I don't remember who, but there was an MIT professor some years ago who set up an economic model, kind of like the evolutionary models used by biological scientists.
He made his model with every individual of equal resources and capabilities i.e. he made his model non-individual specific and then varied economic conditions, geography, opportunity etc. and generated a distribution in which some individuals inevitably wound up wealthy and others poor, even though they were "equal" in the beginning conditions.
Given the vast variations in human energy, psychology, opportunity, personality etc. one could say that most wealth is luck and circumstance.
It is quite common to take the inductive approach and look at people who got rich and try to identify their "secrets" after the fact, and of course a lot of self anointed wags sell such scrutinies as if they are formulae for success extrapolation. That is not stochastically sound reasoning, however popular it might be to think that way.
Dumb luck just isn't what some people would like to believe. They want some kind of pre-ordination or a fantastic skill set that always works.
One might improve one's odds of gaining material wealth by working harder, but it is not a given or a slam dunk, it may just bump up the odds a bit. A lot of hard workers just like to work, or they like the work they do.
Rich [fill in the blank] are probably just [fill in the blank] who happened to get rich, it was not necessarily the reason or a requirement. There are a lot of poor [fill in the blank], too.
One might presume that Andre's wealthy individuals are the self made types rather than rich kids with advanced opportunities and inherited money. However, to complete the picture, one would have to also include the losers and the black swans. Nobody really cares about those, they are much less interesting or just deemed cosmic failures, even if they worked like dogs.
You can cite lottery winners. Lotteries encourage large numbers of people to engage in foolish, intemperate, self defeating gambling behaviors. However, these behaviors will make a random individual wealthy through no other work, skill or productive input except the tendency toward the intemperate behavior. However, the rich lottery winner is just as rich as the individual who "worked hard" for the money. The lottery winner, being most likely intemperate, stands a pretty good chance of losing the money again because the same behavior that caused him to win the lottery in the first place, can over time also cause him to lose his winnings, even large winnings.
A hard working individual may or may not become wealthy, but if he(she) does, they are less likely to lose the money and more likely to enhance their wealth. Then it is up to their children to lose the money for them.
