"you are more or less dooming yourself to a life of poverty"
So this life of poverty is something you opt for, is it? They're deliberate decisions, rationally chosen by independent actors are they, alcohol and cannabis addiction, academic failure, poverty? Every opportunity to succeed is present and there is a willed refusal, meaning then that the poor are poor because they choose to be, "they only have themselves to blame." We live in an open, meritocratic society and they are poor and uneducated because of "bad character."
Would this also be true on a global scale….say that the vast swathes of poor and illiterate in South America or Africa are in the position they are because of “ laziness” as I have heard people say, or is it only in developed nations that we face the curious phenomena of children simply refusing to learn to read from a very young age in order to ensure that they when they grow up they will be faced with a lifetime of unemployment?