Hi Steve, Thanks for commenting. Also, I appreciate the thoughtfulness reflected in your comment.

We probably both display confirmation bias in our thinking here. How could it be otherwise?

Regarding the goodness (or badness) of the various roads to financial independence, a good job coupled with financial discipline and smart investing seems like a ultra-rational approach to building wealth. I congratulate you, sir!

Small business ownership also seems like the right route for some folks. It probably is riskier–though I want to argue in a polite, civil way that it isn’t as risky as some worry. But it also produces higher incomes and higher net worth as per the longitudinal studies referenced.

This is maybe a funny way to look at the subject, but I think about all this in terms of advice to my kids, nieces and nephews, friends’s kids, etc. And I feel “right” in saying things like, “Sure, small business ownership works.”

I also feel “right” in saying things like, “Hey, engineering, teaching, medicine, a skilled trade, accounting, software, sales, etc., etc. work”

Hi Christopher, first, thanks for dropping by and commenting. And then to your question about whether or why you’re an exception, who knows…

The longitudinal survey data does suggest lots of turnover in the top one percent… or at least that’s how I read things. But I guess we would expect some people or families to stay rich just because much of this stuff is so random?

You, as a small business owner, are predisposed to consider small businesses as a viable or even probable path to wealth. For whatever reason, Stanley and Danko came to the same conclusion early on, then spent decades defending it.

I, as a PAW but earning my money by way of an employer, am predisposed to consider small businesses risky. I get paid my salary so long as my work is decent enough to not get fired, and my employer is profitable enough not to go bankrupt.

Who is to say which of us is right? Or which of us is more blind to the confirmation bias every one of us humans hold?

I’m particularly interested in the persistence of wealth AFTER it has been created across multiple generations. Over more than a century, my family has suffered dispossession of almost all of our wealth, the failures of multiple enterprises, sudden and unexpected losses of earners, depressions in which we gave away large sums of our wealth AND expensive, chronic illnesses, yet somehow we have always been able to maintain or re-gain our wealth through entrepreneurship and investing. Why are we an exception to the rule that wealth tends to dissolve/dissipate over generations? I do not consider us to be particularly talented, and we certainly have never had Rockefeller or Vanderbilt-type riches.