No but Seriously. This is just a series of platitudes: decisions are influenced negatively by poverty? Yes, and some are influenced positively by poverty, as in "this sucks and I don't want to be hungry anymore".

I know it motivated me to see my parents struggle, to eat government cheese, and to move all the time because of the need for new work for my dad. Experience is a great teacher, and it motivated me to not make the same mistakes my parents made.

Its not a zero sum game. Even being poor isn't poor anymore. When I was little, and we were poor, dirt poor in the backwoods of Tenessee we didn't have a phone, we had one kerosene heater, we lived on a dirt road, no health care, and we got our milk from the neighbors cow ( real milk kids is gross ). Compare that with the average "poor" person today, cell phone, government health insurance, clean safe water to drink, a government provided debit card to go shopping ( no govt cheese for them), paved roads!

Yep, life's tough. They'll never get out of poverty. Maybe you're right. If it's too nice, why bother. I definitely didn't want to be backwoods poor, it positively influenced my decisions. I ain't poor no more.

I'm not actually dismissing your story -- I am in no position to judge fairly -- but I'm trying to point out that the fundamental attribution bias and the closely related actor-observer bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93observer_bias) are both powerful. What if your personality type made it such that you had a high likelihood of success whether you were rich or poor?

Finally, with all this talk about "choice", let me go ahead and throw out a controversial statement: we have a lot less free will than we want to believe we do.

I remember being a teenager not all that long ago (I'm 32 now). The girls that got pregnant all knew better - I remember sitting through the same lectures in class that they did - but they made their choices.

And obviously you were in the same situations they were, and had the same upbringing, so the comparison is valid? It's nice that you can rationalize your current situation as stemming entirely from all the correct choices you've made, but have you considered that you are far from an unbiased source in such a rationalization?

The truth is that people are not rational actors. Adolescents are even less so. To state that all the girls in your age group knew better when they got pregnant does not immediately point towards them having the wrong goals (or ideas, as you term them), but towards a failure in your reasoning (or at least a failure of imagination).

And yet, any remotely intelligent person living in a remotely modern country is completely capable of not getting pregnant or getting someone else pregnant, should they choose not to. Let's not completely absolve people of blame just because they're poor/young/whatever. Everyone is capable of autonomy.

Thank you for so concisely and cogently resolving what may well have been philosophy's longest-standing and most ontologically profound line of inquiry. I'm confident that one day I will look back and consider myself blessed for having had the opportunity to effectively witness such an historic event first hand.

It's trivially provable that some vanishingly small percentage of people have no choice in life (e.g. die/incarcerated until death while young through no fault of their own). Accepting that, I think it's logical to conclude that some circumstances will negatively impact you more than others, and affect your chances at success. That does not resolve people of responsibility, but in my mind it does make a case for compassionate handling of poor circumstances.

All I'm saying is, your mouth can't get pregnant.

"Your own life matters most" - In what sense? More than that of others?

"What's good for you does not come at the expense of other people." - Do you have evidence for this? Does stealing, which might in some moment be good for a person, not come at the expense of another?

"How can you make your mark on the world" - Doesn't this presuppose that 'making a mark in the world' is a more 'important' cause than changing diapers?

"If the ideas people held were simply a matter of economic conditions, no one would ever rise out of poverty." - Id be interested to see some statistics of the frequency with which people escape poverty. I have a feeling the numbers are fairly low.

You know what? This is a sloppy formulation. But see the point immediately below, because I think it deals with most of the trouble you're having with what I'm saying.

"What's good for you does not come at the expense of other people." - Do you have evidence for this? Does stealing, which might in some moment be good for a person, not come at the expense of another?

Was stealing good for Bernie Madoff? Look at the evidence. He ended up in jail, penniless, and what's left of his family will not speak to him. His son committed suicide. Even before he was caught, his life was a living hell - he admitted as much in an interview.

"How can you make your mark on the world" - Doesn't this presuppose that 'making a mark in the world' is a more 'important' cause than changing diapers?

Things are important or unimportant only in relation to particular lives, and everyone has unique, specific goals. For example, if my goal is to become a world-class concert pianist, fathering children before I was thirty would definitely make the more important (again, to me) goal impossible to achieve.

"If the ideas people held were simply a matter of economic conditions, no one would ever rise out of poverty." - Id be interested to see some statistics of the frequency with which people escape poverty. I have a feeling the numbers are fairly low.

Statistics are only useful when you are ignorant of a specific phenomenon, and have no way to make the necessary observations yourself. What matters is specific, actual people, not some aggregate average that describes nothing in particular and no one specifically.

The fact that some people rise from poverty is all that is needed to prove that it is possible.

One last point occurred to me. People rose out of incredible poverty en masse over the last 150 years, following the industrial revolution. in the 1860s, even the wealthiest businessman could not fly across the country in a few hours, call people around the world, get treatment for serious illnesses (e.g., valve replacement heart surgery), use computers, etc. A lot of people look at poverty from the perspective of relative differences, but I'm just happy to be alive in a time and in a place where there is so much available, in absolute terms (because that's the thing that actually makes a difference in my standard of living).

Your grasp on the use of statistics seems tenuous. It is not to prove possibility but likelihood. I could give one random person a million dollars and that would prove that people can escape poverty? Yes, they "can" but not at a rate or in a way that is meaningful for those stuck there or concerned about the problem.

The financial services industry, according to 2011 statistics, employed roughly 5.5 million people (and this is surely lower than the pre-2007 statistic). Do you honestly think that the majority of these people are thieves?

I could give one random person a million dollars and that would prove that people can escape poverty?

That's not how people escape poverty. People who rise up have to work to achieve it.

But pointing them out as examples to diminish the importance of socioeconomic conditions impact on a person's choices is like holding up any statistical outlier as proof that the statistics are 'wrong.'