If you're born wealthy, it's easy to die wealthy (unless you both have access to, and are stupid enough to actively destroy, your wealth.) If you're born poor,

If you're born wealthy, it's easy to die wealthy (unless you both have access to, and are stupid enough to actively destroy, your wealth.) If you're born poor, it's easy to die poor. The middle class is the only group that has to reproduce itself every generation. The middle class is shrinking due to technology, immigration, foreign competition, dogshit labor laws, and simple scaling (just because you had three kids doesn't meant that it will now take 1.5 kids to do your abstract job.) It leads to desperation and superstitious behavior; people trying to exactly repeat things that they've seen and experienced, consulting trendy oracles and gurus, and rationally trying to maximize the number of things that they try in the hope that one or more will save their children from a lifetime of gigwork. If you don't push your kids like that, and they end up successful, others will just say you were lucky. If they end up failures, they'll say you failed them.