Shark Tank Kids and Egypt’s Social Pyramid: A Reflection on Opportunity, Inequality, and Systemic Reform

In an episode of Shark Tank Egypt, three 12-year-old children from Egypt’s aristocratic class presented their project and requested support from the sharks. Of course, they received the funding they asked for. However, this event has a much deeper dimension that I’d like to discuss.

In a country with a sound societal mindset and balanced collective psychology, an episode like Shark Tank Kids should provoke widespread public outrage. People should be asking: “Why do children at this age have the luxury of thinking about large projects and significant sums of money, while millions of other children in Egypt are deprived of even a place to sleep? They are left in the streets, workshops, and restaurants without the privilege to even dream about their futures.” Instead, what happened was quite the opposite. People were amazed and moved, as if achievement itself is solely about having access to opportunities, rather than the fair distribution of those opportunities.

This leads us to an important question: What societal structure allows Egypt to accept this disparity as normal?

A Modernization That Never Fully Materialized

One of the key issues here, in my opinion, is that Egypt is a modern society whose modernization remains incomplete. If we take a deeper look, we’ll find that Egypt has been, and still is, in a continuous phase of modernization. This journey began with Mohamed Ali’s vision of a renaissance and continued with the establishment of the republic in 1952. However, the failure to build a genuine industrial base to support social mobility led to an increase in social and economic inequalities. Instead of transitioning into a truly modern society, Egypt became a society built on an illusion of change.

For example, free education in the 1960s offered limited opportunities, but by the 1970s, with the onset of economic liberalization, these opportunities started to dwindle. This aligns with the concept of “Reproduction of Social Structures of Domination” explained by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in his book Distinction. Bourdieu argues that social systems perpetuate inequality through three key mechanisms…