Poor kids who do things right don't do better than rich kids who do things wrong

There is a difference between 'having a degree' and 'being educated.'

Maybe you did make it the way your dad showed you :)

I remember a quote about the best part of wealth being that you never feel like you need to cheat another person.

I can't google the source of it (you get some really weird results about rich men cheating, or being cheated on) but it always stuck with me as something to be grateful for every day.

Obviously, some rich people however, never got the memo.

92 out of 813 seats are hereditary peers, the remainder are life peers [Edit: forgot the Bishops] appointed (technically) by the monarch on the advice of the government.

There's really no such thing as a class 'system', let alone anything one could point to as being 'formal'. There is a bunch of in/out group signalling with fairly extreme geographic variations. Mobility across social boundaries can be achieved by understanding and adapting to the signalling although crucially (and getting back on topic) this requires the belief that you are entitled to do so.

I'm down on the notion of class in general personally. I think it's at best an incredibly lazy intellectual model of complex social phenomena. Basically I think there's no such thing [0], but I do very much enjoy listening to the things people say while they're explaining why I'm wrong about this.

[0] Problematic for this theory is that people certainly believe there is and this has operational effects.

This is interesting. I was a scholarship kid to a private boarding school, and then went on to get a scholarship at a private university that was $50k+ a year in tuition. I need to preface that I met a lot of good smart hardworking kids who did alot of great things with their education and their parents taught them good work ethic. Alot of the parents worked hard for their success and knew instilling good work ethics was important. I also went to an Engineering University so more likely that smart successful people there were inclined to have valuable degrees to put to work than say maybe a school where Political Science dominated the potential work atmosphere.

Anyways, despite this, there were these disease ridden people called "helicopter parents". The angry moms who believed their genius little sons didnt belong at ANY place beneath what they deemed to be good enough for them, which of course was only the Ivy Leagues or perhaps the trailing 5 after (but only because they DECIDED, not because they couldnt get in ugh how dare you make such an assumption).

The sons, these rich little beleagured alcoholics had been drinking their way through highschool as their parents shoved them into every extracurricular they could think of and 1. Made them feel they were never enough while simultaneously sending the message they were privileged geniuses who were entitled to the best --> that mindset will screw with ya abit and I witnessed it in the guy I dated for 3.5 years from college

2. Completely strips away their ability to have a. self initiative b. be curious and have confidence in their own intelligence

This leads to a lot of rich entitled kids who simultaneously had low self esteem and no idea what they wanted to do with their lives and were alcoholics.

My ex is interesting particularly because his 4 closest friends were all just like him/similiar background. They all have brand new sports cars fresh out of college and 3 of them have totaled them drunk driving and should be in jail or loaded down with fines and lost their jobs. Needless to say parents payed for lawyers, court, new cars and hooked every single one of them up with jobs and when they "get sad" they can go home and layout at their pools while their mothers dote on them.

My ex before I met him was "depressed" because he wished he could go to state school so his parents sent him to Denmark to party in Europe for a Semester to "cheer" him up....

These kids don't have any sense of consequence for their actions or any idea what its like to work to get into college. They actually have the attitude of being dragged there against their will...

As someone who started on welfare very young and eventually reached lower middle class, going to my college was a dream come true...

Let me tell you though in our 20s ill be paying off student loans and working hard but I am a much happier more intelligent curious person and love my job. These kids are miserable alcoholics bored with life and sitting in jobs their parents put them in.

Their snapshot wealth portfolio may look better than mine ....for now, but they are not happier. They may inherit their parents houses and money but they will still be bored and sad and drinking all the time.

That being said, I know alot of kids who are wealthy and genuinely doing well in life though. I think it is opportunity hoarding when kids who don't want to be in college are forced to go to college, and while some of these kids are obnoxious, upon years of observation I mostly blame the parents for exerting their awful pretentiousness and ways of life onto these kids who basically feel helpless like they don't have any other choice.

> In the UK, the primary selling points of the Public School system ... are social confidence, entitlement and a sense of superiority, and networking.

> It's a perfectly rigid and self-sustaining caste system.

The problem with your statement is that all 3 qualities you have listed could actually be acquired at the cost of $0, either by the parents raising their children differently or by the child itself if it desires so.

Therefore I can't agree that it is anything resembling a caste system. (in such systems there'd be use of force for anyone who steps out of line)

The only way that I see how you could argue that these examples prove that it's a caste system is if you denied that there is free will. Yes, if there's no free will then we only react predictably to the environment like mindless machines so being unable to put your children into private schools will cause them to be poor if they don't have some amazing genetical quality that allows them to transcend the competition.

I strongly oppose this line of thinking. Why? Because it leads to Nihilism and a sense that everything (including your own life) is worthless. It would also allow you to do whatever you want without following any moral code if you take this philosophy to its logical extreme.

Edit: What I mean by that is that it's not like parents do not have choices, no matter how poor. They can teach their kids moral values and discipline, they can encourage them to do something useful with their lives. And the child also can do something about its situation once it gets older.

The economist Thomas Sowell made the very strong argument in one of his books that it is actually culture (= set of all social norms and rules) that determines success of a group. For example some Asian cultures or Jews have always been highly successful, no matter where they immigrated to and no matter how much they were persecuted. In case of the Jews they've faced unequal treatment and persecution for thousands of years.

So what makes them able to overcome all odds? They raise their children with certain values (I doubt its the religious values) that make them (on average) outcompete the children of all others.

So it doesn't matter that much if I'm poor, if I'm rich or what skin color I happen to be born with. If I'm white and from the upper class and decide to use the N word in every other sentence, dress like a Gangsta Rapper with pants down to my knees and have no discipline or work ethic then I'm likely going to fail hard in life. If I'm black and decide to learn how to speak eloquently and dress well then I might become the US president.