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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I feel like it's not hard to be happy about people making large amounts of money building things like Facebook, while at the same time worrying about a system that allows Harvard attendees like Mark Zuckerberg to do that but provides virtually no opportunity for students at Orr Academy High School in Lawndale to get to Harvard, let alone to a place where they can start something like Facebook.

I don't have to hate Paul Graham to think that economic inequality by itself, intrinsically retards equality of opportunity.

I hope we can agree that inequality of opportunity is an intrinsically bad thing.

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I think this is exactly where people disagree with pg's essay.

He is talking abstractly, about whether economic inequality is bad and should be targeted. Most people will answer "no" to this.

The major criticisms of pg's points that I've seen are:

1. Your criticism - namely that economic inequality is, in itself, a bad thing. I.e. pg is wrong, we do need to target economic inequality. (I've actually seen this criticism brought up less, I believe)

2. Even if economic inequality is not bad, and we totally buy pg's abstraction that we don't want to target economic inequality on its own - in the real world, concretely, the wealthy are using their economic/political influence to give themselves more (possibly at the expense of others). I.e., pg agrees that we want to promote the good kind of economic inequality (building startups! yay!), and we should discourage the bad kind (stealing money), but misstates how prevalent each of these is. And the people arguing "against" economic inequality are actually just arguing against these specific "rent-seeking" behaviors, not against the concept of economic inequality like pg seems to think.

Btw, I'm not arguing which side is "right" here, I'm just presenting the major arguments as I see them being brought up (by e.g. Mark Suster, some economists [I think I saw Greg Mankiw talking about this topic]).

I hope we can agree that inequality of opportunity is an intrinsically bad thing.

If parents are allowed to invest in their own children, then inherently, you have inequality of opportunity, since parents have different means and will invest different amounts.

while at the same time worrying about a system that allows Harvard attendees like Mark Zuckerberg to do that but provides virtually no opportunity for students at Orr Academy High School in Lawndale to get to Harvard

If Harvard accepted 10X as many students, it would not be Harvard. If Harvard accepted students based on a lottery, it would not be Harvard. Other than increase financial aid even more, it is not clear what additional actions Harvard could do to increase equality of opportunity, that it is not already doing.

Where I'm from (Ontario) there are not very many private elementary or high schools- some, yes, but not many. A good friend of mine went to one, and his parents paid something like $20k per year for him to have that extras opportunity. He's a smart guy, and maybe his schooling was part of that.

But the reason there aren't that many is that the public sector schools are pretty good. Not perfect, but pretty good compared to what we see in many American states. Teachers jobs are hard to get because they're paid well (and yes, they have a strong union, but let's not derail this point into an argument about their merits). As a result there are very diminishing returns on private schools for kids, and so they aren't so common.

What this means is that most kids are being given an equal opportunity, the same strong education, at the cost of slightly higher taxes. We accept that, generally.

The choices when it comes to left or right leaning policies come down to how much society in general invests in children's future vs how much each parent must invest in their own child's future. When you push too far to the right, the entirety of the child's future is based on how much the parent can invest- and when that happens, we have inequality of opportunity.

There are 230 private primary and secondary schools in Ontario, most of them are lakeward.

I attended four TDSB schools and I must say, they were pretty awful.

Thankfully I got out of that system before high school. I might have gotten involved with the gangs and hard drug trade associated with my nearest high school.

It's not that Zuckerberg went to Harvard.

It's that he went to Phillips Exeter Academy.

A high school that costs over $36,000 a year (tack on more than $10k more if you're boarding there).

Zuckerberg is rare among these creatures in that he likes programming and wanted to build something. Most of them are the kind of parasites you can see in a documentary like "Born Rich" (it's on Youtube), who will live luxurious lives off the profit they expropriate off of those of us who do work and create wealth.

They are not people like you, spending months of drudge work going over BSD code back in the mid-1990s to find rfork holes and such, who two decades down the line might see a little payoff due to the efforts of their labor.

I think that PG's point is that without economic inequality there is zero opportunity. So, I'd say that unequal opportunity is better than nonexistent opportunity. (This is an over-simplification.)

Some inequality is fine, but there's such a thing as too much inequality. If you don't strengthen the position of the poor to counterbalance the position of the rich then you end up with power being increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few. The issue then is how to maintain a balance between the rich and the poor, and there are ideas of ways this could be done without entirely eliminating inequality.

I think that's exactly what PG is saying.

"For example, instead of attacking economic inequality, we should attack poverty."

One major underlying cause of poverty is disparate quality of education.

Fix education and you are fixing one major determinate of future economic inequality.

What if income inequality is a cause of educational inequality? It's not hard to think of reasons why that would be the case: schools suffer because the most capable families in their districts deploy capital to remove their children to private schools (or: because the most capable families pay test prep and consultants to advantage their kids in college admission), &c?

Zooming back out a bit: what are the demographics of successful startup founders? My intuition is that they're not a mirror image of the demographics of the country as a whole. There are a lot more well-off startup founders who went to CMU or Berkeley than there are startup founders from East St. Louis.

It's not a problem if a person picked at random from the population makes 50 million dollars with a photo sharing startup. But it starts looking a lot more like a problem when we're not picking people at random, but instead picking them mostly from the ranks of the most privileged people.

And still! I don't give a shit! I really don't think startups have much to teach us about income inequality and I don't generally believe they're a big Part Of The Problem. I'm much more troubled by the mere idea that startups might be a good lens through which to examine inequality and public policy.

Hayes makes this exact argument in Twilight of the Elites (but for wealth, not income):

"At the broader social level it means we expect a high degree of social mobility. We hope that the talented children of the poor will ascend to positions of power and prestige while the mediocre sons of the wealthy will not be charged with life-and-death decisions. Over time, in other words, society will have mechanisms that act as a sort of pump, constantly ensuring that the talented and hardworking are propelled upward, while the mediocre trickle downward.

But this ideal, appealing as it may be, runs up against the reality of what I’ll call The Iron Law of Meritocracy. The Iron Law of Meritocracy states that eventually the inequality produced by a meritocratic system will grow large enough to subvert the mechanisms of mobility. Unequal outcomes make equal opportunity impossible.

The Principle of Difference will come to overwhelm the Principle of Mobility. Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or to selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies, and kin to scramble up. In other words: “Whoever says meritocracy says oligarchy.”"

> It's not a problem if a person picked at random from the population makes 50 million dollars with a photo sharing startup. But it starts looking a lot more like a problem when we're not picking people at random, but instead picking them mostly from the ranks of the most privileged people.

Our system allocates/distributes wealth pretty much at random, but not uniformly random: the RNG is biased towards people with certain backgrounds and/or the already wealthy. So for every "Disadvantaged minority rags to riches" story, you'll find ten "Stanford grad with millionaire parents and prep school education makes even more money" stories. I'd argue that the root societal problem, though, is the jackpot-like randomness, not the skewed distribution.

In principle, though, can it be fixed?

Won't some people always have more advantages than others because they know more people who happen to be skilled at various things (e.g. technologies) than others? I mean, you have more chance to recruit skilled technologists simply by virtue of being in SV and that fact itself attracts more skilled people to the area.

So people outside the area either relocate or can't compete at quite the same level. Sure, there are other places that are more or less as good, but you're probably not going to have the same connections growing up in, say, Strawberry Point, Iowa.

Tumblr was created by a high school dropout so...

Before he dropped out, he attended The Calhoun School which is a prep school in NYC that currently charges $45,540 a year for High School students.

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