[dougmwne]

It's sure nice to think so, and I thank you for stating this viewpoint so clearly. I think a lot about the line between rich and poor, launch and crash. I've come to think that line is largely in our own heads but also entirely out of our control.

Someone born poor will be born into an other reality of poverty. Every person they love will have no money, education or resume and will have crashed against unmoving walls while trying. Every mentor will teach them that the world takes and never gives. Every day will be tinged with hopelessness. Everyone will tell them they don't have what they ought to have and that there's no way someone like them can get it. This person could be as smart and filled with potential as the best of us and they will never escape this invisible cage of other people expectations.

Someone born rich with be born into an other reality of abundance. Every person they love will have a comfortable amount of money, educational achievement, and professional accomplishment and will have leapt over the obstacles in their life. Every mentor will teach them that if they ask, the world will give. Every day will glow with possibilities. Everyone will tell them about their success and make plans together for how to get even more. This person could be dumb as rocks and lazy but they too live in an invisible bubble of other people's expectations. The wisest of the people in this bubble of prosperity know exactly how fragile it is and work tirelessly to shape their families and communities so that their bubble never pops.

[cloverich]

I agree to the advantages / disadvantages in general, but I think a lot of people push back because it does not jive with personal experience. In my case, my parents grew up poor with blue collar immigrant parents, but became successful and (in my fathers case) eventually wealthy. Conversely, growing up I knew _many_ people who grew up with much more financial and family stability than I had, who just threw it all away. Not a few -- a lot. In college, I became friends and acquaintances with a lot of dirt poor people from Mexican immigrant family's, and I saw a great number of them succeed (from e.g. migrant working parents to law or medical degrees, PhD's, etc). I'd never argue that being rich does not come with substantial advantages that hold in general, but I've just met too many people who threw them away or succeeded despite poverty to buy into an argument that generalizes into absolutes.

[dougmwne]

That's fair, and I don't mean to sound absolute because most things in life are not.

https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi...

"U.S. mobility is among the lowest of major industrialized economies."

So in other words, birth privilege is strongly correlated with future earnings in the USA, but less so in other industrialized countries. We still have more economic mobility than many countries, but we should say the "Nordic Dream" instead of "American Dream."

[dantheman]

The scale of mobility is different, in the USA you can be much more wealthy. That's thrkwd direct comparisons like this off. If every is relatively poor then mobility is really high and uncorrelated with parent wealth.

[Frost1x]

Or those are considered outliers.

While those rags-to-riches cases are true data points, they are not representative of the population sample. They are the exception despite the strong correlation, likely due to another contributing factor (sheer random luck, great financial earning abilities, etc.).