Where are all the people who grew up too poor to get dental care ending up? Not in high-end tech jobs, and tech is less highly selected on this than finance, law, etc.

I've interacted with quite a few interns and new grads at big tech companies and, among U.S. born folks, I think the rate of people who were on the U.S. Olympic team is pretty similar to the rate of people who haven't had dental care (IME, the Olympic team rate has been higher, but sampling from tails like this is noisy)

I don't think there's anything wrong with attending an elite private high school or being wealthy enough to live in a great school district, but the rate feels surreal to me. The thing that really surprised me when I looked at the data is how heavily top companies recruit from top schools and then how heavily top schools "recruit from" high income families.

The median student at a top school is > p90 parental income and even at a "merely good" school, the median student is > p80.

BTW, I consider myself extremely lucky to have grown up in the U.S., but poor enough that I have crooked teeth, lightheaded from hunger often enough that I had standard strategies for dealing with it, malnourished enough that I once broke my collarbone from from gently rolling off the couch onto the floor, in an abusive home where I was regularly beaten, etc.

I definitely had better opportunities than the p99 person in Vietnam and likely even p99.9.

One thing that feels surreal is that someone who's p99.9 privilege in Vietnam is really at the bottom of the barrel in terms of privilege for someone who grew up in the U.S.

It boggles my mind how much of a leg up the median successful American got.

Sure, it would've been nice to have an easier childhood but, by comparison to almost anywhere in the world, my life has been on extreme easy mode despite being considered highly disadvantaged by U.S. standards.