And the guy who sits around blaming society for his problems is always worse off than the guy who actually does something about his problems.

Worst of all is the guy who comes out on top and does nothing, though he sees many glaring problems. That's a lot of guys.

Unless the statistics really do say that people who work hard are just as well off economically and psychologically as people who sit around complaining...

They may, but two major problems here (as is so oft in the social sciences) are the metrics we're using and the integrity (a more specific word would be "completeness") of the data. Statistics are hard to trust in this arena (how do you measure "hard working"?), and so often up to interpretation, though all of the "experts" tend to lean to one side of the political spectrum. Edit: I'm not implying anyone's cooking data, I just think it bears mention. (sidenote: It would be interesting to inject a bunch of diehard conservatives into university faculties and see what happens, how's that for a social experiment?)

If I have kids, I sure hope they're born with a drive to learn, because if they're not, they're gonna hate me.

Sorry, I've been a little sloppy around here lately, but I very much appreciate you engaging me.

Last thing: I generally hate it when people contaminate a system, so systems of people, ugh. Doesn't matter. We MUST figure out our education problem. Case in point: the prez.