I'll offer my perspective on this topic which tends to be pretty contentious and reaches deeply into people's worldview. To bolster my pedigree, I'll note that

I'll offer my perspective on this topic which tends to be pretty contentious and reaches deeply into people's worldview. To bolster my pedigree, I'll note that I immigrated to the west when I was a child and my family was relatively poor, and I find myself relatively successful now. The first point I'll make is that success is a probability game. A person from a certain socioeconomic rung might "make it" through hard work, another by sheer serendipity, and yet another might grind their lives away in relative poverty. I prefer looking at this in terms of aggregate rates across cohorts. "What are the chances", given someone's circumstance, that talent and hard work lead to a relative degree of success greater than some other person. On this question I do find that luck is the primary factor that stands out. But simply saying "luck" doesn't really reveal much. It's more worthwhile to understand the _nature_ of how luck interacts with the likelyhood of success. The best analogy I've come up with this is that society and success and opportunity are a lottery where some people are able to obtain more tickets, and others fewer tickets. Each ticket represents an opportunity to fail and try again for success. In this game, inherent talent and success may buy you 100 tickets, compared to someone else less talented who can only obtain 10 tickets. The 100 tickets does not guarantee success, but greatly increases the probability of it. In that same vein, pre-existing wealth is able to buy you 10,000 tickets. Failure is not out of the question, your tickets might not pan out, but the probability of success is exponentially increased. Not only that, but one or more of those first 10k tickets paying out (in terms of success), leads to more wealth, and the ability to once again buy many more tickets. Speaking for myself, many tickets were handed to me due to my circumstance. I immigrated under stable circumstances, not as a refugee or somebody fleeing violence and subject to stress. I had loving, caring parents that were educated enough to understand how to search and seek out opportunities that they could put in front of me when I was a child. Thus when I was 10 I found myself the owner of a Commodore 64 that my father obtained for me from a garage sale, for free, because the original owner no longer wanted it. Later on, my parents would scrimp and save to buy me a (then state of the art) 486 DX, 33-Mhz computer with 8 megabytes of ram. Some opportunities were disguised as disadvantages: social ostracization in school led me to spend most of my time indoors, on my computer, which never judged me. My isolation from physical socialization led me to seek out online communities online at a time when the world wide web was an academic curiosity. I was afforded the opportunity of recovering from many failures because my parents built a support system around me, and encouraged and nurtured my talents through personal sacrifice. That's how I got my 100 tickets, and a few of them were lucky ones. And that led to some initial success, which allowed me to reinvest that success towards more tickets, which eventually snowballed to the point where I find myself living a kind of life that my parents could have never imagined for me when we first left our ancestral home. I know for a fact that there were many like me who did not get as many tickets as I did. Talents wasted. Kids who were bright, brighter and more motivated than me, who did not get as many tickets, or who did but whose tickets simply didn't pan out enough returns before they ran out entirely. I feel that we as a society are supporting and encouraging an incredible amount of waste by not finding better ways to afford more people more opportunities to fail and recover - "more tickets". It is one of the reasons I am highly supportive of social support programs, public health care, and other collective tools to improve social welfare. Those sorts of policies fundamentally serve to reduce the distortion in opportunity inherent in the social lottery. Those programs allow people to fail and try again. They raise the floor. And we have more human wealth to tap there than we can possibly imagine.