"Successful people often scorn those who are poor or homeless. A Princeton University scholar, Susan Fiske, has used scans to show that the brains of high-achieving people see images of poor people and process them as if they were not humans but thing.

Those who have made it sometimes see poverty as a moral failure and perceive in themselves the triumph of a simple narrative: you study hard, work assiduously, sacrifice for future, obey the law, and create your own good fortune.

Yet that pathway is much less accessible if you are conceived by a teenage mom who drinks during pregnancy and so you are born with fetal alcohol effects.

Likewise, if you're born in a high poverty neighbourhood to a stressed out single mom who scolds you more than she hugs you, in a home with no children's books, you face a huge handicap.

As we'll see, a University of Minnesota study found that the kind of parenting a child receives in the first three and a half years is a better predictor of high school graduation than IQ." (A Path Appears - @NickKristof & @WuDunn)