I'm a huge fan of Mike Rowe. He's done some amazing journalism with "Dirty Jobs" and his mikeroweWORKS foundation is terrific. He claims that unconditional encouragement toward intellectual dreams does not help most people, and argues that more kids should be pursuing professional trades.
This overlaps with one of the better suggestions from this article. In general I think these are hit or miss, and maybe too academic, but the problem is a real one and it's not going to go away tomorrow. People have this notion that robots will just replace all manufacturing jobs next year or whatever, but as usual it's a lot more complex and subtle than that. And it's a cultural problem as much as an economic one.
Of course I'm not able to say this from firsthand experience, having had little difficulty in school, and having accumulated enough skill with computers to find plenty of good work. And I can't really call for some given change before understanding more about the people in worse situations. I did go to a trade school though and more of those sounds like the best idea so far.
Absolutely true. It's not a matter of intelligence it's a matter of trust. Most employers I know value the employees who they know they can trust and rely on much more than the ones who think they're smarter than everyone else.
There are needs to be filled. HVAC, plumbing, electrical, carpentry, general contracting, maintenance, janitorial, painting, roofing, auto repair, etc. You don't have to be a genius or close to it to do any of the jobs.
What you do have to be to be successful long term is on time and trustworthy. You do a good job at a fair price and show up on time every day your customers will be happy and they will recommend you to other people. Most of the people I know in these fields who meet that criteria have more business than they know what to do with and actually make more money than I personally do in my "intelligent" tech job. I could make more if I moved but so could they, so that's a wash.
What blows my mind talking to these guys is that they all talk to me like they believe I'm smarter than them...and it's odd. They are perfectly successful business people but there is just the aura of talking to people who do something that you don't know much about I guess.
My father, working as a tradesman, has more work that he can handle so I use to help him during work peaks (I've a non-STEM degree). You don't need to be a genious, only trustworthy. The problem IMO is that to be trustworthy you need to enjoy your trade and that is not exactly a personal choice (specially on the short term). Educated people are addicted to be challenged and to compete not to routinely execute stuff.
The low competition on trades is a symptom of a massive need of talent and huge opportunities.
I think you just pointed out the problem with vocational education. Going to law school is a vocational education, as is getting an education to become a mechanic. Vocational educations take years (sometimes almost a decade) to complete. From the time you start your vocational education to the time you finish it, the market can drastically change (see Law and nursing). That lucrative job that you thought was waiting for you...isn't. What then?
What happens to mechanics if cars become fully automated? Will we need that many mechanics?
I don't think fully automated cars will have as drastic an impact on mechanics as 3D printed cars. A better question to ask is this:
What happens to all the mechanics when getting an entirely new vehicle is cheaper than paying to have it fixed?
The maintenance required of a 3D printed car will also probably be automated. There's no reason why we can't have robots replace tires, brake pads, and align wheels. Heck, they could even replace the parts that break or wear down by printing new ones on-demand.
The only parts that will still need to be stocked after 3D printed auto parts take hold is glass windows, tires, and similar components that require special manufacturing.
Maybe this is my "old man" moment, but the magical world of 3D printed self driving cars that cost nothing really sounds like the flying car articles that you find in a circa 1960 Popular Mechanics.
I think this is a good perspective to have, but it might dissolve when you look at the technicalities of either problem. Airspace navigation vs, say, 3D-printing the electronics and parts necessary to make what I assume are electric cars are quite different challenges.
Actually, saying that out loud makes me think that you're right.
And paying someone who knows how to fix them their rate to replace a $.10 part can cost more than getting a new thing. I dug a 19" UltraSharp display out of the trash, tested it, and found the problem to be some bulging caps in the power supply for the backlight. The parts cost less than a dollar, and it took about 4-6 hours of my time total. I was billing $90/hr 10 years ago to do PC repair, and we didn't touch electronics, so given the value of my time, it was definitely not worth it for me to repair this monitor, which is maybe worth $100 now ($60 if you can find a good deal).
Since a car is so large and complex, I highly doubt that repair costs will exceed replacement costs in the foreseeable future. Disc brake pads are under $100 for a set of 4 for most vehicles. It's hard to find a car for $100 in any sort of road-going condition to make it more cost-effective to swap cars instead of doing the repair.
This is of course aside from things like insurance, registration, bills of sale, etc which make swapping vehicles a big hassle right now.
I honestly don't see this situation changing in the next 20 years, and the future I see is more in shared vehicle ownership, where instead of owning a car directly, one might join an organization for a few hundred dollars a month which provides access to a network of vehicles, possibly self-driving ones. Uber is, as far as I can tell, trying to be the first to do this, and they might even charge for actual usage instead of some flat monthly fee. BMW is also looking into this, but given they're a car company and not a tech company, I expect them to be badly beaten to market: http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/access-over-... (I'm sure there are other companies working on similar ideas as we speak).
Right, so my hypothetical was more to show the lack of ability for the average person to predict the future...not actually predicting it.
And that's the biggest flaw I see with a vocational education. It's preparing yourself tomorrow for the workforce of today. It can work, but be ready to be out of a job in an instant.
Not what I'm saying at all. Although...maybe at some point in the future, a CS degree will be useless. It's certainly not now, nor will it be in the near future. But it certainly could happen.
Regardless, I'm pointing out the problems with the push for wide spread vocational education. My worry is the usefulness of such an education will have diminishing returns over the life of the recipient of the education, and that decay will be wide spread among many industries.
Look how fast industries and markets change now. Compare that to how long any given vocational education takes to accomplish plus the working lifespan of its recipient. The math doesn't add up to me.
Yes, mechanics to build the machines to repair them in a fully automatic fashion.
For a thought experiment on this, check out http://thelightsinthetunnel.com/ which explores the idea that eventually humans will stop inventing because we'll have everything we need
Interesting premise, if not exactly novel, but some could argue that, excepting some needed advances in medicine, we do have everything we need and we're still not satisfied. It comes down to this, will humanity ever design/invent something universally recognized as being perfect? I don't think so, I will still try to check out the book though.
The assembly process is becoming more and more automated. Some newer cars need to be taken to licensed mechanics, essentially squeezing independent mechanics out of the market.
Tangential, but related: I don't know Mike Rowe's work that much, nor do I follow him. But a few friends over the last year or two have shared some of his social posts and essays.
Dang. The guy can write. If the rest of his work is of the same quality as his seemingly off-the-cuff social stuff, he's worth paying attention to.
> I'm a huge fan of Mike Rowe. He's done some amazing journalism with "Dirty Jobs" and his mikeroweWORKS foundation is terrific. He claims that unconditional encouragement toward intellectual dreams does not help most people, and argues that more kids should be pursuing professional trades.
It's very likely he's more more interested in helping people than in flailing uselessly against "capitalists and their political allies". Rowe's the kind of person who cares about results. Jacobin authors care about posturing.
At the end of the day say that you paid everyone the same amount of money regardless of whether they worked or did not. And there was no additional way to make money. Maybe there was an additional barter economy where you could work for things that you could then trade for other things. How would that change things. Because now no one would have to work and would only do things if they wanted to do them. And everyone could enjoy their lives rather than be treated like disposable machines. I think that sort of future is one to look forward to. One without class or coercion. Where everyone literally has the same power over everyone else and the little trinkets and things that they produce themselves are traded by individuals with other individuals not for money but for things that they themselves made which then determines their worth.
Even supposedly technically superior well paying work usually treats the workers like tools. Management which is often staffed by not the most intelligent has the most power in an organization. They stress coerce and harass people in order to get work out of them, work which is often earning the company multiples of what they are paying people. And that's how the whole economy is structured. It is still not is possible to be a technical person who is well paid yet still not feeling happy, pleasant, or even healthy. It can still be a somewhat miserable way to live your life. Not as miserable as being not intelligent and employable, but still can be problematic.
The economy is general is not a healthy place for mental health or physical health, especially things like getting fired or layed off. You have to go out of your way already exhausted by work to find that.
> Where everyone literally has the same power over everyone else
I'm sympathetic to these sorts of ideals. I think you've gone too far though. I want Elon Musk to be able to exist. The working world is a lot shittier than it needs to be. It's the ultimate buyer's market. The masses are forced to sell their labor under penalty of death. The owners, however benevolent, know this. They design our jobs with it in the back of their minds. They don't want to acknowledge it directly. They know they've won more power than a meaningless game should grant any person. But I think there's a way to fix even the subtlest (and not so subtle) forms of oppression without reverting to the Harrison Bergeron society. Just guarantee everyone's basic security. I want to be able to work. Both because I like nice things and because I want to contribute to society. But frankly, I'm pretty indignant about having to do it just for my basic safety.
I can show you some gravestones if you'd like. The US health system is essentially inaccessible to those with chronic but treatable conditions who aren't continually holding down relatively good jobs. I can go and get my major depression treated at $5 per minute because I have an employer that pays $20k per year for health insurance.
I know families of five whose household income is less than my health insurance premium. I live in a first-world country where people buy antidepressants that they need from their friends and off the street, and have to beg/barter to refill the prescription that keeps their body from destroying their GI tract. Suicide is an ever-increasing problem. I step over the homeless on the way to work and reflexively look for signs of respiration. The dead are everywhere.
Obama (almost) fixed this. The Affordable Care Act extended Medicaid coverage from the absolute indigent, to those making up to 133% of the poverty line in their state, something around $16,000 per year.
The group that is in a bad spot are those right above that number, as even though their premiums are subsidized, deductibles are anywhere from 2400 to 6400 per annum.
That said, you are right the dead are everywhere.
Poverty kills. It deteriorates every system of the body, and it's first target is the brain.
The status quo is an evil waste of humanity, and poverty is grossly expensive and inefficient.
The medicaid expansion similarly had no statistically significant effect on health, though it does make people feel better: https://www.nber.org/oregon/
Now, you may have discovered some correlations between poverty and bad health. As correlation is not causation, and an RCT is the best way to check. So apparently the correlation is caused by something else - i.e., some third factor which makes people both poor and unhealthy.
The RCT you cite examines the effects of "wealth shocks" (read: unexpected winnings) in a population of Swedish lottery winners on mortality and health care utilization, in a country that already has access to taxpayer-funded universal health care. The state pays 97% of all medical costs there [1]. Using this to support your claim borders on intellectual dishonesty IMO.
Re: Medicaid, it's difficult to find high-quality health care in the US as a Medicaid patient, mostly because practices are free to turn you away simply because you're a Medicaid patient. "We don't take Medicaid". That's it. One of the major academic health systems here (in Oregon) systematically directed all Medicaid and Medicare patients to a single low-resource clinic across town by policy, citing inadequate reimbursement rates. The result is long wait times and inadequate care.
[1] Glenngard, A., Hjalte, F., Svennson, M., Anell, A., & Bankauskaite, V. (2005). Health Systems in Transition: Sweden. WHO Regional Office for Europe, 2005
The state provides health care, yet there are still disparities between rich and poor. This confirms my second and third studies which show health care doesn't help.
This study also shows that (as postulated by folks down thread) that money doesn't change health behaviors.
That's the point - health disparities are mostly not caused by either health care or wealth. They are caused by something else (e.g.diet, exercise, genetics).
Here, I'll give you another comment to downvote: your original claim that was supposedly backed by the Swedish RCT was "giving poor people money does not improve health". You've now reversed the direction of causation. Money could easily improve health outcomes without completely eliminating disparities between rich and poor. Your conclusion does not logically follow from your claims.
The US absolutely does not have a universal health care system; roughly 33 million remain uninsured, and a large number of those who are insured do not have adequate savings to pay their high deductible (which can be as high as $6,000 per person per year in-network, and twice that out of network).
The Sweden study absolutely does not show that, and I've explained why elsewhere in the thread. The mere fact that something is an RCT does not make it instantly generalizable to all populations, no matter how many times you repeat the claim. You'd need to at least control for pre-intervention access to care and study a US population to even get close to what you're claiming.
What's the mechanism by which you think wealth increases health? It's not getting more healthcare, since if it were Oregon should have increased health.
If it's buying non-medical things, what is the relevance of Sweden's UHC?
You've made numerous unacknowledged factual and logical errors already, and appear to not understand the limits of the RCTs you're citing. I don't see any value in continuing this discussion. Have a great day.
Have you lived in Western style poverty? Have you mingled with those who patronize pawn shops and payday lenders?
Please cite the various randomized control trials, and I would say it is far too early to draw conclusions on the effects of the medicaid expansion as it has only been two full years since rollout.
I speak from experience, as someone from a wealthy family and a wealthy area that shunned the family business and went out with nothing to seek startup fortune. I had a good start in 2009 with a success in affiliate marketing, when that dried up I put all that I had made into another venture that limped along at sub-ramen levels for a while and then I pulled the plug.
The fallout was not fun, and the effects not benign. It was pre medicaid expansion and there was no healthcare to be had, and almost no safety net to be found whatsoever.
I could have gone home and had everything I needed but I wanted to make it on my own. I had been living in Boulder, Colorado and thought a move to Austin would lower expenses and extend the runway for the company.
That was ill-advised, and another story, but it added another dimension to my troubles at the time.
Was it a stupid risk? It was but I was young and felt invincible, and in 2010 with a liberal arts education there weren't a ton of jobs waiting for me.
The wealth transfers you speak of are not easy to get. I'm not even sure where you get the 15-20k number. What else is there for a low earning single male besides SNAP, and now Medicaid.
In that time, as someone who found themselves with no assets and no income the only benefit I seemed to have qualified for was about $160 a month that could be spent at the grocery store.
Feeling a tremendous amount of shame I applied for SNAP benefits, even though I knew that they were really a subsidy for American farmers, ideology had trained me that subsidies for corporations are virtuous, while subsidies for basic human needs are shameful.
Even though I qualified, the overworked staff denied my valid claim. It took them over a month to tell me this. It would have taken another month to apply again and maybe they would get it right that time. I gave up and having good credit financed my nutrition via credit card.
I hadn't coded since elementary school, but I was able to pick up django web dev and find a high paying job in a couple months.
But that happy ending is not typical. There is no way that the stress from that period didn't shave a little bit of time off my life.
And the lack of liquidity prolonged the period by a good bit. I spent so much time doing this or that to get $200 for the rent, it was tremendously inefficient and stressful. Bad terrible memories, a place I never want to go back to. I was sad during all of this. It broke up the relationship I was in with someone I really loved.
I spent a lot of time with those who ride the bus, with those who pawn. Their lives are very different than the lives of the families from my coastal home town. Their lives do kill them slowly, which is why life expectancy is a full dozen years longer for the wealthy.
I have since moved back to the wealthy coastal town I grew up in. Life is so easy here, because there is wealth here. You can get a nice boat for almost nothing because someone just doesn't want it anymore.
Someone I knew was just gifted a boat for $1 because the owner was just happy it was going to stay on the island.
No one ever gives my former bus riding compatriots anything.
The thing is the people that live here are no different genetically than the people at the pawn shops back in Texas. The only difference is the presence of wealth, and the virtuous effects that has when it's sustained for a few generations.
But if I understand correctly, the point of bringing up the Oregon study was that access to medical care doesn't seem to have a lot to do with it. At least not the incrementally better access provided by Medicaid programs.
I would certainly speculate that there is a bundle of ideas that contribute to it. Ideas about personal decisions being impactful, leading to things like less smoking and better diet, and even better life situations (which can presumably lead to a different relationship with stress).
Probably because the poor behave differently from the rich - they tend to overeat more, exercise less, smoke more and drink more.
Also any disabled person (who probably has other health problems that reduce life expectancy) is by definition poor (poverty is defined as low market income).
All of the behaviors you cite could be caused by extreme stress, poverty, or threats to safety/well-being (rather than being a cause of poverty). I've felt it, and I've done it.
tl;dr; Sad personal story and no stats. Also, faith healing worked for my uncle so I know that all those randomized control trials are wrong!
My numbers come from the BLS Consumer expenditure survey, though they moved it and I don't know where it is now. I blogged about it and reproduced it in a graph:
I would call it a comeback story with a happy ending, as I got to semi-retire at 31 in a beautiful place. The thing is I know I was able to do this because of the wealth effect, and not because I am personally better or more deserving. That's a point that many well off people miss.
The experience gave me insight and empathy. I really learned how the other half live. I will never be a poverty scold because of it.
I posted the story because I think your spreading incorrect information. It's not easy to be public about money troubles, something I think hurts workers and benefits the capitalist class.
I read your blog post for the second time (saw it on HN before) just now and I still don't see the mechanism by which people can choose to receive 22,000 per year by not working.
Has UBI been instituted without my knowledge?
For what must one apply to make the rational decision to not work.
Update to reply:
Ok so I read the paper, it says exactly what I state in other comments.
If your not going to work you better be in a protected group.
The paper lists 5 means tested transfer programs
Temporary assistance for needy families - this is only for people with kids and mostly single mothers
SNAP or food stamps - which isn't enough to survive off of unless your pancreas handles carbs really well
Section 8 housing - you can get on a wait list or maybe find a landlord willing to deal with you
Other than that it lists
Ss disability : you have to be disabled or severely mentally ill
Ss. You have to be over 65
Pell grants - students only
So that's it. So tell me how does a 35 year old non disabled man or woman with no kids make the rational choice to not work?
Even with subsidized housing and food and Healthcare they would still need spending money.
I'm telling you that there's a lot of people that get by with work in the informal economy and that isn't accounted for in those BLS stats.
You are right about western poverty if we tall about germany, but not us, unless you are in a protected group.
No, we don't have a UBI. We have a ragbag of cash and in-kind transfers that add up to approx $20k. Go read the CBO study I linked to, it explains in detail.
Why do you keep ignoring the research I've posted, and continue spreading myths? What do you gain from it?
I read a few of the links you posted. To support a claim that "giving people money does not improve health", you cited an RCT examining Swedish lottery winners who were already covered by a UHC program. People who already have high-quality health care don't spend their lottery winnings on more health care, and winning the lottery doesn't cause significant damage to health. Great. This says nothing about the US population in question, and absolutely does not prove your original claim.
In the US we had a lottery that directly gave out healthcare. That also had no effect on health.
The Sweden result shows that money has little/no effect via non-healthcare purchase mechanisms, while Oregon shows healthcare directly has little/no effect.
Depends on why they aren't working. If they have no capital, and no pension they better be in a protected class, like students, seniors, disabled, single mothers with children or be very attractive.
Otherwise there is almost no financial support coming their way in the United States, except for a meager food ration that has to be primarily carbohydrates, and basic health care.
Everyone will hate them, they will be chased out of any dwelling they inhabit by a man with a gun (eviction), and death will come for them eventually, as it does for us all, but for the destitute it moves with all possible haste.
And that is why there is no army of millions of non working people in the US, getting by on welfare. That is a middle class myth. The only group that could do this are those who qualify for S.S disability.
Most of the non-working are the rich. A lot of the people we think of as non-workers are getting by by other means, and a lot of it is the underground economy, and most of that is drug sales.
Lastly, disability fraud as a substitute for welfare is a huge problem that no one is attempting to solve. NPR did an expose on it: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
60% of the poor don't collect income reportable on a w2 form. That does not mean they do not engage in productive activities that produce cash.
There is a huge informal cash and barter economy of legal goods, and another one for illegal goods.
And yes, the tax man will sell your home out from under you in a tax sale if you do not pay property taxes for long enough.
All of us live under a sword of damocles in regards to cash flow. You gotta keep putting quarters in the meter to live in modern capitalism.
I define rich as those who have sufficient wealth in financial instruments and assets such as treasury bonds and equities to pay for their lifestyle without the need to collect 1099 or w2 income.
They are the only ones who truly do not work, the only ones who can truly sit back and relax. They are the real loafers, the true moochers, and the laziest of all classes of society, I also have the ambition to become one myself, but I will have no pretensions that I would be engaged in anything other than having found a way to have others serve me, no different than any lord or pharoah or emperor, and in fact with much greater security and ease.
So you're saying that we overestimate poverty because the poor engage in extensive tax evasion/disability/welfare/unemployment fraud? And that if we properly tracked work activities by the poor, that poverty would be a much smaller problem than it really is?
Good to know. How large do you think this problem is?
I define rich as those who have sufficient wealth in financial instruments and assets such as treasury bonds and equities to pay for their lifestyle without the need to collect 1099 or w2 income.
Numbers please. How many such people are there?
What percentage of the 15.6 million officially non-working poor do you believe are actually committing tax/disability/welfare/unemployment fraud?
Now lets compare the numbers.
They are the only ones who truly do not work, the only ones who can truly sit back and relax. They are the real loafers, the true moochers, and the laziest of all classes of society...
So a person who produces X resources in year 1 and 0 resources in year 2, but consumes X/2 in both year 1 and 2 is a moocher? Um, ok. That's an interesting definition, to say the least.
> So you're saying that we overestimate poverty because the poor engage in extensive tax evasion/disability/welfare/unemployment fraud? And that if we properly tracked work activities by the poor, that poverty would be a much smaller problem than it really is?
No, Im saying that almost all poor people work, they have various hustles to get by. Most of them are not illegal activities, but yes for the most part these are untaxed cash transactions.
Even the homeless man on the corner with a sign is engaged in a form of work, as it is an active process that takes time, and if they did not do it, they would not have money.
Is it productive, no not very, but the good ones provide entertainment in the form of funny signs, stories or puns. I have donated to quite a few who made me smile on my trip across America.
It does less harm than many respectable professions.
And yes, if you are living off the dividend payments from S&P 500 companies that you neither created, work in nor manage, you are mooching.
It's a respectable mooch, for sure, but a mooch none the less.
What else can we call Sam Waltons heirs other than epic mooches?
Tens of thousands of people toil everday for them, all over the world. They have expert MBA's manage the entire operation for them. The pharoahs themselves didn't have such a great system of exploitation of labor.
My main point in all of this is to be aware of class biases in our perception, and the ideology that comes from, and mainly that we should stop beating up on the poor and scolding them.
Elon Musk can be brutal with himself and then he has to convince other people to join him and those who want to experience brutality or know how to be brutal with themselves, to meet his standard will do so. And that's about it. I don't think "forcing" this on the world is a bad thing, as it's more closer to the natural order of things in hunter gatherer societies than what we have right now.
In Harrison Burgeon the problem is not that people are equal. It's that they are forced by the State to be equal. People naturally have their abilities and gifts. That's not the issue. The issue is when they can coerce other people not because of those, but because of money. And make them behave on certain terms that the people never agreed to. The people simply want money so they can maintain a certain class in society.
Yes it will lead to a certain order but I don't see how that order is bad for society as a whole, compared to the current order. Other than well we won't go to space as fast or we won't get X product fast. We'll get there regardless. It's fine that we have shinning super stars, that we put in charge of other people, and we can do things quicker, better, faster, cheaper because of them. But those people actually end up making everyone around them and as a group society as a whole more miserable, to get the product or service based outcome. But I don't think those things would never get done without Elon Musk or Bill Gates or whoever. They would still get done in a different way and slower. And if we're not so brutal with exploiting everything, maybe there is enough time for that. Compare that to exploiting everything at an extremely quick rate and having to come up with solutions to those problems at quicker and quicker rates which just drives everyone and everything bonkers.
It's like I want driving cars and strong AI right now. Well maybe you'll get those things right now and three generations down the line the earth won't be able to support natural life and everything will have to done artificially, and so life and everyone's behavior will be even more closely regulated, because it will all need to be produced and therefore will be owned and sold for profit. I think these are the sorts of trade-offs we're looking at with the way we're running things.
Why is everybody talking as if the communist experiment wasn't already tried?
If you forcibly remove "freedom" to keep the fruit of your labor, you'll get general misery and poverty. It's false that "things will be done but slowly", the reality is that things will not get done at all, meaning lack of everything and the distribution of misery. For real examples look into any communist country.
Nordic countries have an ace up their sleeve that the United States does not: ethnic homogeneity.
To acknowledge the elephant in the room, political discussion of government support policies always comes with a racial dog whistle. The subtext is that the government wants to take your money and give it to those people. It sometimes bubbles to the surface, such as with Reagan's welfare queen in a Cadillac comments, but it is almost never mentioned explicitly.
Before the United States can implement serious welfare reform, including U.B.I., we must solve this nation's racial integration problem.
Though I think UBI can be implemented before or in tandem with fixing our racial issues, here's a quote to expound on this. The Southern Strategy utilized this tactic significantly. From an interview with Lee Atwater[0]:
> All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 . . . and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster...
> You start out in 1954 by saying, "N-----, n-----, n-----." By 1968 you can't say "n-----" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N-----, n-----."
The most interesting thing about many naive Americans' view of the Nordic 'paradise' is the lack of understanding as to how it is able to exist: a small population of homogenous people of similar ethnicity, shared culture, and history that has high GDP per capita and low levels of corruption.
These same people tend to be on the side of unrestricted immigration and mixing of cultures and ethnicity.
What they don't understand is that the average person will not want socialism if it means taking from one group and giving disproportionately to another. This is why America will never successfully have Nordic like social systems, and why some of the Nordic countries themselves (Sweden) are already beginning to show signs that the system will not work if is abused by some groups in ways it wasn't before.
I agree 100% with you w/ regards to the Nordic countries vs the US.
In that same vein, I really believe that there is a huge cognitive dissonance with many in the US, e.g. the majority of Bernie supporters, when it comes to the desire for a Nordic like social system and at the same time continued massive immigration of non-western cultures and ethnicities.
>Before the United States can implement serious welfare reform, including U.B.I., we must solve this nation's racial integration problem.
Of course, that is almost certainly not going to happen anytime soon. Tribalism in humans is not something that can easily be removed.
Just like our industry has that saying, "pick two of three when buying software: done cheaply, done quickly, and done well", we are going to need to accept that nations, at least in the near-term, can pick one of two: "socialism/UBI or massive integration of cultures".
It is common sense that a country cannot afford both. Even tiny Norway, with its vast Oil reserves, will soon have to make the choice.
Events like Brexit, Trump's rise, etc. are different manifestations of this choice being made.
Shut the fuck up! The hivemind is speaking. Non-neoliberal perspectives are terrible and advocacy for them will be punished by context-free links and downvotes.
Oh please. "DAE COMMUNISM EEEVVIIILL?! (oh I brought links to PROVE it; here's Robin Williams and a wiki about a book)" is thoughtful discussion, eh? It's the same kind of mindless upvotery as your appeal to HN's ostensibly high standard.
I am also very sympathetic to this view. That the work would get done anyway if capitalism weren't aggressively "stimulating" us with an insidious short-term mindset. We will certainly get there regardless. It would be ideal to do it without all the externalities. But locking Elon Musk up in your utopia won't make him a constant beacon of happiness. I imagine he isn't alone in that regard. You're making a utilitarian trade that seems strikingly suboptimal. When you go off the spectrum of motivation, as Elon Musk has, you tend to get a little cranky. There needs to be a place for cranky people to work. We just can't let them dominate other people with their madness. There are plenty of willing converts. Lets actually get rid of slavery. Then there can be a flood of ex-Tesla workers if need be. I suspect Elon Musk would topple your utopia from the inside out before launching his space empire. Getting in his way is not the solution.
The system we have now is far from perfect, and it's being changed with every passing moment by more forms of automation. However, it's a system that was able to take a species of this earth and raise it out of the dirt to be able to mostly conquer its domain - and possibly the solar system and outer-space if we play our cards right.
While some people who have gained powerful positions through their abilities (or their forefather's) have abused them, many have not. That said, "survival of the fittest" is still in some part responsible for the great achievements of mankind which has benefited civilization as a whole.
What's interesting here is that with your plan, those achievements may end up being its downfall too. A slow slide into mediocrity is the fastest way to lose our grip on the controls of our own destiny. Barring an asteroid, super-powerful alien race, or spiteful deity, I like our chances playing the long game with what has (mostly) worked until now.
I can't help but thinking this is a sort of religious thinking. Similar to concepts of heaven. The point of life to feel good on a daily basis. Not to be miserable because you will get to some metaphorical heaven and if you don't follow the true way then you will never get there. There is no where to get to, it's all about the experiences. The world is rich with them if you are not busy being a tool for the Capital machine.
>Even supposedly technically superior well paying work usually treats the workers like tools. Management which is often staffed by not the most intelligent has the most power in an organization. They stress coerce and harass people in order to get work out of them, work which is often earning the company multiples of what they are paying people. And that's how the whole economy is structured. It is still not is possible to be a technical person who is well paid yet still not feeling happy, pleasant, or even healthy. It can still be a somewhat miserable way to live your life. Not as miserable as being not intelligent and employable, but still can be problematic.
As humans, we have this really weird way of adjusting to "normal" - You can put us in a veritable paradise (and I'm not quite sure how else to describe the modern tech company) - or you can put us in really pretty bad situations, and either way, we're gonna whine.
I'm currently having many of the feelings you describe about my dayjob. But then I sit back and think: The worst day as a low-status technical grunt at this job is way better than the best day as a nerd in high school.
In high school, at best you are a burden. Yeah, there were a few teachers who really went out of their way to be kind and helpful to those burdens, but you are still a burden. More usually, though, your highest value use is to be torn down so that someone else can feel slightly less terrible about themselves.
Heck, I think this job is probably better on average than a few of my early jobs, which I loved at the time, simply because being treated as a thing with some small positive value is vastly better than being treated as a thing with no value, and after high school, I was so used to being treated as something with no value that being treated as if I had any value at all was absolutely wonderful.
Being as I'm now used to being treated fairly well, even small slights seem to really come to the forefront, and I find myself complaining about relatively minor social issues.
Alternatively, American society values a human's worth by economic output and the economy has shifted to value humans who can successfully navigate the new more intelligence-based economy.
Human worth is intrinsic and absolute. It depends on nothing and is granted simply for existing. It cannot be taken away. The commission of crimes will result in a loss of freedoms and rights, but not human worth.
Economic value however is not meaningless. It represents a measure of contribution to the capital engine that powers our lives. The whole system however is completely unfair and biased since the actual economic value created by workers is not realized by them. Workers create value that companies could not survive without but these companies do not then redistribute gains from that value in commensurate with the work done.
As such I don't have a problem with us looking at being able to generate economic value as meaningful, I have a problem with the skewed system that distributes the rewards and opportunities unfairly.
> Economic value however is not meaningless. It represents a measure of contribution to the capital engine that powers our lives.
I think you need to define "economic value" here. GP, I believe, was referring to actual exchanges of money for value.
The problem is that lots of very important, valuable jobs aren't compensated accordingly. One could say that being a good parent is one of the most important and valuable jobs, but it pays very little. The same is true of teaching and scientific research. A huge amount of value (almost incalculable) is created for others, but the creator is able to capture very little of it.
Additionally we have created a system where ownership of capital probably creates too much economic value relative to work. Which ends up centralising the capital, to the detriment of society.
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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ...
```
"Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
...
Article 1.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. . .
...
Article 2.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind. . .
. . .
Article 3.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
In an economy where work is increasingly automated, those humans who can do things which machines can't are finding themselves more valued. That seems expected, and I am not convinced it is indicative of any problem or unfairness.
The unfairness component comes from your genetics and upbringing, both outside your control - some combinations are better suited to navigate this economy than others.
So what do we as a society do with those at a disadvantage, sometimes severe (eg IQ below 90?) we can move toward finding ways to include them, or we can move toward excluding them. The problem from the article is a societal one trend toward exclusion, not economic as you pointed out.
Someone who is personable or eager or hardworking (or the opposite) is as much so because of the cards they are dealt by nature or their upbringing as a person who is intelligent (or the opposite). When you get down to it, everyone is exclusively a product of their genes and the environment, and they are in control of neither.
A just society judges and rewards people based on what they contribute. Racism, sexism, ageism, and the like are unfair not because they select based on something "outside your control", but because they deprive a person of the opportunity to succeed or fail based on merit.
Intelligence is a direct factor (though not the only factor) in a person's success at performing just about any job. If it is not a fair criteria by which to judge, then there are no fair criteria.
I'm more concerned about the act of "judging". What does that involve exactly? I'm fine with giving everyone A, B, C, D and F grades. I wouldn't care if you made people sew them into their clothing. But I'd like a person who got an F to have food and shelter. I don't see how they'd ever get another grade otherwise.
In theory, 25% of the population has an IQ below 90. If that's a severe disadvantage we're talking about ~75M people just in the US.
Edit: I read comments before the article as the HN discussion is typically more interesting than the article itself. Didn't realize this exact stat is in the article.
How will actual automation impact small and in some cases medium-sized businesses? If I'm running a restaurant chain with 2-3 locations, does it make economic sense to employ robotic sweepers and chefs? Granted that won't replace all jobs lost, manual labor would still be valued in such areas.
the capitalist class has always been an intellectual one. The labor class is dying; I don't think this indicates a higher premium on intelligence. If anything, this indicates a lower value than before as people take intelligence for granted.
A large part of the economy is still labor driven and will be. Many infrastructure tasks such as complex welding(possibly the job where automation has happened the most) are still outside the realm of full automation.
I grew up in a poor, working class, crime-ridden neighborhood of Brooklyn in the 1970s, and I remember being smart as a kid was a reason to harass, and sometimes beat on somebody who was seen as too smart in class. This wasn't happening in the wealthier, more educated neighborhoods in NYC (I had friends there afterwards). Although, all parents wanted their kids to exceed in both areas.
I think there was also some anger and negative fallout against college, since a lot of working class folks went to Vietnam, and saw college-educated protesters as disrespectful, and actually not so smart.
I remember being tauntingly called "College boy" senior year by a few classmates. Small town, lots of poverty, majority of my classmates never studied past high school. I didn't react much to it; I felt sorry for them, really. They came from homes that not only didn't stress the value of education, but resented it. And that was the atmosphere these kids grew up in... for the first 18 years of their lives! Every time I think of that I appreciate the fact I had parents who told me I could do anything, if I just prepared myself in school. I wish every young person had that kind of support :/
The movie, 'The Revenge of the Nerds' came out in 1984, after I had left my neighborhood, and for all of its silly comedy, was a sign that things were changing.
My parents and other parents in my poor, working class neighborhood saw education as the way to a better future, not just financially. Intelligence was berated by others in my age group in class. I don't equate education with intelligence, since I have met so many bright people who never finished high school (my father), and so many phDs whose intelligence I question to this day. That piece of paper, a university degree, can be earned with average intelligence, but costs a fortune for most non-public universities. As an acquaintance said to me about his son going to an Ivy league school, 'he's set up for life'. Regardless of his son's IQ, or final GPA, the societal strata he will interact with and form networked connections with, along with the school's reputation, will guarantee him a higher-than-average floor of entry compared to my children. For the record, I am not for that type of education.
Anti-intellectualism runs deep in American society. Consider the words nerd, wonk, geek, brainiac, college boy, the negative Hollywood stereotypes, etc. The Big Bang Theory is the latest incarnation of that.
My father learned to keep his book collection out of the living room.
I disagree. Citing a few labels is easy, Hollywood and popular culture have stereotypes for every kind of person. Everybody thinks they are the persecuted group. I think the opposite.
America most certainly worships intellectuals, who control public education. So starting at age 5-6 kids are brainwashed into thinking that they are 'stupid' if they can't do arithmetic in their head, or remember all the inane rules of the english language in their writing or what have you. It is ingrained into their skulls that if they don't go to college and take out loans to get what is basically now a glorified high school diploma++ they are failures.
If you are having a conversation with someone and they ask where you went to college, and you reply that you dropped out or didn't go there is always an awkward moment. If you are making a good living or you hit it big, you are the exception. You slipped through the cracks thats all.
Don't get me wrong As someone who grew up with his nose in a book, I know you ridiculed. But getting made fun of by a bunch of insecure children/teenagers is one thing. All major modern institutions of any importance exalt the intellectual while debasing anyone who hasn't been blessed.
Check out the mania (and enormous $$$) around sports and sports figures, actors, and musicians. I can't recall a nerd ever getting an endorsement contract. The only nerd prize is the Nobel; the Oscars, Emmys, Grammies, Halls of Fame, Heisemann Trophies, etc., are for other professions.
Just for a small slice of it, the mania over the Olympics. Billions and billions of dollars, wall-to-wall TV coverage, of 2 weeks seeing who can run faster than the next.
There seems like a pretty obvious distinction here. Sports brings people together because it's something we can all understand quite easily and it's entertaining. Actors do the same thing. As do musicians. Nerds help improve our lives but do you expect wall-to-wall TV coverage of someone coding the latest app? Most viewers wouldn't be able to understand what's going on and even for most coders it wouldn't be entertaining. When it comes to the awards you've mentioned - they're setup by the very organisations the winners work for. It's not like the world is recognising someone for an achievement. It's their employers and colleagues.
I think it's largely the same everywhere in the world (it's not "American anti-intellectualism") - as an example, people in rural Syria haven't neccesarily heard about my country (Poland), but they've heard about our best footballer (Lewandowski). These fields serve as entertainment for the masses - no wonder people get more excited about it than about other stuff they don't necessarily understand or care about. Watching people sing or perform extraordinary physical feats have always (since the ancient times) moved us on a deep level.
>>All major modern institutions of any importance exalt the intellectual while debasing anyone who hasn't been blessed.
But that's a natural and important thing to do. After all they want to solve problems that require intellectual power. Also, I disagree that the intellectual ones are intellectual only because they are blessed. A lot of grit and hard work is involved that cannot be so easily sidelined. There are a whole lot other issues also involved: nurturing by parents is one, exercising one's freedom to choose is another. If someone chooses, say dancing/sport over mathematics/science, at an early age, they (and/or their parents) are depriving themselves of an opportunity to improve their intellectual prowess. They (and/or their parents) are doing themselves a disservice.
I think all the examples given to the contrary are telling. its all about exalting handfuls of people who 'got lucky' or just 'have good genes' so they get to be the modern equivalent of gladiators. They are there to distract the average joe, and its very effective.
All while, Intellectuals as a group rake in huge amounts of money and power by hooking each other up. We all 'know' that people with college educations have more credibility, respect and influence. The figures thrown around about athletes are pennies, and the token media coverage is meaningless.
As I said above athletes and musicians are the modern equivalent to gladiators. Are/were they popular? sure. But they essentially function as a distraction.
Intelligence is a perfectly fair criteria by which to judge a candidate, as in most jobs it will have a direct effect on the candidate's ability to perform their duties.
If an employer over-weights intelligence to the exclusion of other criteria, like work ethic or social aptitude, then she may wind up with a candidate deficient in some other important area to her own detriment.
It is important that everyone, regardless of their abilities or what they can offer for society, have access to certain basic standards of living. But it's absurd to suggest, as the author does, that we should hobble economic output just to favor creating meaningless busy work over automation. If that's important to us, we should just offer a basic standard of living directly.
If intelligence isn't a valid/fair selection criteria for job candidates, then there is no such thing.
No, it confuses material success with human worth.
And this is not a new human behaviour, it's just exacerbated by increasing inequality, and made more obvious when the rules of success change, favouring different social groups.
American society's infatuation with gungho capitalism certainly plays a part (thanks, Edward Bernaise), but I'm convinced it's a hard wired behaviour, like our preference for attractive people. Associating ourselves with both attractive and the powerful provide an evolutionary advantage.
There are two rather egregious flaws in this line of thinking from the very start.
The first is that "intelligence" is purely an inborn trait. That "being stupid" is a condition on par with serious mental disability. Stupidity isn't mocked by the smart to belittle the dumb. It's mocked by the majority of society to promote feelings of superiority in the mockery yes, but also to share lessons about what not to do.
Anyone (barring mental disability, and even then) can learn, and can be taught. I've certainly encountered my share of the intelligentsia too brilliant to lower themselves to the common level, but I've encountered far many more gifted people who wanted deeply to share their knowledge with those around them. Yes, our society fetishises intelligence, but the vast teeming masses of "dumb people" are a lot smarter than most would believe.
The second fallacy here is that financial earning or being able to survive at all are somehow connected to "human worth" which is connected to intelligence. As we automate more and more fields of labor, we are moving towards a post-job society. The issue isn't that Americans over value intelligence, it's that we over value the concept of "hard work." Especially as enshrined in the old advice of many parents, "you have to work hard to get ahead in the world."
Well, no, you don't. Working smart helps a lot, but soon you won't have to work at all. Or you won't be able to. Forget our negative perception of "the dumb." We need to fix our negative perception of "the lazy." We must learn how to value people for something beyond their contributions to labor, and maybe we must also teach people how to have and feel valuable beyond labor.
And we should do it fast, because after we automate away the drivers, the merchants, and the laborers, it won't be long before we've automated away the lawyers, artists, programmers, and doctors. And then there will be nothing left but politicians, and is that the world you want to live in?
> Anyone (barring mental disability, and even then) can learn, and can be taught.... the vast teeming masses of "dumb people" are a lot smarter than most would believe.
I'm generally in agreement with the potential, but people need to desire to learn (or be smarter, or whatever you want to call it). There seems to have been a backlash against 'intelligence' which glorifies 'stupidity'. Not specifically with that word, but the notion of 'book learnin' being something to look down on, people getting 'too smart for their own good', etc.
There are many folks who have far less 'raw intelligence' - whatever biological component we're born with - than I do, but are far more capable because they've applied themselves far more rigorously than I have over the years. So yes, of course, almost anyone can really learn more, but they have to want to do it in the first place, and get out of whatever cultural norms bind them to their notions of looking down on intelligence (and accomplishment in general).
This is not a problem. Anti-intellectualism is the problem. Our culture encourages people not to be smart. In a sentiment captured by Marco Rubio when he said it is better to be a welder than a philosopher, we teach young people that non-intellectual pursuits are more noble (so long as they make money). We teach men that it is more manly to work with your hands. We teach women that service-sector jobs, or jobs that require more social acumen are more womanly. We teach people the false-dichotomy of left-right-brain dominance, making it easy believe that one is simply unequipped for logic and quantitative mental work. We teach black youth that their role models should be athletes and pop-stars, not people successful in STEM-fields (personal experience). Our popular culture characterizes smart people as weird, eccentric, and disconnected from the rest of humanity -- those tropes are obvious in the article's examples of "Big Bang" and Sherlock Holmes.
When my wife learned coding, all her old college girlfriends were amazed that she turned out to be so "smart". She was shocked, as she never saw herself as particularly smart (though she is), successfully learning to code is just a function of putting in the practice. It became apparent that her friends were socialized to believe that this coding was the exclusive domain of this mythical class of brainy people.
Sure some people are naturally smarter, thus it is relatively easier for them to do mentally laborious work. However, If the economy increasing favors people who can carry a heavier mental workload, then the first step to preparing citizens for participating in that economy is overcoming our culture's resistant strain of anti-intellectualism.
And gets it very, very wrong. "Intelligence" moves around with nutrition, stress, sleep, pollution. The brain is organic. We miss out on human potential in all the neighborhoods around the world that aren't safe and supported. The good news is we are headed in the right direction as a planet, but surprisingly this article doesn't mention it [1].
Your statement would only work as a rebuttal of parent's argument if everyone in the west had equally good nutrition (from birth), stimulation, emencouragement asand education as these factors are suspected to be behind the Flynn effect.
I was just countering the parents argument that we are heading in the right direction - sure there is still some individuals that will benefit from whatever drives the Flynn effect but overall it is now insignificant.
American society worships financial success and the mythology of supermen and superwomen to the exclusion of nearly everything else and this extracts a huge price in the individual and social sense of well being.
Since capitalism will rarely allow more than 20-30% 'success' that leaves a huge percentage of your population feeling inadequate.
Sometimes it feels the focus on individual brilliance without context of social value impoverishes rather than nourishes.
It can induce an adversorial state of hyper competition, in and out groups and a heightening state of frenzy to belong that leaves little room for niceties like empathy and community.
The folklore of America's success reinforces the mythology of individual brilliance, but rational heads need to question without taking away from individual brilliance in the past, now or the neccessity of it in the future, the benefits of the colononization of an entire continent.
The downside to this single minded focus is the simple fact that individuals are disempowered. They cannot effect any change. It takes real community and society to effect even the smallest change and that requires a functioning social setup with community, cooperation, empathy and mutual respect. Any communal action will require large numbers of americans to cooperate for instance protests or activism, at that point americans will discover their social structure does not allow for it and will not deliver. There is very little if any sense of community. It's been engineered out. It's unlikely individuals who have been devalued and left feeling worthless will make common cause in a hyper adversorial social structure.
To be honest, it's really confusing. It's not so much that I worship financial success, it's that I'm scared of being financially insecure. It feels as if the only way to secure my future and the future of my children is to become the best. Perhaps some of this insecurity is translated into aggression toward anti-intellectualism, which I see as an attempt to make me feel guilty about wanting to be secure.
There's also the larger concern over foreign competition. I know that social well-being is important, but when faced against countries who don't value social well-being, it feels as if America is at a significant disadvantage. After all, who could have competed against China's manufacturing prowess when the Green Movement was unique to the West? If America enacts strong protections for unintelligent people, will we see intelligence be outsourced?
I know that my fears are selfish and childish and irrational, but I don't know how else to be. On one hand, I know how absurd it is to believe that intelligence is the solution to all of my problems. But if being smart can't solve my problems, what can? It seems equally absurd that being compassionate is the answer.
I don't know. I'm sure none of this makes sense, but it's how I feel. Sorry about the rant.
> It's not so much that I worship financial success, it's that I'm scared of being financially insecure.
I'm taking some time off from working right now and I think about this a lot.
American life right now is a lot like a combination wager/equation you have to solve.
At some point in life, you're own your own. This could be at 18, post college, or for some - after your parents have paid for college, a car, and maybe a down payment on a house for you.
Whenever this is for you, the game is on - how long will it take you to amass enough savings to pay for your housing, food, and health care, until the age you think you'll die? Variables include your earning capacity, investments (which obviously have all sorts of options and risk), at what age you will no longer be able to do your work (and thus, forced to live off of savings), if you have offspring, etc.
Failure at this game results in potentially terrible living conditions in old age, losing potentially years of life because you can't afford to treat some sort of condition, not being able to pay for food, etc.
Personally, I think it's a tough game to play even with a marketable skill (though to be fair, I wasn't one of the lucky few starting out at 0 when I entered the workforce after college, but most of us aren't.)
I shudder to think how the average American is supposed to win that game.
Taking a year off, it really messes with your head doing the calculus of balancing extended time/freedom to enjoy your life, do want you want, reduce stress, exercise, read, not be a sycophant to some boss/comapny, etc - vs the loss of a six figure salary, and what that would turn into by age 65 (or thereabouts) after hopeful compounded interest and all that.
The wager would be a lot easier if you didn't have the uncertainty about living 30 years after retirement or 10. I would like to see suicide become a socially approved choice so we could eliminate the risk of those potentially terrible living conditions in old age.
(I have stretched my year off to 2.5 and counting... would definitely rather live like this for fifteen years and check out than go back to work to support thirty years in a nursing home.)
I learned when I was a child it was dangerous to be the smartest person in the room. It's much safer to appear to be the village idiot, or at least less bright that the brightest.
I do disagree fundamentally with the concept of the evils of merit - merit is so much more than smarts and formal education, its a mix of capacity for the role, agreeability and eagerness, productivity, effort expended, grooming and appearance, and a dozen other factors, most of which are intangible. You don't have to be information work level of smart to achieve these qualities either.
The problem is a belief that certain kinds of education make one more suitable for a role. I'd take someone with 4 more years of real world experience over that college degree any day.
I think many find the same thing. Don't prove the teacher wrong. Too smart in a few subjects or suddenly figuring stuff out? Accusations of cheating. "You are too smart for your own good" the adults say. "Yeah, they are smart, but smart people don't have common sense and it shows" (which is really more noticing that the kid acts just like other children due to maturity levels or that they are thinking outside of the box).
And it carries over into adulthood. One of the unfortunate things to learn is that sometimes, one just has to not say anything. Don't be smarter than the boss, nor too independent (yet not too clingy or stupid). Always a balance. Fitting into the mold actually goes further than actual intelligence.
For me at least, its more.. don't stand out, hide in the crowd - I've never been one who's good at blending in, I don't need one additional thing to make me a target.
Part of the problem is inserting the same standard across multiple roles; for example, mandating all managers have a college education.
You don't need a college degree for most sales, customer service, and operations roles. Some of the best people managers and sales people I've met have sketchy degrees (or none at all).
On the other hand, putting someone in charge of a process which is highly reliant on statistics or technology who doesn't have a college degree (or real world experience which proves ample ability) can be a total disaster. I've seen what happens when you take a non-statistical director and put them over a data science process.... they hide in familiar details (project plan! communications!) and can't understand the harder decisions involved in the role. Like does the magical black-box system even work....
>> The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy.
That sums it up. Intelligence doesn't matter, rather the appearance of intelligence gets one ahead. Appearing "brainy" counts more than actually being brainy. TheBigBangTheory is part of that trend. Intelligent people are expected to project a particular image. IRL that never happens. Many very smart people couldn't care less for trek, comics or any of the other stereotypes. And conversely, there are many absolutely not-smart people who do very well by simply dressing the part. I say bring on the standardized tests. Let us separate the smart from the fashionable.
While I agree mostly with what you said initially. IMO if you think your "smart" or "dumb" based on the results of standardized tests then either way you are just a gullible fool. Standardized tests are designed to sort people based on what they can remember/understand at a given moment in time. A very crappy measure of 'intelligence' (whatever that word really means) indeed.
>> Standardized tests are designed to sort people based on what they can remember/understand at a given moment in time.
Maybe the knowledge-based tests such as the SATs, but there are plenty of aptitude tests that are not based on memorized knowledge.
I also think it is naive to assume that there is some testable form of intelligence completely devoid of cultural knowledge. Someone may be very smart, but if they lack the basic tools to express themselves within a culture then those smarts are behind a real bottleneck.
The premise is erroneous and it creates a difficult debate.
> American society increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth
I think that we are just in the same place that we have always been.
There were this intelligence tests in the 1900s that is what, still nowadays, commonly people mistakes as innate intelligence. "Yerkes intelligence exams (alpha, beta and individual) were culturally biased, taken under markedly different conditions and tended to reflect years in the U.S. and familiarity with dominant culture, rather than innate intelligence" http://www.understandingrace.org/history/science/race_intel....
Even innate intelligence is more complex than a number as there are different components to account for.
So when the article reads "American society increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth" it should read "Americans increasingly immature when judging others".
I blame this phenomenon at the lack of education quality. Memorizing and doing mental calculus is far from what a good education should give you. Critical thinking, capacity to self-learning, appreciation of universal human values should be the main part of that education.
And as it says America I don't think that it is restricted to any country. Education could be a lot better everywhere. But shrinking education budgets all around the world, because "crisis", are jeopardizing our future.
As I see it, the world, and america in particular is worshipping the culture of the intellect to the extreme, forgetting other innate and arguably more important human qualities.
As philosophers like Jacob Needleman have said before, there is a line of knowledge and a line of being. If one progresses too further ahead from the other,it becomes useless and even harmful. We see examples everyday of people that are really smart but can't treat others like humans.
The canonical example is a great coder that is a total jackass. There is a dire need for empathy, now more than ever...
That's a huge improvement over where we were a few years ago, when Steve Jobs died and I noted all the human misery and pain he caused with his employment of Foxconn sweatshops.
My coworker said Jobs' life was worth more than those factory workers. I reminded him that everyone has equal worth and he seemed stunned at my forceful response. Noting that your life has to feel pretty hopeless to jump out the window of the factory you work/live in.
I guess being a do-well white boy in Chicago afforded him quite the luxury of deciding the world pecking order. Except I was also a white boy in Chicago calling him out on it. Considering we had multiple 2nd generation immigrant coworkers around us, who should in theory empathize with 3rd world work conditions, I was the only one who spoke up.
Probably because the Steve Jobs > all guy was a fairly influential architect. But almost nothing stops me from piping up anyway. Still, judging human worth over intelligence is definitely a bit better than judging based on entrepreneurial capacity as my colleague was.
Maybe in a couple more years we'll all agree that humanity has equal worth and dignity. Then all life, and we'll be set.
That reads as quite the troll, politically or financially motivated but I'll indulge you. To start off, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, do you have citations for either of your claims? Your entire argument rested on them yet you didn't produce.
Even once you produce those, I disagree with your premise. The comparison should be work-related suicides in other factories in nations with better labor conditions. Fiat factory suicides vs Foxconn would make more sense than the population as a whole. Making more money with Pixar, if true, is not correlation or causation.
You can make money, and not drive your employees or sub-contracted to suicide. Exploitation is not a requirement for financial success or otherwise. That was the point.
A meritoracy can reward qualities other than intelligence - integrity, talent, dedication, diligence, courage (both physical and moral), kindness, generosity, willingness to help others...
It's impossible to have a meritocracy because there's no objective way to decide what "merit" is. Even if you decide it's some of the qualities you mention, you can't accurately measure them. It's time to give up on the idea of meritocracy (either in society as a whole, or in a company).
Peter Ubel writes: "The researchers paint a powerful picture of Homo economicus: “We see a person who is intelligent, driven to excel and to dominate other people, and capable of impulse control and of working toward long-term goals. In other words, Homo economicus is the prototypical member of the social and economic elite.”
And the social and economic elite think our society is a meritocracy, and that they deserve their wealth and place in society, and through their control of the media, have convinced most other people that this is true.
The implication here being that intelligence, impulse control, and the ability and desire to work towards long term goals are not merit? I'm curious, what then do you think constitutes merit?
Merit can't be defined generally, varies according to circumstances, and people disagree on what is desirable. When it can be defined, it is usually difficult or impossible to measure. When we attempt to measure it, some people find ways of "gaming the system". And when it is easy to measure accurately, it's often of little practical use.
We have created a society, or rather one has been created for us, in which borderline psychopathic behaviour is rewarded. Many people are beginning to wake up to this. Instead of trying to create a meritocracy, we should decide what sort of society we want and work towards that.
There really is no meritocracy as such it is just the other name for elitocracy, you know the buddy society that favors corruption. In academia the merits are often not assigned objectively even in hard sciences, If you think that everything is based on merits, everything becomes a merit, knowing some famous professor becomes a merit regardless that is because your uncle is his friend. And don't get me started on the elitocracy in politics and other institutions.
I don't have any problems with a society that is a meritocracy. This article is nonsense. If anyone wonders why so many people don't like political correctness just point them to this article.
The whole premise was based on the assumption that meritocracy is bad - my point is that this is a flawed assumption. The proposed solutions were the government could step in and "discourage hiring practices that arbitrarily and counterproductively weed out the less-well-IQ’ed." This is counter to science - it has been shown that intelligence is one of the best predictors of the quality of an employee. Why should the government subsidize stupid people, or interfere in companies hiring the best qualified employees anymore than it already does? The reality is smarter people are on average better employees, which is not at all surprising. This article is using politically correct logic, as opposed to actually correct logic.
A fundamental assumption of the article is that every person is of equal worth. Anyone who objects to this idea is labelled as racist or sexist or whatever-ist. But it is objectively just not true that people are all the same. A murderer is not equal to a doctor. Most people would choose to save a drowning doctor rather than a drowning murderer if forced to pick one. Similarly, if I a rational person had to choose between saving a drowning doctor who is an idiot or saving a drowning doctor who is a geniue, the rational person would save the smarter doctor.
There's no reason that a doctor can't be a murderer. See Harold Shipman. That speaks to the core problem here. A less intelligent but more diligent and trustworthy person can be the better employee.
I'm having difficulty reconciling this claim with how I see American society judging the worth of political candidates. (Also in the journalistic outlets American society values the most.)
It's hard to apply cultural analysis like this uniformly. I also feel that there is a general trend towards anti-intellectualism in America. I think both things can be true: that 'we' value excellence academically (because it confers greater and greater economic benefit) and yet are less open to ideas that are outside our worldview.
On the other hand, the article suggests that the more intelligent are more likely to be oblivious of their own biases and flaws (and where is that more likely than in politics), so on its own terms is not necessarily contradictory :)
People tend to overestimate their own competence (and I suppose intelligence), so they must also see anyone who agrees with them as being of high intelligence too. That means we think the politicians we vote for are smart. It's just the ones other people vote for that aren't.
Nobody will say "I want X but I'm not very smart so the politician who promises X is also not very smart and I won't vote for him."
I don't think so; for example, back in 2004, a poll showed that way more people considered Kerry intelligent compared to Bush. Yet Bush was seen as more decisive and made more people "feel more optimistic about the future".
It makes a valuable point that our popular culture that we think makes us "civilized" is really just a sham and we're no different from olden-days racists and homophobes but with a few extra rules applied. We're very careful not to abuse people because of their race, religion or certain types of sexuality, but for all the non-taboo classes of people, the gloves are off and we're no different from slave owners who justified mistreating blacks because they were sub-human. We can't call people niggers but we can call them retards. We can't lock up homosexuals but we can lock up pedophiles and zoophiles. We can't deny jobs or voting rights to women but we can deny jobs and voting rights to foreigners.
We really aren't any more moral than we were 100's of years ago, we just fool ourselves into thinking we are.
We can't lock up homosexuals but we can lock up pedophiles and zoophiles
It's extremely offensive to compare homosexuality to the others. They aren't on the same spectrum, they're categorically different. Homosexuality involves to consenting adults, the others cannot by definition (according to legal and social norms).
We can't deny jobs or voting rights to women but we can deny jobs and voting rights to foreigners.
Consider that this method of constructing comparisons is ridiculously arbitrary and creates a slippery slope. "We fish with worms but not with Chinese. Therefore no morals!" Huh?
> the others cannot by definition (according to legal and social norms).
Your argument could equally be used to justify criminalizing gay sex as long as it happens in a country where it's illegal and people generally don't like it. But really I'm not talking about sex but about sexuality. That's just what goes on inside people's minds. We aren't even tolerant of that. It's not a crime to be attracted to children but it's certainly ground to be abused by otherwise moral people.
I'm not comparing fish with Chinese. I'm comparing one group of humans with another. You could choose Americans and Chinese. How is it that we can ban members of one group from working for money but not the other? Of course this sounds ridiculous seen through the lens of current culture, but that's my point. We're so immersed in our culture that we can't see its hypocrisies.
We think it's wrong for employers to advertise "Irish need not apply" but today employers advertise "work permit required" and to get a work permit, you're not allowed to be Irish except for some special cases.
Your argument could equally be used to justify criminalizing gay sex as long as it happens in a country where it's illegal and people generally don't like it.
No it can't. It's the notion of consent that is subject to legal interpretation. In a symmetric relationship like homosexuality how would consent apply?
We think it's wrong for employers to advertise "Irish need not apply" but today employers advertise "work permit required" and to get a work permit, you're not allowed to be Irish except for some special cases.
You seem to be missing my point. I'm not saying our categorizations aren't constructed and somewhat arbitrary. They are. What I'm saying is that your comparisons are poorly chosen. It's wise to wonder why we eat cows but not dogs. But a relationship between two consenting adults is not comparable to one between an adult and an animal. If you want to wonder why some farmers prefer sex with goats to sex with sheep, knock yourself out.
So you agree? Our ideas of right and wrong are largely arbitrary so we aren't actually very good people compared to our ancestors. Your main concern is that the examples I used to show that aren't as good as showing that we arbitrarily eat pigs but not dogs?
Your argument using consent seems to be more arbitrary than it needs to be. The legal definition of consent isn't the reason we don't allow those things. That's just a tool we use to decide if it's a crime. The reason we don't allow them is probably because it can psychologically harm the children. I'm not sure about the reason for animals but it's probably more similar to the reason we don't eat dogs but we do kill and torture them. That is, it's not for the benefit of the animals, but something arbitrary in our culture.
I don't think it will ever be ok to be a pedophile which unfortunately you seem to imply it should be ok. Even back then lots of people knew slavery was wrong but could not do much about.
It's hard to make an argument against pedophilia (as a sexuality) which doesn't also argue against homosexuality.
Of course gay men raping other men is bad and is still a crime, just as adults raping children is bad. But that's not what contemporary culture says. It says it's wrong to be sexually attracted to children even without causing any harm.
There were cultures in history where sex with children was accepted, such as the Romans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty#The_Romans but they recognized that it was harmful to the child so it was limited to slaves and other people who they didn't care about.
>It says it's wrong to be sexually attracted to children even without causing any harm.
The act of having sex with children at all causes them harm. Any sex with children is considered rape, because children can NEVER consent to any form of sexual activity. That's the actual "modern value" we hold, not the one you've misunderstood it to be.
That's why
>It's hard to make an argument against pedophilia (as a sexuality) which doesn't also argue against homosexuality.
Is an invalid statement. Homosexuality doesn't have to include raping other men, but pedophilia always involves raping (harming) children. Pedophilia "Just as a sexuality" can be considered immoral because the only way to express that desire is by harming children. That doesn't mean people should be punished just for being pedophiles, but obviously they need some form of counseling and to stay away from children.
I'll agree that if there is such a thing as moral aptitude we perhaps indeed aren't much better than previous generations.
But I don't see that precluding us having a much better body of moral rules.
And as far as pedophilia goes we are definitely adopting more nuanced views of it as of lately.
In America, lots of excessively toxic, obnoxious bastards get much farther along in life than so many others by trading on unsophisticated deception, intimidation and betrayal, and not much else.
After a while, you get tired of being smart and getting nowhere for all the effort you expend.
Then, knowing what you know, and having noticed what's surrounded you for so long, well... intellectuals can decide for themselves a logical corollary to this.
* The very first sentence is horribly misleading, as intelligence (among other things) was necessary to avoid dying in wars or starving to death before then. This describes every decade in human history before the 20th century.
* It also only applied to white men in the US (or Western countries) in the 50s. African Americans, women, people in India surely feel differently about how the 50s were for getting jobs.
* The author blatantly ignores Duke Power, which generally bans IQ tests as part of hiring.
* Apparently decreasing poverty is impossible, but all of the author's proposals aren't.
* The author dislikes the term micro aggressions, yet immediately uses it to refer to calling anything "stupid".
Duke power only bans IQ tests if you can't show a correlation between job performance and IQ. If you want to use IQ tests you just need to do the studies that show that IQ is an important factor for the position you are hiring for.
I wonder how the stats and facts in this article would compare to other developed countries. I know it's not a comparison article, but more of a call to action for America, written by Americans, but I would still be interested in the comparison. Especially, since they mention a couple of world-wide examples in the Darwin Awards and reddit.
A terrible thing about society today is our diminishing ability for self-reflection (which is a form of emotional intelligence). Most of the stuff we do as individuals is driven by marketing and social pressure - So much so that many of us have become oblivious to our true internal needs. Maybe that's why so many people go to psychologists nowadays.
In the past, people put more value on self-reflection, philosophical thinking and other types of emotional intelligence (e.g. wisdom) over raw I.Q.
I am not sure that the author isn't confusing America's wealth disparity with differential treatment of intelligence (which still seems to remain undefined).
Sure, those with high SAT scores have greater access to the means for economic success, but I don't think that is because of any intrinsic difference in high-SATers and the run of the mill dummy. Rather, I'd suggest it is due to the winner-take-all nature of the current American society.
Sortition[1] (randomly selecting from the population for government positions) combined with direct democracy where possible would fundamentally address problems of inequality regardless of their source. Meritocracy, plutocracy, nepotism--you'll end up with a small group of people in power in any system unless the system is carefully designed to prevent it.
Put another way, the article mentions several possible measures to try to provide for better outcomes for everyone who isn't "smart"; these are bandaids for cancer. These are top-down methods for "the elite" in various forms to provide for "everyone else" so that the have-nots have at least enough to avoid offending the sensibilities of the powerful. If fairness is a genuine concern and central goal for a society, then positions of power should be filled by a statistically representative sample of the population. Until then, inequality will be the status quo.
As I see it, the primary benefit in this specific situation (technological unemployment or underemployment for the "not smart enough") would be faster reaction time. You might see similar solutions to those proposed in this article, but you wouldn't have to wait for people like Mike Rowe to write about problems of inequality (and you wouldn't have to wait even longer for people in positions of power to decide to do something). Random selection would produce many people who deeply care about the "not smart" because that describes about 50% of the people selected and many people they personally know.
In fact, I'd say the unspoken premise of the article is that economic success equals human wealth. From there, it argues mainly that economic success is increasingly determined by intelligence.
Strangely, the article ignores the strong anti-intellectual undercurrent in American culture, which may be a byproduct of these economic changes, and which seems to be the focus of many comments here.
Reading illiteracy is no longer a big problem. STEM-illiteracy is the new problem.
It is easier for some to learn how to read than it is for others. Yet as a society we don't give people who find difficulty in learning to read a pass on reading. Nor should we for STEM fields.
"The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along"*
* also being male, White, straight, Christian
...As though the 50's were the bastion of fair hiring practices.
That's not a refutation of the article, unless you think that 50s-style "integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along" hiring practices inherently preclude women/non-whites/non-straight/non-Christian people. Your comment reads like you're just trying to score cheap diversity points against the standards of 60 years ago instead of engaging with the point of the article.
What actually matters is perception of "integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along", because people can only make decisions based on their perceptions. Many* assert that the 1950s was a time when people widely believed that Negroes were shiftless, Queers were deviant, and women were hysterical. If you believe this, then it is natural to conclude that a Black man needed to be twice as hardworking in order to overcome the priors of those around him.
* including myself and pretty much everyone I know.
That's still utterly irrelevant to the article. Unless your claim is that the increased workforce participation from reduced discrimination today inherently leads to a "war on stupid people". Otherwise it's just a nitpick on a small point that doesn't detract from the article and invites off-topic comments like mine.
> unless you think that 50s-style "integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along" hiring practices inherently preclude women/non-whites/non-straight/non-Christian people.
This is pretty silly. In any society, we must decide how to distribute the resources generated by that society. So you make the rules, set up enforcement, and plod along, making changes as you go, as far as you dare in the face of the inevitable political machinations of everyone involved.
The more intelligent and clever always benefit, because they know how to use the system to their own purpose. This has been so since the beginning. The less intelligent either end up in a position where their labor can be exploited, or they're left to slow decline or even death, depending on how much society values keeping them alive.
That's any given society, in a nutshell. They may dress it up in value statements, laws, philosophies, religions, and so on, but in the end it comes down to power, and who has enough of it to extract the resources and status he wants.
The difference is that now the "menial" jobs are almost gone, and the higher up jobs are on the chopping block. And so the first to die off will be those without power (as usual). We can come up with all sorts of platitudes about the value of human life, but in the end it always comes down to this. Welcome to the true nature of man.
Of course, nowadays we have middle class folks who can experience the philosophical angst of the less fortunate, and come up with all sorts of rules, decide which words are acceptable or not, and police outward appearances and speech.
You wouldn't think twice in deciding what to call someone who implemented a password policy with a max of 8 characters, or stored the passwords unsalted or even plaintext behind a system that hasn't had a security update in 10 years. But soon you will, because "stupid" is not an acceptable word anymore, nor is any word that compares intelligence or ability. We're all equal, after all, and that person deserves his job and the income it generates by virtue of his being human and equal to every other human. You wouldn't want him to starve now, would you?
> The more intelligent and clever always benefit, because they know how to use the system to their own purpose. This has been so since the beginning. The less intelligent either end up in a position where their labor can be exploited, or they're left to slow decline or even death, depending on how much society values keeping them alive.
This is a very new situation.
A few generations ago, the smartest or the dumbest still ended up in the same roles. Sure, some people were more productive or slightly more prosperous but that was probably more based on how much land your parents had.
It's only in the last 100ish years where those differences started to matter and since WW2, they're starting to compound where the "cognitive elite" rarely interact with people outside their normal circles (defined by intelligence or socio-economics, which are often similarly grouped).
For example, think of the 10-20 people you spend most of your time with... other than family, I'd wager they're all in the same/adjacent industries; probably use their mind, not their back in their daily work; and economically are very similar too.
Human worth or, as I like to call it "respect" has nothing to do with equality of outcomes.
There is a difference between benefiting materially or politically from how society is structured and social respect. There is a difference between paying someone more or less for doing a job and how you treat someone when you interact to them.
Let me put it a different way... why should you respect raw intelligence over a person's height? After all, both simply an accident of birth (genetics and early nutrition). Neither are something one achieves.
I do not respect raw intelligence. I respect personality traits such as hard work, honesty, reliability, affability and bravery. I respect achievement, not potential. To tie someone's worth to inherent traits such as intelligence is, to me, somewhat shallow.
Your example is incongruous. Height is something you have no power to change, while intellegence can be made. And even if it cannot, it can often be substituted for hard work -- this is why the common trope of the smart person beat by the hardworking less smart person exists.
You're assuming that intelligence is a one-dimensional scale from dumb to smart. Actually, there are many different ways in which people can excel (or be deficient) cognitively, which most would agree makes them forms of intelligence. (Rather than through physical strength, which I can accept is not an "intelligence".)
A mention of the theory of multiple intelligences belongs here.
Many of the intelligences are things that have very evidently contributed to our collective heritage of beautiful, rich and diverse culture: "musical–rhythmic, visual–spatial, verbal–linguistic, logical–mathematical, bodily–kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic".
The cartoon version of intelligent humanity as Homo Economicus that you invoke is kind of missing the point, IMO.
Robert Sternberg wrote on intelligence, its evolutionary role and his theory of "successful intelligence" is well established nowadays.
Latest definition by AI researchers is summed up as:
"Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments"
People keep promoting basic income as the solution to automation instead of focusing on intelligence augmentation. We have a growing population incapable of creating anything worth of value, useless, unnecessary, with no economic value other than the body they have.
We will soon reach a point where their body is the only commodity they have. Not for its labor capacity but for its utility (blood, plasma, organ transfer, clinical trial guinea pigs, surrogates etc.).
When we have a population whose mind is incapble of creating anything of economic value, even slavery wouldn't be economically viable.
Realizing that the poor often turn to crime out of necessity/stupidity and the cost of imprisoning may be higher than simply handing them over the money, I too support basic income. However, don't think for a second that the existential crisis of feeling completely useless can be solved by a basic income to afford necessities, entertainment and wait for low cost living environment to kill them with disease and climate change.
I truly believe one reason people don't work on climate change is they want to use it as an excuse to deal with the poor in the future. After all, there is no moral dilemma when it is a natural disaster as opposed to genocide.
Capitalism is not for the poor. Products are built for people who can afford them. If there was an economic opportunity in serving the poor, everyone would be competing for that market.
Frankly, I'm really conflicted on this subject. On one hand, I fully agree with you and understand human nature is selfish and I often take a nihilistic worldview. On the other hand, we are an intelligent species capable of transcending our nature. I still don't see any use for supporting billions of people who can't produce or contribute anything other than basic human compassion (which is difficult to extend to billions)
With climate change and the flood of future immigrants (immigrating to survive) with little economic value, the growing isolation of individuals from society, the destruction of community and religion, political polarization; I don't know, I feel like it's going to be brutal.
Who knows, maybe I'm wrong and technology, abundance will uplift everybody? Wishful, hopeful thinking?
>The more intelligent and clever always benefit, because they know how to use the system to their own purpose. This has been so since the beginning. [...] That's any given society
I appreciate your post and don't want to sound negative or combative, but I do think your argument's presupposition that intelligence always prevails is an interesting topic of discussion. I question the veracity of that assumption, but I don't know if other people commonly do because it appears to be widely held by individuals. In your argument you set forth that the assumptions has been true "since the beginning," because in my observation, it does not always prevail as true. The other interesting thing about it is that it is difficult to understand what exactly such a statement: intelligence always prevails, means, because intelligence is a difficult thing to measure. Is the idiotic sales guy who is really good at schmoozing successful because he is either less, or more intelligent? Perhaps he has better social intelligence. Or, perhaps it's something else: One theory might be that intellectual intelligence acts as a barrier to effective salesmanship. It's not a stretch to imagine that intellectual curiosity or other personal considerations (ethical or emotional) could get in the way of an effective sales guy's social instincts and intuition.
And what can we say about this presupposition in the long run: 'it has always been the case, since the beginning,' as you said, but what does it mean? Since the beginning of society? So does that take us back up our evolutionary tree: many of the species we evolved from surely had complex societies, as well, and can we say that the more intelligent always survived? It does not appear this is necessarily always the case. Evolution does not appear to be exactly an optimization process that takes a linear path. It is a process of natural selection of random gene mutations. So while our particular species of ape had a particular mutation that endowed us with brainpower at the cost of bite force (http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040322/full/news040322-9.htm...), other species survived with mutations that provided different advantages that did not have the same benefit to intelligence: evolution apparently does not predicate the intelligent and clever will always survive. It may even be true that everything is even evolving to be more intelligent or clever.
Looking at society, I find too much evidence against the idea that the intelligent and clever are always benefiting, as you say. There are just too many examples: Tesla, Grothendieck, Turing, Gaudi, James Watson, Bobby Fischer are some of the most incredibly intelligent and clever individuals of the last century, but all had misfortune due to issues of fitting in with society. How many other bright people do you know that had issues fitting in with society, that never made it to the fame of those individuals? I imagine many, many more bright and clever never reached the point of earning credence as such from society -- it seems if it there are so many of our greatest minds having suffered misfortune post earning social credence, many, many more suffered it prior, and had limited success.
It seems that in our extremely complex and politicized society that the idea that the more intelligent and clever always benefit seems even more of a stretch. Even academia, which an institution created as a meritocracy for intelligence, famously struggles to maintain such status (given, it's much closer to true in the hard sciences).
I appreciate the spirit your post which promotes competition.
You're speaking too narrowly. I said intelligent and clever, because there are intelligent people who are not clever enough to discover how to overcome their personal and political obstacles. Tesla, Grothendieck, Turing, Gaudi, James Watson, and Bobby Fischer are prime examples of this.
When you learn beyond the rules of a system and discover the underlying patterns of the system, you are then able to exploit the system to your benefit. There are those who by chance rise or fall, and then there are those who stack the odds in their favor.
OK, well you may be right, but I really feel obligated to say: Grothendieck didn't want to "overcome" his political obstacles. Turing didn't want to "overcome" his personal obstacles, etc.
I'm having trouble coming to the conclusion that these people being unsuccessful in the world has a lot to do with them, for example, being too stupid to overcome their sexual orientation, or because they were not clever enough to abandon their moral resolve...
We are not islands unto ourselves, and we did not evolve as islands unto ourselves.
All I'm saying is that it's more complex than "stack the odds in your favour and you'll always succeed," for a number of reasons... we evolved in groups, we live in a complex world, intelligence is a broad and complex subject, and we don't know everything.
I, personally, don't even want to live in a kind of world where we describe people with strong moral principles, or sexual preferences different to mine, as not clever enough to be successful, regardless of their other achievements.
>The difference is that now the "menial" jobs are almost gone, and the higher up jobs are on the chopping block. And so the first to die off will be those without power (as usual). We can come up with all sorts of platitudes about the value of human life, but in the end it always comes down to this. Welcome to the true nature of man.
This sounds so damned edgy I'm left wondering if you just read Ayn Rand for the first time. Think things over before posting for the whole internet to see!
I disagree. American society has always had something of a love-hate relationship with intelligence, and there have always been examples like _Big Bang Theory_ venerating intelligence ('Sputnik moment' and astronauts, anyone?). Intelligence correlates with success cross-culturally and over time, so that's not in question.
What is in question is the 'increasingly'; the only evidence offered, aside from anecdote, is that the returns from education have increased. This is inadequate. The research literature I'm aware of (http://www.gwern.net/Embryo%20selection#iqincome-bibliograph...) shows that intelligence has consistently been correlated with SES/income/occupation and it's not that clear it has been increasing at all. Particularly relevant is Strenze 2007, "Intelligence and socioeconomic success: A meta-analytic review of longitudinal research" http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intelligence-... who says:
> Several studies have investigated changes in the association between intelligence and success during past decades. Although Herrnstein and Murray concluded that “ the main point seems beyond dispute ” (1994: 52) and some studies have found support for this point ( Murnane, Willett, & Levy, 1995 ), there are still serious reasons to doubt that the importance of intelligence is or has been growing. Neither the meta-analysis by Bowles et al. (2001) nor the review by Jencks et al. (1979) found any clear trend in the correlations between intelligence and success. The same conclusion was reached by Flynn (2004) and Hauser and Huang (1997) . Breen and Goldthorpe (2001) found that the association between intelligence and occupational status in England is, if anything, declining
Strenze's own meta-analytic results using ~44 studies are on pg13 Table 2, where the correlation of intelligence with education/occupation/income over the 20th century show no clear pattern of increase or decrease:
> The influence of the third moderator variable, year of success (i.e., year of the measurement of success), is analyzed in the third section of Table 2 . Year of success ranges from 1929 to 2003 in the present meta-analysis. Judging by the sample size weighted corrected correlations ( p ), there appears to be no historical trend for any one of the moderator variables: correlations with education and occupation remain more or less stable throughout the period under study; correlations with income fluctuate more but without any obvious direction. Quite surprisingly, if unweighted and uncorrected correlations ( r ) are observed instead, then the correlations with education and occupation exhibit a declining trend.
So, if American society 'increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth' and 'as recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory', why are the more intelligent, if anything, less likely to be successful when we go from 1920 to 2000?
The Big Bang Theory is a show where most of the laughs are derived from the characters being incompetent in some way or another. The basis of the show is "people failing at things outside of their specialist domain." That isn't venerating intelligence.
It's also just a standard sitcom, one that just happens to have the trappings of higher education in its scenery. Same jokes, same cadences, same formula as so many others. Curiously, I find Raising Hope, a sitcom about a dumb-as-rocks family, to be far more intelligently written.
I'm curious if more recent data would disagree at all with this. I agree the whole 1950s as some sort of turning point (or near to) is likely false based on the meta-analysis you linked but I find the idea that this started taking off in the 21st century to be a plausible hypothesis.
Another thing to consider is that though actual correlation with success may not have changed, the cultural attitudes surrounding it may still have. My high school years were in the late 2000s, and although my elementary/middle school years lent credence to the "nerds get beat up by jocks" cultural cliche, my experience (and that of many other nerds) in high school was not anything like what I expected. Not only that, but the nerd/jock divide was blurred to the point of being essentially non-existent. A lot of the people on our championship-winning football team were at the top of our class, and definitely not by virtue of the teachers just passing them because of pressure from on high. This doesn't seem to be such an uncommon experience for my generation.
On a more subjective note, I actually find the attitude aspect to be the more detestable one. One can defend intelligence being correlated with success from a lot of at least not totally evil viewpoints: it makes sense to have more intellectually skilled people in jobs requiring more intellectual skill, intelligence requires some level of cultivation so there should be incentives to do so, etc. But while the social carrot has some arguments that start from acceptable terminal values, the social stick does not. I would be very surprised to learn that chastising people for being stupid across the board made them (or anyone else) smarter. The only motivation I can only see for it is purely egotistical.
> So, if American society 'increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth' and 'as recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory', why are the more intelligent, if anything, less likely to be successful when we go from 1920 to 2000?
Because gwern, we're in a technological stagnation and have been for many decades. The end of world war II temporarily gave America a boost, and the end of Communism temporarily gave the West a boost, but we're all being dragged down by a decline in meaningful technological progress (ex-Computation). This could be because US/West looked good in comparison and/or because a threat to the existing order evoked a competitive response that resulted in artificial rubber, jet engines etc.
I'm not claiming conflict is a good idea. I'm claiming that the above overshadowed a pattern that would have otherwise been much more obvious to us.
When circumstances diminish prospects, what use is there in higher intelligence? That would only be adaptive to express were the environment suitable. This is true whether we're on a timescale of decades (culture) or centuries (biology).
Note I do not claim we're zerohedged into oblivion. Just that the rate of technological change has changed to slower speed. It's a long term secular stagnation that has received relatively little attention until relatively recently because we are biased to notice things when they affect us and not before.
My pet hypothesis is that modern education, which became prevalent in that period you mention, is at least partially responsible for this. That modern education has a failure mode that reduces our prospects while demanding that we endorse more of it is suggestive to me of a bad memetic parasite that has infected the host and makes it do maladaptive things. Like how religion invariably starts with some transcendent quality but ends with the Inquisition and the One True Way.
In truth I think we all recognize that 'education' and education are not the same thing but one has gone from a proxy for the other into a masquerade for the other. If I'm right, then the evidence should be that a new form of education, perhaps as yet unrealized, will be able to dramatically supersede the existing institution. It is at least interesting that Silicon Valley is the only place that I know of that is successful and that takes the traditional education system much less seriously than other places. To overcome the inertia generated by the extant education system with its credentialing must take a powerful force.
"based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics..."
I don't know if the author is trying to make this sound _better_ than today, considering "physical characteristics" often meant "white and male".
In the European Commissiom aka the public sector the only test you take to go into any position even clerical is an IQ test. I can't comprehend this it should be the other way around. Since maximizing profit is not so important but serving the public is.
Society historically confusing religious convictions with human worth is somehow becoming worse by confusing intelligence with human worth. Fascinating case of rationalization.
Except that the world around us is buildings, made of raw materials, i-beams, 2x4s, piping, etc. Built by people with trade skills. Filled with beds, sheets, refrigerators, dish washers, art on the walls, TVs, etc, etc.
The whole world may seem just focused on data if you live in silly valley, and your job is to increase conversion rates and improve SEO so some founder can sell more overpriced clothes to people with disposable income.
To the majority of people out there? The world is not all just data.
Politics, religion, and their close correlate, global warming, are subject to opinion sans facts. Hence, the average discourse re: those three tend to the degenerate case.
As a non-American, and so 'judging' America only through the media, it does feel like the complete opposite. Deep ingrained anti-intellectualism, idolization of stupidity and love of the brazen and the rich. Scary decline of the sciences and rapid expansion of superstitions. Of course this does not apply to this here readership, but at least from an outside perspective we see 'idiocracy' surging onto the stage at breakneck speed.
Please don't post generalized putdowns of other people's countries here. They're too generic to be substantive discussion and too provocative to do anything but start conflicts. (I realize you didn't mean it that way, but that's what experience has taught us.)
Your assessments are not consistent with facts. You imply that the media is a distorting lens, but then you go on to espouse views that come entirely from the media. I'm not sure I understand that.
The US is becoming less religious, and it is the least religious it has ever been. People aren't increasingly idolizing stupidity or loving the rich, or Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders wouldn't have done as well as they did (both used anti-elite messaging). In fact, the on-going presidential election is proof that the rich are falling from grace. Occupy Wall Street, anti-"1%" sentiment, and a Democratic Socialist almost becoming the President are all indications that neoliberalism is dying in the US.
Yes, i accept that the media is a distorting lens, that is why I specifically put this in as a disclaimer, but not living there it is the only lens I have available. I'll give you Sanders as a point in showing at least an attempt at curbing extreme neo-liberalism, but Trump seems (to me) like the front runner in the race to 'idiocracy'.
I don't think the GP meant to say that Trump isn't smart. It's that the policies he suggests are meant to appeal to feelings, not rationality. They are thus more likely to attract voters who don't think through what those policies could mean, were they to be implemented. (Not saying those are all of his voters, there are other motivations as well. Also not from the US.)
I think Trump supporters would say that there are simple truth about the universe that faux sophisticated liberals don't grasp or weight equally with less important things.
I believe that orthodoxies of the past half century have been a failure. If average wealth has not risen for decades, a fact, then there is something wrong with your model. Notice the slogan is not Make America Great. It is Make America Great Again.
That admission of failure is fascinating and completely ignored.
I don't see how your link to an article written by a writer who was censured for advocating riots against Trump is evidence that he is a smart person. Can you explain in any more detail?
Lots of terrible people are still very smart. He could incite riots at the same time as thinking Trump is smart.
I'd argue that, to capture the attention of hundreds of millions of people around the world using so little money, someone would have to be pretty smart.
The US may be becoming less religious but there's a clear and growing trend of anti-intellectualism. Look at the anti-vaccine movement as an example. It has managed to convince many people that vaccines are risky, which is directly contrary to all scientific evidence.
Anti-vaxxers believe that they are intellectuals. They think that they are the only ones who can resist the propaganda of Big Pharma and see the underlying science.
You can't define "anti-intellectualism" as "people who disagree with me" (even if you're right).
My sentence wasn't very clear. When I was talking about Trump and Sanders, I was referring only to the idolization of the rich. Both Trump and Sanders spoke out against the wealthy elite controlling politics. Trump even rejected partisan campaign financing until recently.
One of the biggest culture shocks I had when I first moved to the US was the near constant push of consumerism and celebration of consumption. I had never seen or experienced this before at such high levels and even 15 years or so later, I still cannot come to grips with it (although I am a bit more desensitized to it). It permeates every aspect of American life and is quite difficult to escape. Perhaps this is a bad cliche, but the average American's status here is very much defined by his or her ability to consume. Americans may sneer more at the 1%, but idolization of being rich has never decelerated.
The article is - sadly - a lie. There's an idealisation of productivity, which has somehow become correlated with IQ. (Even though in practice the relationship between IQ and productivity is subtle and context-dependent.)
Most of US culture has absolutely zero interest in clever people unless they're also making money and/or running a business. There is no situation where IQ and abstract intellectual output are valued purely for their own sake and not for their financial productivity - not even academia.
Which means the real problem is the way that "business" has become the de facto state religion - in the sense of being the ultimate moral arbiter of personal value and the one true absolute definition of how "good" people are recognised.
Hard work and money. Or money at least.
Trump's success is based on a weird identification - the belief that Trump represents the interests of the 99% because he's a non-intellectual plain speaker who says what he means and means what he says using language that everyone can understand.
That makes him "one of us" to many people, even though of course he's nothing of the sort.
> People aren't increasingly idolizing stupidity or loving the rich, or Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders wouldn't have done as well as they did (both used anti-elite messaging).
O_o
Trump's constant refrain is "I'm so good at business. I have so much money". And Occupy Wall Street and the anti-1%'ers have changed what fundamental aspects of US society, exactly? Sanders is something less mainstream, but he was always trailing the 'business-as-usual' candidate.
Also, speaking from an outsider's perspective, it seems to me that the US was less religious just before the 9/11 attacks than it is now.
Canadians and Europeans love to look down on Americans, we already know this. Thats all your comment adds is an example of that. People and movements (including the Trump supporter movement which you are alluding to) are very complex. And frankly you just don't understand.
Well, it would be helpful if you could explain rather than just complain.
The Trump phenomenon is baffling to many of us outside of the US. I can obviously grasp some of the key reasons – anti-establishment feeling, for example – but equally I'm confused by other aspects.
Average living standards are falling despite the general impression given by politicians and journalists. This is also true in Europe.
The West isn't doing as well as advertised and this traces back to the early 70s. Attrition has been going on for decades.
If you find this incomprehensible then you've got to understand if you are in SV or a major city that you're in the Core of the system, it is the Peripheral that first runs into difficulties when a down cycle appears.
Take countries such as Venezuela, South Africa. These are places on the edge of our economic system and they are blowing up. It is easy to ignore this because they were always, from our perspective, borked. In fact they used to be doing much better in the past.
The key point to grok is that many of our 'stats' about the world are incorrect. Interest rates are not really at zero percent. The economic system is fracturing and traditional models/tools don't work anymore. This is what it looks like when a complex system is in danger of falling to pieces. Larry Summers is borrowing from the same technological stagnation playbook as Peter Thiel. Oil prices halve without meaningful changes in economic growth. Hmmmm. Maybe something is up.
I'm sorry if that is what you get from this. Believe me, we have more than enough of our own Trumps over here too and there is absolutely no distinction between our own neo-liberal heists and yours.
Nerdy geek-type intellectuals are at the BOTTOM of the totem pole in terms of respect and human worth in the 21st century. They are ostracized, bullied in school, most are awkward virgins (intellect is the anti-thesis when it comes to being a "womanizer" or "stud") and it's only getting worse as society progresses.
Are you living in the same world as the rest of us? Sure, there are people who fulfill the stereotype that you've repeated here. But among the nerdy people I've known you'll find some great people with rich, full lives. People who spend their work lives searching for evidence of dark matter can also climb mountains and have great family lives. Telemetry engineers who spend their days working on RF systems can spend their lunch breaks learning sign language or brushing up on their knowledge of Korean.
Those are just two of the people I've worked with.
And look around. The most popular movies are based on comics. The most popular books are fantasy (Harry Potter) or science fiction dystopia (Hunger Games). Video games often have budgets on par with blockbuster films. Where is the social stigma on being a "nerd"? Largely gone, or at least it seems to me.
This is an all too common occurrence with "nerds" such as yourself on Hacker News: You are perhaps intelligent and high IQ. You are perhaps a successful telemetry engineer, yet you are BLIND when it comes to even a BASIC understanding how everything operates socially.
Raw intelligence by itself, is scoffed at by the general population. Outside of your tight knit nerd-circle or a back office server room in Silicon Valley, nobody actually cares about your quirky radio-frequency system hobby. Not even your boss cares, he just wants you to bust your back to help turn a profit.
On a social level, athletes and high-school football jocks take higher precedence than you. Pop musicians take higher precedence than you. Actors take higher precedence than you. Your local handsome extroverted bartender who can't even operate a computer takes a higher precedence than you (especially in the eyes of ovulating women) That is what human-worth means, in the 21st century.
Sorry guys. The show is over. Perhaps in the near future high-IQ nerds will finally engineer fully immersive virtual world(s), because that will be only world they will ever get any respect.
Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but I suspect the differences of opinion between you and the person you replied to may be due to age differences.
I was a nerd in high school and was picked on when I wasn't being out-right ignored. My college experience was noticeably better, but the stereotypical extroverted "jock" still had me and my friends beat in the dating pool and other social circles. By graduation I too would have agreed that "Your local handsome extroverted bartender who can't even operate a computer takes a higher precedence than you".
However, ten years later into a highly technical career, I am constantly amazed at how beautiful my coworkers' partners are and how much respect they command from their social circles. It turns out that by the mid-thirties intelligence, and the success that comes with it, are incredibly attractive qualities. Most of these coworkers were introverted outcasts like me in school, but it's hard to ostracize someone in the prime of their life with a beautiful spouse, intelligent children, and a six figure salary.
I would disagree that I am blind. You and I have looked at the same things and drawn different conclusions.
I mean, if we're going to get along and have a basic understanding of being social, it would probably be nice if you didn't insult my social abilities right there in in your opening paragraph.
You are absolutely correct. The ones that get the most worth and respect are actually the middlemen who are good communicators between the "geeky" types and the zero knowledge "corporate" types. Whether the middlemen deserve it or not, I don't know but such are the things in the real world.
In an IT company, for instance, you will always find the project managers and even supervisors getting all the glory and respect whereas the programmers and architects are shunned on the side.
As i'm sure I'm not the first one to observe, a (better?) more accurate statement: "American society increasingly mistakes corporate heads of (tech?) companies and/or large amounts of money for intelligence..."
>> hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”
This is the worst kind of off-topic tangent that we see on HN: trotting out ideological talking points, then slathering on flamewar fodder. It's so ridiculously out of place here that we've banned this account.
I think we banned your previous account for doing this as well. If you don't want to be banned on HN, it needs to stop. If you want to commit to keeping this sort of comment off HN, you can email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look into unbanning your original account.
> Men have higher quantitative reasoning ability than women. The truly magical men that should be in control of our society are being shouldered out by very intelligent women.
Dear God, I never thought I'd read a comment as blatantly sexist as this on HN, but here we are. In one comment we have a theory which posits:
* America is in decline because "traditional men" are being attacked by a deliberate feminist takeover.
* "Genius men" (which arise through natural means) bestow the lesser gender with the ability to reason, and therefore any "genius women" are the direct result of their fathers.
* Said "Genius men" are actually being targeted in a systemic fashion, with the end goal of genocide.
I'm very sure you consider yourself among these elevated men who are under attack, in which case I can only hope your theory is true so the world is spared the presence of like-minded fools.
Not sure if that is relevant. Source should not be important if the facts match reality.
Some social scientists observed that women tend to choose lower-risk decisions compared to men that are pressured to take higher risks with immense payouts (rare) or complete disasters (frequent). So these two strategies yield different results - women have a smaller variance, i.e. there are less women at the top and less at the bottom of the society. For men, there are many more men at the top but almost the whole bottom tier consists of men.
There is also the theoretical notion of hypergamy, i.e. women never marrying anyone below them on social ladder and shooting for the top 10-20% of men, so the higher status they achieve, the lower dating pool is available to them. Complementarily, the higher status a man achieves, the bigger his dating pool becomes due to aforementioned hypergamy effect. Frankly, I am not sure how true this is but perhaps can be used as a heuristics while looking at current state of gender relations.
So the question is how to motivate women to take immense risks in order to achieve what traditionally men do and how to persuade them to date down. Any ideas?
From what I've seen, women tend to pick "fun" (literature, art etc.) careers more often than men. My understanding is that they're aware of availability of the backup strategy of marrying some guy who makes more money than them (and thus avoiding near-poverty life associated with those degrees), which makes them less risk-averse.
I expect to see this downvoted into oblivion, but you're not wrong. Men have a wider distribution of intelligence than women, so you end up with more male retards and more male geniuses. The bell curve is real.
Steven Pinker wrote about the distribution you mention in 2002 in the "Blank Slate". I'd highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in neuroscience and assumptions about human nature that underly political discourse in this country.
It's remarkably relevant even though it's over a decade old
In a real meritocracy you would expect gender imbalances anyway, because of statistical phenomena such as these. Funny enough there are few comments on the gender imbalance of more females in nursing than males. Regardless of whether it comes down to stigmatizing of the profession (possible given the higher end of wages in nursing meaning the incentive should be there) or if it has to do with some distribution of talent, it's not commented on, despite being consistent with a universal application of sexism logic vs a particular application for just one gender.
The civility rule here doesn't switch off just because someone else is wrong. Please don't do this again. Instead, please (re)-read the following, which describe what we're looking for in comments on this site—the idea is to post civilly and substantively, or not at all:
Class, note the level of civility here. It is also well known that traditional men and women are more civilized. The stats carry on for ages. "Sexist" areas of America even have lower crime rates.
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This overlaps with one of the better suggestions from this article. In general I think these are hit or miss, and maybe too academic, but the problem is a real one and it's not going to go away tomorrow. People have this notion that robots will just replace all manufacturing jobs next year or whatever, but as usual it's a lot more complex and subtle than that. And it's a cultural problem as much as an economic one.
Of course I'm not able to say this from firsthand experience, having had little difficulty in school, and having accumulated enough skill with computers to find plenty of good work. And I can't really call for some given change before understanding more about the people in worse situations. I did go to a trade school though and more of those sounds like the best idea so far.