My choices were nothing special: Pay attention in school, do my homework, get good grades, pick a meaningful hobby, don't drink or do drugs, don't beat up other kids for fun, read books, work in a retail store, stay away from drama, get into a decent college and choose a good major, do internships, network, pick up recommendations, get interviews at tech companies, get tech job, start paying debts, save and invest money, move and get better tech job, save and invest more money, pay more debts, keep learning new skills, get even better tech job, pay off debt, save and invest even MORE money, get promotion, save and invest TONS of money... by now you can see compounding effects are kicking in and not much can stop me. All this from a poor boy born in Raleigh.
> My choices were nothing special: Pay attention in school, do my homework, get good grades, pick a meaningful hobby, don't drink or do drugs, don't beat up other kids for fun, read books, work in a retail store, stay away from drama
I concede that the rest of this list is choices you made, but I wonder how much of the part I quoted can be attributed to actual, conscious choice on your part.
Me personally, I'm in tech by pure luck. Because my mother let me watch Star Trek as a kid, because my father arranged for a PC in our house, because they gave me essentially unlimited and unsupervised time in front of it, and because I lucked out with education reform that transferred me out of the worst class in primary school to the best one in secondary school - only because of that, I picked up programming as a hobby. My job, my knowledge and my material situation are pretty much directly attributable to this. It wasn't my choice.
A lot of people think that their success was entirely by their own efforts. I'm with you, there was a lot of luck involved.
Things that contributed to my success that I had nothing to do with:
I'm white.
I was born in the US.
I'm male.
I have a reasonably high IQ.
My parents were middle class.
I was raised in a medium sized town on the west coast.
I was interested in computers and an early adopter.
I stumbled into jobs that let me use that interest and make a successful career out of it.
Certainly I made some good decisions along the way, but in different circumstances I could have turned out completely differently.
A lot of those things are conscious choices... I suppose getting good grades is tough if you are not intelligent and were born with a bad brain, or paying attention might be tough if you had ADD.
Some of it may just be a result of having decent parents that instill good values in you, like warning you about hanging with the wrong crowds or teaching you right from wrong or showing you interesting stuff.
I guess if one is looking for an excuse for their shitty upbringing, your parents are the first place to start, not society. Maybe if someone is a shitty parent we should be more aggressive about taking their kids away, instead of letting them reach maturity in their sorry state where it becomes increasingly harder and more expensive to get them back on their feet. Maybe people shouldn't be entitled to raising their kids automatically if they can't demonstrate they'll be a good parent. It may be the only way to solve the problem of poor and underemployed people breeding out of control and creating more poor and underemployed.
> A lot of those things are conscious choices... I suppose getting good grades is tough if you are not intelligent and were born with a bad brain, or paying attention might be tough if you had ADD.
Or you were surrounded by such people, or the teachers and your parents didn't successfully convince you that school is important. Or the teachers were plain bad. Or you had too much resistance to bullshit.
> I guess if one is looking for an excuse for their shitty upbringing, your parents are the first place to start, not society.
Yeah, probably, and they could recursively pawn off half of the blame to their parents. My point here wasn't to assign blame, though, but to point out that the factors most impactful in one's economic prosperity are essentially beyond one's control. Blaming people born into poverty, or set on a course for poverty early in their childhood, or thrown into poverty by totally random factors, is not fair.
I believe that society has a duty to reduce this variance that's beyond individual control. To an extent, it does already, but we need to do more. It's in our own best interests - happy society is a stable society, and the more opportunities people have, the more productive and innovative the whole. There will be poor people and rich people for as long as you can rank and sort people by some attribute - i.e. forever. But that doesn't mean the poor must suffer.
> Maybe people shouldn't be entitled to raising their kids automatically if they can't demonstrate they'll be a good parent.
That's... hard. Right now, I think it would lead to much more suffering than it would help.
> It may be the only way to solve the problem of poor and underemployed people breeding out of control and creating more poor and underemployed.
That's not how it happens, though. It's not the individuals, and especially not poor people, that create underemployment, it's the market that does. Gainfully employed people end up unemployed, because the job market moved in some direction, raising some people to prosperity nearly by accident (like me and tech; I learned to program out of my own intrinsic drives, I didn't even consider profitability of this until way into my university years), and grounding others.
Also, if we want to create a society of people successful in the market, then there's a whole disconnect between choices they need to make, and the choices society teaches them. What society teaches is: be helpful, be hardworking, conscientious, moral. What to do to succeed on the market: always look for reward, cut corners, be comfortable about scamming people and making the world worse, be amoral. The question is, if we're blaming people for making poor economic choices, are we really willing to entertain a society in which people make right economic choices?
