>You said "OTOH, who your parents and ancestors were counts for a lot in what you start out with in the lottery of life."
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>I was merely refuting that with my own personal experience and so was Michael. So what do you do? You come back with "Once again, you suggest that the plural of anecdote is data. There are outliers in every series."
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>I cannot tell you how impressed I am that you have managed with a single statement to trivialize my entire life experience. I am sure that Michael also appreciates how little respect you have for the challenges that he had to overcome.

My bio-father was from a very successful family.
A big part of his problem was the idea that the world owed him and he was going to collect.
That, and a lifelong rebellion against the world that had wronged him.

If you are going to believe that a person can work hard and make a success of their life no matter their starting point
then the flip side to it is that you can start out advantaged and end up in the gutter.

Social mobility in America is alive and well - we don't have a caste system, nor inherited nobility.
My life experience and simple observation tells me that it is not where you start that matters.
It is what you do that matters the most.

Does that mean that having a great or awful family has no effect?
Duh, of course it has an effect.
If your family rejects education and achievement, your odds of going to Harvard or Prison do change.
It is a lot more about your own attitude than your family's economic class.

The funny thing about human nature is that we value our own achievements more than things we did not earn.
You see that in all social classes - it is not a lower or upper class thing.
I saw a rich kid who was gifted a Porsche just treat it as trash while the kid who had to work at McDonalds after school really took care of his Honda.
It was disgusting to see the Porsche with oxidized paint and smoking exhaust because Richy Rich could not be bothered to have the car waxed or the oil changed.

I think reaching into the pool of poor and minority kids and choosing a lucky few to thrust into upper tier schools to achieve "diversity" is a failed approach.
The dropout rates are a tragedy for poor and minority kids who are not academically prepared in such schools.

The upper class whites who push for "diversity" don't even realize their hypocrisy - and it is YUGE.
Their kids still get all the goodies.
The fact is, it is somebody else's white kids who lose out.
Not to mention how unfair it is to screw the high achieving Asian kids.

Poor and minority kids have the same range of abilities as the advantaged kids.
Successful charter schools and "Stand And Deliver" have shown that with great teachers and encouragement these kids can do great academic work.
The tragedy is that we are utterly failing to offer these kids an outstanding education.

They should be getting great teachers in a great system.
Instead, union tenure rules mean even the worst teachers keep their jobs.

Upper Class involved parents like Tamar figure out who the good teachers are and demand the best for their kids.
Bravo!

Meanwhile, the mediocre and bad teachers that can't be fired get shuffled around.
The racist result is that many poor and minority kids drop out of "failure factories" instead of getting the outstanding education we would all hope for.