You only need to study successful rich people or use common sense to figure out that you don't become wealthy by investing to some index funds. You do that after you have sold your business and want to shield your wealth for carefree life.

Pensions (dne), social security (ha), somehow make your own business capable of supporting you into old age, work until you die.

Pensions are going to the same place...

Want to be rich? Are you rich already?

No? Then too bad.

Because "equality of opportunity" in the US is only available to those who are more equal than others.

At least for children who grow up with married parents, there's still quite a bit of income mobility.

Such children born into the bottom quintile of income, are pretty likely to end up in any quintile. The probability of ending up in each quintile from bottom to top, is 17%, 23%, 20%, 20%, 19%. Seems pretty fair to me; totally fair would be 20% chance of each.

It's a little skewed for people born into the top quintile, but not so much: 10%, 13%, 21%, 27%, 30%.

Source: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2014/08...

This sentiment is the driving force behind the popularity of many crypto currencies. Crypto enables class mobility where there was none before. For instance, purchasing $1,000 of Nano (XRB) at 10 cents (4 months ago) would be around $87,000 now if it didn't get stuck on bitgrail.

You can trade penny stocks in the normal market, too.

That's demonstrably false. You could make an argument that on average it has become harder to change your social class, but plenty of people start life poor or middle class and end life rich.

It's true to a first order approximation.

If there were no exceptions, then how could those born into wealth persuade themselves of their own moral superiority?