I am the exception that confirms your rule.

I grew up very middle class, was working all the way through college (though mainly at the university) and ended in, well, affluence anyway. (I have yet to own either a car or a house.)

Now let's look at the details. My parents didn't have much money, but they were well-educated, and had non-working class accents. While we were in conventional ways poor (i.e. small apartments, no car and a black and white TV set), I never lacked for any educational thing I wanted, and we took long holidays on the cheap when we lived in Europe in the 1960s.

It turned out very early on I had a gift for mathematics and computers, and I got out of school unfortunately about 5 years later than Bill Gates et al but early enough that I was always able to work.

Eventually my talent for answering stupid math puzzles got me into Google early on, where I was able to contribute very little as I worked on endless projects that were shelved through no fault of we the programmers, but they threw me a bunch of money.

And sure, I worked hard, long hours fairly often, but I didn't have to keep my finger on the button. I could yell at a police officer and not go to jail. I could just not show up to work for a day or two because I met some girl, and people would just laugh. Twice I went over a year between jobs because I didn't want to take the shitty jobs that came up, and I was able to not have to settle.

I was very lucky.

I was lucky to have a rare skill. I was lucky to signify as "intelligentsia" to people I met, thanks to my parents. I was lucky to be white, male and Anglo-Saxon. In forty years of programming, I have never once worked on a team with an African-American and rarely with women. I was lucky that I continued to enjoy my work, though a lot of that came from me deliberately targeting unusual and difficult problems (no doubt influenced by my father).

People I knew with other talents equally strong in other fields that weren't the flavor of the moment did badly.

I know a lot of professional writers. All of them had spent decades learning their trade, and could write on a wide range of subjects given some research, and be entertaining and authoritative.

Many of them managed to get lucrative jobs in the early days of the Internet, but then Silicon Valley collectively figured out that they didn't have to pay writers because people will do it for free - like me, I suppose and all their jobs disappeared in a few years.

One of them, Skylaire Alfvegren, just died this year, of undetermined causes - unlike to be COVID, she seemed fine and then suddenly died in her sleep, I feel it was just decades of want and the long-term effects of alcohol.

Another, Reverend Jen (amongst various other bylines), lost her long-time apartment to gentrification and her long-time boyfriend to cancer in just a few years, but she thank goodness managed to come to a soft landing due to a lot of luck and a strong NYC community.

She mentioned once that every single publication that had been paying her a decade before was now out of business.

Others retired to gentile poverty or did other things, badly paid.

I have known hundreds of professional musicians and as many other artists. Three dozen still make their income that way and a plurality of them either have money in the family, or in a couple of cases lucked into some hovel where they pay almost nothing in an otherwise unaffordable city.

A long life has not shown me that hard work and talent are rewarded, but rather that a few people get rewarded for some talent that is the flavor of the moment, and that starting rich is the number one, two and three predictor of whether you end up rich.

Thanks for a strong article!