[DistressedDrone]

The thing is, it's all luck.

Policies are made with the idea that someone like you must have somehow "earned" it, and you may believe it yourself, but no one chooses to be poor. You were lucky enough to get a good job, lucky enough to be able to work so much without burning out, lucky to be born smart, or a man, or white. It all adds up and it's all luck. You always made the most optimal choice you thought possible, as anyone would.

Yet the pervasive idea that one can "earn it" and become rich through sheer willpower has the unfortunate implication that those who are "still" poor must somehow deserve it. If some can grit their teeth through their misfortune and achieve upward social mobility, why can't they all? This is of course absurd of the face of it because your gain was someone else's loss, we can't all be "rich" as it is inherently relative. But also because any given poor person generally has the goal if not the priority of becoming less poor. Having grown up poor, no one wants to believe it's a permanent state of affairs.

Generally speaking, everyone works hard and no one wants to be poor. Yet modern capitalism (even our Canadian version) is largely engineered to punish the poor for being so, even though in the end, it's all luck.

Edit: Here's an interesting paper on the topic of misattribution of success: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/7/eaau1156.full