What is rich? Not many people are born in the top 1% -- by virtue of most people being born in the other 99%.

More than half of the top 1% was not born in the top 1%.

Only 1.2% of children born into the top 1% out earn their parents [1].

The elephant in the room is luck. Being born rich is an element of luck, but it's not everything.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2017/05/04/poor-ri...

Especially true in America where upward intergenerational class turnover is 10-25%. Or higher. Need to find my source

The article prominently mentions partner choice, which is different than hard work.

If your partner is on meth or likes to commit felonies, you probably won't become rich soon.

Even drug abuse - or felonies - seriously differs depending on if you are rich or poor. A poor person needing rehab might only have NA to rely on because it is free and allows both parents to watch children: A rich person can likely pay for an inpatient facility and child care. Even before rehab, the poorer person's meth habit is going to take up a larger percentage of the family finances, adding additional stress. The effect of a meth habit really depends on how rich one is when it starts.

A similar thing happens for felonies. IIRC, simply being poor makes it more likely that you commit felonies and more likely that you get caught for others. The richer person can do their cocaine in relative privacy, even if they are outdoors in their own yard. The poor apartment dweller doesn't have such luxuries.

Divorce is also an issue: I've met multiple folks that stayed married to their partner simply because they couldn't afford the fees to get divorced, let alone think about a lawyer if they felt they needed one.

Both have stress, but they have vastly different tools available to help them out with the situation.

Absolutely; I dealt with addiction issues some years back and I was allowed to take 6 months -- at full pay -- to sort everything out. People higher on the income scale often have more access to treatment and better safety nets to be able to make it stick. Addiction is largely a nuisance for the wealthy rather than an existential threat.

I fortunately have never been arrested, but from my peers who have the troubling trend is that if you can afford a good lawyer, the DA will almost immediately plead your felony down to a misdemeanor with no jail time attached. Rich people are far less likely to suffer consequences, even if they're caught because the justice system isn't built to deal with defendants who can fight their case.

The only divide in the US that matters right now is the wealth gap.

Prior partner choice pretty much wiped out my chances of getting "rich". But then, arguably that choice wasn't very intelligent.

(I'll go with the top comment, though. I suspect a lot of smart people simply don't care that much about being rich.)

It's not orthogonal. If you are interested in bootstrapping a high income lifestyle, you won't marry a partner who is self destructive or destructive to you even.

Unfortunately, they don't all come with a label.

Talent and intelligence don't help you much if you don't use them to work hard.

That said, getting rich by working hard if you don't have talent or intelligence will be a lot harder. So I guess you need a bit of all of them.

Even if you have all three, getting rich when you start poor is a lot harder than having deficits in all three and starting out rich.