Once again, I think it's interesting how people think making money is so easy. Like yeah, it's cake to become a billionaire when you're handed money, right?

Do you honestly think that if you handed a hundred people 100 million dollars, that a high % of them would make it to the Forbes list?

You sound sillier than normal, Kerowo. Guess what? Making money is hard. Becoming a billionaire is really, really hard. There are about 1600 of them on the planet of approx 7 billion people. This weird thing where people like you handwave it as no big deal is comical.

Dumb****, no one is saying making money is easy. What we're saying is having a **** ton of money to start with makes it easier to make a **** ton more money than if you started with nothing. The percentages you brought up earlier even show it. If your net worth is $50k and you invest it wisely and work hard and you double it you're still only worth $100k. If your net worth is $50 million and you double your net worth it's $100 million. Do you think it's 1000 times harder to go from 50 to 100 million than 50 to 100 thousand?

Wil, Kerowo's point is that Trump shouldn't be judged on being a billionaire (and so its silly to bring up something like there only being 1600 billionaires). Instead he should be judged on how hard it was to go from what he started with to what he ended up with.

And while I agree that was hard. It's probably not harder than what millions of other people have done.

Oh, one of us is dumb alright.

4 Billion is 40 x 100MM. If you think making 40x your money is easy, then lol.

I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying it deserves a little more respect than what people give it.

I agree there are lots of people (particularly ITT) that don't give it as much 'respect' (in terms of degree of difficulty) as it deserves. In general, I'm not sure I agree with you though. Just as many people give it way more respect than it deserves.

I guess, my question is - do you agree its on the order of difficulty as what's been done by millions of other people and not on the order of difficulty as whats been done by just a couple thousand people?

Depends on many factors. Was he given 40 million, 100 million, or 200 million, and is he really worth 4 billion, or 2 billion or 8 billion? He claims 8, but I think the accepted number is 4. We have no real idea of how much he was given.

I think you have a point where some people have built enormous wealth (not in the billions, but say tens or hundreds of millions) from nothing, and that could be considered "more successful" than Trump. So yeah, that's a good point.

However I don't think what Trump did was in any way, shape, or form easy. He built up a lot of businesses and made quite a lot of money doing it. He managed and was involved and worked very hard. Yeah, he had failures, but he had plenty of success too. He also lived a lavish lifestyle all during that time. That means something. That takes dedication, intelligence, and hard work. If he was a complete clown he'd have ****ed it all up and squandered it. How many stories do we hear of people given enormous amounts of wealth and them squandering it? Happens all the time.

What I will say is if someone magically handed me 100 million dollars right now and said "Wil, turn this into 4 billion" I'd have no ****ing clue how to do that. I wouldn't know what businesses to get in to, much less build some kind of empire like he did. And I think that deserves quite a bit of respect.

Idiots don't. I'm not claiming he's an idiot.

Don't get me wrong, he's clearly significantly above average in most measurable ways, that much I would agree on. I just think there're vast numbers of people who have for all intents and purposes an identical level of genetic giftedness. And I could bring up the fact that there're something like 10 million people in the US alone with IQs > 130, but obviously that means nothing if you conveniently choose to reject IQ as a meaningful measure of intelligence when it contradicts the narrative you're trying push, and instead laud him for undefinable qualities for which there's no clear evidence.

I feel like there're some people in this thread who would look into his toilet and see profound meaning in the way his feces were smeared against the side of the bowl.


Proof of being above average kind of doesn't cut it when you're trying to get elected as president with almost no meaningful history of working on policy, bringing innovative ideas to the market, or really doing anything that would loosely relate to the kind of situations he'd be faced with as president.

And my original response to this thread was addressing his toothiness for his belief that "there are very few people alive better at creative, independent, big-picture thinking".

Well, see, this really gets to the heart of estimates of his inheritance.

Because there are significant taxes on inheritance, and that's one of the reasons why people don't just wait until the day they die to pass assets off to their children.

Which is one of the biggest reasons why an inheritance tax isn't functional - there're just too many ways to get around it. Although the government is still obviously willing to cash in on whatever they can.


If there's one form of tax that places the incentives in the right places and is difficult to evade it's luxury taxes.

Again, I think the Forbes "self-made score" is relevant here. Alice Walton = 1, Oprah Winfrey = 10, Trump = 5. I wouldn't even say it's a measure of success, more like impressiveness. Oprah is lower on the Forbes list than Trump (211 vs. 121), but she didn't just start from nothing, she had significant disadvantages. Her achievement is much more impressive.

Would this be like saying Reggie Miller sucks at 3 pointers because Steph Curry just crushed the record?

Yeah, Oprah is wildly successful. That doesn't turn Trump into Corky from McDonald's.

Why is Bernie Sanders more intelligent than TRUMP in your view? Put another way, why do you feel Bernie is better at creative, independent, big picture thought than TRUMP ? Obviously you rank Bernie higher than TRUMP on the intelligence scale.

Just for the record, I don't think Trump is fit to be President by a whole wide range of metrics. He's probably smart enough if he had other qualities to compensate (raw intelligence is vastly overrated in many situations) but he doesn't.

You're trying to imply here that the success should be measured in absolute and not relative terms. But of course it's relative that matters for impressiveness.

Having only 1 (or 10 or 100 or ...) in the whole world be better than you at something is still pretty damn impressive. But yes having millions of people doing something better than you definitely makes you less impressive.

Duker wasn't saying Trump was Corky from McDonalds (although I don't get the reference) just pointing out that Trump is nowhere near as successful as he'd like you to believe because his inherited wealth gave him a big leg up and was responsible for a portion of his success.

Look, I don't think Trump should be president or would make a good president. Anyone who speaks as recklessly as he does just doesn't deserve to be the POTUS. I'm just saying that all the people who disparage him because of they don't think his business acumen is impressive or disregard him because he had a head start just sound like haters to me. The guy worked hard and did extremely well. I think it's silly to have an attitude that "anyone could have done what he did with what he had". To me that sounds ridiculous. If becoming that successful (massively smaller scale) was so easy, everyone would do it.

4 Billion is 80,000 x 50k. If you think making 80,000x your money is easier than 40X, then lol.

Wil, the problem is most of your arguments aren't about this. A number of your arguments are silly and try to make it seem like what Trump did was super duper impressive when its clearly not. Just off the top of my head you pointed to the number of billionaires and tried to make an analogy to the very best athletes.

So maybe let's try to quantify this instead of speaking in generalities. If you were to rank every person on Earth by their financial success, taking into account the situation they started with, what percentile do you think Trump would be in?

Don't want to speak for Wil. Wil to me was making the point that dismissing TRUMP as a dufess is ridiculous at best and intellectually dishonest at worst. I never got the impression Wil was stating that TRUMP was presidential timber or anything. Similar to the points you were making earlier in the thread about acknowledging TRUMP's intelligence.

Where did you get that impression?

On raw, genetic giftendness they both meet the min criteria, and trump edges out bernie for that metric in my view - though I don't know how much of my perception of that can be attributed to developmental issues.

The contention here isn't that other candidates have higher raw intelligence. It's that there're tons of unknowns who're higher than trump, and that raw intellect isn't really a meaningful measure of competency because there're major diminishing returns wrt the impact of genetics on a persons functional intelligence.

I'm unsure, and I don't see how we can put that into perspective. By purely that measure, I would think it wouldn't be as high as what it seems I'm trying to imply it is. There are many "successful" people out there who have made great improvements in their situations, but I think a lot of that has to do with improving their human capital potential. I think we can say there are quite a bit of people who can count themselves as "more successful" if we went strictly by your measure of what they started with.

However, if we take into account a high level of success on top of becoming famous, having a hit television show, and then running for president (and leading his party) on top of that, I think that number dwindles down quite a bit. No?

I think Trump is a buffoon who speaks recklessly and is ignorant in a lot of areas that are essential to being a good president. He didn't cure cancer or unlock the mysteries of the universe, but that doesn't mean he still isn't the man.

You'd do a round of golf with Trump. Admit it. (this is a little humor)

You don't even have a range? I agree its a hard question to answer given the information we have. But I'd say he's probably 25th to 5th percentile.

Probably not, imo. Because you get into things like life choices and ambitions that many many people don't have.

Financial success is still sort of like that (many people don't care to maximize financial gains), but its probably the most 'pure' metric that we have.

I'd do a round of golf with almost anyone. Hell, I'd do a round of golf with Hitler as long as I had assurances I'd be physically safe and could say whatever I wanted to him.

It would be a total guess. I would say your range is pretty accurate but once again, we are counting people who start with absolutely nothing. A lot of that can be attributed to just pulling themselves up to "normal" levels. A person is living off of 2 dollars a day without running water and turns their situation around into making the equivalent of 50k a year would probably beat Trump in a metric like you are suggesting. I just don't put those in the same category, even if you could argue that the 2 dollar a day guy's situation was harder.

Agreed, it's hard to measure. I know I've slowed down in my ambition in my career. I'd he happy to stop right where I'm at and stay there until I retire. There is something more involved with people who hit fabulous amounts of wealth and decide to keep going.

Heh. What I'm saying is most people would be pretty happy introducing their friend at a party and it was Trump. I look at things a little bit differently than others. I don't think Trump is an actual bad person. He says things that could be attributed to someone who could be a bad person, but I don't think Trump is one of those people. Does he say things that are considered racist? Yeah. Do I think he's an actual racist? No. Pandering to a crowd and "letting them think what they want" is one thing. For me actions speak louder than words, and I really don't think he'd do a lot of the things he has implied he would. He's just caught up in the mix and rolling with the rhetoric.

It's entertaining to me to watch Trump go on this wild ride. I'm sure he wakes up every day and is like "wtf?" That ride will be over soon, though. He won't beat Clinton in a general.

Note : I dunno about doing golf with Hitler. That may be a skip.

But this is sort of the point of this whole discussion. It's absolutely relevant to point out to the types of people that act like Trump's wealth is a spectacular achievement - that Trumps head start makes it significantly less impressive. It's still impressive - in the same way that someone that makes a living in minor league ball is still an impressive baseball player and better than the vast majority of people out there.

I do. I mean, trying to decide if someone saying horrible things actually believes them or not, isn't something I care to do.

I would absolutely not introduce Trump as my friend to anyone.

You stating that Toothsayer was wrong in his assessment of TRUMP's intelligence.

Ok you think TRUMP edges out Bernie in "raw giftness" then we can safely state that you believe Bernie is behind TRUMP in creative, independent, big picture thinking.

So what Toothsayer states about TRUMP is false for all the remaining candidates then in your view, fair enough.

Who actually made this claim other than David Sklansky perhaps?

Once again, I understand your point but I just see the scale of it differently. Minor league ball is impressive but I'm sure it isn't to Derek Jeter. I'm not saying Trump is Derek Jeter in this example, I'm just saying I don't think Trump is a minor leaguer.


I don't think you have enough information about him to make that judgement. I will not try to talk you out of it, though.