Thank you @iFortknox. Dropout doesn't even begin to tell their stories. Gates (Microsoft) was the son of a successful attorney, while Zuckerberg (Facebook) is the son of a practising Orthodontist.

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by @iFortknox view original on Twitter

One of the oversold stories of our time is the achievers syndrome built around OVERCOMING odds and obstacles. It's the myth that hardwork, focus and determination leads to success. Let me show why they often don't.

Merit-ocracy is a myth. Social (upward) mobility is largely a myth. Hardwork, focus and determination are good but don't lead to wealth. The number one predictor of a child's socioeconomic class is not his IQ, talent, education or networks, it's the parent's socioeconomic class.

If you're poor/middle class/rich, there's an 80% chance that your folks are poor/middle class /rich respectively. Do you also know that the #1 predictor of a child's academic aspiration is not their IQ, family wealth or type of school, but the mother's academic attainment?

Poor folk have only 8% chance of ever ending up rich in their lifetime. In most cultures the chances are btwn 7.13-13.56%. The upper middle-class folks? 20% chance of ending up rich. In fact 60-85% of all people live & die within the social class that they were in, in their 20s.

Don't get it twisted, the rags to riches story tend to be anything but. Yes, there is always a poor guy who started from the streets to billionaire status but that is the exception not the rule. And as the saying goes when you legislate to the exceptions you end up with bad laws.

About 40% of those born poor will live and die poor. Contrary to what you keep hearing, education is great but it's not an equalizer. In many societies rich kids with lower IQ graduate in higher numbers than poor kids with high IQ.

The ability to make Zuckerberg/Gates/Oprah/Bezos kind of wealth within one lifetime is possible but not normal and available to 99.9% of the population. Usually it takes about three to four generations of industrious heirs to achieve it.

That's the reason the good book says, a good man leaves an Inheritance for his children and his children's children. The forces at play are referred to as the principles of inherited (dis)advantages....

prospect.org/article/wealth…

In the GODFATHER Mario Puzo tells the story of an encounter between the Irish criminal lawyer Tom Hagen and the Hollywood film star Mr. Woltz. The mafia, Don Corleone, had sent Tom Hagen to negotiate, a once in a lifetime deal, for his other godson Johnny Fontaine.

During their strained exchange Tom Hagen tells Mr. Woltz. 'Italians have a little joke, that life is so hard that a man needs two fathers to take care of him, and that's why they have godfathers.' Tom himself was a consigliere (eyes & ears) to the Mafia, Don Corleone, even though

....he was Irish and not Sicilian as was the tradition, something that regularly invited scorn from the other five Sicilian New York Mafia families. He had been adopted into the Corleone family at 11yrs after his dad died of alcoholism and his mom went blind and mad.

There are different kinds of 2nd fathers out here depending on where you fall. There's the 5% (est.) of the population who were wise enough to choose to be born to wealthy parents or those whom Warren Buffet calls the 'lucky sperm club'.

The level of family influence & laws of general immobility is their second father. Zuckerberg and Gates fall in this category. Being born to upper class professionals meant they already had access to good education/healthcare/hoods/exposure that could discount their dropping out.

There is the 2nd 10-15% (est.) people whose second father is their endowment. These are people who are armed either with exceptional brains, massive talents, amazing personality, displays great judgement, extremely good looking or they are simply lucky.

#Vanderbilt & #Rockefeller fell into this category. That they rose through poverty and pioneered industrial capitalism in the 1820s is part of the reason the myth of personal effort alone is such an American/global cult. But these were outliers; men with oversized personalities.

For the other 85% (est) with average brains, average families/average income/average talent the only '2nd father' available is social mobility through public sector reforms. This include affordable public healthcare/education/social amenities, or a general economic boom.

It matters at what point you turn 18-23yrs. Turning 23yrs during a boom like the telcom/Real estate/higher ed/banking boom & Narc wave of `99-05 avails massive chances for progress & incomes. The opposite is also true for those who clear uni during a glut/bust/recession like now.

Proper reforms can lift a significant level of the populace upwards and increase opportunities e.g. the South-east Asia tech boom, Mongoli mining boom, Xiaoping 1970s Chinese reforms,  Brazil's factory boom of early 2000s and the Singaporean 1950-2000s public sector reforms.

We went to the polls to give one man a trillion annual budget, 22 ministries, 200+ parastatals and over 800k employees. Armed with this and a proper focus on public sector reform agenda including the TJRC report he'd have lifted this country back into prosperity with 3-5yrs.

That's why the electoral authoritarianism and the bungling of the election by the primitive elite, and the CRIMINAL ARISTOCRACY is a tragic dot on the future prospects of majority of the poor in this country.

Given that 3 in every 4 Kenyans work in the informal sector & according to KNBS 60% of them earn below 25k it's safe to say Kenya isn't a white collar middle-class society but a BLUE-COLLAR WORKING CLASS society. After all the middle-class are est at only between 100-272k people.

All else being constant, for the top 5% 'lucky sperm club' and the massively gifted 10-15% they will prosper irrespective of how @UKenyatta (mis)handles the economy, after all they are the criminal aristocracy, have ties to them or (in)directly benefit from the plunder.

For the 85% out here, given the dynamics of social mobility, we were going to the polls to essentially (s)elect our 2nd father. A litany of stupid choices and electoral mess and here we are stuck with the primitive elite upheld by the colonial superstructure.

So, what are our options? Exactly what we did in '02; create a ground up revolution that forces the criminal aristocracy to behave, after all this is the same pool we had in' 03 yet somehow they behaved then, why not now?

The question isn't whether we can stand up to the elites but can we theorize and problematize, teach and help create a political wave made up of a critical mass of Kenyans who understand the contours of the NATIONAL STRUGGLE just like in '02.

Based on the laws of social mobility if we make a stupid set of choices as the masses, studies show that we'll have the same (or worse) incomes than we have now, come '22. So over to you theoreticians, dreamers, & public intellectuals. How do we engineer a ground-up 'Narc Wave?'

1. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jo…

2. ifstudies.org/blog/the-many-…

3. highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/po…

4. newyorker.com/magazine/2014/…

5. newint.org/features/2018/…

6. newrepublic.com/article/116462…

7. prospect.org/article/wealth…

8. theatlantic.com/amp/article/30…

There are two ways to react to this thread. One can hunker down and take it as a sign of doom and depression or you can accept that there are forces beyond our control yet not beyond our capacity to observe them, acknowledge their existence and use them to our advantages/profit.