Absolutely correct. If you are white, come from a rich family with abundant financial resources and legacy avenues to private schools at all educational levels, the likelihood of success is 99% assured. Even if you are an abject failure within a wealthy family dynasty, like Bush 43, you will be successful by always being bailed out by family. Trust funds rule!!! (Snark**)

Means that you are a peon. When I first started working I noticed that the less one made, the harder one worked. As a secretary I couldn't take time off without being replaced, but my boss could be gone for weeks. I went back to school and got a Masters, but it was too late and the economy was headed downward.

Yes, working hard can get you places, but being born to the right family is much better and more likely to make you successful.

The avalanche has started, it's too late for the pebbles to vote.

the greatest correlation of 'success' (itself a suspect word) is tied to someone who gets an education, stays off drugs, and follows the rules and works hard. Further, those who are at the bottom of the economic ladder in the United States tend to have one of the following: Alcoholism, drug addiction, dropped out of school, criminal record.

It would follow that if you get a decent education, considering education through 12th grade is free, and if you study hard and score well on your ACT's so is a 4 year college degree. Two year degrees can be achieved while in high school, and in a majority of communities are also free. Student deferred loans are available, so that a four year degree is readily available.

Getting a job frankly is no great shakes in a society with under 5% unemployment. If you can read a clock, get up, and follow basic instruction you can reach a $30,000 per year job in most major cities as a start.

If you are angry, drink, fight with your coworkers, carry a chip on your shoulder, refuse to go to school. No, success is more elusive. I haven't seen a good sociological study that does not bear out the relationships. And interestingly persistence is more highly correlated with success than learning, and getting along with others is more highly correlated with happiness than being smart as well.

If everyone else is an asshole, and out to get you and keep you down. Especially all those rich bastards. Yeah I guess I can see some trouble in the interviews for jobs. The attitude might show through a bit. Not fun in the office.

But for those of you who don't want to work, there is always the lottery.

Isn't Howard Zinn required reading anymore? It should be. The chances for Horatio Alger-type success in the USA are much lower than in many other countries.

The slaves in the Old Confederacy worked hard I'm sure. Didn't get them too far ahead except for maybe house slave status. Colin and Condi, ya listening.
Then the robber barons discovered wage slavery in the mid 19th century. Sure beats chattel slavery because you don't even have to feed and house them.
Henry Ford was the exception in that he understood that if his workers didn't have money they couldn't buy his cars. The WSJ of the time was outraged and accused him of being "too Christian".
The Reagan, Bush, Cheeeeney regime has just been trying to bring all that back.
Hard work...give the planet a break. It's a suckers game.

but getting up and doing something constructive every day will probably keep you fed.

I did inhale.

talking about the system and inbuilt unfairness, besides problems in elementary and secondary schools there is horrid problems in collage and university education.

you have the grading based on the bell curve coupled with overworking underpaid part time professors. a growing trend were more and more if not most teachers are treated like replaceable contract workers despite years of advanced education, where competition for rare tenure creates animosity and petty bickering(seriously uni profs stealing each others mail) between what should be mature and cooperative peers. with the rather insane grading system students are forced to literally sabotage one another to get ahead. Its crazy to call a system that will still fail members of a class even if every single person worked hard their whole education, where profs base their grade on first impressions because they dont have time to evaluate them and the other hundred or more student's essays over two days.
not all schools but any of them concerned about "grade inflation" which is any that can get you into the graduate schools that rich folks pay to get their kids into.

which says, "There's work to be done around here and everybody does their share." It's much different than Weber's "Protestant Work Ethic." I was also told that if I wanted something out of life I was going to have to get it on my own. Nobody was going to give it to me.

I started earning my own money outside the home when I was 9. Between then and when I could get a "real" job when I was 16, I mowed people's lawns, shoveled their sidewalks, carried their golf clubs, delivered their newspapers and cleaned their schools. When I was 16 I started working in the mainstream economy. I paid for my own Catholic high school and college.

As I entered adulthood I became aware that the work I did had little to do with pulling my own weight and everything to do with being a good consumer and churning up economies of scale for "economic growth." I learned that this country wasn't going to do anything about making ourselves independent of Middle Eastern oil - not because because we couldn't provide the necessities of life without it, but because, without those oil imports, I couldn't go to work making crap that was better unmade so I could afford to buy consumer gods that I really didn't want anyway and in doing so create an excuse for the military-industrial complex to police the world to maintain the "stability" required for the function of a "global economy."

I'm employed now. Six weeks from now I probably won't be. A year from now I may very well be homeless. Maybe it's for the best. I'm in dire need of motivation.

A lot of very wealthy people work very hard, just not at physical labor (except for professional athletes). But what is disturbing is that the wealthy now are passing down most of their wealth to their children and providing them with all the societal advantages necessary for them to continue generating wealth on their own. These children still have to work hard to continue making such money, but the fact that they are in high quality universities and then nice paying jobs increasingly means others in the lower classes are not able to get these advantages.

We are seeing outright nepotism more and more in almost every industry and craft, and American society embraces this - no one really questions it. The most egregious offenders are in Hollywood - think of the successful actors today who are the children of famous actors. Or someone like Miley Cyrus, whose famous father packaged her to Disney as an up-and-coming pop star. Lots of people with more talent than her will never get that opportunity.

It's becoming epidemic in politics, too. Congressional seats are becoming birthrights, not just with the Kennedys, Clintons, and Bushes, but in the Senate (Gore, Murkowski) and in the House. Children of famous politicians have a natural political advantage - brand recognition.

Combine all this with the drive to eliminate the death tax, and you have an aristocracy of perpetuating, permanent wealth being created in this country. People in the lower classes can work as hard as possible, but the breakthrough moves into the upper class will become fewer.

I moved out of Miami, Fl to Oklahoma City, OK on 9/00 for the much cheaper cost of living here. Poverty's the biggest industry here tho... Unemployment's high.

Anyway, before I tried OKC, OK, I tried Queen Creek, Arizona. Boy, talk about your low cost of living. The desert's great for that. But employ is many many miles away, closer to Apache Junction, or better yet, Tempe/Mesa, or best, Phoenix itself. But ye gods, what a commute. Yet there ya are; long commuting gives one cheap cost of living and area of employ...

Now if only gas were a buck a gallon or less again! (A Honda Shadow 750 gets 45+ miles to the gallon...)

US Students Do Worse in Science and Math

By NANCY ZUCKERBROD – 1 day ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. students are lagging behind their peers in other countries in science and math, test results out Tuesday show.

The test, the Program for International Student Assessment, was given to 15-year-olds in 30 industrialized countries last year. It focused on science but also included a math portion.

The 30 countries, including the United States, make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which runs the international test.

The average scores for U.S. students were lower than the average scores for the group as a whole.

U.S. students also had an average science score that was lower than the average score in 16 other OECD countries. In math, U.S. students did even worse — posting an average score that was lower than the average in 23 of the other leading industrialized countries.

more

But characterizing people who do not have your advantages as "lazy" is the problem. And many many people work hard and do not get ahead, while many who are lucky to have rich parents do very well. Getting a few million a month for waking up in the morning and having the right name (i.e. "Walton") is a bit unfair to those who are working hard but will never gain the profit from it working in your stores.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

Charles Darwin

i got something else

the myth being that anybody can get ahead with hard work.
the problem is that everybody can't get ahead with hard work.

if every or even most people gave their all, pushed themselves,were ambitious, etc. things wouldn't be all that different, there still isnt all that much "success" to go around. like my point with the grade curves only some people will get the rewards even if everybody worked themselves to near death. even if you and your coworkers did every possible thing to deserve promotion, only one of you can still get picked for arbitrary qualifications or just because you did the little speck better than the rest. and wouldn't everybody working hard actually create unemployment as fewer employees are needed to do the same work since they all try hard?

what good is a path to success if only a few can follow it anyway, even if everybody pursues it?

dose't our economy actually depend on people not doing everything it takes to succeed. if everyone is smart with their money then wouldn't thousands of businesses go bankrupt as people hold off from buying anything but what they need or as few luxury goods as possible since they are just wasted money unless you are already rich.

what about the economy needing x% of unemployment for inflation? at least labor value becomes crap if everybody is working hard, like i said need less workers, normally unemployed x% of people competing for jobs. etc.

art,movies,tv,fiction,poetry,plays,etc. would be next to worthless as more people pursuing the arts would devalue even great modern works. even leonardo would look bad if there were 20 other guys doing works that were just a little worse.

ambition, hard work, whatever, it's only valuable and rewarded because it's rare. greatness means nothing if it has company.
so how can you say it's valid when not everybody can actually succeed that way.(not even counting third world countries) at the very least it would be the same thing as today, a few exceptionally exeptional people rewarded and the rest stuck grinding gears for nothing.

at least that is how i think it would be in our current system, by all means if im way off do say so.

p.s. isnt hard work in some areas actually pretty fucking evil anyway. i really hope all those corporations that benefit from trapping third world countries in debt and exploiting them are full of slack asses and morons.
that is ambition, that is hard work, just ask machiavelli about the wonders of ambition and hard work.

pps. some members of my old football and ruby teams had a saying: if you aren't cheating you aren't trying hard enough. now look at the upswing of highschool/collage/university cheating, those people are sure trying to get ahead and if they get away with it they will probably be rewarded. now look at our problems with the economy, a lot of cheating, and a hell of a lot more people working hard to succeed and they have been rewarded for it. too bad it just screwed with the economy.

PPPS. and then dont we arrive at a point where we must ask if success is all that. lots of very well rewarded people who earned their jobs and their salaries through hard work are still doing it. putting in more hours than most people, but they sure don't seem all that happy, isnt stress from work becoming the biggest cause of health problems in north America? those people are the definition of success and reward from their own ambition and hard work, but to maintain that position they can't slow down or really enjoy their rewards. aren't the new wireless gadgets seen as a curse by some because work follows them on vacation. and i dont know about you but working you whole life so your retirement is great seems kinda pointless, i dont want to have only my last few decades to be the only time i have to not have to work hard.