1. This reply seems like "forget hard data, here are two anecdotes" which seems like a poor approach if you're trying to convince [good] engineers.
2. 62.9% of the world has cell phones. The global median income is likely less than $5,000 and it seems difficult to reconcile the two without many poor people - and not just in the US- owning cell phones. More to the point, do you know how hard it is to get a job or a house without a phone? Cell phones are very hard to do without in this age, especially if you're homeless.
3. Education should help to ensure people can make better decisions, but access to decent education is terribly unequal in the US, so kids attending schools in poor districts are even less likely to learn what they need to get ahead. You're ignoring structural issues if you think people are just making "stupid decisions" and ignore the facts about inequality of education.
1. If engineers don't value stories as valid for exploring and explaining reality, then they'll be doomed to lamp posting forever.
2. You're just making my point for me.
3. The access to secondary education that Americans have in is unparalleled anywhere else except in certain parts of Europe. It's been our collective obsession for decades, the subject of intense policy initiatives all over the nation. There's no political will to improve prisons, but an initiative to expand student loan funding will always be approved.
Anybody can take on $X0,000 in uncancelable debt to obtain a college degree with. The reason they can't follow through and actually improve their lives with it runs along emotional poverty lines. We can't educate our way out of this problem.
Re: #1 the original statistics presented show that in the US, there's a stronger correlation between individual income and parental income than in most OECD countries. You've claimed this is "measuring the wrong thing" but it isn't clear to me why you think that, or what we should be measuring instead.
Re: #3 The real inequality of opportunity isn't in secondary education, it's in primary (K-12) education. I went to a public highschool in a well-off suburb that had high participation in AP programs and sent the overwhelming majority of the student body to college. A couple of miles away in the city, the high school struggled to retrain accreditation.
2. 62.9% of the world has cell phones. The global median income is likely less than $5,000 and it seems difficult to reconcile the two without many poor people - and not just in the US- owning cell phones. More to the point, do you know how hard it is to get a job or a house without a phone? Cell phones are very hard to do without in this age, especially if you're homeless.
3. Education should help to ensure people can make better decisions, but access to decent education is terribly unequal in the US, so kids attending schools in poor districts are even less likely to learn what they need to get ahead. You're ignoring structural issues if you think people are just making "stupid decisions" and ignore the facts about inequality of education.