Can Just chickeny cite a reference....was: American Middle Clbutt: Endangered Species
Roy, I think you are "right on" in the above buttessment. FYI, repost of my corporate bad guy mindset file: Quote (page 261): "The Prevalence of Corporate...
On Sun, 5 Mar 2006, Just chickeny
I worked for a time around extremely wealthy and famous people. Part of that as a bartender at an exceedingly exclusive club. My observation is that those who worked and earned the initial...
From the "Forbes Special Issue" Oct 6, 2003, it was disclosed that of the richest 400 people in America, no more than 2-3s of them had even a BS degree, and very few had any graduate degree.
Most of this education,
JC never cites his sources, but I'll cite mine (I read the book): "What Happened To Their Kids? Children of the Rich and Famous" by Malcom Forbes...
A fairly large fraction came out of the gutters (would it be likely that they get their "secrets to wealth" from their fellow gutter peers?), and one fourth got their money by inheritance (what peers?). This perspective also came from the same issue of Forbes, and the "Book of the British Rich" by Philip Beresford.
I think it was Stanley Thompson whose books (such as "The Millionaire Mind" and "The Millionaire Next Door") discuss not the richest people but the ones who are in your $1-10 million net worth category who also finds that they, generally, worked their way up from low positions and from reading large parts of the second book I would not say that peers were mentioned as sources of "secrets" but most of them concentrated on the development of their own businesses. Today's MBA route to wealth is a much more recent phenomenon; maybe you consider that as "peer" sources, but I'd call it formal education.
At the end of the day, "peer
"appear to be" by you? What peers? Since most lazy people seem to stay lazy, I hardly consider that notion as credible.
Genes? There are as many examples (Stephen J. Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man") where wealthy people came out of poverty backgrounds (no genes) as wealthy people who came out of nice backgrounds (the book by Forbes "What Happened to their Kids"). Many kids born of "good" genes screwed up, too.
If you ever take graduate level courses in genetics, and even some undergraduate courses, you will learn that it is totally impossible to breed for intelligence and we are very far from understanding let alone identifying the genetic bases for intellectual and related tallents that would make any eugenics proposal worth considering. What I am talking about can be found in most books on human genetics.