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Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

This sort of attitude just shows how great the disconnect is between the haves and the have-nots. Many of these individuals who lack privilege may not even have proper internet access, or the literacy skills required to harness the internet even if they did. Deep-seated social ills cannot simply be solved by ubiquitous internet access and ever cheaper consumer electronics.

Indeed, recent studies on MOOCs have shown that the majority of their users are (surprise, surprise) young, white males with college degrees and a privileged background. One could even make the argument that MOOCs are actually exacerbating inequality, rather than reducing it.

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Regarding MOOCs, part is that is likely cultural - some groups are more likely to have been enculturated in communities where independent learning and self-study is acceptable, if not actively encouraged, versus being discouraged by social ostracization or physical violence in others.

The broader issue of drastic differences in outcome, where some people can't get a job scrubbing toilets while others are getting 250k job offers, is also probably due to the winner-take-all employment environment that an increasingly developed economy creates. Use of technology amplifies productivity, so that differences between different quantiles of worker productivity become larger, and companies have more incentive to hold out for the potential employees at the top of the food chain. And as it becomes a more competitive environment, there's less incentive for the less competitive members to bother participating whatsoever. Since increasingly more of society's functions can be performed by smaller segments of the population it shouldn't even be that much of an issue, except that, especially in the US with its widespread "screw the non-contributing zeroes" and "let them die" attitudes, no one wants to consider restructuring the system to support the huge portion of the population that didn't "make it," despite that being the same population that the same highly productive individuals are being produced by and drawn from.

So my suggestion is it results from productivity differences due to technological advancement, and social welfare programs will not eliminate those differences, they can just help sustain the necessary population that will never be making 250k a year working as a senior engineer for a large tech company.

Why do you think that the cultural capital of a certain social group is completely isolated and detached from their income level or past history of economic affluence or wellbeing?

What I find from my observations and unbiased reading is that rich people or people with a good track of generational prosperity have better chances to instill in their families the values of entrepreneurship and taking initiative while in poor or less fortunate families this becomes paradoxically difficult to achieve despite the seemingly urgent need to act on.

So, poor families especially the ones with a history of poverty and hardships spanning many generations back are hit on so many levels whether economically, socially or culturally and your thinly veiled attack on minorities communities and the insinuation that their culture product is the reason behind their economic hardships are not really helpful.

I certainly didn't mean it as a "thinly veiled attack on minorities," and it does seem more likely linked to the economic history of various communities. Children of college graduates are more likely to go to college themselves; parents with PhDs are more likely to have children who receive them as well. That could be due to genetics or shared environment or other factors, and there's a whole realm of twin and adoption studies on how much life outcomes are due to shared environment versus inheritance. Bryan Caplan has a good summary of this in the book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids (p. 53-58), but it mostly favors the inheritance-based view over the cultural one (admittedly contradicting my original assertion), and so certainly isn't going to be more friendly towards your view of trends in generational wealth.

How the suggestion that some social environments will be more supportive of self-education than others automatically becomes an attack on minorities is baffling. There was no intended suggestion of any such thing, and the entire rest of my post was hypothesizing something completely different: society's increasing net productivity leads to increasing gaps in income.

I agree. MOOCs would work if we did something like what Newt Gingrich proposed in the 90s: give every child in the US a laptop or PC as part of their schooling. Too bad his proposal was shot down as soon as he mentioned it.

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