And that's just for academic pursuits. A 10-hour shift waiting tables or working on a road crew is an orders of magnitude different kind of "hard."
Or working two part-time jobs (say, one at Wal-Mart and one waiting tables) without benefits because you can't get a full-time job offering a single ten-hour shift. On top of that, you have to find child care, get to different places on time (but your car is acting up or the bus schedule makes it difficult), and deal with a medical problem you can't afford to fix. There's barely time to help your kids with homework, let alone ferry them to after-school enrichment programs that you can't afford anyway.
I think it's easy to lose perspective when you don't have to face these kinds of circumstances.
It's also easy to assume that lower-income people have low IQs and that their kids wouldn't get much out of the Russian Math School anyway. I recently spent some time with a large group of PG people, and they weren't all in a position to afford expensive extras. Being PG is no guarantee of earning a high income (it may work against it, in fact).
