It seems the more unequal the society the more pressure there is on children to "beat the odds" to avoid languishing in poverty by being useful to capital in so

It seems the more unequal the society the more pressure there is on children to "beat the odds" to avoid languishing in poverty by being useful to capital in some way. In many European countries and other strong first world nations like Japan and Oz that provide strong social safety nets and baseline standards of living you see the inverse passive effect described in other comments where people can stop trying to sell themselves at all. So it seems like people will eat each other until the average is good enough at which point a segment of the population stops competing at all.