The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Rich Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B0000547HR | Format: PDF
The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Rich Description
Who are the rich in this country? What do they do? How do they invest? How did they get rich? Can you ever become one of them? Get the answers in
The Millionaire Next Door, the never-before-told story about wealth in America. You'll be surprised by what you find out.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 8 hours and 21 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: October 27, 2000
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0000547HR
Let us get one thing out of the way. This is NOT a bad book. In fact, it is a well-done, interesting, and much needed study that gives us all new insights about what millionaires are really like as opposed to people's misconceptions of them. If this was merely a study of what millionaires are like, I would give it five stars.
The problem begins when people see this book as a recommendation: "most millionaires are frugal, hard-working, well-educated, and diligent investors - so if I will act like that I will be a millionaire". This is simply not true - and for a very simple reason discussed below.
Indeed, most millionaires ARE like that. Indeed, it is good advice to be frugal, hard-working, and well-educated as opposed to the opposite. It is also gratifying to see that sometimes "doing the right thing", the protestant work ethic, and the "nose to the grindstone" attitude sometimes pay off not only in "being a better person", but in concrete monetary success. Apparently good guys DON'T finish last after all.
But the book suffers from a double survivorship bias. "Survivoship bias" is what happens when one only pays attention to those who survive a certain activity, peril, or risk, and makes ungounded conclusions about cause and effect from that. One famous example is Neitzsche's famous saying, "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger". It is based on the survivorship bias that those who survive terrible calamities tend to be stronger than other people. But it doesn't mean the calamity MADE them stronger - it might mean simply that only those who were strong to begin with survived the calamity.
What survivorship bias do we see here? First, it interviews ONLY millionaires.
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