[ItendToDisagree]

I get that feeling as well. There seem to be a lot of people responding to these types of articles who have 'stars in their eyes' and think that they'll be able to join the 'old boys club' if they just work hard enough, or get lucky enough (though some also seem to deny that luck has anything to do with success which baffles me).

The reverence for the wealthy in America really is a whole other weird thing. America doesn't have the history (in time span) to really have many historical heros other than those who were wealthy enough to 'do things' so we have to make due with what we've got.

That is not to say that a great deal of any given place's heros of the past were not also wealthy in their time though.

[blumkvist]

Luck?

Luck is invented to be an excuse for the feeble minded.

There is no luck involved in getting rich. If you want to get rich you have to 1) work hard 2) be smart 3) be unscrupulous.

The 3rd dependency is often misunderstood and the results of it are attributed to "luck".

[tragic]

Yes, Paris Hilton had to put in a lot of hard, astute and unscrupulous work to get those parents of hers.

In a past life, presumably.

[blumkvist]

Your comment just proves my point - people refuse to face the reality and would rather come up with excuses, exceptions and other self-deceptions, than admit they don't have what it takes.

And for the record, Paris Hilton did not get rich. She was born rich.

[tragic]

Oh, I'm happy to admit I don't have what it takes, according to your little calculus. I'm lazy. I'm smart, but not that smart. And I find it emotionally difficult to climb over other people's bodies to get to the cash money. But that's fine - a life of relative material comfort and intellectual stimulation is quite enough for me.

The point is, there are many people who do 'have what it takes' in those terms who will never, ever be rich. Are you seriously arguing that somebody with a comfortable Orange County upbringing has the same barriers to entry for riches, wealth and glory than somebody who assiduously grafts out a bare existence in some Rio slum?

> And for the record, Paris Hilton did not get rich. She was born rich.

Alas, now you have conceded the principle, and we can negotiate over the price. Paris Hilton was 'born rich'; what about, say, the child of a family wealthy enough to afford a private education? Who got preferential treatment in an Ivy League admissions process because they were born to an alumnus? Whose uncle got them an internship at some bank?

[blumkvist]

>But that's fine - a life of relative material comfort and intellectual stimulation is quite enough for me.

No arguing there. I never said everyone should aim to be a millionaire. I just find self-deception amusing and sometimes even irritating. Perhaps because I fall for the same self-preservation techniques in different context at times.

[druiid]

So she was born rich. You might even say... she was born lucky.

[blumkvist]

She was fortunate, not lucky.

Luck is the (favorable) interconnecting of previously unrelated happenings. People use it instead of "chance". The thing is, you can improve your chances with your actions, thus improve your "luck". The majority of people though, conveniently believe that luck is what happens to you, and some people are just "lucky" and things happen for them.

That may be true for a very small number of people (who won the lottery), the rest of the "lucky" bunch were fortunate because of outside factors, or stacked the deck in their favor.

[tragic]

OK, so we've gone from

> Luck is invented to be an excuse for the feeble minded.

> There is no luck involved in getting rich. If you want to get rich you have to 1) work hard 2) be smart 3) be unscrupulous.

...to drawing a fatuous semantic distinction between luck and good fortune, on the basis that luck is pseudo-random, and good fortune is not ... when the whole point that you're ducking is precisely that the advantages of the economic elite are not random at all, but pretty easy to define and empirically measure.

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to defend a position that is nutso bonkers.

EDIT: fixed the paraphrase