If You're So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?

The most successful people are not the most talented

Science being exclusively sponsored by the government and corporations, here is a study of theirs sustaining social fallacies. The whole point is that intelligence/smartness shouldn’t be exploited to favor any group, community, or the business world, because every time we try to, we create social misery and injustice.

It is a fundamental philosophical problem because people generally tend to hang out with like-minded, but this only works till a certain point since we are all interconnected. The correct behavior is 50–50% because when we remain oblivious to our environment, we end up sawing the branch we sit on (French saying). Nature ensures that everything must remain perpetually balanced — and our attention.

Nature — Laws of Creation — must therefore become our philosophical template. That’s the only way to see where the Truth lies after all.

And we must respect this Law. But unfortunately, monetarism fueling profit-seeking disturbs this balance as we all can see now. So the best way to act in sync with Nature is to master Her science instead and acknowledge that the “intellectual segregation” is a half-truth, whether culturally or economically. The absolute bottom line is that we are all humans living on the same planet whose ecosystem has been gravely endangered due to irreconcilable philosophical flaws that have been with us since the dawn of time.

What the study below demonstrates is the power of an economic status quo, that if you were not born in the right environment, you are (much) less lucky.

The capitalist consensus makes us accept that many are losers and some are winners. But how does it make us feel when seeing other people lose, as the worship of meritocracy is what motivates society? When we happen to honestly think in terms of losers and winners, we quickly realize that this “sadomasochistic” way of thinking is at the core of unfairness and injustice. Accepting that there are losers is also tolerating all the structural violence going along with it.

What we call “wealth” today is the symptom of severe mental dysfunction. The only wealth that has ever existed and which we should take care of is our planet. The mindset must therefore be corrected first to change our social premises radically… There goes more than 4,000 years of civilization down the drain! Are you ready?

ps: yes the quote is from B. Gates, but those at the top happen to tell the Truth.

If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? It turns out it is just chance. (2018)

The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms. Taking that into account can maximize return on many kinds of investment.

THE MIND AWAKENED: now computer scientists want to gamble on the impossible. On luck… but casino rules do not apply here.

The distribution of wealth follows a well-known pattern sometimes called an 80:20 rule: 80 percent of the wealth is owned by 20 percent of the people.

Actually, that there have not been a lot more global protests so far does make sense because the rich and the powerful still mesmerize the crowds. But do you see the contradiction here? The French Yellow Vests are paving the way through.

But the distribution of wealth is among the most controversial because of the issues it raises about fairness and merit. Why should so few people have so much wealth?

As long as the consensus accepts that a society must have losers and winners, we will not change the world nor be able to take down our top-down model. But it is becoming increasingly clear that billionaires and millionaires have extracted the most wealth while generating the worst pollution levels ever and selling the illusion of materialism to the masses.

The conventional answer is that we live in a meritocracy in which people are rewarded for their talent, intelligence, effort, and so on. Over time, many people think, this translates into the wealth distribution that we observe, although a healthy dose of luck can play a role.

There is no such thing as positive and caring meritocracy because humans will always collude when artificial and stretchable value determines the right to live. The luck of being wealthy increases the chance of earning more. So it does mean that the luck factor can be skewed.

And yet when it comes to the rewards for this work, some people do have billions of times more wealth than other people. What’s more, numerous studies have shown that the wealthiest people are generally not the most talented by other measures.

That is what meritocracy is all about—the right to own “more” because of connections.

Could it be that chance plays a bigger role than anybody expected? And how can these factors, whatever they are, be exploited to make the world a better and fairer place?

Exploiting… a verb summarizing the mantra of the typical capitalist mindset and which needs to go!

FULL ARTICLE: MIT technologyreview.com