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I understand what you're saying, but you sound like you believe your outcomes are essentially fixed at birth, or very early in life. I agree that it's rare for someone to break out of their class origins, and it's also probably unrealistic and unhealthy to have "joining the elites" as a goal in life, such that you'll feel like a failure in life if you don't get there.
That said, it is possible to do this, and someone who really sets their mind to it (and has the raw ability, an important qualification) has at least a chance.
Currently reading a biography of Abraham Lincoln, our quintessential "born in a log cabin" American success story. And it does not disappoint: for once, the mythology is mostly true. His father was an uneducated shiftless failure who sneered at "book learning." His mother was a decent but equally uneducated woman who may also have been kind of a floozy. He grew up in crude, impoverished surroundings with violent, uneducated, low trust people who saw no value in working hard or being ambitious or trying to improve their lives because this was assumed to be foolish and pointless. Lincoln failed in most of his business ventures and several attempts at careers.
Now, Abraham Lincoln was obviously exceptional. Even at a young age, people were recognizing that he was smarter than his peers. But while obviously not everyone will be a log cabin to president success story, I would submit that what separated Lincoln was not so much his intelligence, but that at a young age he explicitly rejected your premise: "This is the class I was born into and I should not expect to escape it."
Lincoln was president in the 1800s. It's easy to believe that class divisions back then didn't work like they do now, especially given the proportionately greater rural population.
If anything, it was harder in the 1800s to move up in class.
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