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.
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.
"[Pariser] went out of his way to “friend” people with conservative politics. When he didn’t click on their updates as often as those of his like-minded contacts, he says, the system dropped the outliers from his news feed."
There's the rub. The Internet, among other things, has created a flood of data into people's lives. Filtering is essential. Pariser's built-in mental filter took over. I understand the premise of what's being said here. But it's more complicated than this. If an article/story/data in general is uninteresting or repellent enough to someone that it's ignored, did it really help that it was on the page briefly as it's skimmed past?
I think the problem is that it _automatically_ dropped things from his feed. It might be good to offer a way to turn filtering off entirely and leave it up to the person. I can't imagine anyone would really want this for long, though.