re: Nice opinion piece on income inequality from CNN

quote:

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Yep, and the same who are born into wealth.

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I agree 100%.

I think a lot of people on this board need to accept the fact that so much of our potential is decided well before we're even born. Who your parents are and where you grow up have as much to do (if not much more to do) with becoming successful as ones work ethic.

That's why the "hard work" argument is so fricking obnoxious. It's self-serving and smug; it's ignorant of the economic and social realities of wealth; and it suggests, rather nefariously, that those who aren't successful have only their personal shortcomings to blame.

It's also incredibly lazy thinking.

ETA: I say this as someone who was born into a well-off family and never had to worry about a thing growing up. My education, my car, my health, etc., that was all taken care of by mom and dad. I didn't even have to pay tuition for undergrad or grad school. Yeah, I'm a good worker (not a particularly great one) and ambitious enough to succeed, but I'm not going to sit here and pretend that if I were born to a single mother in the Lower Ninth Ward my story would turn out just as well. I owe a lot of who I am to my family and my environment growing up, things which are entirely out of my control.