[you&me]

Originally Posted by iggy_oi

Not at all. You should re-read the post I was responding to and my full response to it instead of taking one sentence out of context to make an argument against.

It wasn't taken out of context. The rest of your post was a fabricated example. The part I wanted to address was the part I quoted.

Opportunity matters. Some people don’t get the same opportunities as others regardless of how intelligent or productive they are. It’s really that simple. A company could make a clone of their CEO to be an exact match in every way, but only one of them will be able to be the CEO of that company despite being identical candidates because the opportunity would not be there for both.

I wish I could pretend things like nepotism and economic barriers didn’t exist.

Of course opportunity matters, but an individual still has to be able to take advantage of any opportunity. There are very few low-intelligence individuals that can be come very successful based solely on opportunities. Again, they would be the exception.

What does this have to do with what we’re discussing? I haven’t stated that people who are successful aren’t hardworking or intelligent. I was arguing against Dirac’s position that successful people are successful because they are naturally smarter and more productive than the population at large because it ignores a number of factors that can contribute to or limit success.

Top 1% or the 1% eh? If you happen to run into Galen Weston jr would you mind asking him if he beat out all other candidates to become CEO of Loblaws due to his intelligence and productivity or if there were other factors involved and let us know what he says? You can do the same if you happen to run into Ivanka Trump as well.

Like I said, I acknowledge that there are exceptions and outliers.

However, I would take exception with your use of Galen Weston as an example (and the snarky undertone).

Under his stewardship, Loblaws has been a roaring success. It is also a publicly traded company and if he weren't at least qualified (if not the most qualified, then he would likely not be the CEO, regardless of his last name and any implied nepotism. To put it another way, if he had different parents and a different upbringing, he may not have become CEO of Loblaws, but I would expect that he would still be successful.

I don’t disagree that it is a very important factor, and it may be the most important one.

I think everyone generally agrees. Knowing a lot of "successful" people, I sometimes take exception with any notion that they generally don't "deserve it" and are only there through dumb luck, being part of the lucky sperm club, screwing someone over or a dirty combination of all three. Of course there are examples out there, but those are an infinitesimally small portion of "successful" people and I feel the vast majority of successful people probably deserve more credit for their position in life than what is generally afforded to them.