Just a thought I had, like what can a ten year old do(besides mass murder & accidents) that messes up their life so badly that it is unrecoverable?
It has to be something that is self inflicted and not something that is the cause of others around them.
If, when you're born, you don't choose to be rich, that messes you up forever.
If you're not born rich you can become rich (or "comfortable") later in life. It doesn't mess you up forever.
Quite frankly, the idea that it's likely that you can get rich through your own work/intellect/ingenuity is more and more false. Social mobility is not at all on the up and up.
You can also easily fuck up your life by failing at the attempt to become rich, or by ordering your life around that attempt. See crypto bros etc.
I'm confident it was never true. Case in point, for America: Most people are either black or female. Even looking at white men, "mysteriously", the vast majority of the great men of the past came from fancy backgrounds.
Very true, good point.
Oh gee, I hadn't thought of that. I'll go tell the African children. /s
Just eyeballing the life stories I know, and looking at the actual statistics on social mobility, if you do everything right you can expect to climb up like a single rung of the socioeconomic ladder. On average. There's a great deal of luck involved there, even, and it's possible to do everything right and go down the ladder if, for example, something unexpected cripples you.