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Comment by dudul | Hacker News Reader

It sucks, but what's the solution? Because let's face it, the primary purpose of "being rich" is to provide for one's family, at least from my point of view. If I work my ass off it's to make sure I can help my kids do better than I did.

What's the point of being "wealthy" if it's not to help your kids have a better life than your own?

I don't want to sound insensitive. All these studies about kids born in poverty and unable to escape it sound very unfair. On the other hand, there has to be a reason for people seeking wealth. And taking care of your children has to be the main driver.

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The solution is to diminish the income gap.

If we believe that few employers are happy to carry employees who provide a net productivity deficit, then on the face of it we cannot assume that those who are impoverished and employed are not meaningfully productive. The question we ought to ask ourselves is how much disparity is acceptable to allow across the incomes of productive individuals; or more bluntly, why do the executive and management typically earn several orders of magnitude more than the producers? Is it necessary to encourage upward motivation, or is it exploitative and predatory?

Anything that increases social mobility would be good.

America is doing quite poorly in terms of social mobility, compared to other top-tier countries.

Surprisingly, there are some recent, more sophisticated studies indicating that our social mobility is a lot better than earlier thought, relative to the countries that are usually lauded for social mobility.

For example, Scandinavian countries are famous as exemplars for how to be a developed country with high income mobility. But a recent paper focused on Denmark (the most income-mobile country in the group) in order to study the effectiveness of the Scandinavian model. It found that pre-tax, pre-transfer income mobility was the same as the US! Needless to say, this is a pretty shocking find, as it belies years of assumptions about equality of opportunity and its effect on achievement (as measured by income). Even the addition of Denmark's much heavier investment in all levels of schooling does nothing to budge the level of educational attainment among the poor, relative to the US.

From the Atlantic article linked in my footnotes:

> Low-income Danish kids are not much more likely to earn a middle-class wage than their American counterparts. What’s more, the children of non-college graduates in Denmark are about as unlikely to attend college as their American counterparts.

IMO, Denmark's generous redistribution is worth the impact on outcomes, but it's fascinating to see redistribution have almost ZERO impact on one of its most positive-sum, universally appealing benefits (moving more towards equality of opportunity).

[1] http://voxeu.org/article/intergenerational-mobility-denmark-... [2] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/the-amer...

Coming from Denmark I can totally agree. Of course can't speak on behalf of US conditions, but NO we sure as hell haven't solved the redistribution problem here in Denmark. Haven't read the article you linked, but judging by the quotations I totally agree. There are big obstacles if you are born out of the "wrong" family, in the "wrong" part of the country. Of course you can overcome them, but you start at an disadvantage.

What could make a difference though is the relative difference between poverty in US and poverty in DK. I am pretty sure that you are better of as poor in Denmark than you are as poor in the US. We probably have a better safety-net. And in the other end of the spectrum I'm pretty sure that there is a smaller percentage of mega-rich in Danish terms even. So while I agree that there is still a problem in Denmark I don't think our problem is as big as the US.

My main point being that you can't just look at Denmark through this lens and say - Hey! They haven't solved it. And you also can't say that we have. As I see it, it is as always; a lot more complicated.

I wouldn't be on it, being poor in America still means you have more money than everyone in the world, including more than the middle class in most EU nations.

Social mobility in Europe is also really not great especially once you adjust for the immigration, you also need to account for the fact that social mobility studies in Europe are based on the income level of parents and grandparents, both WW2/Eastern Block and immigration from Africa, Asia and the Middle east inflate the social mobility figures considerably.

Actually being poor in America is worse than being poor in most other OECD nations; most first world countries have unemployment benefits that don't have time limits (they may have performance limits, i.e. you need to apply for X amount of jobs per week, etc). A number of them have free health care (and even some 2nd world countries have this). A non trivial number have free university education, or a university education that is paid out of your taxes (after an earning threshold) and the outstanding balance forgiven after 25 year or so. The USA can at times be a brutal place to be poor; even still this can be better than a large number of 2nd world countries, and almost all 3rd world countries.

That is not indicative of social mobility, the tax liability on the poor and the middle class in the US is considerably lower than in Europe. Wages are on the other hand considerably higher.

This holds true even for low income jobs, McDonalds pays nearly 10$ an hour in the US vs 4.35 GBP in the UK, or 6.50 EUR in Germany (there are comming minimum wage changes in Germany so it will increase to about 8 EUR in 2017) and US those workers are taxed at considerably lower rates.

The current minimum wage in the UK is £7.20, and what's more if you are on the minimum wage in the UK the government will frequently top that up with tax credits (money paid directly to the claimant either weekly or monthly) and possibly housing benefit (money paid to either the claimant or landlord, and in some cases help to pay your mortgage) as well, although these typically only apply to people who are earning less than an equivalent to a full time minimum wage job and/or have children.

Despite your claims about socialization of higher education - which is perfectly true - America actually graduates a lot more people out of college than European countries. A lot more.

There is a better 'safety net' in most European countries, but there is a lot more opportunity in America. It's 100% true that 'anyone can make it' - as long as 'making it' means having a job, owning a home, in a regular place like Cleveland or Pittsburg or whatever.

Europe has a much, much stronger class system than the US.

American companies have tons of workers and professionals who came from poor situations. Europe is not like that at all.

> Despite your claims about socialization of higher education - which is perfectly true - America actually graduates a lot more people out of college than European countries. A lot more.

A lot of what would be a college degree in the US is done though trade schools in Europe. I also think there are much stricter requirements on what the degree is in most countries, as in the won't fund a lot of arts degrees.

> I wouldn't be on it, being poor in America still means you have more money than everyone in the world, including more than the middle class in most EU nations.

Source?

OECD median income per country: http://www.oecd.org/social/income-distribution-database.htm

The US poverty line household income is $22,541, this is more than the median income in Poland, and not that far from the median household income in developed countries like Belgium.

Aside from the obvious omission of cost of living, you're also conflating income with wealth.

Stop reading libertarian / right wing / whatever propaganda, open your eyes to the real world. I've lived on both sides of the Atlantic. Being poor in America is a lot worse than being poor in Europe. Dress up your statistics all you like, the fact is America is a trap for anyone below middle class.

That's not saying there are rivers of milk and honey flowing in the EU either. But over there, at least you still have access to decent health care even if you're at the rock bottom, and at least your kids could get decent education so they achieve escape velocity.

But here? Once you're below a certain level, society just throws you on the dung heap. Leaves you to your own proverbial "bootstraps", however stupid that meme may sound when you see how things could be handled differently in a civilized world.

I wonder if you ever actually bothered to go through any of the actual poor regions in Europe and tell me how well they are having it. I live in the UK, I'm not a libertarian, I'm not a right winger, and I don't read propaganda.

"America is doing quite poorly in terms of social mobility, compared to other top-tier countries."

I think this is a myth.

Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland all do pretty well on the 'gini coefficient' - but they are tiny, relatively homogeneous societies. They are ethnic groups - and they are each smaller than Los Angeles.

What would the gini coefficient look like for 'The entire EU' for example - which would be a better direct comparison to America.

It would be terrible.

Why? Because Greeks grow up mostly to live in Greece, and much poorer than Swedes, who grow up to be Swedes, generally much richer than Greeks.

Poor Greeks, Sardinians, and Bulgarians kids mostly do not grow up to reach the level of wealth of middle class Scandinavians - not even close.

From Slovenia to London ... the gap is really quite huge.

I generally agree, but we benefit from realizing everyone's potential, and this study seems to indicate we're not doing so now.

There's also a political angle; Meritocracy is an important justification for American capitalism. If you can't make the argument that the system is beneficial to the whole, then there's going to be support to overturn the system.

The arguments you present seem orthogonal to the point. What's the relevance of people wanting to be wealthy in order to give their kids a better life? It's not as if we should improve equality by making sure children have worse lives than their parents.

If you worked very hard to become rich in your life (and presumably secure a future for your children), then congratulations, your hard work paid off.

If your children squander your fortune and squabble over their inheritance, how you feel about that is entirely up to you.

Warren Buffet said he would donate the vast majority of his wealth to charity upon his death. When asked about inherentance for his children, he said that a couple hundred thousand each would be enough.

Parting thought: if your children waste the fortune that you worked so hard to build, that says just as much about you as it does your children.

But this is all hypothetical. I'm sure you have fine kids.

(View this as a follow-on, not a counter. I agree with both you and the GP).

Wealthy kids will always have a leg up on poor kids. It can never become completely equalized, as whatever new attribute that does cause your children to do better will become a new aspect of wealth. That's one of the corollaries to what the GP was saying, and by its nature that leads to a system that leads to a system where the outcomes can never be entirely equalized as lone as you allow different wealth levels.

It's not that children from wealthy families do better (as any situation where that is not true points to a very sick society), but how much better they do, and how well we catch those that are disadvantaged when they fall. This is also complicated by the fact that poverty is relative (and when not, such as using official definitions, nobody can agree how useful it is), It's a very complicated topic, and in my opinion you are generally either stuck with so much nuance that it's hard to tease out some useful plan of action, or so little nuance that you risk taking away the wrong conclusion.

For example, in the end, is how wealthy your children are even the correct thing to be measuring for outcomes? What about happiness? What if we focused on increasing the number of people that reported being happy with their lives? That probably doesn't require people being in the top bracket for income, but it might require that most of the time they aren't in the lowest bracket.

Note that I wasn't talking about inheritance or legacy. The article makes the point that people with money are able to spend more time helping their children, or maybe pay for a tutor, or send them to a great private school. Basically spending money to help them learn how to be successful and be happy.

I don't think I'll ever reach a point where I have a "fortune" to give to my kids :)

Not sure why you were down-voted. It would seem to be a valid point that offspring are a motivation for achieving success and wealth.

You're probably correct in the N+1 generational context, but there are good reasons to consider policies that mitigate entrenched multi-generational aristocracy.

Wealth is associated with having more kids, not just weather kids. Which provides an evolutionary incentive on it's own.

on its own.

Fix the fucking educational system and stop wasting people's time.

I, too, think the educational system is the place to turn to help fix lots of society's problems. We have kids "captive" for 8 hours a day for 13 years, so it's an amazing opportunity to do some good. The problem is that everyone has different opinions about what "good" is. I tried a little experiment a couple months ago: I asked 5 of my highly educated friends from MIT how they would improve the educational system. And I got back five very different answers, most of which I found pretty unimpressive.

For example, my material scientist friend immediately launched into a tirade about how we should teach kids how subatomic particles actually work rather than the simplified model of the atom, about about how history is a useless subject that should be removed from school altogether. I couldn't have disagreed more.

Personally, I'd like to see tons of changes, including:

- vastly more funding, so we can attract more skilled and experienced teachers and have smaller class sizes

- year round school programs, so poorer children don't fall so behind during summer break

- more emphasis and encouragement around reading, which much fewer restrictions on what we consider "acceptable" to read (my high school did everything in its power to get kids to hate reading)

- systematic experimentation around different teaching styles and educational systems, so we can learn what works and doesn't

- history classes more focused on storytelling and distilling lessons from historical events, and less focused on pro-America propaganda and remembering random disconnected facts and dates

- more focus on practical psychology, rhetoric, debate, logic, and/or research in the curriculum (how can people become productive citizens and informed voters when they can't dissect an argument or perform research?)

- more emphasis on the benefits of the scientific method compared to alternatives

- practical education around business, finance, etc, so that poor kids aren't left behind in that arena

I could go on forever.

> my material scientist friend immediately launched into a tirade about how we should teach kids how subatomic particles actually work rather than the simplified model of the atom,

That's the problem, we have to get rid of the idea that there's a set of ideas that kids "have" to know. Why don't you let the kid decide what he wants to study. Like there will be limitations but fuck it, if s/he is interested in something weird, encourage it instead of killing it.

> vastly more funding, so we can attract more skilled and experienced teachers and have smaller class sizes

I think that the teacher model doesn't scale. Develop MOOCs and like online communities. School will be the bridge from real world to these communities. Teachers will help you when you get stuck.

> more emphasis and encouragement around reading, which much fewer restrictions on what we consider "acceptable" to read (my high school did everything in its power to get kids to hate reading)

Exactly. Also remove the idea that reading means reading fiction. Make sure that the kid is doing something somewhat productive and that s/he's engaged. Engagement is key.

>systematic experimentation around different teaching styles and educational systems, so we can learn what works and doesn't

I actually think that Barbara Oakley really hit the nail on the head. She describes it e.g. in this article http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/how-i-rewired-my-brain-to...

> - more focus on practical psychology, rhetoric, debate, logic, and/or research in the curriculum (how can people become productive citizens and informed voters when they can't dissect an argument or perform research?)

Exactly. But also fundamentally just make sure the kids can explore whatever area of human endeavor they want to.

> That's the problem, we have to get rid of the idea that there's a set of ideas that kids "have" to know. Why don't you let the kid decide what he wants to study. Like there will be limitations but fuck it, if s/he is interested in something weird, encourage it instead of killing it.

The collective cultural experience is that this is sometimes incredibly valuable, but very often leads to intense study of subjects of marginal economic value. A person may be intensely interested in Latin and Greek Classics, but the odds of this producing skills for a livelihood are not as high as some other subjects.

Which is to say there's sometimes an awkward tradeoff between "Weird thing a kid wants to study" and "Thing that can be studied that will pay the bills later in life". This is not something that can be avoided by making education services free at point-of-consumption, because student time is finite.

The educational system is a scapegoat for far bigger and more entrenched problems.

Exactly.

I strongly suggest to speak with some actual teachers, instead of blindly relying on ridiculous propaganda. The problem is not the system, the problem is social mobility.

Poor kids don't do well in school because their families and their environment don't value education. They perceive (correctly, BTW, from a statistical perspective) that if you're born poor, there isn't much you can do. You're gonna die poor anyway. So why worry about school? Families don't care (exceptions do exist, of course), peers look down upon you if you're "bookish", it's a vicious cycle.

There's a lack of hope among those at the bottom. No amount of educational reform will fix that. People know they're in a social straightjacket from birth.

Fix whatever systemic problems keep America's social mobility so low, and the aforementioned issues will get a lot better.

>They perceive (correctly, BTW, from a statistical perspective) that if you're born poor, there isn't much you can do.

How can you blithely state this "fact" given that the article itself shows that a poor person who graduates college has a better-than-average income distribution (every percentile is better off than the population as a whole).

It's really frustrating to me that people like you don't make any honest effort to distinguish between objective "lack of hope" where poor people actually cannot improve their situation, with subjective "lack of hope" where people for whatever reason are unable to be motivated to take actual opportunities that could help them. Clearly these are different phenomena and conflating them is irresponsible and dangerous.

> Poor kids don't do well in school because their families and their environment don't value education.

Have you considered the possibility that the educational system doesn't value the needs of the poor?

And if it did, how would that work or operate?

What I was getting at is that the subject matter often isn't applicable to helping them solve their specific problems. Education (curriculums) shouldn't be one-size-fits-all.

What subject matters do you think are substantially neglected by the American educational system that fails to reflect the needs of the poor? How should curricula be changed? What specific problems are unaddressed?

Well I imagine the needs of inner-city-poor and rural-poor are often different, to pick two extremes. But I myself have never lived either of those lives, and I've only interacted with the rural-poor (through volunteer organizations). So, I can't really know their needs. But where I'd start, is with what I might call the "forbidden subjects" - stuff you and I probably learned from our families, if we were lucky. Interpersonal relationship skills, managing personal finances, and probably most importantly, mental patterns/attitudes/habits/priorities for more effective use of the mind. (Because complacency is effectively the "default state" of the amygdala. And combined with ignorance of the mind's ways, it can only stay that way.)

If you can stomach some underground hip hip, here's a track by Dead Prez for one anecdotal inner-city perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8IUbVQRqAk

You know, my rural poor high school had a course covering personal finance, relationships, health, home economics, and so on. It was a required course for all freshman, who were 15 or so and not yet eligible to drop out.

It did not accomplish nearly so much as you might hope.

The underground hip hop complaints as relative to material mostly cover political questions and show that he didn't pay attention to the courses that would help "get our rent paid".

OK. What might you or your friends have found to be more helpful uses of time? It doesn't have to be in a classroom setting. Or in your experience was the curricula more-or-less sufficient and you consider something(s) else might be better targets for improvement/change? I would like to understand your perspective better.

Most of us would say material directly relevant to our later specializations of choice. That's difficult to do in practice, both because of the diversity involved and because of the difficulty in predicting eventual specialization. Not everyone knows at 12 that they want to be a programmer!

More diverse electives for specialist history would have been nice, but there are practical restrictions on the specialist teachers available in a town of 50k people.

Huh. I felt the same way about my high school. I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised.

I wonder if it could be feasible to rotate kids through some kind of county/state shared resource with opportunities for "demoing" various specializations. Educational almost-internships for kids, if you will. 180 days/year, 5 days/week = 36 specializations. That's probably not enough time to get much of any feel. Kids pick their top 5 or 10, and spend a year learning about those. You don't necessarily need a specialist teacher for everything, but rather a specialist skilled in teaching research / getting to the bottom of a field/industry. Make the kids teach each other; teacher is basically a facilitator? Too impractical?

I would agree it's not enough time, and plenty of workplaces aren't practical for that. Psychology and medicine come to mind for privacy reasons, and lots of workplaces are generally not kid-friendly (construction sites, heavy factories...)

Getting kids to teach each other strikes me as impractical. Most of them aren't going to learn enough in a few days to teach a useful amount, and learning about a profession through the lens of an opinionated kid seems very sub-optimal. Plus, a year is a lot of time.

I have seen a lot of schools have "career day" type things, where parents come in and briefly discuss what they do. That's a little more direct and a less time consuming at ten to fifteen minutes a parent. This is valuable in proportion to the economic diversity and schedule flexibility of parents, though.

> It did not accomplish nearly so much as you might hope.

Exactly, I can't think of a single subject that actually achieves what it should when taught in the school setting.

Really? Because basic literacy, civics, history, and mathemathics as commonly taught work roughly as well as they are expected to.

The problem with the class I describe isn't that it didn't teach effectively. It's that the students largely didn't care to apply what was taught.

The classes are never the suitable speed for all the students. When learning on your own, you set your own speed but you can't do that when in school. But note that all subjects are like the subjects you mentioned you took in HS. The mathematics doesn't actually go all that far. Note that all of HS mathematics can be summarized in those HS math review books that are actually not that thick. It's a travesty that fundamentally, you spend maybe like 4 years reading like 6-7 books?

The point is not to be optimal for every student - the resources required for such are not available and MOOCs are not an adequate replacement. The point is to lay a universal foundation in a series of selected subjects while socializing students.

The model of turning a literate child loose in a library and letting them be for six or eight years should not be assumed as universally useful. It's not a good way to produce a shared general foundation for a modern democracy.

The main issue is that you don't really learn anything in depth. You get some sort of very general overview but your knowledge still has so many gaps. If you make the educational system more efficient, when you leave the reformed high school, you might actually be somewhat proficient at X.

Most people agree with this. What becomes more difficult is figuring out what concrete steps make the educational system more efficient.

OTOH, even that would still probably disproportionately benefit those with the best home environments and support to make use of the more efficient system, and increase rather than narrow the gap between the best and worst served. Efficiency and equality are largely orthogonal concerns.

It sounds like your complaint is that the basic primary/secondary educational system does not produce specialists. Have you considered the possibility that neither primary nor secondary education serves the purpose of specialist training, that being reserved for tertiary education?

The purpose of the current design for primary and secondary education is to produce a general foundation atop which any sort of tertiary education can be built.

My main issues are the lack of efficiency and lack of educational freedom.

> The purpose of the current design for primary and secondary education is to produce a general foundation atop which any sort of tertiary education can be built.

Yeah, it's not very good at that.

It's relatively efficient compared to alternative currently available approaches. We have not reached a point where Khan Academy and Udemy can replace everything - or even a major part - of education after basic literacy and numeracy.

The model of turning a literate child loose in a library and letting them be for six or eight years should not be assumed as universally useful.

I'm not sure I really want to argue about this but fundamentally I think that you might be thinking that fixing the educational system means making the schools on the wrong side of tracks perform as well as the schools on the other side. It's definitely not that simple, the system as a whole is somewhat flawed.

I certainly understand the desire to not argue with strangers on the internet. :)

"Scapegoat" is probably less accurate than "symptom". In that, in many states (i.e. Kansas), the education system has been deliberately hamstrung by people empowered by the "entrenched problems".

even if the educational system is fixed, it doesn't change the fact that if you're poor you first have to find a job, and entry level jobs in careers are hard to find, so you might end up getting something you're overqualified for just to pay the bills, something unrelated, then maybe while you work at something unrelated life happens, you maybe get married, or have kids, and now leaving your underqualified but paying unrelated job becomes impossible, and by the time you can you've lost 10-15 years and your opportunities will be minimal.

If you're rich, you start working in your parents' business, you're also likely to intern in it, and/or in your parents' peers' companies, and if you're any decent you're likely going to be groomed for an exec position, a position the poor college grad will never be able to aspire to, and if you're not decent you're probably going to get some sort of face-saving "consultancy" position, paying again way more than the poor graduate can ever hope to get.

This is unrelated to the education system, and it's not something you can ever fix, because people will always try to make sure their family has an advantage, which means that as soon as a family reaches a position of influence it will use it to perpetuate its position.

Meritocracy is nice in theory, but humans as a species are wired a lot more for tribalism than for meritocracy, hence why to get some semblance of it you need a culture/government that fosters it, and those are in short supply.

> entry level jobs in careers are hard to find

Jobs aren't hard to find if you are one of the few people in the world who can do the job. I know, these aren't entry level jobs but given the right education, you can skip those I think.

> This is unrelated to the education system,

Fundamentally, I think that few things in society aren't fundamentally related to the educational system. Or more precisely, quite a bit of society can be explained by looking at the educational system 10 years ago.

I'm personally all for fixing the education system, but the idea that this would fix (or even help) income equality is a fantasy. Denmark is often held up as a model of low-inequality, high-income-mobility, high-education-investment countries. But a recent study indicated that these policies' have zero effect on Danish income mobility and education-attainment mobility relative to the US! Their high levels of equality rely entirely on direct transfers. There's nothing wrong with this per se: despite the costs I'd bear, I wish our system was a little more redistributive, including education investment. But the theoretical positive-sum gains from broadening opportunity regardless of your background are simply not supported by the data. And this is in one of the most income-mobile countries (post-taxes and -transfers) in the world!

[1] http://voxeu.org/article/intergenerational-mobility-denmark-... [2] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/the-amer...

Ok, I haven't read the study too closely but I can't imagine how having a more educated population would be beneficial for the society. Also note that you can't really measure poverty by just percentage of income alone. The pool people in US are probably doing better than in Somalia. If nothing else, I can't imagine more education not raising the general standard.

1: We have very limited ability to change educational outcomes in this country and the differences between schools have little to do with external inputs (systematic differences in per pupil funding, teacher quality, etc). https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/my-r...

2: Years of schools have essentially no explanatory power at an international level (even in lesser developed countries that should have much more "low hanging fruit") Other research shows that without improving test scores, which are strongly influenced by genetics, education is basically worthless for economic development.

https://pseudoerasmus.com/2015/06/15/education-econ-growth/

3: Poor people in the US, especially net of taxes and transfers, are quite wealthy by broader international standards. US poor vs Somalia? LOL that's not even a question. The poor in some of the more economically successful nordic/northern european countries might have somewhat higher material living conditions, but the differences are much more modest than you might expect and as compared to what you find in other developed countries (especially larger, less homogeneous, less cherry -picked countries), say, France, Italy, Spain, etc it's far from clear cut. The US also has significantly more diversity in multiple dimensions, especially as compared to an extremely (traditionally) homogeneous country like Denmark.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161011131428.h...

How would you do that?

Fundamentally I think that we have to get rid of the concept of a teacher and replace it with person who helps you when you get stuck. I think that fundamentally, the school should just teach you to read as soon as possible and from there on it should just give you things to read. You should also have much more freedom in what you want to study, e.g. if you want to check out idk, optical engineering in high school (even if for the reason that it sounds cool), the high school should be able to somehow assemble a path for you.

I think that just about everyone has dreams that can be solved with more knowledge and skill. The path to achieving these isn't always very clear though. The school should be the organization that gives you that clarity and supports you.

> I think that fundamentally, the school should just teach you to read as soon as possible and from there on it should just give you things to read.

I fail to see how this won't devolve into parents that have more time to devote to their children's education through encouragement, steering, tutoring, or paying for the same having a better outcome. And since I think having more money is causal for having more time, I think that's just a way to make the problem worse, not better.

You replace teachers with tutors. You encourage study group work. You use better educational tools. In Mindstorms, Papert talks about how the computer is fundamentally the best educational tool. This reflects my experience but for some reason computers are barely used in education and if they are, they are used in all the wrong ways.

On some level, I think that if the kids need tutors, the system is broken.

What you describe only solves the problem of wealthy parents providing an advantage when the tutoring and/or computer system is perfect with respect to what is available otherwise. At any point where it could be improved wealthy families will be able to take advantage of that improvement for their children. This is a natural consequence of how we value our young and their future.

What you describe would be good to reduce the advantage of wealth on outcome, but it's also papering over how hard the problem is. The real problem is getting from here to there. It's akin to saying "well, just eliminate racism." Sure, that's a good idea, nobody should object to that. But it's not like we'll wake up a year from now and say "problem solved!". As a simple example of this, we probably can't make good computer tutors for kids without somewhat good AI. That's not exactly an easy problem to solve.

That's an idea, and I've seen your other comments and think that they are interesting. I don't see how this would fix the phenomenon of wealthy parents being able to support their children better than poor parents.

Wealthy families will be able to pay a better "person who helps", or send their children to a better high school to study optical engineering. Fundamentally, wealthy people will always have access to better services.

"Fix the fucking educational system and stop wasting people's time."

America spends more % of it's GDP and more $ / capita than any nation on earth.

America graduates far more people from college than any European country.

European Americans score better than Europeans on standardized testing.

Same for all ethnic groups: Asian Americans do better than Asians, African Americans do better than Africans etc..

The reason America - on average - fares a little lower than Europe has to do with it's ethnic composition. BTW - I'm not saying that some ethnic groups / races are 'smarter' than others, but that literacy, attitudes towards education etc. are multigenerational things, and most Latino Americans and African Americans are only about 1.5 generations fully literate, so it will take some time to fully catch up.

In fact - if you account for ethnicity - America has the best schools in the world - wherever they come in from - they do better than they would have from whence they came.

I'm not saying American schools are perfect or whatever - but it's worth noting that if you look at the facts, they don't fit the whole 'American schools are crap' narrative. It's more nuanced than that.

> If I work my ass off it's to make sure I can help my kids do better than I did.

> What's the point of being "wealthy" if [...]

You confuse "being wealthy" with "working one's ass off".

Since that isn't even close to what the OP said it's pretty clear you're dedicated to the narrative of the evil rich. Keep plugging! It'll stick soon

I believe you've swapped the narrative.

A lot of people work their ass off just to pay the rent and feed their kids.

Working your ass off does not imply wealth. That's the problem.

"A lot of people work their ass off just to pay the rent and feed their kids."

We should also be questioning why someone that can barely pay the rent decides to have another kid (or even a kid at all). Financial management should be a bigger part of our education system.

"Working your ass off does not imply wealth. That's the problem."

It has never and should never imply wealth. When I was in college, I worked my ass off and studied for an exam one time. I barely passed. Do you think this is fair? I probably worked harder than many of my classmates.

Obtaining wealth involves: timing, hard work, intelligence, and discipline...with a little bit of luck thrown into the mix. Most wealthy people in the US did not inherit it.

Before claiming that the system is rigged (which seems to be pretty common these days in our presidential campaign), we need to take a hard look at the responsibility of the individual.

Obtaining wealth is mostly timing/luck.

There are plenty of hard working, well disciplined, intelligent poor people. There are plenty of lazy, stupid rich people. There's virtually no correlation between any of the things you named and wealth.

The question then becomes how much should a lucky person be "rewarded," or how much should an unlucky person be "punished." A lot of people feel that being unlucky shouldn't mean living in perpetual debt, for example, or going bankrupt because you broke a leg.

A lot of people feel that our society could gain a lot by helping those unlucky people rise to their potential.

Where's your source for all these assertions?

Well using IQ as a proxy for intelligence, you can find many sources that say there's no significant correlation between IQ and wealth (https://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/intlwlth.htm).

Many studies find that your parents' wealth is the single greatest influencer of your wealth (http://www.umass.edu/preferen/gintis/intergen.pdf).

I would say that who your parents are is about as "lucky" a thing could be, considering it's totally independent of who you are or decisions you make.

My only other assertions being that smart poor people and dumb rich people exist? I hope that's self-evident to anyone on this board...

We should also be questioning why someone that can barely pay the rent decides to have another kid (or even a kid at all).

This statement is rife with all kinds of shitty assumptions. Until Obamacare came along, it was common for health insurance in the US to not cover birth control -- yet it often covered Viagra. So, a guy who is too old to get it up anymore is entitled to sexual pleasure, but a young woman servicing a man is going to vindictively be made to pay, both literally and figuratively.

Second, a woman can be raped and end up pregnant. Rapists aren't exactly known for using protection and one rape case was determined to be not rape because the victim managed to convince her assailant to use a condom to protect her from disease. The courts determined this somehow proved consent on her part.

Third, it's quite difficult to get an abortion in the US. There are a lot of barriers to getting an abortion. So if you get raped and wind up pregnant, good luck ending it -- even though rape is supposed to be one the exceptions that allows you to get an abortion.

Fourth, there are religious faiths that tell women they are going to hell if a) they don't willingly oblige their husband for sex or b) they use any sort of birth control whatsoever.

I could probably go on, but I am a desperately poor woman who needs to try to get some work done so I can keep eating this month, in spite of having been one of the top three students of my graduating high school class and having had both my kids legitimately within the bonds of matrimony and generally having done every goddamn thing "right" that I can possibly do, but it is still FUCK YOU Michele, because, hey, women don't need no stinkin justice or respect. And before you ask: I have been celibate for more than 11 years at this point.

Wow, do assumptions of the sort you are making piss me off. It is a great way to guarantee that the world will continue to remain in the toilet, no matter how hard people work or how virtuous they are.

> Until Obamacare came along, it was common for health insurance in the US to not cover birth control -- yet it often covered Viagra.

Birth control costs literally $7 a month. You can get it from almost any pharmacy in the nation. Complaining about your health insurance not covering birth control is like complaining about your car insurance not covering gasoline.

Men tend to make more money than women. Seven dollars a month may not be a big deal to you, but it is for some people. And my criticism is more like saying that insurance companies would pay for your gas if you were male but not if you were female.

> Men tend to make more money than women. Seven dollars a month may not be a big deal to you, but it is for some people.

How is this also not an argument that health insurance should pay for food? People (including women!) pay way more per month for food than the $7 that we've agreed birth control costs, and it's far more vital to one's continued health than birth control is.

> And my criticism is more like saying that insurance companies would pay for your gas if you were male but not if you were female.

Only in a tortured and incorrect fashion. Insurance companies will pay for treating all kinds of maladies that only women can get. Is that an argument that they're discriminating against men?

Wow, I respect this post and the poster

Everyone believes they work their asses off, but like every other expression of human ability, the actual amount of ass-working is normally distributed.

You may be conflating the resulting tiredness of menial physical labor with actual productivity, which is certainly understandable from an emotional perspective, but not really logical.

where did the parent say anything about "evil rich"? At the moment, your post is the only one on the page along those lines.. so it seems to be a narrative you're injecting.

Edit: also, whether or not someone worked for their money, says nothing about good or evil. I'm sure we can all point out people in both camps.

He works his ass off to be wealthy. He didn't suggest that is the only way to be wealthy.

The set of people who worked their asses off and the set of people who were considered wealthy when they reached the median retirement age (or at the time of their death) don't necessary have a high degree of overlap.

Ancestor post stated that the intersection was not equal to the empty set. Its reply post implied that the intersection was not equal to the union, and perhaps that the intersection was not even a significant fraction of the wealthy set. They were speaking past each other.

Wealthy people like to overemphasize the contribution of hard work to their own wealthiness, which has a side effect of encouraging non-wealthy people to fall into exploitable patterns in their attempt to become wealthy. If you want to get rich, don't work hard. All that hard work is just going to distract you from what you should be doing--acquiring ownership of moneymaking machines that are either fully autonomous or have a very high multiplier for turning your own work into spendable money. You can buy them, or you can build them, but you'll have a hard time doing either unless you spend a lot of time around wealthy people, leeching off their knowledge of how the machines operate.

Maybe. I didn't see any figure in the article to define what "rich" means in this context. Different persons have different definitions. I don't think I'm technically part of the 1%, but I do make very good money, I just work hard for it and wasn't born with it.

They don't have to be mutually exclusive...

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