Enjoy reading your insights. Opportunity, Timing, and Open/Equal Access are also the contributors to the American Dream. If the ‘resource’ controller sets up a protection ‘firewall’ to restrict the access to the reward-promising education system, the jobs, and opportunities to gain, then these filtered-out people won’t have a chance to achieve their dreams. Lots of examples mentioned in the history book. The classes/ranks of people in both Eastern and Western worlds, farmers, workers, scholars, and governors. The rulers understand the power of knowledge. They can restrict the people what to learn.
However, in the other end, the supply-and-demand model in a free enterprise community, needs for having knowledge workers to make business grow and profit indeed encourage these workers to make their American Dream. Not really a zero-sum model what you have discussed. The in-progress IT revolution today needs lots of IT professionals, software engineers, innovators due to the demand in communities (markets), the business side asks for the mass supply of these knowledge workers. Apparently, it becomes another wave of American Dreams for these selected people. But not for all, people without the knowledge are left out. Sad. / James