Given only like 1% of people hold PhDs i feel like you're massively underestimating your own effort in your success.
Where you grow up, what schools you attend, who your childhood friend group is, luckily not getting hit by a bus and put in the hospital, etc. A whole host of factors conspire to grant or deny you opportunities.
However once the opportunity arises you have to seize it. Many people have lots of opportunity yet accomplish nothing because they lack the skills, will, or both to do so. Conversely many people with the drive and skills never hit the right opportunity and end up nowhere.
For whatever reason the broader culture seems to bounce back and forth between both extremes. The whole "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and "get a job you lazy bum" crowd acting as if you can get rich purely with hard work. Then on the other side there seems to be this well-intentioned idea on the left that if we simply give every under-privileged kid opportunity they'll be successful.
Real humans and real lives are far more complex than such simple notions.
I would add that, while “giving every under-privileged kid opportunity” wouldn’t make them all successful, for just the reasons you said, I’m not sure that’s even the bottleneck! It’s like… how do you “give someone opportunity?” It’s a very subtle problem. It’s not easy. I doubt there’s any straightforward intervention where you can give everyone 10 units of opportunity, use them wisely please. School funding and clean streets and EBT and whatnot are sort of proxies for this, but it’s just really not that simple.
(This isn’t a disagreement with anything, by the way.)
I'd be surprised if more than a tiny minority of people actually believe that. It has more to do with believing that ideally, everyone should have access to the same opportunities.
It seems rather straightforward and non-controversial that providing more people opportunities to succeed will inevitably lead to more people succeeding, even if only a small minority of people are capable of seizing upon the opportunities they are provided.
The difference is I argue from an ideological standpoint that everyone should receive the same opportunities while acknowledging that only a fraction of people will be able to turn those opportunities into success.
I should point out this ideal is core to the very founding of the US:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The original quote was a typical conservative dismissal intended to demoralize: since not everyone who's given opportunities will succeed, we shouldn't bother providing opportunity to the riffraff.
Here's Daniel Lemire dunking on PhDs: https://x.com/lemire/status/2082851447499088173
Lemire in part claims:
"For social reasons, it is highly uncommon for people to fail the oral defense of their thesis. Some people are just terrible at it, naturally. They cannot think well on their feet. They get confused and answer the wrong question."
The fraction of your 1% with the credentials to be on the panel just hands them out regardless as a consolation prize.
Who is gonna be able to challenge them. Except on the whole being 1 of billions like everyone else.
It's social status moat chasing.
Every one deserves recognition for having completed that journey, if not for having meaningfully contributed to their field of research.