Or they come from wealth. It does not require a massive inheritance to get ahead here - it requires enough to be exposed to the market, which most Americans don’t get.
The 10% above is to make this example clear and easy, not a specific asset class.
We can discuss to what extent people receive opportunities to gain significant personal income, but I strongly disagree that personal conduct and talent are the primary factor. The number one rule of the world is “people respond to incentives” - there are massive structural deltas in incentive landscape and opportunity exposure as a function of background. You can have amazing parents who do right by you, and grow up poor and stay poor for want of exposure to opportunities and the market.
Because year-over-year growth is runaway, time in the market is of extreme importance too. In a very real sense - every second you don’t have more assets in the market than the next person, they are pulling away from you in literally exponential manner.
A huge amount of it is society, and there’s a lot of light between “let’s try to make society better by preventing the gravity-like accumulation of capital entirely into a modern feudalist state” and “communist slavery”.
The 10% above is to make this example clear and easy, not a specific asset class.
We can discuss to what extent people receive opportunities to gain significant personal income, but I strongly disagree that personal conduct and talent are the primary factor. The number one rule of the world is “people respond to incentives” - there are massive structural deltas in incentive landscape and opportunity exposure as a function of background. You can have amazing parents who do right by you, and grow up poor and stay poor for want of exposure to opportunities and the market.
Because year-over-year growth is runaway, time in the market is of extreme importance too. In a very real sense - every second you don’t have more assets in the market than the next person, they are pulling away from you in literally exponential manner.
A huge amount of it is society, and there’s a lot of light between “let’s try to make society better by preventing the gravity-like accumulation of capital entirely into a modern feudalist state” and “communist slavery”.