While I agree that improving access to education and opportunities for all is a big part of the remedy, I do have to take a disagreement with the author's initial statement that wealth ratios aren't worth considering.
Expensive education may be one part of the gap that appears to be widening, but as wealth disparity grows, so does power disparity. Money can't buy you happiness, or even 'true' friends perhaps, but it can buy you influence and it can keep people following you. This can let the wealthy 'open' job and experience opportunities where others might not be so fortunate.
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.
Expensive education may be one part of the gap that appears to be widening, but as wealth disparity grows, so does power disparity. Money can't buy you happiness, or even 'true' friends perhaps, but it can buy you influence and it can keep people following you. This can let the wealthy 'open' job and experience opportunities where others might not be so fortunate.