[nascentmind]

I have seen that most of kids who have struggled in their childhood because of say low income from their parents or bad family have a kind of a fighting spirit. Most of the people who you see achieve greatness either say in sports or in engineering come from really poor and troubled backgrounds. Now compare that to the upper middle class and the rich whose kids have been given all the resources and you don't see much of them at the top. Even if you see them it would be because their parents would have set up artificial constraints on their resources which they would have to fight to get it.

So finally it all depends on parenting and the values they instil on their kids which require no money. It just needs some thinking and common sense which is available to both the rich and the poor.

[dalke]

You have a massive survivor bias in your example of greatness in sports.

The odds of achieving greatness in sports is very low. If you come from a rich background, and want to maximize your chances of having a well-paying career, you do not go into sports. You go into law, or medicine, or banking, etc. Sure, the top players get paid well, but then look at what, say, minor league players get.

But if you come from a poor family, then sports is one of the ways to get out of poverty, because even if you can't go pro, there's still the chance of college athlete funding or becoming a coach for a school.

Engineering is similar, though less so.

[nascentmind]

>But if you come from a poor family, then sports is one of the ways to get out of poverty, because even if you can't go pro, there's still the chance of college athlete funding or becoming a coach for a school.

This is true. In India for example engineering and medicine are the ways to get out of poverty. Hence there is an over representation.

[stickfigure]

Do you have some statistical evidence to support the claim that people from low income and bad families are overrepresented in the higher echelons of sports of engineering? I strongly suspect quite the opposite is true. It is not sufficient to view a few examples - after all, a huge portion of the population comes from 'really poor and troubled backgrounds'.

[nascentmind]

No I don't. It is just an observation. Now in for e.g. India there are a lot of people going into engineering or medicine as a way out of poverty. So you are right but now it is the profession through which to get out of poverty and there will be a lot of people from poor and troubled families in it.