Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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What if income inequality is a cause of educational inequality? It's not hard to think of reasons why that would be the case: schools suffer because the most capable families in their districts deploy capital to remove their children to private schools (or: because the most capable families pay test prep and consultants to advantage their kids in college admission), &c?

Zooming back out a bit: what are the demographics of successful startup founders? My intuition is that they're not a mirror image of the demographics of the country as a whole. There are a lot more well-off startup founders who went to CMU or Berkeley than there are startup founders from East St. Louis.

It's not a problem if a person picked at random from the population makes 50 million dollars with a photo sharing startup. But it starts looking a lot more like a problem when we're not picking people at random, but instead picking them mostly from the ranks of the most privileged people.

And still! I don't give a shit! I really don't think startups have much to teach us about income inequality and I don't generally believe they're a big Part Of The Problem. I'm much more troubled by the mere idea that startups might be a good lens through which to examine inequality and public policy.

Hayes makes this exact argument in Twilight of the Elites (but for wealth, not income):

"At the broader social level it means we expect a high degree of social mobility. We hope that the talented children of the poor will ascend to positions of power and prestige while the mediocre sons of the wealthy will not be charged with life-and-death decisions. Over time, in other words, society will have mechanisms that act as a sort of pump, constantly ensuring that the talented and hardworking are propelled upward, while the mediocre trickle downward.

But this ideal, appealing as it may be, runs up against the reality of what I’ll call The Iron Law of Meritocracy. The Iron Law of Meritocracy states that eventually the inequality produced by a meritocratic system will grow large enough to subvert the mechanisms of mobility. Unequal outcomes make equal opportunity impossible.

The Principle of Difference will come to overwhelm the Principle of Mobility. Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or to selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies, and kin to scramble up. In other words: “Whoever says meritocracy says oligarchy.”"

> It's not a problem if a person picked at random from the population makes 50 million dollars with a photo sharing startup. But it starts looking a lot more like a problem when we're not picking people at random, but instead picking them mostly from the ranks of the most privileged people.

Our system allocates/distributes wealth pretty much at random, but not uniformly random: the RNG is biased towards people with certain backgrounds and/or the already wealthy. So for every "Disadvantaged minority rags to riches" story, you'll find ten "Stanford grad with millionaire parents and prep school education makes even more money" stories. I'd argue that the root societal problem, though, is the jackpot-like randomness, not the skewed distribution.

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