It feels like one's opinion on this is fundamental. The way people respond to it seems more like built-in bias rather than reasoning by logic. For example, I believe I disagree with you at a premise level rather than a reasoning level. The evidence that working hard helps you get ahead is legion. The evidence that having connections helps you get ahead is legion. Who is right?
I've always thought that you got ahead by hard work, even while I spent most of my life being lazy. I didn't turn in home work or pay attention in high school; I couldn't afford college because I wasn't a protected class (unlike my best friend) and my parents simultaneously made too much money and had too many kids to pay it; and I scraped by as an adult, always being able to declare exempt on my taxes. But I knew that if I had really wanted to, I could have done something. Even the college thing was just an excuse.
Finally, when I was 25 I decided to work really hard. Within a couple years I was able to get a programming job, and a couple years after that I was making 90k. You can say all day long that it's an anecdote, but seriously, the only luck involved is superficial. If it hadn't been those "lucky" events, it would have been some other ones.
I had no connections. I hardly had any friends! My parents didn't help. They wouldn't even let me stay with them while I tried to make something of myself! Hard to say that it's just an anecdote when you lived it.
Finally, whenever this issue of how we measure economic mobility comes up on HN, I object. What is the ideal mobility from the bottom quintile to the top quintile, anyway? Genes matter. Parenting matters. Those two things matter way more than anything government has been shown able to do. It is absolutely possible to imagine a society, one with a lot of interventionist and redistributionist policies, where economic mobility is higher because it is more arbitrary rather than merit-based. How far are we willing to take economic mobility? Parents matter more than schools. Should we redistribute children to different parents?
The funny thing is that you seem to think you've achieved something significant with your work. Even if it was 3x, 270k, it's small potatoes. Value accrues most to those who can insert themselves at a nexus where a lot of money flows, where siphoning off a small percentage adds up to a large absolute gain. Typically, it's through getting other people to work for you, or owning a lot of capital, or selling large quantities of something that has low marginal costs.
TL;DR: the way you crack the 1% or 0.01% is not by working hard, but by getting other people to work hard. Which may or may not be hard work. Whatever the case may be, merit has little to do with it; it's all about scarce resources in high demand, which is a metric free of moral values.
I am a fan of the idea of working smarter, rather than harder. Sure, when you are starting out in an endeavor, shit work is pretty much where you cut your teeth. For example, as a programmer, cleaning up other peoples' messes. It's also good experience in that it lets you see other peoples' mistakes and gives you an opportunity to see how to avoid them.
But I've watched a lot of people do shit work, and even work hard doing shit work. Working hard may be necessary but it falls far short of sufficient. Those who have merit approach the shit work as a way of looking for problems to fix, as a way of finding what can be done to reduce the level of shit, and so forth. Those who do not just keep shovelling away.
I'd suggest that finding the right connections is often a matter of demonstrating to the right people that you fit in the former category.
>I've always thought that you got ahead by hard work,
One gets ahead by providing things of value that others are willing to pay for. You can work hard at digging a hole and filling it back in again, but since that has no value for others, you won't get ahead no matter how hard you work at that. You can also work very little and get ahead if you are very good at creating things others value.
I.e. hard work is neither necessary nor sufficient in order to get ahead. It's being able to provide something that others value that matters.
>hard work is neither necessary nor sufficient in order to get ahead. It's being able to provide something that others value that matters.
While nominally true, this falls apart in the real world. Creating value is great, but if you aren't working hard at it then you will likely be outcompeted by someone who creates similar value per work unit, but works much harder than you. There are caveats and exceptions to this, but one cannot take the statement "hard work is not a necessary condition" to mean anything other than "hard work is a necessary condition" if one is to have any expectation of success.
I'm in a similar situation to you - dropped out of school, worked dead-end jobs for years, then suddenly "decided" to turn it around and have a career, and mostly just talked my way into a series of larger and larger successes. And I've met a few other people who've followed this path.
But I have friends my age who just can't pull this off. There doesn't seem to be any particular reason, but they just keep failing to find anything but the most soul-crushing low-paying jobs. I can't find anything that they're doing that's different than what I was doing - and some of them have nice college and graduate degrees, even.
And, somehow, there's a correlation with the income level of each of our parents. It's as if it's just easier for some of us to navigate the economy, if we've had good examples of how to do it.
So I guess I agree with you, even though I could have sworn I was trying to write a rebuttal.
"""The evidence that working hard helps you get ahead is legion. The evidence that having connections helps you get ahead is legion. Who is right?"""
Actually, the evidence that "working hard helps you get ahead" is not that much. Mostly correlation based on some people that got ahead in other ways (parents, environment, education, connections, chances, etc) but also work hard.
The counter-evidence though is enormous. Hundreds of millions of hard working people never get anywhere.
We just keep in our mind that CEO X that works 16 hours a day doing CEO work is a "hard working man", while we forget the millions pour sods doing real hard labor for the same amount of days...
I've always thought that you got ahead by hard work, even while I spent most of my life being lazy. I didn't turn in home work or pay attention in high school; I couldn't afford college because I wasn't a protected class (unlike my best friend) and my parents simultaneously made too much money and had too many kids to pay it; and I scraped by as an adult, always being able to declare exempt on my taxes. But I knew that if I had really wanted to, I could have done something. Even the college thing was just an excuse.
Finally, when I was 25 I decided to work really hard. Within a couple years I was able to get a programming job, and a couple years after that I was making 90k. You can say all day long that it's an anecdote, but seriously, the only luck involved is superficial. If it hadn't been those "lucky" events, it would have been some other ones.
I had no connections. I hardly had any friends! My parents didn't help. They wouldn't even let me stay with them while I tried to make something of myself! Hard to say that it's just an anecdote when you lived it.
Finally, whenever this issue of how we measure economic mobility comes up on HN, I object. What is the ideal mobility from the bottom quintile to the top quintile, anyway? Genes matter. Parenting matters. Those two things matter way more than anything government has been shown able to do. It is absolutely possible to imagine a society, one with a lot of interventionist and redistributionist policies, where economic mobility is higher because it is more arbitrary rather than merit-based. How far are we willing to take economic mobility? Parents matter more than schools. Should we redistribute children to different parents?