There are a lot of people in the comments here pointing to environmental or exogenous factors, things that "aren't your fault": where you're born, family obliga

There are a lot of people in the comments here pointing to environmental or exogenous factors, things that "aren't your fault": where you're born, family obligations, stress levels and their effects on cognition, the behavioral economics of risk and scarcity, shocks for the poor vs. the wealthy, and a host of other things. These things are real. However, I want to point out that there are other very real things going on too. Particularly, there are real, and strong, effects from natural selection. The people who tend to succeed really are smarter, harder working, healthier, stronger, etc. The natural selection at work is obvious to any scientist thinking about it, but it's difficult or impossible to talk publicly about it these days. Hating on such an obviously true thing in order to show off to your friends is unfortunately very trendy :-( This is a problem because it means we look for invisible boogeymen rather than having a correct understanding of the situation and going from there.