Thoughts on Nicolas Kristof's "USA, Land of Limitations"

One place young me is from: Fallscity Oregon.  A very beautiful but poor and small town.

The main thing the author conveys in this article is that the American ideal of anyone, anywhere, having a shot at ascending past their starting point is a myth and the reality is that most people who are born poor and working class will stay poor and working class.  The author highlights this point with references to economic mobility and class gap studies comparing America to other European based majority countries and also by reflecting on, his late friend, Rick Goff's life.

For the most part I agree with the author's emphasis on the difficulties of overcoming a bad starting hand in terms of economic class.  I do not think I agree that the difficulties are so much directly a result of "the kind of socially rigid hierarchies that our ancestors fled, the kind of society in which your outcome is largely determined by your beginning" as the author says.  I guess I should tell the readers a little something about myself because making myself better than where I started is what I have been working on for the past three years.

Like Rick Goff, who was from Yamhill, I am also from Oregon.  I lived in multiple locations in Oregon when I was young some being: Grand-Ronde, Fallscity, and Independence for my younger years and Portland for most of my young adult life before I came to Rhode Island. I was raised mostly in isolation in the country by a single mother who was already stressed with raising three boys and made money by breeding fancy Himalayan cats and Pomeranian puppies under the table (which she had me sell to strangers in Portland by myself a number of times when I was very young) and who had a number of emotional instability issues and rage outbursts.

 Needless to say I was instilled with more bad habits than good and developed strong beliefs in restrictions, consequences, and fixed ability and possibilities.  All of which I am slowly and painfully undoing.  Last year I made $37'000 which is working class but that is still far above what I started at and I manly did that by good work ethic, being fairly open and personable and not putting myself in a debt that I could not afford.  So, I already did what was difficult to overcome: my upbringing was poverty and now I am working class.  Once I iron out my procrastinating habits, strengthen my goal focus, and be consistent in doing what needs to be done to accomplish all this I will get to the next economic class and then the next.

However, this will be impossible for me to do if I believe I can't do it and continuously focus on why I cannot do it.  That is the main issue I have with this article:  what does the author think a solution to Americas economic mobility issue would be?  Politicians need to talk about this more?  Sure.  But what would we come up with?  Maybe there is something society can do to help American children get out of poverty and working class but in the mean time I will promote having a growth mindset and the accountability every single individual has to make their situation better.
My question to class:  What do you think society could do to help with economic mobility that does not require effort from those in poverty and the working class?

(Because I had to put a hyperlink this is a summary for a book I highly recommend:  "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success")
https://www.seeken.org/mindset-the-new-psychology-of-success-summary/
I think this is one of the main hurdles for class mobility because I believe the poor may be far more likely to have a fixed mindset and with the fixed mindset there is no growth or possibility for economic mobility.  I really understood what I was coming from and what I still deal with now after reading this book.