> One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor.

I've noticed the same thing over my life (I'm almost 53) and by and large the well-off people who assume the poor are lazy are among the laziest, most useless neobaby piles of shit I've met.

It is like they themselves had an easy road to success thanks to having well off, well connected parents and assume people significantly poorer must be even lazier than they are because their own success wasn't very hard to achieve, oblivious to the fact that the poor people they are looking down on started in a very different starting position than they did.

And to be clear, I'm not saying all wealthy people are lazy, some have worked legitimately hard for their success, and I'm not saying some poor people aren't lazy, of course you'll find examples of both. But there are tons of extremely hard working poor people, and tons of extremely lazy wealthy people who make absurd amounts of money doing very "bullshit" jobs.