Comment by RestlessMind | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RestlessMind | Hacker News Reader

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I disagree with you.

"The rich guy can buy a harvard education, and the poor guy can buy a cheap but effective online education"

And what is the outcome of having Harvard education against having cheap online degree? I am sure Harvard graduates come way ahead of graduates of online universities, both in private job market as well as in influential government positions due to "cliques" and "networking".

But the problem is much deeper than whether you can afford high quality commodities or not. Those with excess capital can accumulate assets, and then rent out those assets to those without capital. If this sounds too abstract, consider a concrete example - bay area housing market. Only those with capital can afford houses. Those with excess capital can buy additional houses and rent them out to those who cannot afford housing. Net result? The ones who cannot afford houses now have to keep paying rent to those who could, thus making homeowners richer.

Piketty has elaborated this in detail. But the most salient question he raised was that inequality, per se, is neither bad or good, but whether it is justified? Today, Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg have billions more than I do. But I am OK with that because they took risks, invested their efforts (and yes, also got lucky). But I am don't think someone like Alice Walton or Paris Hilton deserve their billions - in their case, all they did was just to be born to rich parents. And they and their heirs are going to have a better life (education, nutrition, accommodation, entertainment, connections...) than almost everyone else. Why? Doesn't seem "justified" to me.

Edit: Why the downvote? And while I respect your freedom of speech (to downvote), I am sincerely interested in knowing your counterarguments.

You're missing his point a little bit. He acknowledges that the rich will keep getting richer, and places like Harvard will continue to act as gatekeepers. But the intrinsic value of education will largely be available both to the rich and the non-rich. The credential and social signal of Harvard won't be, but the actual learning of things will.

Actual learning is only one of the multiple aims of college degree. One aim is also to improve career prospects in terms of better job opportunities and networking. And for that, Harvard has vast advantage over cheap online education.

It seems tautological to say that one of the benefits exclusively allocated to the rich is an ability to be rich. Stipulate that the rich are going to stay rich, or even get richer. How are you rebutting the comment upthread, which argues that regardless of income gaps, the quality of life gap is narrowing? Isn't the quality of life gap the more meaningful of the two gaps?

Rather than income gap or quality of life gap, I personally find "opportunity gap" to be more important. And I believe that gap is proportional to wealth disparity, i.e. rich people have a lot more opportunities than poor people.

Basic safety net in the rich societies may ensure a decent quality of life even for the poor folks. But does that mean they have opportunities to escape poverty, and have means to pursue whatever they are interested in pursuing?

Since you asked for concrete evidence in one of the other comments, here is one example showcasing opportunity gap - a child in Atlanta raised in the bottom fifth of the quintile has only 4% chance to rose to the top fifth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-incom...

EDIT: tptacek, seems I cannot reply to you here as well. But you are right - the biggest advantages of being rich today is that you have better life today and you have better chances to be rich tomorrow, which means you (and your heirs) will keep having better life than others.

I responded to your appeal to opportunity downthread. It seems tautological. The benefit you're reduced to allocating exclusively to the rich is "becoming rich".

That's all well and good. Learnings don't matter one bit when it comes to what an HR department or venture capitalist will look for on a resume or pedigree in a slide deck respectively, or the social network of having been present at said institution. Pedigree might be for suckers as PG put it, but it's still a signal of being selected and completing an expensive hazing ritual. So it will continue to function for people that value expense and exclusivity.

Tautology. You can't say that a benefit of being rich is being rich, or having ways to be rich. What are the intrinsic benefits of education? Do the poor in capitalist societies have more access to those intrinsic benefits, or less?

(For what it's worth, I dropped out of college after a single semester).

You're completely wrong and missing the boat.

If someone is a child of a farmer and hangs out in a tiny farm town without internet access, doesn't complete high-school, their odds of creating great wealth are zilch. They may start a hardware store but don't get your hopes up that they'll be the next Sam Walton. Whatever they hope do, it will be much harder. Some of the doors are closed, some doors don't matter.

If someone where a Ruby developer and wanted to work for a startup, a degree probably wouldn't matter as much as say MegaCorp.

But if someone goes to an exclusive university, graduates and then lives in a large city and has lots of friends, their odds of wealth dramatically improve versus the former... if they were ambitious, many more doors would be open to them (vendors, partners, investors, customers, etc.). Being close to the action with the right contacts is a world of difference from being a random person without successful, helpful friends and pedigree.

Furthermore, it is valid to be self-reinforcing because it is. Without wealth, it's impossible to capitalize on opportunities to make smart investments which one would otherwise have to pass on while others with more wealth may have the chance to make more money on them. Also, people with wealth have plenty of pseudo-"friends" pitching them opportunities to make wealth, whereas someone without wealth is unlikely to have a full calendar of people trying to get investment from them. Think of how many deals Mark Cuban can pass on just because he doesn't like the terms, and how good he's gotten good at negotiating favorable equity terms and knowing which deals are good/bad. Someone that's totally new is likely to be totally inept at some part of the business dance and will likely get rooked. Someone with the right friends is far more likely to get good advice from them about what to do or not do in a business setting to make fewer mistakes.

It's harder to get from zero to having VC's for friends that send you sweetheart deals to invest in, but that usually requires proving oneself (rich) first.

In conclusion, rich does not assure itself but it tends to be self-reinforcing.

(I took the ten-year plan and barely finished because I subconsciously resisted due to the conscious futility of it. Box checked, not about to start Dr. ... PhD)

Yes. We all agree about that. The question is: how much does that matter? Maybe it matters a whole lot. I won't be surprised if it does, because that's what I intuitively believe too. But if it's so obviously true, we should be able to marshal evidence to support the idea the idea that distribution of wealth matters to the welfare of the whole population.

So far, arguments against the comment upthread boil down to two things:

* Arguments that appear factually incorrect, like, "the wealth gap means the rich have good nutrition but the poor don't".

* Arguments that wealth inequality means that the poor can't become wealthy, which is like saying "the problem with wealth inequality is wealth inequality".

Those sort of arguments are broad generalizations.

It's impossible to say anything's impossible given determination, but the level of difficulty varies and it's context-dependent.

It's harder to become wealthy if your car is a POS and you miss a crucial client meeting, or live in a rough neighborhood and have your laptop & cell stolen because your apartment was robbed. None of those sort of things individually are fatal, but the likelihood of i) not being taken seriously (lacking friends, intros, pedigree, previous exits, paying customers per my previous comment) or ii) more set-backs as mentioned here make it HARDER to "get ahead." When someone is really broke, doesn't have a car and is living on the street, it's much hard for them to claw their way back to "normal..." it's an uphill battle that only slightly flattens out into more "normal" everyday challenges. (Life's challenges never go away, no matter which end of the spectrum, the challenges just become different.)

Unless someone has been homeless, their ability to appreciate and empathize with the set of challenges they face would be a stretch.

(I've done client-facing AWS technical consulting in the mobile industry while living out of the back of my car, and bested the competition and expanded the "beach-head" as it were. So I've little patience for laziness or people that can't hustle to bring home the bacon.)

How do we make them not broad generalizations? How do we get the "is" right, before debating the "ought"? What's an axis along which the rich have a zero-sum quality of life versus the poor?

Do the correctness of generalizations matter to someone living on the street?

By the way, how apropos: Pandora just played George Thorogood's "Get a haircut."

This reminds me of my father yelling at me when I was 16: "If you don't do good in school, you won't get into a good college, and you won't get a good job and you'll be working at McDonald's." This same dogmatic formula plays out in hundreds of millions of families. It's only partially true, for some kinds of jobs. But if one is absolutely set on startups or some technical jobs, then it's not absolutely essential. In fact, it's best to know what job/field one would be aiming for and work backwards from that... may save a lot of effort, time and cost.

(I did the least amount of work possible in high school and didn't study for the SATs.)

"the problem with wealth inequality is wealth inequality"

Just one nit - the problem with wealth inequality is that it perpetuates wealth inequality (and Piketty has detailed evidence for that).

We have had a lot of back and forth in multiple threads for this post. It is helping me clarify my thoughts, which for now can be summarized as:

1. Today, rich people have much better life than poor people.

2. Rich have higher chance of being rich tomorrow than poor folks. So that means they and their heirs have a higher chance of having a better life perpetually than ordinary folks and their heirs.

3. I don't begrudge better lifestyle for those who earned it (Gates, Zuck, Buffet...), but I do think its grossly unfair to enjoy better lifestyle just because you were born to rich parents (Walton heirs, Koch heirs, Paris Hilton...).

4. If you think capitalism has improved things so much that differences in wealth hardly matter (or such will be the case in future), kindly provide me evidence. I don't see it anywhere in my observations - eg. first class vs economy class experience in air travel, public schools vs private schools in the USA, job prospects for ivy league vs third tier univs, or even longevity[1] - rich people's life is better in almost all aspects (some of those aspects might frivolous but some are very meaningful).

[1] : http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/us/23health.html?_r=0

   > differences in wealth hardly matter

This is obvious from any comparison between the United States and any genuinely poor or developing country.

In the United States, the "poor" own cars and televisions (with cable!), enjoy smartphone service, live in air-conditioned houses, and eat lavish meals. The standard of living they enjoy is fantastically better than the poor or even middle class in any developing nation. Not only that, but their standard of living is far superior to the standard of living of the "poor" in this country 10, 20, or 50 years ago. Economic growth has lifted all boats. What's more, no one in this nation has a valid justification for envy.

If your neighbors are eating well while your children are starving, okay, be envious. It might be justified. That's not the case here. As Maggie Thatcher once responded to an accuser, "you would prefer that the poor be poorer, in order that the rich would be less rich". Greed and envy are not to be confused with justice, and should be rejected.

Perhaps if the wealthiest among us suffered more equally the pain of fighting wars and of medical care insecurity, they would invest more heavily in world peace and healthcare, and less on Angry Birds and luxury taxi services. This is why equality of quality of life matters -- to keep us focused on each others' wellbeing.

Disparity of wealth also erodes our democratic process, when money buys speech.

I'm confused about what people object to, about the parent comment.

We do have virtually equal quality of life in the US. A rich person can have ten cars, but he can't drive ten at the same time. It is a left-wing cliche that the burden of fighting wars falls upon the poor. In the real world we live in, the military is all volunteers and mostly middle-class, not from the poorest demographics. And pretty much everyone in the USA has access to state of the art care. You cannot buy your way to the top of an organ donor list or something. Certainly there is a difference between rich and poor, but you have not shown that it is an unjust difference or that it is harmful to the poor person.

Gates and Zuck were born rich, FYI.

It's hard to get off the streets and back to "normalcy" (or dignity) if people pretend you don't exist.

West is becoming more like semi-urban India as the vice-versa... flattening.

A every increasing wealth inequality destroys incentives to work hard. The song sixteen tons encapsulate the feeling workers get when they just get "another day older and deeper in debt".

With wealth being hereditary entitlement to one group that increasingly get more wealthy, we end up with everyone else being in more debt to them each passing day. The debt bondage model simply moves from being about a mine, and becomes the model of the country.

I feel like this conversation is sidestepping the fact that "cheap online education" is synonymous with "we'll take a bunch of your money under unique loan conditions and operate as a paper mill".

Not to say anything else about the political economy, I'm a believer in capitalism as the 'least bad system', but in the education sector, those 'cheap online schools' are actually a point in favor of the exploitation narrative.

The "paper mill" refers to credentials, which refers to the wealth-enhancing effect of education. But this subthread stipulates that the rich will keep getting richer.

Are the non-rich getting drastically worse access to teaching and learning resources? If you had to plot a line representing this (admittedly abstract) concept starting in 1950 and running to 2020, what would that line look like? It needs to capture the Internet, Wikipedia, the digitization of books, citeseer and scholar.google.com, open source software, Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseware, and Coursera.

> Are the non-rich getting drastically worse access to teaching and learning resources?

Yeah, that's what I'm arguing if you're going to point to online certificate programs that get advertised on the subway as evidence for equal opportunity. You could make a better case for online self-directed research, probably, but I don't think there's a substitute for 19yos being exposed to great minds with tough expectations -- that only happens at good/decent universities [1]. And that's without even getting into the whole 'learning starts really young' thing with good school districts compared to lousy ones, etc.

[1] If you want to take that point and argue for investment in good state universities, I'm entirely with you, but the current power structures seem to disagree[2] as evidenced by funding decisions.

[2] I realize it's silly to term an emergent outcome as 'disagreement'

I don't know. My 19 year old self went to a decent state research university. The lectures I sat through were much less effective than watching Gilbert Strang on Youtube at 3x speed with arrow keys to get him to repeat himself when I miss something and a pause button so I can work out problems after he writes them on the board but before he explains them. There was 1-on-1 time at "real" school, but it was with TAs and a room full of 19 year olds. I feel like the Internet addresses that use case better as well.

(Fair warning: I've been pretty successful in my career, but I dropped out of school after a single semester).

Well, you're an outlier. Deleted the rest of my post since I'm on my way to bed and didn't want to steal the last word. You can probably guess most of it.

Not necessarily an outlier. I was dumber than him and sat out the whole four years. I spent a year doing something I hated because that's what my degree got me.

I now have a job I love that has literally zero to do with what I studied. If I had focused on the acquisition of knowledge when I realized I wanted to program for a living I could have saved a lot of time, money, and opportunity cost. I know more than a handful like me.

However you also have the luck of having a computer, being interested in computers, and being able to further than interest. Do you think you would've fared nearly as well, if your interest instead was in cars? Clothing design? Social work?

Us tech workers are fairly lucky that in all honesty, the things we tend to like seem to be problems that can be solved with one another.

I'd also argue, that while the billionaire's life is not a million times better than the thousandaire, that this never was the case, and that is thinking of the best of times.

However, look at the worst of times. You get a serious illness- say, a cancer. For one, as a wealthy person you likely could have it detected much earlier from regular doctor visits and various signs. The poor never get this opportunity. When time comes for treatment, the best medicine, procedures, and rehabilitative therapy are available- and for the poor, they might be able to get the procedures, but the medicine will often be second-rate and there likely will be very little, or perhaps even no rehabilitation.

Similar states repeat for smaller life disasters. You get in a car wreck; The rich man likely has a newer car, and can much easier afford to use the insurance to get a worthwhile vehicle again without being out very much. The poor was probably driving a car worth less than $1500, with numerous problems already, but at least it was paid off. The wreck might leave them with only enough money to get another car, but now they must make payments and still only get another 2-3 years out of it, if they're able to at all thanks to an insurance plan with less coverage.

There is a huge quality of life gap here. Being poor today isn't at its worst when everything is going well- overall, things are pretty great there, and are a good reason why even lower middle class people rarely fall into absolute poverty. But the inability to pull oneself out of a hole is a much, much more pervasive problem.

First, most poor people also have access to computers --- as in, have them in their homes.

Second, stipulate an aristocracy of permanently wealthy people and a majority underclass of people living at a technical poverty level. Assume that price competition is going to continue to improve the standard of living of that underclass.

Exactly what will prevent those people from designing and selling clothes, fixing and modifying cars, or doing social work?

> First, most poor people also have access to computers --- as in, have them in their homes.

It depends what you mean by "most". If you mean "more than 50%", that is technically, barely true. 57% of households making less than $25,000 have a computer; the $25,000-$50,000 bracket reaches 76%. For "internet access anywhere", the numbers are 50% and 64%.

http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p20-569.pdf

And 5-10 years from now, because of price competition, those numbers will approach the numbers for telephones. What percentage of people living at the poverty line in the US have telephones?

Paris Hilton earned her money as an entertainer. You may not like her, but she didn't flop into a career. She took some seed money (just like Bill Gates) and used it to build her bizarre but profitable little industry.

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