If you're not a member of the professional class, there's not a lot of options where long-term planning and sticking to goals at your gas station job get you ahead in life.

The issue is that the ladder for those values to get you ahead has basically disappeared unless you hop on before you're done with high school.

And who's likely to hop on that ladder in high school? People that are good at long term planning, sticking to goals, not being shitheads, etc.

And even if you work a shitty gas station job opportunities you can learn the gas station business, impress the owner, and get them to invest in opening your own. Or you can learn a trade in your spare time.

You don't think environmental factors might play in to the type of choices a 16yo gets to make?

They very much do. Which is why so many don't get out of the rut of their background. Despite teachers and all school pep talks telling them they should go to college most who don't have that in their family background don't do it.

You can give up and lose or you can try again and maybe even win. If your environment sucks that's just one more reason to improve it.

> And even if you work a shitty gas station job opportunities you can learn the gas station business, impress the owner, and get them to invest in opening your own. Or you can learn a trade in your spare time.

You most likely will be used to the extreme and thrown away. Lot of places don't care about who is working in low paid skilled jobs. They are as replaceable as ever. Amazon warehouses have machines doing the firing. Soon it will be your gas station. The machine doesn't get impressed unless you break your back.

And conflating poor people with being shit heads is interesting.

No wonder many worker class people feel the ire to hate big tech and workers increasingly.

Millions of poor immigrants would beg to differ

Poor immigrants generally work the shitty jobs I'm referencing and try to make sure their kids are on the professional ladder before finishing high school.

There's still no ladder for them, personally.

There is a ladder for poor first generation immigrants: starting a small business. Look around you. Who owns many of the restaurants, convenience stores, dry cleaners, landscaping services, etc.?

That's a really good point, although those jobs still don't pay great from a $/hr perspective.

I think first generation immigrants cut across the conscientiousness/income relationship that's being presented in this thread. It's a self-selecting group.

>It's a self-selecting group.

That only proves the rule. If your environment is awful but you have the right mindset/personality then you can still be successful.

'Conscientiousness' is the 'Big 5' personality trait here. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness

Seems like you’ve reversed causality there. Poverty is a social context that shapes many of the attributes you’ve described. It’s not as if you took a kid from a rich family and put him in with poor one, his genetic virtues would somehow make him come out on top.

The causality is reversed, but not in the way you are inciting. Regardless of background, married men tend to make more more and act more responsibly:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/04...

Please keep this garbage out of HN.

The downvotes are very telling...

There’s a lot of hard data which actually suggests otherwise. From the classic paper “Why G Matters”: https://images.app.goo.gl/X4wAFYFC6xQrSU259

Poverty was a reason to get married in the past. Lots of civil war brides.