Now it’s clear: hard work doesn’t make you rich

"Now"??? That was as clear as the sky ~5,000 years ago, when Egyptian farmers were spending parts of their idle dry seasons building those trendy new "pyramid" things for burials of the well-to-do. And a millennia or two later, the Greek myth-writers strongly favored kings, princes, and bastard sons of divine beings for "hero" roles in their stories.

Has anyone really said, "If you work hard, then you will be rich?" What people say, and they're right, is that unless you're born wealthy or win the lottery, hard work is a key to becoming rich. That doesn't mean that most hard-working people will become rich, but good luck meeting with great success of any sort without working hard. Even if you're gifted, so what there are other gifted people, the ones with perseverance and a work ethic are going to be the only ones in the game so to speak.

The truth is that there is no single formula for success, but there are elements required to succeed, and hard work is one of them.

So, let me get this straight -

There's what seems to be a politically questionable think group, whos entire shtick is researching into inequality. They release a paper in which they studied the poorest members of their country, and found that differences in intergenerational mobility, across various factors in the poorest members, hasn't changed much in people born in the 80s compared to people born in the 70s, both of which had slightly worse mobility (they don't provide any numbers for this) compared to people born in the 50s.

Then some highly emotional, obviously politically biased "journalist" takes this, and turns it into an opinion piece story about how "hard work doesn't make you rich".

What? There's nothing about this journalism which is any way real. From one end to the other it's purely emotional, political propaganda.