Very much this - average genes, hard work, and sacrifice can generally guarantee upper middle class (barring accidents). Basically, all you need to get there is being a good cog in the machine. That is to say - you come in groomed, you do your job, you study or take night classes, you don't spend your money on having a life, you don't make mistakes which come with fun. Eventually, you will get to your $100,000/year and your 1 mil networth.
The sad part is that I have met some really low IQ people who are unable to even prep for a college exam, or the SAT, ACT, MCAT, whatever. So, their innate intelligence or upbringing denies them even the shot at an average comfortable life.
$100,000/year salary and $1M net worth are incredibly specific numbers, where are you getting them from?
It's a tautology to claim "average genes, hard work, and sacrifice can generally guarantee upper middle class" because if someone isn't upper middle class you can just claim they don't have average genes, they didn't work hard enough, or they didn't sacrifice enough. None of those things are measurable.
You could come up with some loose measure for each of those. Genes: IQ, hard work: educational attainment, sacrifice: hours worked. Someone with ~110 IQ, college degree, and willing and able to work 60 hours a week is going to have an extremely high probability of achieving upper middle class. The biggest obstacle for that person is going to be health issues.
The median full-time wage in the US is near $50,000 now. That median is a person with two years of college or less.
If you have a four year degree with ten years or more of experience (eg you're around 35 years old), in almost anything to do with eg engineering, getting to $100,000 or close to it, is not difficult.
The average salary for a person with a bachelor's degree, in the engineering field, first year out of school, is around $65,000 for 2018. Emphasis that that's the first year income. Petroleum engineers with a bachelor's degree earn an average of more than $80,000 their first year out of school.
The parent's premise isn't very far out of line, even if it glosses over that the effort required is considerable, and a lot of people simply do not want to be engineers (with the best six figure alternatives for volume being healthcare and sales/biz-dev).
Sure, but what does that have anything to do with the "average person with average genes who works hard and sacrifices?" Most people aren't engineers and most people can't become engineers, the market can't sustain a 200%+ increase in engineers.
You seem to merely be saying engineering is a good career. Everyone already knows that.
It takes more than hard work to stick out engineering for 20 years, its not a job for everyone, you're going to burn out if you absolutely hate the work. I personally know two mechanical engineers who were both straight A students but hated it once they got to the job. Both didn't even make it to 5 years as engineers.
Do you have any research backing up this position? It seems to fly in the face of every reputable study I've seen, which suggests the opposite is true - average genes, hard work, and sacrifice is not enough to "guarantee" anything.
Nothing in life is guaranteed, but some things sure stack the deck. Average skills, hard work and a bit of ambition will greatly increase your chances of a comfortable life.
A person who manages to accumulate a million dollars is far beyond middle class and a wage of 2x the median household income is well beyond middle class.
IQ is highly predictive of the outcomes of future IQ tests, and to a degree academic performance (though much of academic measurement is based on similar theories, so this is unsurprising)
There's much less corellation when you consider "future success" in terms of things like job performance, financial success, happiness, et cetera. IQ is obviously measuring something, because IQ tests are quite reliable, but the thing it's measuring does not seem to show a strong corellation with a lot of real-world goals.
It's one of those measurements that people _want_ to use a lot, and so it sees a lot of use, but the idea that you can boil general intelligence down to one number is fallacious to begin with, so many of the things it's used for are not useful.
This is literally one of the things the post we're commenting on is saying. High IQ people are not automatically successful and whatever effect high IQ may or may not have on future success is easily lost in other, more significant, factors.
> whatever effect high IQ may or may not have on future success is easily lost in other, more significant, factors.
IQ correlates with income more than any other factor. When you take away the correlation between socioeconomic situation and IQ (which admittedly there is), it correlates even more.
High IQ people are not automatically successful in the same way that tall people are not automatically basketball players.
You're making a lot of claims contrary to generally accepted research. It's invaluable, and not in the good way.
I can tell that that isn't your story, because there's a lot of conjecture in there that isn't supported by the data. Even just starting with #1, the ability to pick a degree at _all_ is a privilege not automatically afforded to everybody. Should you be able to do so, then working during college is strongly linked to worse outcomes, as you have less time to dedicate to learning - thus making #3 harder as you're competing against people who have had better chances than you. If you can't do 3, you can't do 4, 5, 6, or 7, and 8 is predicated on that.
It might be "common sense" to you, but it's directly contradicted by all the data.
"the ability to pick a degree at _all_ is a privilege not automatically afforded to everybody."
I completely agree that this is a huge issue. A large problem for kids from "bad" families is not having any idea what they "should" be doing, and by the time they figure it out, they may have already ruined their life and missed opportunities.
(Seriously. Training willpower takes willpower. If someone has some kind of executive disfunction or something, they literally can't 'just choose the right thing'.)
Excepting those with a medical condition, low willpower individuals can invest that willpower in developing more willpower and get to average levels over time.
I've seen this many times working with the homeless and in addiction recovery. It's just like compound interest with investing.
Just because you start with a very very small amount doesn't mean it can't grow over time.
This is embarrassing as hell to admit, but in high school my ADHD was so bad the only thing I enjoyed was World of Warcraft. I would commonly play for more than 24 hours and couldn't get myself to stop for anything. It completely dominated and ruined my life. You can say video game addiction isn't a thing if you want, but I was definitely acting like it was. Tried alcohol, cocaine, etc.. and never had a problem, but I could not control myself with certain video games.
When I started developing my Willpower it was literally with 5 minute breaks every 4 hours. And it was extremely difficult. After a week, I extended those to 15 minute breaks, and it was 6 months before I got my total WOW time to less than 8 hours in a day. But I did it.
I'm in my 30's now, and this new World of Warcraft expansion is the only one I haven't played at all. Hoping to keep it that way.
The sad part is that I have met some really low IQ people who are unable to even prep for a college exam, or the SAT, ACT, MCAT, whatever. So, their innate intelligence or upbringing denies them even the shot at an average comfortable life.