(For what it's worth, I dropped out of college after a single semester).
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)
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".
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
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.
West is becoming more like semi-urban India as the vice-versa... flattening.
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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'
(Fair warning: I've been pretty successful in my career, but I dropped out of school after a single semester).
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.
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?
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%.
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.
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.