Surely almost everyone realises by adulthood that the real answer is that most people just aren't trying to be rich? It's not the actual goal of the vast majority of people.

If everyone were trying to maximise their own wealth, we would have no nurses, no-one would be a firefighter, no-one would be police, no-one would work in the military, etc etc. Vast swathes of jobs would have unfillable vacancies because everyone would work them for at most a couple of years whilst living out of their car or similar in order to save, then they'd be hustling and trying to start their own business or get a job in finance or whatever.

I have a fairly solid academic background, and of my cohort, less than half, maybe even under 25%, went into traditionally well paying fields.

Most are more interested in driving academia forward or generally on other social goals as long as they have enough to pay for the house and car. There is nothing wrong with that at all.

> The most successful people

For some value of "success" that doesn't include whatever Findus and Pettson are doing here: https://littlefinland.de/8487-large_default/pettson-and-find...

The paper: [1]

(While it's nice to have a model, "fortune" has been synonymous with "luck" and "wealth" since Roman times [2], so it's not exactly a new concept)

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.04237

[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fortuna#Latin

> The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some people work more hours than average and some work less, but nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else.

If we instead look at the effectiveness of the output then there can be massive disparities.

Einstein thinking about relativity vs me digging a hole to China.

Einstein is working the same hours but the output is 9999999x more valuable.

1. It isn't at all the direction the article is going, but there is an argument that the smartest among us do things like swear vows of poverty. Optimising for wealth isn't all that obvious, especially given that the difference between 10 million and 10 billion is mostly about how you influence society than what outcomes are personally experienced.

2. More on the subject of the article, the simulation is probably good but the conclusions being drawn are not as robust as they might appear. For the sake of argument, lets say that this simulation outcomes align perfectly with reality. That doesn't conclusively demonstrate that wealth is random with respect to people's decisions and abilities. The random events in the simulation might be driven by people's preferences, abilities and habits (hereafter, "skills") which are themselves randomly distributed.

For example, lets say that everyone encounters an opportunity to become a billionaire at a perfectly constant rate of 1 opportunity/year [0] and the probability we can capitalise on it with our skills is normally distributed (ditto for ruinous events). That would be indistinguishable in outcomes from random lucky events that are normally distributed, even though in reality our skills are actually playing a huge role. That is to say: reality can be perfectly aligned with the simulation even if the assumptions of the simulation are different from the realities of reality.

In the real world it is probably a mix of both. There is certainly luck involved in becoming absurdly wealthy, but there is a also an element of skill that shines through in some people who seem to have a miraculous ability to make their own luck. I've met a few of the inverse who it would take much more than luck for them to get wealthy, there are people who fumble their chances.

[0] Picking an absurdly high rate for the sake of argument.

That website had three popups before I could read the article and another one that appeared across the bottom. Two cookie-related popups, and two others. I almost lost patience and just closed the tab. And MIT Technology review is kind of something you'd expect to be just a little bit more ... serious?

How can this be good design? No, forget that: how is this even acceptable design? Now I will remember the experience for at least a few weeks and avoid clicking on anything that points to that site since I already know it is probably going to be a hassle.

Can someone explain the design decisions to me?

Oh, and if this comment seems irrelevant to the subject: see what I mean how annoying it is to have to wade through a bunch of nonsense before you get to the bits you actually care about?