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You're really lucky if you don't know what's it like to live in a country where all the poor people are certain that things will never change for the best and therefore do absolutely nothing about it.

And yet the social mobility in the USA is quite low compared to other developed countries: "Several large studies of mobility in developed countries in recent years have found the US among the lowest in mobility." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_...)

Empirically those countries with a highly built-out welfare system (e.g. those where the economic pressure on the poor individual is lowest) see higher probabilities of those poor people working themselves out of poverty.