If your assumptions were true, then software engineers, medical doctors, or persons with whatever well-payed jobs there are at a given point in time should always end up on the bright side if they are hard working and disciplined.
To that I can counter that I have met many hard working persons with excellent higher education (IT, medicine, engineering, science, no matter) in my life, but then bad luck struck and destroyed it all. Their kid died and they didn't overcome it. They had to flee a country in war and are now 50+ and unemployable. An extreme example a lawyer told me: An entrepreneurial woman with a great company stopped to help a person in an accident; Along comes a crazy car, crashes into all of them, and the woman looses both arms in the incident - now she's in deep dept and the company in ruins. And so forth...
The opposite, good luck, is just as prevalent in middle income strata, too. Take software engineers: There are usually hundreds if not thousands of persons applying for a job. Certainly there are several in most cases that would be a match. But will you be the lucky one who got picked? Etc. The article itself also has some examples, like getting an career boosting promotion earlier than normal. Yet, in the end, all (first and second world inhabitants only, and only if you were not born to some miserable parent(s)!) striving for that job and not being struck by some bad incident might end up just fine. [As I should add: But not doing maximally great either, unless being struck by one or - more likely - quite a few really lucky incidents.]
In other words, luck plays an always present role in all strata of society, not just the extremes. Only, it might not be that obvious right there, "in the middle." But whatever, the whole point of the article is about the extremes, smoothing those cases with exceptional bad or good luck, not about those in the mid ranges doing just fine...
To that I can counter that I have met many hard working persons with excellent higher education (IT, medicine, engineering, science, no matter) in my life, but then bad luck struck and destroyed it all. Their kid died and they didn't overcome it. They had to flee a country in war and are now 50+ and unemployable. An extreme example a lawyer told me: An entrepreneurial woman with a great company stopped to help a person in an accident; Along comes a crazy car, crashes into all of them, and the woman looses both arms in the incident - now she's in deep dept and the company in ruins. And so forth...
The opposite, good luck, is just as prevalent in middle income strata, too. Take software engineers: There are usually hundreds if not thousands of persons applying for a job. Certainly there are several in most cases that would be a match. But will you be the lucky one who got picked? Etc. The article itself also has some examples, like getting an career boosting promotion earlier than normal. Yet, in the end, all (first and second world inhabitants only, and only if you were not born to some miserable parent(s)!) striving for that job and not being struck by some bad incident might end up just fine. [As I should add: But not doing maximally great either, unless being struck by one or - more likely - quite a few really lucky incidents.]
In other words, luck plays an always present role in all strata of society, not just the extremes. Only, it might not be that obvious right there, "in the middle." But whatever, the whole point of the article is about the extremes, smoothing those cases with exceptional bad or good luck, not about those in the mid ranges doing just fine...