What seems to be at stake in the Big Question discussion is "how much equality of opportunity" exists. Achieving an equality of opportunity is far more difficult to achieve than an equality of wealth. A redistribution scheme could level up wealth very quickly. Engineering opportunity (if that is even possible) takes much more time, requires considerable intrusion into private life, and perhaps requires unique historical circumstances,

The various states, counties, cities, federal government. and NGOs in the United States have been trying to engineer opportunity for disadvantaged people since the 1950s. Supreme Court decisions, Congressionally funded large education outlays, laws requiring consideration of disadvantaged groups (equal employment opportunity programs), federally funded nutrition programs, mandated health care access, and so on have been carried out. Some of the programs have expired and been replaced in an effort to improve achievement of legislative intent.

Results are persistently inconsistent, inadequate, and uneven. Some groups, in some locations, have experienced an increase in opportunity -- sometimes substantial. White people (males and females, economically disadvantaged and not), gay people, persons with physical disabilities, various minority subsets have benefitted. Some people, including substantial percentages of whites, blacks, hispanics, asians, and American indians have scarcely benefitted at all. What's the difference?

Those benefitting the least from efforts to increase economic opportunity...

a. tend to have long, multigenerational histories of disadvantage which has produced deep poverty, social marginalization, and social exclusion.
b. tend to be located in regions where economic opportunity is in long-term general decline (like the Appalachian states -- Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee) and other areas.

Those benefitting the most from efforts to increase economic opportunity...

a. may be poor, but have multigenerational histories of literacy, striving, social mobility, social membership, and social inclusion.
b. tend to be located in regions where economic opportunity is upwardly inclined (at worst, level) and have a generally progressive culture.

So, poor white children on farms and in small towns (or even metropolises) in New York, Nebraska or California may experience inequality of economic opportunity, but they belong to intact cultures which inculcate economic success-related behaviors like literacy, perseverance, and planning. Though disadvantaged, they have many of the skills needed to benefit from "social uplift" programs like government scholarships for college. Some blacks, hispanics, and Asians share these characteristics and are able to benefit.

Poor white children in Appalachia, by contrast, are located in zones of multigenerational economic decay and collapse. They tend to be socially isolated, have lower rates of (effective) literacy, much poorer health, more insular cultural traditions. Many blacks share these characteristics: multigenerational poverty, social exclusion, insular cultural traditions, poorer health, lower rates of literacy, culture of poverty. So do American Indians. Hispanics may or may not, and Asians may or may not share these characteristics.

The people on the bottom (multigenerational poor, marginalized, insular, sick, etc.) are not in a position to respond and benefit from economic opportunity programs. They can't make it to the first rung of the ladder.

Those at the higher levels of economic success have opportunity "built in" and some of these prosperous people would have to go out of their way to fail.

So what it amounts to is this:

Those who have a lot to start with, keep it, and get more.

Those who can benefit do benefit.

Those who can't benefit lose what little they have and keep sinking.

Percentages?

20% = Most successful layer of population in US
40% = Can become successful if program exists and economy is healthy
40% = more or less permanently screwed

Upshot?

Those who are least advantaged economically will probably stay that way, barring a highly unlikely tremendous economic boom.

Why can't we "fix people" and "make them succeed"?

Some programs exist that aim to "fix" the least likely to succeed. The Harlem Children's Zone is an example. It's very time and input intensive, and expensive. It's quite intrusive. It might need to be more intrusive. Courts have sometimes viewed the army as a way of fixing people, and programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps. "What'll it be," the judge says. "Jail, the army, or the CCC Job Corps? The army or Job corps did them more good than jail.

People tend to be comfortable in their natal surroundings. It might be a pile of shit, but it is a familiar pile. Prying them out of comfortable surroundings with familiar (and very unsuccessful) people and putting them into special camps is not considered nice. It might work, but people resent it, the ungrateful bastards.

A slowly growing economy (like the current 1% -1.3% in the US) doesn't create a lot of openings for job growth.

Unequal economic distribution intersects with unequal economic opportunity in this way: The small number of people who possess very vast wealth are not able to spend enough to really stimulate the economy. The purpose of soak-the-rich tax programs isn't to make them poorer as an end result, but to get a big hunk of their idle money moving through the economy in the form of wealth transfers.

When ordinary people get more money, they tend to spend it. They have unsatisfied, unmet needs, and buying goods and services creates economic growth.

Thanks for the enlightening reply, @Bitter Crank. It's good to hear from someone more learned than I am in these matters. As you might have noticed, I only became interested in these sorts of issues in recent years. You'd be hardpressed to find much from me on this sort of subject in the other place, and of the few times that I did pipe up, my views were quite different from those that I currently hold. You, on the other hand, are years ahead - decades even.

I think that Ella's argument annoyed me the most. It's just fantastical and ignores the harsh reality.

She acknowledges that there's both an inequality of wealth and of opportunity. She says that people need and want more stuff, and want everything that they can have. She's against what she sees as piecemeal reform, and instead wants fundamental change. She doesn't want "therapeutic management" of the little that people have, and thinks that if we actually want to tackle inequality, then we shouldn't have any limits on what people can have or make. She's against top-down reorganization. She doesn't want a "rubbish middle", but instead wants to bring everyone up to the top. She wants working-class people to have as much as those at the top. She wants people to earn and do as best as they can, and thinks that we should encourage them.

Yet she seems to ignore all of the big obstacles that are in the way - one of them being inequality itself, as evidenced by an international consensus of organisations such as the OECD, IMF, the World Economic Forum, and the World Bank. When confronted with this inconvenient evidence, she responds by attacking a straw man about an appeal to emotion, and then points out the very problem itself: inequality, and more specifically, an unequal access to resources which is negatively effecting the working class. She then goes on to say that we should stop crying and do something about it by demanding more economic growth - ignoring that point-in-question, namely that the level of inequality that we are faced with in todays society is a hindrance to economic growth. Like you said, @Bitter Crank, ordinary people tend to spend money, and super-rich people tend to horde it. This point was raised in the video as well.

Sara's point at 14:55 is salient here.

Sapientia, you are paying me more compliments than I deserve. I will thank the patient tutelage of some old Socialist Labor Party members for putting me on the right track.

Ian and Ella, 0; Sara and Faiza 1. The program you brought forward does a good job of representing the basic positions about economic opportunity: re-structure the economy (the left); get a job and work harder (the right).

I believe a society of equal opportunity can be built. There is always the question, how? And do we do it by reform, revolution, or just waiting for a high tide to lift all boats?

Reform can work, but a strong electoral support and popular will is needed to maintain the reform effort long enough to accomplish goals. Revolution is risky business, and might fail--resulting in worse conditions. The economic tides... these are not governed by the moon and stars. The high tides of the British Empire were not accidental, and neither were the high tides of the American Empire's expansion across North America. The high tide of WWII, for instance, sank a lot of boats as well as raising others.

I think we are stuck with reform, but it needs to be more than palliative. Raising welfare rates is palliative; raising the minimum wage to a living wage standard is genuinely consequential. Taxing a few yachts is palliative. Eliminating off-shore tax havens is consequential. Cutting social welfare benefits is punitive; raising the tax rates on wealth by 10% is consequential.

Sustained reform requires an informed electorate, and (in the US, at least) that condition is doubtful, to say the least -- not because people are stupid, but because disinformation campaigns are so sustained. Convincing large numbers of people that finally having access to health insurance is a loss of freedom is just mind boggling, but they did it.

This from the Brookings Institution: How "economic despair" affects high school graduation rates for America’s poorest students...

"What if inequality doesn’t incentivize students at the bottom of the income ladder to work harder, but rather disincentivizes them? This is one of the questions Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine sought to answer in a new paper published as part of the Spring 2016 Brookings Papers on Economic Activity."