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Obtaining wealth is mostly timing/luck.

There are plenty of hard working, well disciplined, intelligent poor people. There are plenty of lazy, stupid rich people. There's virtually no correlation between any of the things you named and wealth.

The question then becomes how much should a lucky person be "rewarded," or how much should an unlucky person be "punished." A lot of people feel that being unlucky shouldn't mean living in perpetual debt, for example, or going bankrupt because you broke a leg.

A lot of people feel that our society could gain a lot by helping those unlucky people rise to their potential.




Where's your source for all these assertions?


Well using IQ as a proxy for intelligence, you can find many sources that say there's no significant correlation between IQ and wealth (https://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/intlwlth.htm).

Many studies find that your parents' wealth is the single greatest influencer of your wealth (http://www.umass.edu/preferen/gintis/intergen.pdf).

I would say that who your parents are is about as "lucky" a thing could be, considering it's totally independent of who you are or decisions you make.

My only other assertions being that smart poor people and dumb rich people exist? I hope that's self-evident to anyone on this board...




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