Becoming Rich & Narratives:

Robin Hanson:

"Sometimes people start out poor, and end up rich. Sometimes this is because they create real net value for the world, and sometimes this is because they gambled, where their wins came from others’ losses. But to the people involved, this difference may not be noticeable. What they see is how they started poor, then initiated many particular risky and effortful activities, had ups and downs which tempted them to quit, but had attitudes that made them persist, and then they finally succeeded.

Such newly rich folks are quite often sensitive to criticism about their wins. They wanted not just wealth but also respect, and so resent skeptical suggestions that they won due to luck, exploitation, or cheating, and so don’t deserve much more respect than others. If they do not deserve their wealth, maybe it should instead be shared with others.

To resist such skepticism, rich folks typically generate key narratives along the way. These are stories about the world, their personal nature, and the role that people like them play in a world like that. In such stories, people like them show key virtues in their efforts, and then naturally end up adding value to the world. When such people get rich, they look to continue to act in ways that support such narratives, so that they can continue to affirm them relative to less flattering narratives.

Of course most individuals aren’t especially good at constructing and maintaining narratives. But communities that together struggle to get rich can achieve this together. Thus in different industries and areas of life we see different standard stories about how people there got rich. Stories about what sort of personal features contribute to that outcome in what sort of situations, and how that behavior changes the world. So once rich, people in different areas tend to do different things to affirm their local area wealth stories."