In the 1960’s and 1970’s a fixture at stamp auctions in the United States was Claude Jaeger. Claude ran a small stamp business that dealt in Western Europe mint sets, and he was always at our auctions to bid on these stamps. Claude's history was an interesting one. Claude was Haitian and had been born to one of the ruling Creole families in Haiti. Haiti in those days (and probably today too, though it is a different group) was owned by only a handful of families. It had basically a medieval economic system- less than 1% of the country was owners, and the balance were serfs or subsistence wage slaves. It was a fine system if you were part of the 1% as Claude's family had been, but Claude was born at the wrong time. While he was in the US at NYU studying Plutocracy (so as to carry on the family business), Papa Doc Duvalier fomented a revolution, and one set of oligarchs was replaced by another. The people stayed destitute - the oppressors just changed.
But Claude's family was out, and Claude went from being a very wealthy young man to being an impoverished refugee in a new country. But he was a stamp collector and soon became a stamp dealer, and stamp dealing is a trade that doesn't have a language barrier or a trade school or state licensing requirements. Claude was successful enough at professional philately to have a wife and kids and a home and the entire American dream. He never was bitter about the revolution that cost him his share of a country; rather, he was very happy in a way. Once he told me that working to provide for his wife and the ones he loved made him feel better than he had ever felt as a member of the privileged ruling class of Haiti. And he had never realized that the hobby of his youth would be the foundation of the trade that would make his new life work.