Basically it's simple: as more wealth creation is driven by technology, the wealth shifts to whoever owns the technology or can operate it. Why is the payoff for founding a successful technology company so potentially lucrative? It's because you're basically both. If you think acqui-hires that pay something like $1 million per engineer is a lot, that's basically why.
In the US, we should have two political parties mitigating this by figuring out the balance between helping low-skilled workers become high-skilled (e.g. education funding and reform) versus making sure those unemployed low-skilled workers don't get sick and starve to death on the street in the meantime (e.g. unemployment and health insurance). Instead we have two political parties arguing to the death about whether or not to raise taxes by 4.9%.
We already have a system that's supposed to help people become high skilled workers, public education. Instead of producing competent workers, it churns out compliant cogs.
It's designed to churn out compliant cogs, and through various forces has only become better at doing so. Modern western public education is based on the Prussian school system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system) which emphasizes compliance, uniformity, attendance, punctuality, busy work, etc. All of which are great for making functional factory workers, but that has become less and less relevant as the nature of the economy has changed due to technological disruption. More so, the increasing disempowerment of individuals and refusal to treat students as adults in training (see: closed campuses, zero tolerance policies, etc.) has merely exacerbated that impedance mismatch. Now we have high school graduates who can barely read or do algebra let alone use rules of logic to reason or communicate effectively on complex topics at a time when knowledge workers are in the greatest demand in all of human history.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/human-versus-phy...
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/technology-and-w...
Basically it's simple: as more wealth creation is driven by technology, the wealth shifts to whoever owns the technology or can operate it. Why is the payoff for founding a successful technology company so potentially lucrative? It's because you're basically both. If you think acqui-hires that pay something like $1 million per engineer is a lot, that's basically why.
In the US, we should have two political parties mitigating this by figuring out the balance between helping low-skilled workers become high-skilled (e.g. education funding and reform) versus making sure those unemployed low-skilled workers don't get sick and starve to death on the street in the meantime (e.g. unemployment and health insurance). Instead we have two political parties arguing to the death about whether or not to raise taxes by 4.9%.