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Vaniver comments on Rationality Quotes August 2013 - Less Wrong
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The specific oppressions you led off with: yes.
I thought we were talking about Oppenheimer and Cambridge? It looks like if Oppenheimer hadn't had rich parents who lobbied on his behalf, he might have gotten probation instead of not. Given his instability, that might have pushed him into a self-destructive spiral, or maybe he just would have progressed a little slower through the system. So, yes, jumping from "the university is unhappy" to "the state hangs you" is a gross exaggeration. (Universities are used to graduate students being under a ton of stress, and so do cut them slack; the response to Oppenheimer of "we think you need to go on vacation, for everyone's safety" was 'normal'.)
<snark>"Oppenheimer wasn't privileged, he was only treated slightly better than the average Cambridge student."</snark>
I'm sorry, I never really rigorously defined the counter-factuals we were playing with, but the fact that Oppenheimer was in a context where attempted murder didn't sink his career is surely relevant to the overall question of whether there are Einsteins in sweatshops.
I don't see the relevance, because to me "Einsteins in sweatshops" means "Einsteins that don't make it to <Cambridge>", for some Cambridge equivalent. If Ramanujan had died three years earlier, and thus not completed his PhD, he would still be in the history books. I mean, take Galois as an example: repeatedly imprisoned for political radicalism under a monarchy, and dies in a duel at age 20. Certainly someone ruined by circumstances--and yet we still know about him and his mathematical work.
In general, these counterfactuals are useful for exhibiting your theory but not proving your theory. Either we have the same background assumptions- and so the counterfactuals look reasonable to both of us- or we disagree on background assumptions, and the counterfactual is only weakly useful at identifying where the disagreement is.