<i>Opportunity inequality happens when people cannot have access to the same level of education that rich people have. Poor people don't get the same high level counselling that rich people have.</i><p>I think this is so true. It's not necessarily that everybody needs to go to Princeton or whatever though... I think a lot of poor people get essentially <i>no</i> education on finance, entrepreneurship, etc. <i>at all</i>. Certainly when I graduated from high-school, I'd had effectively no education on any of these topics.<p>If we did nothing more than find a way to give everybody a certain baseline of knowledge about how finance works, financial markets, the basics of entrepreneurship, etc., I think that would go a LONG way towards helping this problem.<p>It doesn't have to be all high-tech stuff either, in terms of entrepreneurship. My best friend was a truck driver until an injury forced him to give up that line of work. In response, he opened his own landscaping service. His first year, he only made $30,000, but he was just telling me that he's already almost hit that for this year. Assuming nothing crazy happens, it looks like going the entrepreneurial route is going to work out really well for him.<p>But he was lucky enough to have a fairly intuitive understanding of what it takes to run a business like that. I think that for a lot of people, a little education on things like "how to form an LLC", "basic business taxes", "basic employment law", etc. would do a ton to enable them, and give them the confidence, to take a leap like that.<p>So to answer the OP's question: I think software developers can help income inequality by:<p>1. Developing educational / information sites/apps that share quality information on the subject matter mentioned above.<p>2. Create better / less expensive / easier to use tools for small business owners / entrepreneurs, to plan/manage/run various kinds of businesses.<p>3. Create tools to leverage "open data", machine learning, predictive analytics, etc., and make that stuff easy enough to use so that "Joe's Screen Doors and Small Engine Repair" can benefit from those things.<p>Also, to loop back to tech a little bit... I don't think all the solutions need to involve pushing people into "doing technology" but that said, technology <i>does</i> open up lots of opportunities to create value. Just imagine all the things you can do/create using Arduino, Raspberry Pi, the ton of open source software that's out there, open data, etc. So with that in mind, another thing that we could do might just be offering to do some teaching/tutoring around the things we are knowledgeable about, and help expand the areas where people use these things to create value.<p>Take the example of my friend the landscaper - I haven't even given it any thought yet, but I can't help but think that if he learned to use microcontrollers, some basic electronics, and a little software, that he could do some really cool stuff for his customers. Maybe automating turning certain yard lights on and off depending on ambient light, maybe automating a legacy sprinkler system in a better way, etc.