In the UK at least, the people who've managed to bootstrap themselves to success through hard work and good decision making are the overwhelming minority.
The causal chain seems to roughly be: Top jobs tend to belong to those who attended top universities. => Top universities are attended by those who went to private schools. => Those who went to private school are either from wealthy families or attending on scholarship due largely to the fortune of genetics and/or an educated family. I certainly benefited from that (school scholarship => Oxbridge => good tech job), but I don't know that I could have if fortune hadn't smiled on me.
I agree that even with all those benefits, you can still fail if you make poor choices. However, I don't think the vast majority of people with worse circumstances can just choose their way out of it. It's not to say that it's impossible - my grandma has a rags to riches story that's only slightly marred by her similarly ethically dubious sales techniques...
The causal chain seems to roughly be: Top jobs tend to belong to those who attended top universities. => Top universities are attended by those who went to private schools. => Those who went to private school are either from wealthy families or attending on scholarship due largely to the fortune of genetics and/or an educated family. I certainly benefited from that (school scholarship => Oxbridge => good tech job), but I don't know that I could have if fortune hadn't smiled on me.
I agree that even with all those benefits, you can still fail if you make poor choices. However, I don't think the vast majority of people with worse circumstances can just choose their way out of it. It's not to say that it's impossible - my grandma has a rags to riches story that's only slightly marred by her similarly ethically dubious sales techniques...