>We have made incredible improvements in alleviating poverty and suffering over the past 50 years

We have also made incredible strides at capturing the productivity and free time that would have fed innovation and effectively transferred it to the financial services industry.

Since schools in the US were desegregated for people of color and women, America embraced a radically neoliberal approach to education. Rather than funding higher education for every citizen who wanted to pursue it now that everyone could, those in power chose to systematically and cynically de-fund higher education and replace it with a degree-for-debt model.

State universities that used to provide low/free tuition to white men, now offer their services to all, for an ever-increasing price.

This has created a society where smart people get on the edu-debt treadmill in search of a better life, only to then be beholden to existing, stagnant profit-maximizing entities to try to pay that debt off for the rest of their lives. This is how innovation has stalled: a top-down systematic defunding that has ensured both gifted and special-needs kids have to fight over scraps.

That is not true either.

There is very little innovation happening in European countries where college is low/no-cost.

They have less innovation than the US does despite our terrible college debt.

It takes a certain kind of person to innovate and they make up a small % of the overall population.

Measures aimed at helping the general population are very unlikely to help them.