Then again, it's "luck" to get the right genes, live in the right country, etc. But mostly luck applies at the level of individual occurrence. A deal works because you contacted the customer at precisely the right time; a week later and you'd be SOL. Of such make-or-break moments careers can be made ... in some cases.
And it cuts both ways. It's the same kind of "luck" that makes it possible for the child of two executives each making well into the 6-digits to be born autistic and be doing very well in life to be a gofer, or for a rich kid to fritter away the money that s/he inherited. We hear about the lucky/rich kid who's taken care of, not the rich fool or unlucky rich.
And while we like to hear about the rags-to-riches stories, we don't want to believe them if they don't apply to us or if we're convinced they're impossible. My one aunt died with millions in the bank. It was because she and her husband both worked 40 years, were frugal, and had no kids. They invested wisely and, in some ways, at the right time. My mother's going to die poor. She had kids. She invested too cautiously. Ceased frugality after about age 65. And has Alzheimer's, so that's chewing through the $600k she saved up. (Born into the right family? She left home at 17, a high school drop out, with $50. Married and pregnant a year later, divorced a year after that from a guy in prison; she was homeless. Her step-father helped her by giving her living space. The rest was hard work and the luck of finding a husband that provided stability and a second income for her and her son. Got her GED when she was 35, and worked overtime like you wouldn't believe.)
We also forget that "severe" poverty, persistent and intergenerational poverty, is what's hard to get out of. As soon as we say that, we drop "severe" and redefine poverty to being 180% of the poverty level. Those kids have no real impediment to being at the least middle class, and there's a lot of social mobility. (We like to cite the chances of going from the bottom 10% to the top 10% because if we cite the chances of going from the bottom 10% to the middle 30% it's not so bad. And we don't like citing the changes of starting in the top 10% and ending up in the bottom 50% because that blows our narrative out of the water. If the facts don't fit, toss them.)
It makes "luck" a priori excuse and not a post-hoc excuse because it's a good salve for the ego. It worked in my neighborhood--the guy who went back to school and was cross-certified in various ways got a job that increased his annual pay by 25-30% was "lucky." The kid who graduated with a bachelor's in cultural studies with a thesis on the history of rap was "unlucky" when, after a year, he was still bouncing from part-time fast-food job to part-time fast-food job. It had nothing to do with employability, experience, or anything else. It was luck, not an abundance or failure of wisdom and vision. It let the unemployed kid say he was just as good as the guy who got the good job--legally, morally, and in many ways this is perfectly true, neither is superior to the other. But the one guy was far wiser and more disciplined, and those are also traits that can denote a kind of superiority. But the kid's family tried to say that since it was just luck, their kid was in no way inferior. And that's silly. He choose foolishly. Even in his job hunting he didn't so much pound the pavement as tap it gently.
Obama's not superior to Palin. Obama's superior to Palin. Both are equally true because neither is anywhere close to being completely true.
Take Cathy L., a woman I knew years ago. She never made more than $10k/year. Depended on government assistance after her husband divorced her, and was a homemaker before she was divorced. Loyal to her sons and she helped them and others when possible. Cheerful. Hardworking. Optimistic. Caring and forgiving. But frail. Of uncertain health and ironclad morals. And she didn't have the brains of an hydrocephalic goose. In some ways, superior to many. In others, far inferior. With no way to sum up all the +s and -s to produce a single answer. In many ways I respect her more than I respect my mother or Obama.
It's not a one-size-fits-all term, "superiority." You gotta "curry" it--a technical term in some fields that means something like "break it up into parts, each of which is evaluated separately", named after a guy Curry (the alternative synonym is to "schonfinkelize" named after, well, Schoenfinkel). Treating superiority as all-or-nothing is to make the theory not as simple as possible, and not even simpler than possible, but far, far simpler than possible.
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