Telling children 'hard work gets you to the top' is simply a lie

More straw-man crap trying to pitch the ridiculous idea that hard work doesn't matter at all. OK, sure, you can argue that you're more likely to reach the very highest echelons of society if you are lucky enough to be born rich, etc. But:

a. "more likely" doesn't mean it isn't possible to achieve if you aren't "born right"

and perhaps more to the point:

b. "success" is measured on a continuum; it's not a binary proposition. And there's a lot of room between "Becoming a Supreme Court justice" (just to pick an example) and winding up as a barista at Starbucks. Like, plenty of lawyers who make a nice living for their families, or all the thousands of local district and superior court judges out there, or the hundreds of federal circuit judges who don't quite make it to the very top.

This kind of article is boring and pointless because it's selling a dangerous idea: that nothing you do matters at all, and, ergo, you might as well do nothing. I mean, if hard work doesn't matter, why bother working hard to begin with, right?

As the old saying goes: "It is better to shoot for the stars and miss than aim at the gutter and hit it". Or another take on it: "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."

So yeah, tell your kids to dream big and work hard. They'll probably go further than if you tell them "life sucks, you have no chance, so just go ahead and do nothing but play video games and smoke weed all day".

There are two really big problems with this outlook. First if everyone achieves a high level education, the competition for high skilled jobs also goes up, making the higher education mean less and requiring further education to beat the crowd. This is something millennials are experiencing right now. Second, if employers take more risk and hire more people from underprivileged backgrounds, it just means that someone from a privileged background missed out on the job and just shifts the resentment from one group to the other. It doesn't really solve the fundamental problem.

Working hard will move you forward. How forward is hard to determine, and it varies. The reality is that some people in their lifetime won't achieve success but they lay the foundation for their children too...ex his mothers struggle to get from Africa to the UK laid the foundation for him to achieve his success. Their is little chance that he will become say the Prime Minister, but his children may...thanks to their dad being able to provide them with a privileged life.

The job market isn't static like that. If there are lots of highly educated people, there will be new jobs created to take advantage of their skills. There might be more competition or there might not be, and it's definitely not a linear correlation.

"As the old saying goes: "It is better to shoot for the stars and miss than aim at the gutter and hit it". Or another take on it: "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars." "

These are fine. However, there is also the belief that all people who have reached the stars have worked hard or that people who haven't reached stars just haven't worked enough. These are wrong. Success is a combination of hard work and a good portion of luck. You most likely won't be successful if you don't work hard but if you don't succeed it's not necessarily because you haven't worked hard.

To me it's a call for successful people to be more compassionate with people who aren't successful.

If there are equal outcomes, then we have succeeded at creating equal opportunity. Not as individuals; but statistically.

Individually preferences, choices, dumb luck, etc. of course would lead to unequal outcomes -- as it should be. But when taken as a whole, those differences should disappear.

It is an ideal, but I like it because it is a measurable ideal.