[d9fb698e010974b]

I think your conclusion is right for most people, but you're a bit too cynical. The system isn't rigged purposefully. It is just that the people who decide who gets the elite jobs all act a certain way and had similar backgrounds. Naturally they like people like themselves and so the jobs go to those people. Even then, there are lots of qualified people from those backgrounds who don't get those jobs. Everyone is competing for a purely positional advantage (i.e. in order to move up, someone else must move down) and the 1% is already large enough to replenish its own ranks.

[tsotha]

Yes. The idea the wealthy got together and formed a big conspiracy to shut everyone else out is a bit on the paranoid side. It's not that you can't get a prestigious job without the right kind of background, it's that you don't have an advantage other people have. And, as you say, there aren't enough top jobs to go around.

But we don't have to look at top jobs to see this dynamic at play. Good looking people of both sexes get better jobs than the rest of us, as do people with more energy.

[namelezz]

Easy for you to say especially when you are not affected by the system.

[d9fb698e010974b]

Everyone who wasn't born into the small elite is affected by the system, including me. It's not a competition to see who suffers the most.

Edit: also, the elite themselves are punished by the way things work. The number of truly elite jobs is small and the competition is very strong. For every kid whose parents bought his/her way through the system there were a number of others whose parents tried, but failed, to do the same thing.