“They have all the “human talent and intellectual wealth” that we need.”
I’m all for providing those people with the opportunities to live up to their potential but that is going to take resources and some of this resources come from the people I’m talking about both in terms of the capital and the creativity (Elon Musk is an obvious example of such). It is naive to think all people have the same potential.
To miss out on some of the top few percent of earners and intellect would be a mistake.
However, domestic policies with respect to education and taxation, and typical economic forces, mean that such talent is commonly wasted due to being born into lower privilege families. General economic trends seem to be going in the direction of greater inequality of opportunity based on parental wealth (i.e. so that one’s eventual socioeconomic result is increasingly inherited rather than earned), and politically derived policy now appears to be in favor of accelerating that trend (as opposed to wanting to slow or stop it but not always being effective at doing so, as was the case in the recent past).
An example relevant to these forums is that many states’ public universities are unaffordable to students from lower and middle income families (due to poor in-state financial aid), so that even if they have talent that can be cultivated by attending a university, they are unlikely to be able to make use of it to help both themselves and the rest of society. See http://www.epi.org/blog/college-graduation-scores-income-levels/ on how powerful parental income is in determining whether someone graduates from college – high achieving (by 8th grade standardized tests) students from low income families have the same chance of graduating college as low achieving students from high income families.
@ucbalumnus – that link is all over the place. The first graph shows incoming freshmen at “top-tier” universities by income quartile. Basically meaningless without comparing that to application rate by income quartile and then showing entrance rates by quartile for equivalent test takers. Also, why the limit to “top-tier” universities?
The second graph show college completion rates by 8th grade tests. How does that compare to college entrance rates? Also, why use 8th grade tests and not SAT or ACT, which are taken much closer to college entrance?
What’s funny is that some here appear to believe that the solution to these issues is to bring in more rich folks from other countries.
Nontechnical jobs don’t contribute significantly?