Where in the world is it easiest to get rich? How Lambda School is making the answer: “Anywhere.”

I recently watched a TED talk by Herald Eia, which as I’m writing has over 1.1M views on YouTube. The title is Where in the World is it Easiest to Get Rich? (link to video below)

The premise of Herald’s talk is that the places in the world it’s easiest to get rich and the economic environments that produce actual wealth creation, might not be what you think.

Let’s start by defining what we mean when we say “rich”.

The UN defines the line for poverty in the world being anyone who makes less than $2/day. The Wealth Report sets the line for richness being individuals with a net worth of more than $30M USD.

Now when we look at the countries with the most individuals with a net worth of over $30M, we might see some countries that we expected:

But this data set doesn’t really give us a good indication of where it’s easiest to get wealthy because these are just raw numbers. They are skewed by the number of people who live in these countries. What we need are the countries with the most wealthy people per capita.

If we aggregate our data per capita and remove some of the global tax havens such as: Cyprus, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Monaco, who have an artificially large share of rich people, we get a very different picture.

Countries with the largest number of < $30M net worth individuals per capita:

How can this be? These countries are known for their welfare systems, high taxes, overreaching governments. They’re not “Great Capitalistic Nations” like the US, a country that for many years has been perceived to have the greatest opportunities for social mobility. (US ranks 13th on this list, by the way)

So how and why is this happening? That’s a debate for economists everywhere, but Herald Eia poses a strong hypothesis with two major points. We’re only going to focus on the first point, if you’re interested in his second point, go watch the video.

His first major point?

Free education.

The top 5 countries in the world where not only the most ultra high net worth individuals per capita reside, but where it’s far more statistically likely for you to go from poor to wealthy in a single generation, have a single thing in common:

Free higher education.

The bar to access the best education in their country is extremely low. So low, in fact, that it is literally available to everyone.

Compare that to the US, where to get into the best colleges you either need to already come from wealth, or work your ever-living ass off for 18 straight years.

And even if you don’t manage to get into the best universities, it’s extremely likely that you’re going to be crushed by huge student loan debts.

This is where Lambda School comes in.

No loans, no debt, and no up-front tuition.

It’s not truly free, like the universities in Denmark and Canada, etc. You do have to pay back your tuition over time after graduation.

But the absolute key is that the incentive of Lambda School is the same as that of the student:

Get the student a well paying job in the industry for which they’ve been trained. You don’t pay back your tuition until you’ve been hired in industry making at least $50k/year.

But the payback is capped at $30k total, so if you get an extremely high paying job (and some students have), you aren’t penalized.

They additionally lower the bar to enter by making the school 100% online, meaning you can access it anywhere as long as you have an internet connection.

Conclusion:

Lambda School is still a fairly new company. But early signalling indicates that it may very well change how higher education is done.

Peter Thiel (co-founder of Paypal, Palantir & Founders Fund) has a rule commonly known as 0 to 1. It boils down to creating something that is either completely new, or innovates upon an existing solution but improves it by at least 10x.

Amazon’s Kindle is an example of a product that was created that was 10x+ more convenient than going to a book store. It had 10x+ more storage than a bookshelf. They went from 0 to 1.

Lambda School seems to be taking higher education from 0 to 1.

It will be interesting to see the data come back over time to see if Lambda School’s model changes the answer of where in the world is it easiest to become rich from places like Denmark to:

 Anywhere with an internet connection.

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Presentation referenced in article: