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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

> adversity score

Hm - so people who faced more "adversity" would be propelled to the top of the list? I can see that going horribly wrong: if it worked perfectly, you'd end up with yo-yo generations where one generation went to a good college and had a successful career (and if you don't believe one thing follows from the other, why bother with the adversity score at all?) while the next would be relegated to struggling, giving their children the needed "adversity". Realistically, though, you'd have smart parents finding the right mix of adversity to give their kids a leg up just just the way they find the right mix of extracurricular and volunteer activity today.

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What mechanism do you imagine would push high income families down the socioeconomic ladder?

Isn’t the whole problem that it’s so much easier to make money when you have money? Providing advantages to economically deprived candidates seems to be a perfectly valid mechanism for promoting social mobility to me. The entire basis of affirmative action is that past discrimination had created generations of economic hardship, and that the hardship creates a self sustaining cycle of further hardship.

If you create mechanisms to improve social mobility then you address that problem. As a bonus you do so without blatant racial discrimination, you don’t elevate the hardship of one group above the hardship of another. You create a system that actually addresses the problem, rather than handing out additional benefits to wealthy minority group members, and you avoid creating a system that people can game by claiming minority group membership based on either some minuscule percentage of heritage, or even perhaps based on no heritage at all.

> right mix of extracurricular and volunteer activity today

This is close, but I imagine it would be more akin to temporarily relocating to a different school district, then selling / moving out after the children hit college age.

Note that this type of thing does aalready happen, albeit not to the extremes you're imagining. Imagine one parent retiring early or temporarily so that total family income qualifies for certain loans or grants.

Nah, you'd just have wealthy people deciding how they calculate the score and making sure they can tweak the numbers to show their kids are disadvantaged.

My salary as a CEO was only $1 last year, therefore my children need access to this school.

Just like some wealthy parents find a friendly doctor to diagnose their child with a "learning disability" to get extra accommodations on tests. Knowing how to work the system confers huge advantages on the privileged.

You know, I'll take "yo-yo generations" over what we've got now. Right now we've got "a massive wealth divide". "yo-yo"ing would imply that some people that are right now stuck on the bottom would at least have some time a bit higher up.

That sounds like a strict improvement over the current system, where those that struggle adversity are stuck trying to pull themselves up by their bootstrap forever.

If that means my parents made decent money, but I can't get into a good school and have to struggle a bit? Sure, fine, that's still nothing compared to those who have parents with no money and also can't get into a decent school.

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