Volpri, you seem to be suggesting that any person has the power to change their situation, and although that is true to an extent, you simply don't want to acknowledge that the start you have in life makes makes perhaps the biggest difference to where you end up. What some of us are trying to argue against is that this biggest difference is usually out of your control. You don't choose your parents, you don't choose your skin color, and you don't choose where you are born.
Although you can't see it from this perspective, let me ask you this. Why do you think it is that kids from the ghetto, be it some American city, or perhaps people in some other part of the world that has been left behind, tend to vastly under perform people who come from a more gifted environment? You seem to say that its all a matter of how hard you work. Now if this was the case, you would expect a fairly normal distribution of hard working people all over the world. Surely you can't say that people born in Africa are generally less hard working that people born in California or New York. Smart people are everywhere, as are motivated individuals, and I would bet the percentage is roughly the same from country to country. But what we have is that in America, its vastly more likely that you have millionaires and billionaires. If environment had nothing to do with it, and hard working/motivated people are everywhere, why don't we have more rich people in Africa?
If this doesn't convince you, here is another example. Lets look at China. In the last 30 years, China has exploded with the number of millionaires. We can't assume that its only in this last 30 years that people started to work hard. Why didn't all the hard working people in the 50's and 60's attain such riches? Are you suggesting that 30 years ago they didn't work hard enough or were motivated enough to change their situation?
