>OTOH, who your parents and ancestors were counts for a lot in what you start out with in the lottery of life.
>

My father grew up in Southern West Virginia. His father was a coal miner who worked maybe half the time.

He enlisted and went to Korea (after the war), came back, went to college, and became a teacher.

Then he got into I.T. in the early days of IBM and EDS and became a highly successful project manager.

When he got married to my mother, she came from a family that was even poorer than his.

And yet by the time I was born, they were generally middle to upper-middle class. How did my father do that? He worked his butt off.

Yes, that's just one story - though there are many more like it.