Well personally I've come from a family where hardly anyone make a productive decisions, where nobody had a college degree, and a tiny portion are even middle class. And now I'm 22, self-taught, and make $70k a year in the Midwest. And I did get there by working endless hours and catching the carrot, repeatedly. I think the truth of how these things go is probably somewhere between where your typical anti capitalist and your typical social Darwinist would expect it to be.