative are you using? (There are a few, and they're not identical.)
- TheOtherHobbes 10 years ago
- twoodfin 10 years ago
- tehrania 10 years agoThat's the whole point of economic mobility, to measure it against income and inequality.
- twoodfin 10 years agoNo, that's not the point. A society with almost no income inequality, where everyone makes almost exactly the same amount, would have nearly perfect "mobility" as measured by the correlation between the percentile of parent and child earnings (a few random dollars would move you a lot!). But it wouldn't be a "mobile" society in the sense we usually mean, where the poor can become rich (and vice versa) because there would be no poor and no rich!
- kcorbitt 10 years agoIt depends on what you're trying to measure by "economic mobility" though. I can think of valid reasons to want to know the percentile change between a person and their parents, irrespective of the absolute value difference, and reasons to be interested in the different-but-related measure of absolute change in income/quality of life.
It's generally better to start with the question "what do I want to know?" and then looking for a suitable statistical framework that will answer that question, rather than starting with a ready-made statistical analysis and then trying to use it to answer arbitrary questions.
- watwut 10 years agoMobility is about moving between classes of society. So, the society you just described would be rightfully described as having high social mobility. What it probably does not have is high average wealth.
- kcorbitt 10 years ago
- twoodfin 10 years ago
- TheOtherHobbes 10 years ago
- nateabele 10 years ago> "Or is it more like a mass delusion keeping us from confronting the fact that poor Americans tend to remain poor Americans, regardless of how hard they work?"
The language used here is interesting. Wasn't the labor theory of value thrown out a while ago?
- justintocci 10 years agoyeah but I'm always struck by how many successful people started out through some criminal act. Andrew Carnegie apparently committed fraud to get his start. That was a new one to me.