I had a general idea of how many belong to the former and latter categories, so I'm not astonished. The statistical data supports my point.

http://www.economicmobility.org/

>>People who start out with wealth seldom create wealth. In the best cases, they usually just administer it. Its the people who start out with the bricks that seem to end up creating the wealth.

This isn't just about starting off with wealth. My Ferrari metaphor is more about having the repertoire of values and skills needed to become wealthy in a place like the U.S. rather than simply being endowed with money. You're vastly more likely to do well in life if you have parents who spend time with you teaching you to read, making sure you do your homework, provide emotional support, and instill values of hard work and success than you are if you have parents, a parent, or no parents who do none of those things.

The late John Ogbu studied why the children of affluent African American parents who went to excellent schools were much more likely to underperform academically relative to their peers, and discovered that parental disengagement was a major factor.

http://www.hepg.org/her/abstract/38

Sometimes people manage to acquire the necessary values and thus the skills necessary to do well, despite starting off in adverse conditions. But they're the exceptions, and were psychologically and sociologically positioned to be that way. So unfortunately they can't be used as examples demonstrating that "anybody" can overcome adversity.

>>Slavery and poverty are different economic relationships altogether. Equating them is usually rhetorical hyperbole and if taken seriously, leads to some very wrong conclusions.

It's not exactly a stretch to say that the enslaved have typically been poor on account of their being slaves, is it? And I never equated slavery and poverty[1]: I used slavery as an obvious example of how you can have the deck overwhelmingly stacked against you.

1. I'm resisting the urge to say, "Anyone who says or implies that I equated them is themselves engaging in rhetorical hyperbole." :)