[iagreeentirely]

I would disagree with your luck statement. I broke out of poverty. My parents were both unskilled labor, we were on assistance at least once that I can recall.

Part of what allowed me to escape is luck. Yes it required that I developed early and so was ahead of my peers in education. It also required hard work to capitalize on that lead. However, what kept more than one of my cohorts from escaping was bad luck. A family member had a health issue, a legal issue, whatever. Their need to care for their family caused them to miss an opportunity (Get a job rather than go to college).

Unless you're advocating living life as a sociopath and ditching people as 'dead weight', luck is absolutely part of escaping poverty.

[downandout]

In my original comment, I said that there's no reason to be poor, with a couple of exceptions - including bad luck. With hard work and discipline, you don't need to have especially good luck to break out of poverty, but yes, any bad luck can wreak havoc on the life of anyone in almost any socioeconomic circumstance. This is why it's still important to have social safety nets, even if the general public doesn't like the fact that these nets will save both the very unlucky and irresponsible people/those that simply don't want to contribute to society.

[iagreeentirely]

Luck is luck. Whether you call it bad luck that they had an adversity to overcome that I did not, or good luck that I did not have that adversity, you're still talking about fortune.

In any case, whether you say it is that the parents are poor or that they are drug addicts or don't care or whatever, you're talking about things outside the control of the individual. I cannot choose the parents I was born to.