Rich Kid, Poor Kid: For 30 Years, Baltimore Study Tracked Who Gets Ahead

a study published in June suggests that the things that really make the difference — between prison and college, success and failure, sometimes even life and death — are money and family.
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They found that a child’s fate is in many ways fixed at birth — determined by family strength and the parents’ financial status. The kids who got a better start — because their parents were married and working — ended up better off. Most of the poor kids from single-parent families stayed poor.

At this point this a typical story about how poverty self perpetuates. Bad options, bad choices leading to bad results.

Then I got to this part:

The researchers found that more affluent white men in the study reported the highest frequency of drug abuse and binge drinking, yet they still had the most upward mobility.

Great options, bad choices, great results. How do you explain that?