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A lot of those things are conscious choices... I suppose getting good grades is tough if you are not intelligent and were born with a bad brain, or paying attention might be tough if you had ADD.Or you were surrounded by such people, or the teachers and your parents didn't successfully convince you that school is important. Or the teachers were plain bad. Or you had too much resistance to bullshit.
> I guess if one is looking for an excuse for their shitty upbringing, your parents are the first place to start, not society.
Yeah, probably, and they could recursively pawn off half of the blame to their parents. My point here wasn't to assign blame, though, but to point out that the factors most impactful in one's economic prosperity are essentially beyond one's control. Blaming people born into poverty, or set on a course for poverty early in their childhood, or thrown into poverty by totally random factors, is not fair.
I believe that society has a duty to reduce this variance that's beyond individual control. To an extent, it does already, but we need to do more. It's in our own best interests - happy society is a stable society, and the more opportunities people have, the more productive and innovative the whole. There will be poor people and rich people for as long as you can rank and sort people by some attribute - i.e. forever. But that doesn't mean the poor must suffer.
> Maybe people shouldn't be entitled to raising their kids automatically if they can't demonstrate they'll be a good parent.
That's... hard. Right now, I think it would lead to much more suffering than it would help.
> It may be the only way to solve the problem of poor and underemployed people breeding out of control and creating more poor and underemployed.
That's not how it happens, though. It's not the individuals, and especially not poor people, that create underemployment, it's the market that does. Gainfully employed people end up unemployed, because the job market moved in some direction, raising some people to prosperity nearly by accident (like me and tech; I learned to program out of my own intrinsic drives, I didn't even consider profitability of this until way into my university years), and grounding others.
Also, if we want to create a society of people successful in the market, then there's a whole disconnect between choices they need to make, and the choices society teaches them. What society teaches is: be helpful, be hardworking, conscientious, moral. What to do to succeed on the market: always look for reward, cut corners, be comfortable about scamming people and making the world worse, be amoral. The question is, if we're blaming people for making poor economic choices, are we really willing to entertain a society in which people make right economic choices?