[brooklyn_ashey]

I'm glad someone said it. Merit= very short bootstraps. This is a much denied truth here in the US, where everyone is so desperate to believe in our national mythology of anyone who works hard can do anything and be anything they want to. This myth can't even carry an aroma of truth these days. No one who has "achieved" anything ever wants to get real and admit how they really got it--- they'd rather tell you and themselves a great American tall tale. Becase if it isn't earned, if it isn't "merit" in any real sense, then what? Then does everyone have a right to opportunity? Yeikes. We don't have enough opportunity for that. Instead, we avoid facing these issues by focusing on "diversity" now... but only a certain very narrow definition of diversity, and only when we want to raise ourselves above others of merit for being so meritorious as to think of diversity. Then, we wonder if "diversity" has made us less competitive. The only answer here is money. Money. That's it.

[Clubber]

I absolutely agree with what you are saying, but I also believe most hugely successful people who work, work (or worked early in their careers) just as hard as anyone else, they just happen to be working at the right thing with the right people. Of course once you are successful, you can hire people to do most of the work for you while you just monitor.

Finding the right thing with the right people is where the socioeconomic status comes in, particularly having a well connected family.

On my graduation year, my university created a slogan, "It's not what you know, it's who you know." Having just spend 5 years getting a degree from said university, I thought that wasn't a very good slogan for such an institution. It was absolutely correct though.

[scottLobster]

Bill Fernandez (Apple Employee #4) did a nice interview last year where he talked about (among other things) the origins of Apple. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca-LXxMpveE

In it he talks about how Steve Jobs and company were just immersed in a technological community from a young age. They had after-school tech clubs (that the kids actually wanted to go to) as early as elementary school, virtually every Dad on the street was an engineer... yeah, no shit they created Apple. Not discounting the skills of Jobs and Woz, but they had about the most fertile soil possible in which to grow a tech company and a network of contacts from childhood. Listening to that piece made me insanely jealous. Would have killed for that kind of community as a kid.

[briandear]

You are wrong, at least in some sense.

I was teaching English in China making about $800 per month. I wanted to build an application and had no experience and certainly no money. I went to school for Journalism and have zero family money or connections.

I bought Agile Web Development with Rails. I spent the next year or so trying to learn while working an ultra low pay job with almost a dial up connection.

I applied for an accelerator with my terrible app, got accepted, ultimately didn’t raise any money but I did end up with a junior engineer job. Which led to another, then another until finally here I am, I still work contract jobs but finally that terrible app is actually good and generating real money.

I own a house now. I get paid more in a month than I would make in 18 months teaching in China.

I didn’t go to a bootcamp, I didn’t go to Stanford and I have never raised investment money.

How I really got it? I worked very hard. Studied cheap books, reached out to experienced developers I tracked town through sheer force of will.

By most definitions, I am successful however that success might not have yet resulted in a million dollar pay day but life is pretty food.

Another story, the founder of the Gringos restaurant chain in Houston, literally started as a dishwasher and now he flies in a private jet and gives millions to charity. And before someone declares “white privilege” or some other nonsense – he’s brown.

Another kid I knew was a minimum wage bar-back at a nice Houston bar. 5 years later, he owned the place.

Look at Asian immigrants to the US, plenty of stories of first generation immigrants that speak not a word of English and arrived in the US with $500 and now they’re sending their kids to Harvard.

How many Algerian immigrant kids are in France’s elite schools? Probably close to zero.

There are tens of thousands of stories like that.

You rarely hear about rags to riches in Europe.

While the US doesn’t have a monopoly on success stories, the American dream os far from a myth. It is literally there for the taking. Look at the Apple story, Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet. How many self-made billionaires are there in Europe? How many self-made millionaires even?

Nothing is stopping a poor guy with a squeegee and a bottle of Windex from creating a window washing empire – if he’s willing to dream that big. Good luck doing that in most other countries – they’d crush him with taxes and regulations before he could even afford to buy his first truck or hire his first employee.

In Europe, starting or growing a business is only for the rich or privileged generally. In America, anyone can do it; but not everyone wants to put in the sweat and hours to actually execute.