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Opinion: Getting rich has more to do with luck than talent

The UK suffers from the  highest levels of income inequality in Europe  – partly because of the delusions of its rich. In countries where the rich have less, they  tend to be less delusional , about themselves, about other people, about what is possible, and about why some become rich. In the UK, it is unsurprising to read that an investment banker thinks £100m is a lot of money but  “not a ridiculous amount of money” . In a report in The Guardian newspaper earlier this month, we also heard that one particular banker is “fairly confident” that a driven and passionate individual could “start from zero and get to £100m within 20 years”. However, there is hope. In the research report that kicked off this latest set of news stories, Katharina Hecht from the London School of Economics and Political Science found that  one third of her sample  of extremely rich people working in the City of London agreed that “the government should reduce income dif...
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The Amazon-Walmart Showdown That Explains the Modern Economy

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With Amazon buying the high-end grocery chain Whole Foods, something retail analysts have known for years is now apparent to everyone: The online retailer is on a collision course with Walmart to try to be the predominant seller of pretty much everything you buy. Each one is trying to become more like the other — Walmart by investing heavily in its technology, Amazon by opening physical bookstores and now buying physical supermarkets. But this is more than a battle between two business titans. Their rivalry sheds light on the shifting economics of nearly every major industry, replete with winner-take-all effects and huge advantages that accrue to the biggest and best-run organizations, to the detriment of upstarts and second-fiddle players. That in turn has been a boon for consumers but also has more worrying implications for jobs , wages and inequality. To understand this epic shift, you can look not just to the grocery business, but also to my closet,...
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How GM Beat Tesla to the First True Mass-Market Electric Car

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Ten years ago, the room where I’m standing would have been filled with a deafening roar. The air would have pealed with the sound of a dozen V-8 engines, each one trembling atop its own laboratory pedestal as engineers in white shop coats used joysticks to adjust its throttle and load. ¶ Today, though, this former engine testing facility at General Motors’ Warren Technical Center, outside Detroit, is almost dead silent. From one end to the other—across a space roughly the size of two soccer fields—the room is blanketed with the low-frequency hum of cooling fans, interrupted only by the occasional clack of a keyboard and, on this particular morning, the chatter of Larry Nitz’s voice. ¶ “Let’s take a walk,” he says after we’ve lingered in the doorway a moment. A voluble guy with a head of gray curls, Nitz is chief of electrification at General Motors, and this facility—the largest automotive battery lab in North America—is his domain. In place of all the old V-8s, a grid...
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