I actually have done my research Social mobility is shrinking in America , and wealth inequality is growing . Children who are born in the lowest fifth of all Americans by wealth are likely to stay in the bottom fifth , and most who move up only rise up to the second lowest fifth . 70 % of children born in poverty will stay there . By the way , your experiment makes a fundamental assumption people can afford to save up $ 200 and invest it . If you ' re working minimum wage , you ' re not going to have money to invest . Also , $ 2 , 000 is chump change its enough to rent out an apartment for what , two , three months ? Maybe you don ' t understand that , because it sounds to me like you are in college , or maybe high school . Either way , life is fucking expensive . You also make the assumption that people have time to learn how to code . People working 70 hours a week for 7 bucks an hour aren ' t going to have the time or the energy to spend a couple hours learning to code every day . You can ' t arbitrarily apply your life experiences to other peoples lives . The issue of endemic poverty isn ' t genetic , it ' s environmental . Kids aren ' t staying in poverty because their parents gave them shitty genes , they ' re staying there because they aren ' t taught how to succeed , they ' re taught how to survive . They go to shitty schools , and are treated like shit . Of course they aren ' t going to succeed . Some kids can get out of poverty , but the point is that most don ' t , regardless of their skills . Saying that the this is the world and that this just is the way that it is is crazy . Are we just supposed to accept that this system doesn ' t work for the majority ? We cannot just accept that . We should be thinking about how to change things for the benefit of the majority , instead of the chucklefucks at the top . PS the fact that workers are expendable is part of the problem . How can you move up if you aren ' t even stable in your current position ? Without sufficient capital , or tremendous luck , or some combination of the two , you can ' t escape the cycle of poverty . I ' m not even going to get into talking about the Jews .