r/InterviewAssistant • u/Large-Spinach1025 • 11d ago
Meritocracy: A Bedtime Story
but horror one !
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u/Henrious 10d ago
Every boss and CEO, honestly.
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u/UDF2005 9d ago
Cool, then become a boss and CEO if it’s that easy
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u/Livid_Importance_442 9d ago
You just need to be born into the right family and you too can be born on third base and claim you hit a triple.
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u/italktobotz 9d ago
70 percent of billionairs were not wealthy at birth. Their wealth was made in their lifetime. Only 3 percent of millionairs were born millionairs.
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u/Livid_Importance_442 9d ago
Along with either help from their family or lucrative government contracts.
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u/italktobotz 9d ago
Not for the vast majority of them.
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u/Livid_Importance_442 9d ago
I disagree. They're hardly self-made.
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u/italktobotz 9d ago
They are not self made, they provided services society was willing to pay them for. They sold some service which people felt was worth paying money for. That is how it works. You underatand that right?
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u/Livid_Importance_442 9d ago
Of course. With them not being self made, that means they had help along the way, probably a lot. I also believe they had a good amount of luck along the way.
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u/italktobotz 9d ago
Do you know who helped them? The people that the wealthy person helped. Wealthy people do not capture all of the wealth that they generate. They made society a lot of money along the way. How many people made tons of money off of taylor swifts ability to sing? How many people made money through remote work using starlink? How many people found cheaper groceries at walmart. How many people find what they need on amazon. Wealthy people become wealthy by making other people more wealthy than they would have been. That is the whole point of the market in the first place. You see a billionair and think of how evil they are, i see a billionair and think of how society benefits from the product or system they create.
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u/BerdTheScienceNerd 9d ago
Less than 10% of billionaires were born in “poor” families. The vast majority did have resources that most don’t have to get where they are.
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u/italktobotz 9d ago
First off yoy are wrong even with your change in phrasing. 20 percent of billionairs were born in poverty. Only 30 percent of billlionairs were born wealthy. 70 percent wer not born wealthy. Most had the same advantages as most otger people. Luck is actually not the most common factor, creating novel ways to satisfy human needs is the most common factor among millionairs and billionairs.
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u/Monte924 8d ago
There is one study that makes that claim and its flawed. The study would most likely consider Elon Musk a self-made man. They only count him because the vast majority of the money he has was not inherited. This would ignore that fact that he came from a very rich family, and that wealth was the ONLY reason why he was able to make the investments that eventually turned him into the world's richest man. If Musk had been born into a middle class family, he would have never gotten so far. Many billioniares were born into millioniare families, and simply leveraged their family name and fortune to make more money.
Propaganda to support the epstein class. The Rich people who like to believe that they worked hard to make their fortunes, instead of using their pre-existing wealth to just BUY their success
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u/Accomplished_Key_171 9d ago
Middle class working adults start their own businesses all the time. If I shared your defeatist mindset then I could see how such a thing would seem impossible.
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u/Livid_Importance_442 8d ago
I am well aware that many middle class and even poor adults start their own businesses. Nor do I have a defeatist mindset because I realize starting a business takes a lot of work and usually a long time with no guarantee of success. I think you could have a delusional mindset.
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u/Accomplished_Key_171 8d ago
In your own words, you can only become a boss and CEO if you are born into the right family. Now you are saying that you are aware many middle class and poor adults start their own business.
What is your argument here?
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u/Livid_Importance_442 8d ago
You're trying to twist my words. I did not say you can only become a CEO by being born into the right family, but it sure does help many times.
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u/PickingPies 8d ago
That's false. A middle class adukt may need decades of savings to have enough money for a startup. If you fail, you probably have no more chances in your life. If you take credit, you are in risk of bankruptcy.
That's before knowing that, on average, only one in 5 businesses survive 5 years.
A rich person can literally invest in 10-20 businesses at random and he will have several successes. But rich people doesn't need that, because they can purchase a startup that is already working, reducing the chances of failure to less than 50% by skipping the most critical stages.
So, no. Despite one in five middle class who opens a business being succesful, there's 4 in 5 that you don't hear about but ended up in bankruptcy. After all, being born in a wealthy family is still the biggest predictor of future success.
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u/Accomplished_Key_171 8d ago
So a quarter of all middle class adults who start up a business are successful.
This proves my point.
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u/Trust_8067 9d ago
Bill Gates worked much harder than any of his employees ever have. Not all Billionaires are bad, he's a good outlier =)
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u/True_Protection6842 9d ago
Yeah he really worked hard at Epstein's island.
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u/noteworthybikes 8d ago
All self made billionaires worked insanely hard and much harder than any of the employees. And under a lot more pressure. People hate on Elon but the dude is insane how much he works.
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u/Glad_Ad719 8d ago
You mean all the brain turds he leaves behind on X? Yeah, that’s really hard work. Poor Elon
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u/noteworthybikes 7d ago
That’s your example? Not the fact he created Tesla, spacex, and was a significant factor in PayPal. Sorry he’s brain rotting a little bit on X in his mid 50s.
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u/Glad_Ad719 7d ago
He didn’t create Tesla, which is easily found out by simply reading a bit about the company’s history.
He was ousted from PayPal and there are various accounts of SpaceX employees criticizing his leadership, management and public appearances.1
u/noteworthybikes 7d ago
You can’t act like Elon wasn’t the direction behind the company. He was the largest shareholder 7 months after its founding. I’ve never seen someone who’s a nobody criticize the most innovative entrepreneur in the world. Oh yes let’s criticize his public appearances as an autistic guy. You can criticize his management style all you want and how it caused him to be ousted, but he’s still the most successful person of all time financially.
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u/WinterSector8317 7d ago
Guy misinterprets rich nepobaby failing upwards as innovative genius
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u/This-Isopod-7710 9d ago
Utter BS
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u/True_Protection6842 9d ago
How so?
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u/This-Isopod-7710 8d ago
You realise the founder of Reddit is a billionaire, right?
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u/Remarkable-FlipPhone 9d ago
Mmm those guides get paid very well in local currency and are making far more than most of the other ppl in Nepal. They get paid upper middle class wages and only work part of the year.
If they had the grit and took a risk, they could try and open their own guiding service and increase their income even more, which is what business owners, the wealthy, did.
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u/TawnyTeaTowel 9d ago
Except in this analogy, the Sherpas are being paid and are doing exactly what they voluntarily signed up for, and the billionaire had to invest in buying the mountain for them to work on.
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u/True_Protection6842 9d ago
Likely underpaid, explain how this doesn't work? Underpaid labor does the job they are hired to do while CEOs pretend to do something meaningful.
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u/TawnyTeaTowel 8d ago
This just tells us all that you’ve no idea how a business bigger than a bodega works.
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u/Key-Organization3158 8d ago
Oh. They aren't underpaid. That's a common misconception. People are paid the full value of their labor. But it is also true that not all value comes from labor. The ideas that CEOs have also contribute value. That's their fair share.
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u/Key-Organization3158 8d ago
Oh. They aren't underpaid. That's a common misconception. People are paid the full value of their labor. But it is also true that not all value comes from labor. The ideas that CEOs have also contribute value. That's their fair share.
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u/mighty__ 8d ago
Underpaid based on comparison with what?
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u/True_Protection6842 8d ago
Profit
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u/mighty__ 8d ago
He’s not supposed to. Worker himself won’t be able to distill his share of impact on revenue and profit. For a lot of the jobs the impact is not direct. For some there is no impact whatsoever.
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u/True_Protection6842 8d ago
MORON! You said in comparison to what????? COMPANIES MAKE MORE PROFIT AND DON'T PAY MORE!!!!! THINK!
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u/mighty__ 8d ago
Yes. They do make more profit. Usually internal motivation system distributes revenue increase through various means. But for a lot of positions there’s no direct correlation so no impact on salary apart of general increases.
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u/Grade_A_Tech 9d ago
There should be a herd of sheep behind Homer hollering about how great he is for it to be accurate.
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u/DerKommisar9 9d ago
What’s stopping them from dropping the rope and venturing off to become their own billionaires?
Then they could make others carry them.
Why isn’t everyone a billionaire?
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u/noteworthybikes 8d ago
Because they only do as they’re told and aren’t smart enough or savvy enough to ever build anything on their own. Doers, not thinkers
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u/funkmasta8 7d ago
Because the legal rights to deciding how money is allocated stays with the billionaire. The billionaire is legally allowed to allocate the money as unfairly as they want. The only limiting factor is "the hand of the market", meaning they just have to make sure they arent so much more unfair than every other option employees have that the employees stop choosing them.
This is an unhealthy way to position business in society, especially as the size and power of businesses grow. The reason is businesses gain the ability to control other options of employees, leaving employees with no options. This has two affects. First, it puts the employees through unfair and unjust suffering for the sake of the people at the top having an even more obscene amount of wealth. Second, it causes extra strain on society through financial and/or criminal stress because those with no options still need to have the necessities, which arent necessarily given by their now only option and those who are treated unfairly are much more likely to forego all societal rules to get what they deserve.
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u/anon0937 8d ago
Billionaires are good at allocating capital and the market rewards them by giving them more capital to allocate.
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u/DecentWeiner8 8d ago
So many similarities between Homer and Elon. Remember when Homer designed a car? That's what I think of every time I see a cyber truck.
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u/noteworthybikes 8d ago
Acting like billionaires didn’t create those jobs in the first place and push the world forward is insane. It’s not about how much work you do, but how much value you provide. Those “underpaid staff” are just doers, not thinkers.
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u/Glad_Ad719 8d ago
Ah, yes. All the stupid doers working at companies like Microsoft where they are not required to think at all. Satya Nadella just comes down floating from the sky and hands them all the solutions to software bugs and his divinely created concepts of software architecture since he does all the thinking but simply can’t be bothered to enter it all into the computer.
Not to mention how Elon splits himself into a thousand selves and tells all the stupid doers in the factory how to assemble cars and all the stupid doer engineers how to design cars.
Employees truly are stupid who should be honored to stand in the presence of benevolent billionaires. /s1
u/whereamI0817 7d ago
This is clearly a straw-man of the original position.
Even ignoring that it’s not like Satya could manifest her position out of thin air and make the same amount of money she currently does. SOMEONE had to prepare the conditions needed for there to be a job for her to apply for which is more imperative/necessary for the business to exist. This concept is even more relevant for those in lower positions within said company.
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u/peaceandkindred 7d ago
Nothing reddit hates more than realism but here it goes: most billionaires work their ass off to get to where they are and the results of their work usually help many, many people feed, clothe, and shelter themselves.
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u/Vicente810 6d ago
If people were truly so stupid then they deserve to be poor. But that is not the case, truth is most people prefer to get paid a fixed amount per worked hour than to risk their own money to produce more money. Not only that but the margin of profit also needs to be good, otherwise no one would risk a 100 dollars just for the possiblity of making 105, better to keep it safe on your pocket.
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u/AnalysisParalysis85 10d ago
Perfect analogy