[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.).