But that just averages to systematic error.

The same mistake has much worse consequences if you don't have wealth.

Nailed it. If you're Elon Musk, does some dumb mistake and lose 200 billion, your life barely changes. If you live on minimum wage, and loses half of it, starvation ensues for your family. The impact of losses is disproportional between rich and poor.

So you’re saying the poor have much more to gain through hard work and shouldn’t be discouraged?

You have it completely reversed. Hard work for the poor most likely means they will still be poor and therefore have very little to gain from it.

We certainly disagree. You do you guys.

This is just not true, at least in Australia (and I suspect most other first-world countries, including the US).

If anything, it's easier to go from having nothing to a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle than it is to go from middle-class to wealthy.

First-world is not most world. And even those places face welfare state dismantlement since at least the 80s.

Funnily enough, most of the people that seem to express this sentiment live in the first world and are educated.

I guess people who live in the third world and have mastered English see living proof every day of where their hard work can get them.

They are already pretty motivated and usually do work a lot more than middle class folks.

The poor people who burn out completely and stop working end up on the street and either die pretty fast or find some more motivation to keep going even in that state.

Also, sadly what many poor people lack is not work ethic but capital, in the sense that they can't just take on a ~20-30M loan to send their kids to school and wait for them to start working and then pay it back. So instead of doing this they are forced to do very near-zero ROI things.

Could you imagine saying this to a poor person with a straight face?

So you’re saying the rich have much less to gain through hard work and shouldn’t be incentivized?

There’s probably a lot more of a self actualization and entertainment component to it at that level.

Isn't that a given? The idle rich as a class has been a thing for a long time. Rich people do not generally work shitty dead end jobs, as a general rule.

For some reason companies still agree to pay huge bonuses to their (already rich) executives to incentivize them working more/better.

Quite the opposite. While a $200M loss for Elon Musk might be nothing significant, a $200 loss for someone who is truly poor could be a huge setback. The poor have to play the game much more conservatively than the rich, which means they can’t make the big bets that have those huge upside outcomes.

Whether or not they should be discouraged is a very different question from what they have to gain.