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Comment by Ralith | Hacker News Reader

What? The solution proposed by the article is to make quality education available.

And the implication of everybody being well educated is that everyone will have white collar jobs or prestigious blue collar jobs. If everyone is well educated then who will want to take a job as a street cleaner when they've just spent $80k on their education? The solution is clearly not limited to just educating everyone, is it?

Real education does not necessarily mean spending big bucks. There is plenty of evidence that simply throwing money at the problem doesn't really work. A better correlation is high parental involvement and a community which values education.

Also, pay alone does not determine if one is poor. It is not possible to avoid having people who are "relatively poor" as measured by absolute income. But it is possible to take better care of people and reduce real problems like malnutrition, even if you have phd's waiting tables because there are too many of them.

What about a creative approach to the problem coupled with questioning our basic assumptions - why should anyone be relatively poor in the first place? Do we really need money in a high resource environment? When society is, in effect, dependent on everyone doing their part then why should someone be poorer just for the part they play? Why do we not run more social experiments on different ways of structuring things? We could section off a few islands and let the idealists create their perfect societies on them and see who does best. We could take lessons from those experiments and integrate them into mainstream society.

I'm just saying, education has been improving steadily over the last century yet the wealth gap has increased. It's clearly only one element of the solution.

I think there will always be relative poverty, no matter what you do. By that I mean there will always be some folks who have less, some who have more. I have problem with that. In fact, I think there are big problems with trying to force too much sameness. But, yes, I think we can do better by the masses. I have thought about such things a long time.

I am currently homeless and most homeless people are not penniless. Most of them have too little income for a middle class lifestyle but do have some kind of income. I would like to start a business at some point which would not be aimed solely at homeless people but which I think would probably have high appeal for them. In other words, I expect them to be a significant percentage of the customer base. Treating them like customers instead of charity cases in a business aimed at adding value to their lives for a reasonable fee would improve their situation, not necessarily helping them get off the street but helping make life more bearable while on the street. Also making life more affordable for folks who are barely hanging on, thus likely preventing some people from slipping into homelessness. Charities have their place, but there is a reason why the expression "charity case" is basically insulting.

Robots?

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