That sounds like my life except for the inner city part. Substitute "redneck-ville" though, and it's the same basic principle. And I will say that I think the idea that these things mean you need massive amounts of luck to become "successful" (depending on exactly how you define successful) is bullshit. I never had any particular amount of luck that I can identify, relative to my peers who were born in similar circumstances, and while I'm not a millionaire (but I'm still working on it), I've been what most people would call reasonably successful. In my experience, what it takes is mainly insane work ethic, an indomitable attitude, dogged determination, and relentless pursuit of your goals.

I'm not saying anything about you specifically, but that sounds a lot like a kind of "anti-libertarian" straw-man argument I hear a lot. Certain people like to claim exactly that libertarians believe "that all people who are not successful did not work hard", which is far from true.

I think everybody understands that some people work very hard and still fail to achieve "success" (depending on how you define success). But what I think should be taken into account is that:

Some people who fail to achieve "success" do so because they didn't work hard enough.

Hard work, good decisions, etc., do play an important role in the amount of success you attain.

Obviously reality falls somewhere in between "luck is everything" and "hard work is everything", but I get the sense that some people promoting the "it's all luck" mindset have an agenda in terms of denigrating the fundamental idea that effort and initiative count at all. Again, not saying that's you, and I'm probably just over-sensitive on this subject.

As I posted elsewhere in this thread already, I think the real issue is that the ideas of Robert Frank are not about these "regular" cases in the middle income range at all. (At most, I'd conclude that the interviewer asked questions that would touch persons in that range, too, and who likely form the majority of the site's readers.)

If you are doing OK-ish on the upper end or OK-ish on the lower end of the middle income strata of a Western (!) society, your "lot" should be quite tolerable. And nobody would deny that with extremely hard work and discipline you can move from the lower end of middle income to the upper end of middle income. However, if you are doing really bad and are below the poverty line or really well and are in the top 1% range, that certainly requires a good portion of (possibly: bad) luck. It already starts at conception, with your "birth rights". And the aim of the article (or rather, of Mr. Frank's theories), as I interpret it (them), is pointing that out that we need to find measures how to smooth those extremes, not about figuring out if some middle income person had a bit more or less luck, or if it even mattered.

So I (and others in this thread) will continue to try to convince people to have more empathy until we do have such a system.

I see those as orthogonal concerns. You can have empathy even if you don't have a "everything is luck" mentality.

And sure, you can have some empathy even if you don't have all of the empathy. But those are definitely not orthogonal concerns. Being able to empathize fully with someone's situation IMO includes recognizing that everything truly is luck. Like down to your genetic makeup. Hell, being alive is lucky.

That seems like a content-free and useless definition of "luck" to me. What value do we gain from pointing out that "being alive is lucky"? We're deep into "shit nobody can do anything about" territory here.

Again, I don't dispute that different people start from different positions in life, but my position is that we should focus on doing things to broadly expose opportunities for everyone, and then providing support for the the truly unfortunate who are not able to take advantage of any opportunity. But I have NO problem with unequal returns in terms of relative achievement between people who start in similar positions. Some people simply do work harder, and create more value. I don't see any reason they shouldn't benefit from that.

what's the point if they're not seeing equal returns?

I don't see why anybody should expect equal returns, especially not in terms of lockstep "moment in time for moment in time" comparison. Success won't come at the same time for everybody. We should also keep in mind that "success" is not a binary operator... it's more of a continuum - not to mention somewhat personal and subjective anyway.

Edit: I think it might be productive to society for the exceptional cases to ask how a better attitude could be encouraged in their former peers. Do the ones who fail lack faith that their efforts would pay off, or do they just not care?

For me personally, I think positive-outlook TV shows like Star Trek TNG had a bigger influence on my attitudes toward life than I might want to admit. So I'm really curious where others who take a significantly different path from their peer group derived their motivation to succeed.

I don't think there's any way for me to answer that. My attitude has been shaped by 43 years of various influences... parents, friends, TV, books, movies, and FSM knows who/what all else.

To that I can counter that I have met many hard working persons with excellent higher education (IT, medicine, engineering, science, no matter) in my life, but then bad luck struck and destroyed it all. Their kid died and they didn't overcome it. They had to flee a country in war and are now 50+ and unemployable. An extreme example a lawyer told me: An entrepreneurial woman with a great company stopped to help a person in an accident; Along comes a crazy car, crashes into all of them, and the woman looses both arms in the incident - now she's in deep dept and the company in ruins. And so forth...

The opposite, good luck, is just as prevalent in middle income strata, too. Take software engineers: There are usually hundreds if not thousands of persons applying for a job. Certainly there are several in most cases that would be a match. But will you be the lucky one who got picked? Etc. The article itself also has some examples, like getting an career boosting promotion earlier than normal. Yet, in the end, all (first and second world inhabitants only, and only if you were not born to some miserable parent(s)!) striving for that job and not being struck by some bad incident might end up just fine. [As I should add: But not doing maximally great either, unless being struck by one or - more likely - quite a few really lucky incidents.]

In other words, luck plays an always present role in all strata of society, not just the extremes. Only, it might not be that obvious right there, "in the middle." But whatever, the whole point of the article is about the extremes, smoothing those cases with exceptional bad or good luck, not about those in the mid ranges doing just fine...

But none of that means it's impossible or that it requires luck to break out of (again, assuming they live in a country with abundant economic opportunity). It requires hard work, discipline, and perhaps most importantly, an understanding that the limits their parents ran into that resulted in their impoverished upbringing are not insurmountable.

Part of what allowed me to escape is luck. Yes it required that I developed early and so was ahead of my peers in education. It also required hard work to capitalize on that lead. However, what kept more than one of my cohorts from escaping was bad luck. A family member had a health issue, a legal issue, whatever. Their need to care for their family caused them to miss an opportunity (Get a job rather than go to college).

Unless you're advocating living life as a sociopath and ditching people as 'dead weight', luck is absolutely part of escaping poverty.

In any case, whether you say it is that the parents are poor or that they are drug addicts or don't care or whatever, you're talking about things outside the control of the individual. I cannot choose the parents I was born to.