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Robin comments on Rationality Quotes December 2014 - Less Wrong
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The annual US GDP per capita is $55,036. For Somalia, it's $145. I cannot give you a specific example of someone who succeeded by luck, but I can assure you that successful people are not born in the US by chance.
As of 2005, there were 2.6 billion people who lived on the equivalent of under $2 per day [source]. What possible values could they have where that could be considered success?
This is availability bias. There are clearly other factors differentiating Somalia and the US. If there weren't, there would be massive starvation in Somalia because you can't get by on $145 a year in the US.
Really? Do you think successful people don't have children? And that they don't try to make these children US citizens by 'immigrating' (often illegally) to the USA? I can assure you this happens frequently.
Yes, but most of those people live in areas where $2 goes a long way.
That's up for them to define, not for you to define. Why should they care about your standards? Let them say they are successful if they believe they are successful. You lose nothing but your ego by acknowledging somebody else's success.
The GDP statistics I cited were nominal. The $2 a day thing was not. They don't make $2 a day. The make enough to go as far as $2 would in the US.
Only 13% of the US population is immigrants. 20% of the world's immigrant population is in the US, so it works out to about two million immigrants. Less than a thirtieth of a percent of the world population. I does not explain the discrepancy of income.
It's not up for you to define either. It seems highly unlikely that living on a fifteenth of what the US would call poor is successful. There are certainly people who value living on next to nothing, but I don't think there are billions of them. It would take powerful evidence to show that they consider themselves more successful than a US citizen. How much evidence do you have of this?
Well, there is a caveat there. The PPP estimates that drive statistics like that are based on the prices corresponding to a basket of consumer goods, but don't (in fact can't) preserve the ratio of prices within that basket. That's not a big deal if you can make some assumptions about distribution, or if everyone you're dealing with has roughly the same lifestyle, but in areas like Somalia I'd expect local distribution costs to make things like, say, razor blades a lot more expensive relative to locally produced goods like, say, sorghum flour. And that does have subsistence implications.
Somalia's still a really poor country, though.
This argument has gone far away from the original quote. I'm not going to argue about the details. If you want to try to disprove your ability to become successful by using your intelligence, go ahead.
It's very difficult to make economic comparisons between countries while simultaneously acknowledging all of the cultural differences between countries. You can do it, but the results aren't necessarily meaningful.
There's a couple of things going on there. One is that Somalia is in fact a very malnourished country. Another is that the GDP figures DanielLC cites are nominal, not based on purchasing power parity, and therefore can be skewed by exchange rates. The currencies of poor third-world nations tend to be very weak, so going by nominal GDP will end up making them look even poorer than they actually are.
PPP estimates for Somalia seem uncommon for some reason, but the CIA estimated a per-capita annual value of around $600 USD in 2010.
Thanks for the information. My point is that money is a poor predictor of happiness and success.
There is, in fact, massive starvation in Somalia, price differences notwithstanding. The first sentence of the first link from a Google search for "malnutrition statistics somalia" says that "Somalia has some of the highest malnutrition rates in the world".
Malnutrition and Starvation are different things. It's much better to be malnourished than to starve. And it's much harder to feed people the optimal food than to just feed them some food...
But you're missing the point. There are successful people in Somalia, if you manage to not be malnourished in Somalia then you are successful (unless you value eating bad food for religious reasons...).