Median American pay for full-time workers was ~$62,000 USD in Q4 2024 (BLS), which is around $85,000 CAD. The median Canadian salary is very definitely not $85,000 CAD.
It's not like Americans are all buying X so they can't afford to buy Y - there isn't really a major category of consumption where the US median is below the OECD median. If the US had a higher savings rate, then people could smooth out consumption more (build up savings some years, draw them down in bad years or in retirement), and maybe enjoy more psychological security. But it doesn't really make sense to say that Americans are unusually "bogged down in expenses" and yet have more goods and services in every significant category.
The median American is, materially, much richer than the median person pretty much anywhere else. The US is a bad place, by rich-country standards, to be in the bottom 10%. But in terms of consumer wealth - how large your house is, how many cars your family has and how nice they are, if you have a dishwasher and home A/C, how often you eat at restaurants or travel long distances, can you afford a home repair or the latest gadget - typical American workers are second to essentially nobody. Having grown up in and left the US, I am deeply familiar with all of its downsides, but there's an abundance of data to support this.
A ten year old Honda Fit is like $12K, pretty fuel efficient, and probably reliable and low-maintenance (I owned one until recently). People aren't buying $50,000 new Ford F-150s because they just need a working car to go to work and the grocery store.
How is working at NIST not "going to DC and working for the people at government wages"? He is, in fact, currently working at NIST, he's on the website:
every.org is just a generic non-profit payment processor. Lots of people use payment processors, because managing payments is annoying. Calling this "laundering" is like saying that accepting third-party payments through Stripe is some sort of illegal sinister plot.
Daniel Kokotajlo quit OpenAI earlier this year, and was one of the only people who refused to sign their secret non-disparagement agreement, even though (at the time) OpenAI told him this meant he would forfeit his equity. The idea that someone who quit OpenAI months ago, and who volunteered to give up all of his OpenAI stock in order to be able to publicly criticize OpenAI, is actually part of a secret OpenAI marketing strategy, reads like a galaxy-brained conspiracy theory.
"Since the data points are solely about extreme wealth and Elite MBAs, the only thing that can be proven is some degree of correlation between the two. What you have is insufficient (by a lot) to prove causation."
The conventional wisdom is that there is causation as well as correlation. Everyone who goes to one of those elite MBA schools- and a lot of smart people do- goes because they believe in causation as well as correlation. The burden of proof is on you, to show that there is no causation, because the conventional wisdom says the exact opposite. See also:
"One who wishes to believe says, “Does the evidence permit me to believe?” One who wishes to disbelieve asks, “Does the evidence force me to believe?” Beware lest you place huge burdens of proof only on propositions you dislike, and then defend yourself by saying: “But it is good to be skeptical.” If you attend only to favorable evidence, picking and choosing from your gathered data, then the more data you gather, the less you know. If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider." - http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues
"If your thesis is that the Elite MBA led to the extreme wealth, you have to look at the volumes of Elite MBAs out there. HBS alone turns out 1000 a year. Only a small % of them get to extreme wealth (going back to your point that a few hundred million doesn't count)."
Agreed, but that's a lot larger than the percentage of people who "learn how to hack" that go on to extreme wealth.
"Are you measuring the value of an MBA by the odds of becoming a billionaire (or even >$100M)?"
I admit that it's a quick-and-dirty metric, but that applies to PG's argument as well as mine.
"People achieve that level of success without regards to their education."
Some do, but the point is that education helps. Consider this list:
"One of the best ways to become a self-made billionaire is to attend an Ivy League school. 16 of the 52 self-made billionaires have Ivy League educations:
Warren Buffett, Columbia
Bill Gates, Havard
Carl Ichan, Princeton
John Werner Kluge, Columbia
Edward Crosby Johnson, III, Harvard
Sumner Redstone (Viacom), Harvard
Charles Bartlett Johnson, Yale
Edward Lampert, Yale
Steve Ballmer, Harvard
Geroge B. Kaiser, Harvard
Leonard Blavatnik, Columbia, Harvard
Ronald Owen Perelman, Penn
Michael Bloomberg, Havard
Stephen Schwarzman, Yale, Harvard
Eric Schmidt (Google), Princeton
Jeff Bezos, Princeton
An additional six billionaires have near-Ivy quality education:
Sergey Brin, Stanford
Larry Page, Stanford
Philip H Knight, Stanford
Charles Schwab, Stanford
George Soros, London School of Economics
James H Simons, MIT
The conclusion is clear. If you want to become a self-made billionaire, get the most prestigious educational credentials.
The best degree to get is an MBA. The following nine self-made billionaires have MBAs, and it's worth noting that eight out of the nine have an MBA from one of the nation's top three business schools: Harvard, Wharton, and Stanford.
Steve Ballmer, Harvard, Stanford MBA
Geroge B. Kaiser, Harvard, Harvard MBA
Philip H Knight, Stanford MBA
Charles Egen (Echostar), Wake Forest University MBA
Leonard Blavatnik, Columbia, Havard MBA
Ronald Owen Perelman, Penn, Wharton MBA
Michael Bloomberg, Havard MBA
Charles Schwab, Stanford MBA
Stephen Schwarzman, Yale, Harvard MBA"
I was making a related point that I thought was interesting, not a direct rebuttal of PG's statement. I was rebutting the related claim "if you choose not to get an MBA and go into the startup industry, you should focus on improving your programming skill, even if you're already a pretty good programmer".
There's certainly some element of correlation in there, but that doesn't mean that there's no causation. Going to an Ivy League school is partly correlation and partly causation. So is getting a Ph.D. from a top university, if you're going into academia. Why should business school be different?
I should also note that this point applies equally well to PG's original argument. What if it's purely correlation- that is, what if "programming IQ" and "business IQ" just correlate really well, so that lots of top businessmen are also top programmers? In that case, it would be relatively useless to learn programming.
"All of which has nothing to do with an elite MBA. Does Sam Altman have an elite MBA?"
Of course not. What I was saying was: suppose you accept that an MBA is more likely to make you a billionaire than going into technology startups, but you don't want to get an MBA because you wouldn't like it, and you're fine with the comparatively lower returns in the startup industry. In which case, I argue that you still shouldn't focus on programming skills (which was Paul Graham's suggestion), because other skills will probably help you more. This does assume that you are already a good programmer to begin with.
"The answer is still, the ability to write code and understand customers, much more so than having an "elite mba". An "elite mba" probably helps you become a business consultant or something corporatey."
I was talking about the world in general, not just the startup world. Being a partner at a management consulting firm and making seven figures is "successful" by most people's standards.
"become an entrepreneur building multi million dollar startups, which was the point of the portion of PG's essay you extracted. You set out to debunk it and didn't do so at all."
No, it wasn't. Paul Graham was making a point about being successful in general, not just being successful in startups. Read the quote:
"So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you'd do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA."
He's talking about business in general, not just startups, which is why he talks about MBA prevalence among all billionaires, not just those that made their fortune in startups. I agree that getting an MBA will help you very little in the startup world, but both me and PG agree on that.
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/BFI_WP_2...