I propose Success = Hard Work * Opportunity^2. That is to say that hard work without opportunity equals nothing and opportunity without work equals nothing. But work and opportunity do not have a linear relationship, a bit more opportunity can greatly leverage a bit of extra work. Big opportunities practically become self-fulfilling. Just look at all the poor students who became president. Their lack of work in school couldn't hold them back from their massive opportunities.
I guarantee you are not working harder at tech than many, many minimum wage workers.
Having done both tech and minimum wage, the difference is that I can do the minimum wage job and they couldn't do mine. Minimum wage jobs often use humans as robots, and most humans can move around in relatively complex ways all days - that's what our brain evolved to do. I can do it, the minimum wage workers can do it. On the other hand most people can't write code. I'm not confident that most of the people that I worked with could be taught to.
I don't know if this is thanks to my genes, my brain, my education, my parents, or something else; and that's certainly not something I hold against them. I don't consider myself better than them because of that. But the reality is that most tech workers could hold minimum wage jobs, while the opposite isn't true.
I guess that it's a really good illustration of your "Success = Hard Work * Opportunity^2". Even if my ex-collegues work harder than me, by having more opportunities than them I can easily earn more/have better jobs.
> the difference is that I can do the minimum wage job and they couldn't do mine
[citation needed]
A lot of low-wage work is skilled physical labor. I for one would need months to years of physical training before I would be strong enough to perform many of those jobs, and then it would take me months to years of practice before I could do them efficiently and effectively.
If you were to give a day laborer the same amount of time to learn to code, they might be a pretty competent developer.
I was able to be productive in a day at McDonald's. At the joints factory, in an hour for my main task, and 5-10 minutes for the others. I think skilled physical labor (plumbing for example) is usually very well paid (I live in France so maybe that's the cause?). Do you have examples of skilled physical labor which is still minimum wage?
Your argument about physical fitness and "mental" fitness makes sense though, that's something I didn't consider. Thanks for the insight.
I think this is an important point, and one that is rarely discussed. We've seen our economy shift to one where the highest paid jobs are those that are based predominantly on knowledge (doctor, lawyer, engineer, and also licensed trades like plumber, electrician, etc.). Knowledge is something anyone can attain, but some people gain knowledge easier than others... we generally refer to that ability to gain and retain knowledge as intelligence. There's a huge cliff, rather than a progression, between menial low-skilled jobs and high-skill jobs, where before there was a much more progressive increase in income. This has had numerous impacts on society, such as creating the K-shaped recovery coming out of 2020, and the vastly different outcomes for unemployment across socioeconomic lines.
Intelligence is on a bell curve, flatter for men, more rounded for women, but nonetheless has a relatively normal distribution, and the types of work that are most well-rewarded in society are shifting right-wards (towards higher IQ individuals) along that distribution. It's a simple fact that our economy is shifting in such a way that the average person no longer has the same opportunities for success that the average person had 20-30 years ago. We don't know all the reasons why someone might have higher intelligence than someone else, whether it's genetic, or a factor of their home life, or some other psychological trigger that happens in childhood. But it's a simple fact, at this point, that higher IQ people are likely to have higher earning outcomes in our current economy. It's not just that opportunity is a multiplicative factor (as others have mentioned), it's that you must have the capabilities to capitalize on an opportunity and turn it into a successful outcome.
Probably many of those minimum wage workers have the necessary intelligence to do more complex knowledge-based work that is more richly rewarded, but many of them do not, and they are being left behind as our economy changes. One of the last great jobs for people who are of average intelligence to have meaningful economic mobility is going to be eliminated by automation within the next 20-30 years (OTR trucking), and within the same time span our society will have no choice but to wrestle with the reality we've created. I think it's obvious at this point that our socioeconomic structure does not work well for everyone, but that changing it to work better for those left behind will artificially hinder technological and social advancement for all. This is one of the reasons I think UBI is likely to be the path forward for society in the future. Everyone deserves basic human dignity and the needs met to support that dignity, and our continued increases in productivity through technology make it possible to allow for that even as there is no longer meaningful work for large swathes of the population.
I agree with most of the points you made, however:
> Knowledge is something anyone can attain
I don't agree with this. I don't have a proof for this, but I think this is the kind of thinking that can trap people (and society) in the mindset of "they should work more" or something. Where I live (France), people with disabilities can get money from the state because they're considered "unfit for work". This doesn't mean that they can't and shouldn't work, but that compared to the average person, working for them is harder so we try to make life easier for them, to compensate. I think something like that for "intelligence" could be nice (although I wouldn't know how to measure it).
We already have something that looks like UBI in France (RSA) but it's not really universal. For example, I don't benefit from it because I work. Students also don't get it. I like the idea of UBI though, not having to work to live is appealing to me in principle.
So many stories and personal examples of parents pushing their kids into good positions without kids having to do any work at all. Or just friends pulling friends in their firms into cushy positions. No hard work in sight but pure opportunity.
Opportunity is the prerequisite for success, not hard work.
Personally, I think there's a Luck component separate from Opportunity that needs to be factored as well. You can start with a great opportunity and get absolutely destroyed or outlandishly rewarded by bad or good luck separate from anything you do (ex. COVID destroys one kind of business while pushing another through the roof). Something like...
This equation's better but you need to factor in "starting point" as another poster put it. Consider person A and B, with the same hard work, opportunity, and luck. If person A starts out with a $10M trust fund, he will have more success.
Success = (Hard Work + Head Start) * Opportunity^2 * Luck
I would personally lump both head start and luck into opportunity. Opportunity can come from many things. It basically just means an open door instead of a locked door. I think it encompass all environmental factors such as class, education, upbringing, genetic lottery, connections, support network, citizenship, gender, ethnicity, economy, unsolved problems, unaddressed needs and on and on.
I guarantee you are not working harder at tech than many, many minimum wage workers.