Comment by bobmcnamara

Growing up I thought that my family was rich because my parents were still together, we owned a home with a foundation with help from the bank, and my family was clean. It turns out the bar was real low in my hometown.

"...didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net" As someone who grew up considered both a dirt poor hick by the city slickers and simultaneously a carpet-baggin outsider, this is often a relative perspective, how do we calibrate against a larger population?

These are the sorts of things I picked up on growing up: Could they go to college if they wanted to? Did their parents go to college? Did they live homeless, apartments, trailers, multi family, single family homes, McMansions? 0/1/2 parents around?

I suspect HackerNews may have some survivorship bias compared to national averages, (and especially where I grew up).