Although education can cause wealth in some cases (and only in the "developed" world at that) in most cases wealth is passed down generation to generation.
Go to several "lesser developed" countries around the world, where people are educated to the tooth and are still not wealthy.
Or go to our nation's universities and see the wealth (monetary not information and knowledge) there versus the corporate world (say Enron) where it is not education but greed that causes wealth.
"Although education can cause wealth in some cases (and only in the "developed" world at that) in most cases wealth is passed down generation to generation."
Empirically false. The US real GDP has more than doubled in the last thirty years, so half of our total wealth didn't even exist a generation ago.
Wealth begets wealth, but unearned wealth begets expensive taste :)
Looking at the uberwealthy is deceptive, because they're a product not only of their own skill and ambition but the circumstances where they made the fortune. 5 years earlier or later and Bill Gates wouldn't be a billionaire (ditto most computer billionaires - they were the right person in the right window of time). They are outliers, black swans, etc. Hard to make theories based on them.
If you look at (to draw an arbitrary line) people making more than $100,000/yr, I'll bet they are either a) business owners or b) highly educated (college and above).
As the average person becomes more educated, there are and will be other barriers to wealth (isn't it not what you know, but WHO you know?)
In fact, I would say Y Combinator recognizes and institutes those very principles: offering potential participants a network of expertise, mentoring, and access to venture capitalists the recipe for success doesn't seem to be based on education, or knowledge, but on wealth, and the proximity to that wealth.
If you look at all these recent tech-made millionaires, one thing is strikingly similar: they knew someone wealthy who chipped in large amounts of cash.
Do you think a Ph.D, or even a guy with a bachelor's half-way across the world will have access to this wealth (monetary or otherwise)?
I don't think so.
But, from time to time, I stop by my school's library to read some scholarly journals of political science and international affairs to try to understand a little more about how the world works.
I think it is also valuable to read the work of non-mainstream thinkers. Noam Chomsky, in particular, says some important things (alongside some bizarre things to be sure). To be honest, I am much less familiar with and sympathetic to polar ultraright opinion.
I recommend all of these things.
I wish there was a publication of the anti-CFR set that wasn't fringe and crazy...
Thanks to the English magazine's clever rhetorical strategy, calibrating an effective mixture of aristocratic contempt, two-notches-smarter-than-Newsweek diction, and occasional anti-elitist populism to pander to its majority-American readership, readers trust The Economist. They - particularly American readers - trust it because they think it knows more than they do; this is its entire appeal. They even get a sick thrill being talked down to by a dirty old aristocratic prig. For Americans in particular, accustomed to the lifeless, dumbed-down, least-common-denominator prose in their own media, reading The Economist is its own reward, giving them the sense not only that they're smarter than the average Time subscriber, but that it even makes them vaguely decadent, in a literary-aristocratic sort of way. They become smarter by osmosis simply by being in the imagined drawing room of The Economist's wit-slinging editorial offices.
http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=10127&...
The Exile, a tabloid though it may be, had predicted exactly what would happen in Iraq.
Getting harder and harder if you didn't go to college?
Have you ever been to a best buy? It's getting easier and easier for someone of meager standing to have an entertainment center that only the rich could afford two decades ago.