Right. Wealth has both absolute and relative terms. The poor in American today have it better in many ways than even nobility in millennia past. But there is also a relative component to wealth too. If Bill Gates and his class can pay for their children to receive personal instruction from the best tutors and at the best schools, that does price/crowd out the less wealthy. But that's because the tutors and schools will naturally seek to get more money rather than less money. I think most people would. So it's hard to know how to solve this problem short of forcing these tutors to do what others want at the point of a gun, or cloning them, etc. None of these seem very satisfying.
I pump this from time to time, but MIT's OpenCourseWare does a great job of making a fantastic education widely available. Perhaps this is a model others could adopt more widely.
Interesting. I've always gotten along well with Germans, but in reading that article, I can tell that I have embedded in my speech some of the pleasantries that annoy Germans. I'm even more interested in visiting Germany and the Netherlands than I already was.
MIT's OpenCourseWare is a fantastic project. It's been a while since I was involved with it, but I contacted them a few years ago and helped TeX up some of the notes (for Physics courses, not CS). Anyhow, if you feel inspired or just want to learn a subject even better by reading its notes carefully enough to typeset them, consider contacting OCW and asking if they've got anything available. It's a good experience and it's nice to think about how many people benefit from it.
You could say that this is not necessarily true, even though we all wish it was. There's an endless supply of people out there who work really really hard and yet they never become billionaires, in fact they might be living at poverty levels.
It's kind of a cool myth, but social mobility doesn't quite work that way.
I see two separate assertions : one, that hard work lifts you out of poverty. Two, handouts don't result in lasting changes in someone's economic status. I agree with you on the first. As for the second, that seems true enough: few welfare recipients have their lives transformed by the payments.
