Certainly a bigger sample than I was expecting.
There's a Superfund site about 10 miles from my house. Luckily it's close to the headwaters for a major source of our drinking water.
Cancer rates here are really high.
Surely they're not connected.
Then I thought it meant managers who were in charge of divisions that created Superfund sites before being promoted to CEO made riskier decisions as CEO.
And now I'm back to "pollution babies take greater risks". Which to my surprise was a surprisingly reasonable hypothesis.
It is about where the CEO was conceived and born. From the article's introduction:
>Our approach addresses these issues by exploiting prenatal exposure to pollution from Superfund sites as an exogenous source of variation in executive risk-taking behavior. [...] we control for a wide range of fixed effects, including firm, year, industry-year, CEO birth year, birth county, and headquarters state, ensuring that comparisons are made among otherwise similar CEOs. [...] we show that selection mechanisms in promotion can amplify behavioral traits shaped by early-life conditions, even when firms are unaware of those traits.
Personally, I think it sounds like hogwash -- "statistically significant" findings that have little bearing on reality.
More likely, those born in heavily industrial areas are more likely to have careers in industry.
There were even reports from the early 2000s of workers getting nauseous within the offices, and the former YouTube CEO passed away recently prematurely from lung cancer (not saying that's related, but if we're looking at correlational studies...)
Were you a Google employee forced to return to office? You may be entitled to compensation.
It was a huge waste disposal area.
It's curious someone changed the title of this, and I'm of two minds about it:
Pro change:
- Yes, the original title "Pollution causes CEOs: study"is baity.
- Yes, the new title is the actual title of the underlying study, which is less baity.
In general, this is the kind of thing I love about HN.
Con change:
- The original title is the literal title of the FT article, whch is what the post is on, and it does provide commentary (some snarky) on top of the paper.
- The original title does more elegantly and effectively convey the conclusion of the research, whereas the paper title does not convey this at all. It's more crappy intellectualized science writing.
I think this is one case where the more engaging title is also the more effective one.
>Superfund CEOs—those born in counties later designated as Superfund sites—excel in internally focused management domains where risk-taking remains adjustable and containable, yet struggle with externally focused policies where risks are immediately exposed to market consequences. [...] Superfund sites represent some of the most hazardous contaminated areas in the U.S., and our sample primarily includes executives born before industrial chemicals were widely recognized as developmental toxicants. [...] This historical setting provides a unique opportunity to examine how early-life conditions interact with career selection mechanisms that systematically filter executives based on risk-taking outcomes.
Meanwhile, people with lower sensitivity needed more stimulation and became more prone to crime and risk taking.
I wonder if superfund sites decrease nerve efficiency leading to less stimulation and therefore risk taking.
EDIT:
A 2015 longitudinal study based on army medical records of Swedish men showed a correlation between low resting heart rate and violence and criminality, with the authors theorising that lower sensitivity to stimulation resulted in increased likelihood of risk-taking and sensation-seeking behaviour – effectively a low sensitivity counterpart to SPS."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_processing_sensitivity
marojejian•1d ago
Paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5270031
OK, I'm very skeptical of the correlational results, and feel a bit guilty posting this. But... on the other hand:
1) This is pretty entertaining! 2) Pollution aside, I do buy into the narrative that selection bias for lucky risk-takers explains a lot of bad leaders:
>Superfund CEOs, by contrast, are more likely to take high-variance internal risks — such as aggressive restructuring — that sometimes generate standout outcomes. When these gambles pay off, they are difficult to distinguish from skill. Firms, observing only results, may systematically promote risk-takers...
bberenberg•1d ago
bluefirebrand•1d ago
paulddraper•1d ago
Outcomes however are not evenly distributed, large success typically has outsized rewards.
This is why VCs have the investment strategies they do: invest in 10, 7 fail, 2 don't matter, and 1 is everything.
glalonde•1d ago
ebiester•1d ago
paulddraper•22h ago
The effect is more mild, not necessarily because the profile is different but because public companies don’t usually have 100x upside.
darth_avocado•1d ago
It’s not even actual lucky high risk gambles that are successful that are rewarded. A lot of times, it’s just perceived success. Plenty of leaders fail upwards. Reward for incompetence and failure is a promotion that is mostly dictated by who you know in the organization. And perceived success is a huge factor in “who you know”.
bonoboTP•1d ago
darth_avocado•1d ago
gopher_space•1d ago
nosianu•1d ago
The parent commenter wrote
> it’s just perceived success
and the abstract from the paper says
> suggesting firms reward observed success without recognizing underlying risk tolerance
CGMthrowaway•1d ago
Or, perhaps relatedly, short-term success which sets up long-term failure - but by then the leader has moved on from the role.
ashoeafoot•1d ago
serjester•1d ago
0cf8612b2e1e•1d ago
pton_xd•1d ago
ranger207•1d ago
At a certain level, risks no longer are about potential upsides and potential downsides, they're about potential upsides and potential massive upsides. Risk taking has no negatives
quantified•1d ago
pkasting•1d ago
For example, it explains Elon Musk entirely.
nickff•1d ago
wtdo•1d ago
nickff•1d ago
pkasting•1d ago
I don't know what "found the Tesla as it exists now" means. Founding and leading are distinct. Musk has been a key leader at Tesla; he was not a founder of it or any merged or acquired company.
nickff•1d ago
kttjoppl•1d ago
kttjoppl•1d ago
If you want to showcase a company he unambiguously founded which is unambiguously successful, why wouldn't you pick SpaceX?
wagwang•1d ago
pessimizer•1d ago
You took a lot of words to agree that Musk didn't found Tesla. That other stuff would better be argued with someone else who is disputing it, because the person you replied to was talking about founding companies.
madmountaingoat•1d ago
pkasting•1d ago
As far as I can determine, Musk is the sole founder of only two companies -- SpaceX and The Boring Company. The former is clearly valued at >$1B; the latter is not.
He is also the cofounder, with many other cofounders, of a variety of other companies: Zip2, X.com, OpenAI, Neuralink. OpenAI is clearly valued at >$1B; Musk was one of eleven cofounders. My assumption is that your third company is X.com; Musk was one of four cofounders, and the company then merged with Confinity (also multiple cofounders), then took the name PayPal (which had been a Confinity product). PayPal is clearly worth >$1B today. I would find it misleading to say Musk "founded OpenAI and PayPal" given the above, but up to the reader.
Whether this is "more than luck" -- in particular, whether it's actually due to Musk's good leadership -- is far from proven. OpenAI, for example, had $1B in capital pledged at founding, suggesting it was already valued at over $1B at creation time. And the skill sets required to found a later-successful company versus to lead one are distinct. Musk might well be a great founder but bad leader.
(Of course, the obvious intent of my original post was to be a snarky dig at someone I view to be an atrociously terrible leader whose success has been due to a combination of others succeeding despite his influence and simply going all-in with huge amounts of capital every time. If you're not already inclined to view Musk that way, and you believe he's actually a successful businessman who is brilliant if eccentric, then a joke post on HackerNews won't change your mind.)
nickff•1d ago
>"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."
jemmyw•22h ago
DebtDeflation•1d ago
It explains a lot more than bad leaders, it explains almost everything in society. The winners write history and you can't really win unless you take big risks.
selimthegrim•1d ago
shermantanktop•1d ago
I’ve worked with this guy for a long time and he’s a risk taker but nothing like this.
What seems to have triggered this is his fascination with LLMs. I have a feeling this is happening to a lot of execs in tech right now.
bgnn•1d ago