Quote:
Originally Posted by ToothSayer
The mentally ill are screwed. As are those that are trapped strongly in cultures that are dysfunctional. But they're a fairly small minority and it's not anyone's business to interfere, if such was even possible.
To me, a fair shot is defined as "If someone from a lower class wants to leave their surroundings and improve their life substantially without doing anything special, can they?" and the answer in America in 2017 is that they can do it very easily. You have to get into pretty bizarre victim politics to disagree with this imo. The only people this doesn't apply to are the mentally ill and those with trauma such as child abuse.
No one is arguing that an idiot should have the same expectation of success as a Bill Gates, or that a totally level playing field between everyone is possible.
This is not binary. The mentally ill and people trapped in dysfunctional cultures are almost totally screwed, but kids with parents long-term addicted to hard drugs, or with recidivist parents, or who suffer from prolonged physical or sexual abuse are quite screwed too.
Lower down the scale, kids whose parents split when they were young are disadvantaged somewhat compared to peers with stable family structures.
That's not saying that some individuals from those backgrounds but born with the right characteristics can't become successful in life (and there are examples here of people who have - the survivor bias cases); simply that fewer of them probably will.
From his post, BoredSocial was able to leverage his strong IQ advantage over his peers by recognising that his parents weren't good role models and presumably by studying/working hard and in the right ways.
If he'd been the same kid without that advantage, it seems reasonable to say that it's much less likely he'd have been able to make a success of himself, as his post says.
What he's arguing is that due to no fault of their own some people are so disadvantaged by some background factors (and I'm deliberately not citing race because I know you don't even regard it as a limiting factor) that it's wrong to say they have a fair shot at a successful life, so to claim that
"The US is such that anyone who is capable of delaying gratification, who is smarter than a dog and doesnt' have children out of wedlock, can quite easily become middle class wealthy working 40 hours/week."
is untrue.