Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you talking about? I said it probably makes financial sense too. I know the HN community abhors things like budgets getting in the way of universal healthcare & longer unemployment benefits, but there's a limit to what can be spent. Let me just say we should be spending a lot less money on war and a lot more money on welfare. Yet let me also say that the genesis of many ghettos was in a "war on poverty" that…
I wasn't referring to you in particular, but Americans as a whole. The thought that if you work hard, you will always succeed. This is not the case, of course. I agree with your post.
And here is where the entire concept of if you work hard, you will always succeed shatters: there are roughly 300 million Americans. The industry in which they could have (and many have) worked hard has systematically been outsourced, destroyed, under the idea that "we're going to design it, and they are going to build it, somewhere else, cheaper". Capitalism, except that most of those ~300 million people do not really have the means (intellectual, financial, you name it) to be scientists and engineers.
To make matters worse, the American culture has a strong bias towards low-brow making fun of engineering and science (a prominent case in point: "The Big Bang Theory", or shoving sports, in particular "football", down everyone's throats at the expense of more intellectual programs). For instance, "geek" and "nerd" are very American terms which I'm not aware of existing in Europe, where being an engineer or a scientist is celebrated and prestigious.
It's the perfect storm, and one which has been systematically brewed for the last 60 years of American history. Anthropologists and sociologists rejoice, for you now have a lifetime opportunity to observe what happens when you have a laissez-faire, hardcore capitalism system without checks and balances.